LFC Hosting Review: Java Shared Web Hosting Provider

Web hosting companies are the first visitors you will have when you intend to make a website of your own. There are so many of them in the internet that its pretty normal to get confused with too many options available. Also, it depends upon the kind of site you want to host. A personal website may normally take only a starter’s plan to start with, whereas corporate and enterprise setups need their namesakes. So we are starting a series of reviewing web hosting companies individually and then we will make a comparison of all that. For now, let’s focus on LFChosting i.e. Loose Foot Computing.

Plans

LFChosting has plans from $10/mo to $ 40/ mo. The bandwidth of website traffice too varies from 10 GB  to 40 GB. Again, the disk storage starts from 1.5 GB and with pricier plans it goes upto 4.5 GB.

You can go through different plans like Starter’s, corporate, Enterprise, Reseller’s and then find the one that suits you the best.

Detailed Plans

Power Facilities

The servers are protected by high-end managed Liebert and APC UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) battery power backups, which are able to sustain our network for much longer than is needed for the natural gas generators to become activated. So even if there is a major power fault, don’t worry because your system is in safe hands.

User Monitoring

LFC Hosting utilizes Ethernet Power Controllers which provide LFC with the unique ability to automatically monitor, log, report, notify, adjust and control the power status of all servers, and even remotely reboot servers in the event of serious errors that cannot be resolved on the software end. This increases reliability and uptime by preventing power-related problems by early detection.

Internal Network

LFC prides itself on providing a gigabit Ethernet-based internal network featuring ultra-fast throughput with extensive room for expansion, redundant routers and switches throughout, etc.  Moreover, LFC’s bandwidth infrastructure (ie. Internet connection) includes  1,000 Mbps (GigE) Fiber Internet connection.

Three Tier 1 providers include Big Pipe, Rogers Telecom and New Global Telecom.

Firewalls and Routers

Security and connection is of your utmost preference. Keeping in mind of just that. LFC Hosting uses a technology called LVS on Custom Firewalls/Routers to provide both Firewalls/Routers and network with redundancy, fault-tolerance, load balancing, packet filtering and port blocking services.

So even if one server crashes, they make sure there are 2-3 more which immediately take up a position.

E-mail Monitoring

SPAM scanning, Virus scanning, IMAP, auto responders, aliases, always-BCC, “Catch-all” accounts, Peace-of-Mind 28-Day E-mail Backups, are the primary characteristics of LFC email service. Finally, it runs on an isolated Gigabit network, improving security and speed. The result of all of this is a fast, reliable, secure, robust, and feature-rich e-mail service for the customers and yes you can feel the difference too.

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Backup and Recovery Control

LFC Hosting  features a unique multi-terabyte hard drive backup solution. Featured is an advanced Disaster Recovery system, allowing them to restore a server in the event of a complete crash or disaster in as little as one hour, as opposed to several days. They also use their much acclaimed Retrospect Recovery software which comes with frequent upgradation. Backups include full file and .NET 3.5 (+ ASP.NET) permissions. Backups are performed daily on a completely isolated Gigabit network, and they maintain a secure off-site storage facility.

Finally, through your Control Panel, you are actually able to restore or download individual files or complete backups for any day over the last 14 days instantly,

Offsite Network Monitoring

LFC Hosting also employs an offsite network monitoring system, which integrates with Nagios to track network and server uptime, CPU load, disk utilization, and to also provide an accurate view of overall infrastructure performance. This enhances both availability and proactive capacity planning.

They also use Alertsite.

Windows Security

LFC Hosting uses SecureCentral™ PatchQuest, an industry-respected patch management solution designed for use in enterprise environments to identify vulnerabilities, schedule multiple expedient simultaneous security updates, and keep hosting environments at an optimal security level. There is also a scheduled upgradation system so that your system gets updated automatically even if are busy with something else at that time.

Our Experience

We started using LFChosting 3-4 years back. And then we continued for 2 years. At that time LFChosting used to support jsp and servlet through JRun. Though we wanted to move to tomcat and had no way to do so. LFChosting have been very helpful and knowledgeable in their spectrum and we had a fairly good experience with them. It was just that we found the pricing plans to be a bit on the higher side because, @ 30$/ mo, you can get dedicated servers from serverpronto. with 1400GB bandwidth, 512 MB RAM and 40 GB of hard disk space. So I guess LFChosting must consider this now, esp in this competitive market.