Case Study: Civinfo

Why Civinfo Chose Us!

Civinfo is a forum dedicated to the Honda Civic. It has over 15,000 members and at the time of writing features over 330,000 posts.

The site is run by Andrew Potts, who explains the timeline and custom setup below.

Testimonial:

"I started an automotive forum from scratch in 2006. Naturally I had no idea about web hosting and it's pitfalls, so just went with a well known company. For the most part it was fine, but you could have long periods of down time, and at busy periods on a shared server everything could come to a halt.

In 2007, I read a review about a small host with good service, Vidahost, so signed up with them. The difference was immediate, even though I was still on an ordinary shared host if anything went wrong or needed changing (and this was the major lesson I learnt - it doesn't matter what you do, things will always go wrong from time to time) then I could just phone up or email and get an immediate response and solution. All was going well.

With the improved performance my site was getting, visitor numbers increased and they stayed for longer. On a regular shared box, I was still occasionally getting slow downs, possibly even caused by my site. But my problem was that the site was not big enough to warrant paying for a powerful dedicated server. I was stuck in the middle between shared and dedicated - I was "an awkward size".

Then Vidahost proposed a middle ground - "semi-dedicated". I would share a powerful server with a very small number of similarly sized sites, such that at full demand we were still well within the capability of the box. Furthermore, the other sites would be carefully chosen, so we would not suffer the fools that can land on a shared box and bring it to its knees.

And it has worked perfectly. I am as happy as can be - the site runs as well as I'd expect on a dedicated server, but for a fraction of the price. I get excellent service (this is vital), and I would recommend Vidahost to anyone looking for somewhere to put a site that really matters."