Rochen Hosting Review

I moved out to Rochen in October 2009 after reading and hearing extremely good reviews about them everywhere. Especially the people working on Joomla, they seem to go gaga over Rochen. So, I shifted my 500 UV's/day and 1500 page views/day website to their multiple domain hosting plan 1. That was $11.95 for 500 MB Disk Space, 30 GB Monthly Data Transfer with 3 Domains.

They are pretty good this far. They have this excellent customer support system where you submit a ticket regarding any problem you're facing and they'll give you a reply within 2 hours. It's just very smooth and very fast, their customer support. Also, if there are other issues that are not very important to be submitting a ticket, you could go out to their customer forums, which I find very useful and full of resources. There are tips and tricks in their customer forums, other customers telling you new things about site development and the like.

My site has been with them for almost 5 months now and there has never ever been a downtime. Never once did my website crash or behaved abnormally. They really have what they say "99.99%" up-time.

They provide you with the standard (and even more) technical features and it's pretty easy to get used to them. Unlike most of the hosting companies out there, they give you seamless IonCube loaders and Zend Optimizers which are very important to run some 3rd party extensions on Joomla like jReviews and Virtuemart. I had a tough time with many many hosts manually loading IonCube loaders and not getting it right even then. Kudos to Rochen for this!

However, there are some drawbacks with Rochen as well. First of all, they provide you with very less disk space. You do something on the website and you'll notice the dik space indicator rising each day. So that kind of bothers you all the time. For example, on plan 1 of multiple domain hosting you have like 500 MB and you'd think twice if you want to install other services like phpbb or wordpress along with Joomla because then you may run out of disk space. I have Joomla installed on my website and some 3rd party extensions and already it says I've used 225 MB of disk space. So that is very less.

They have a high price. You could still do out with lower plans like mine ($11.95) but if you need a VPS or a dedicated, I don't think you could stick to Rochen. Their VPS starts at about $150/mo and not giving you much disk space and bandwidth as some other VPS hosts out there. Similarly, their dedicated starts from $500!

Thirdly, they have in their Accepted Usage Policy (AUP) that you can't send more than 100 emails per 10 minutes and more than 1000 emails in 24 hours. That kinda sucks big time! If you have a good mailing list with some thousand of members out their on your joomla website, then they'll suspend your account. If you ask them this, they'll recommend you some lame options like using software that send out mails in batches. This is really annoying!

Finally, they have no option to pay them other than credit-card. It would be better if they included options like paypal and google checkout or at least a debit card along with credit card.

But, lest of these shortcomings, they are a pretty good hosting company for your small joomla website. If you go large then maybe you'd want to move out. But till then, you could stick to these guys and you'd be concentrating on only making your website and not host issues!

I moved my joomla site to rochen a few weeks ago and I am glad I did. The servers are very reliable and fast.

The cost is a little more but the knowing your site is going to stay up with out issue is worth it.

The server was constantly down (server was Broome for you Rochen customers) and the support seemed to suffer from bi-polar disorder. They were either very friendly, or extremely annoyed.

Rochen billed my client twice (when she no longer had an account with them), then accused me of "threatening them" for saying they'd need to refund her money or a complaint would be filed with IC3. Rochen even admitted they were wrong, but not before writing me a 500 word response telling me reasons why I'm the one who's to blame. Right. I'm to blame because one of your techs didn't delete the billing profile for a closed account on a system I have no access to.

Wondering why the forums are so positive? They instantly banned me before I could write a testimonial.

I would highly advise against using Rochen. Look into cloud hosting or slice/linode hosting.

I could not figure out how to configure the account so I sent emails asking. No response. The video tutorials were not helpful either. I tried to cancel, no response. I emailed Chris Adams, the previous contact, and he did not respond. I kept getting charged. None of my emails were answered so I sent in a support ticket and they said that since this was the first they heard from me that they would not give me a refund. I was charged for three months and my site was never actually hosted.

Also, they removed the option for me to submit another support ticket after closing my account, thus eliminating any chance for me to follow up. And the response they sent me was from a no-reply email address, so I have no way of contacting them. So, I am out $23.85 for zero hosting. Since they will not give me a refund, I hope this review costs them at least that much in lost revenue from potential customers.