Rochen Hosting Review

We've been on Rochen for a number of years. We were on several other services previously, but each one eventually caused a problem that couldn't be resolved through the normal support processes. Rochen is different.

Most of our sites are Joomla! but a few are WordPress. Rochen makes it easy to configure a site or upgrade to a new release, using their Fantastico.

We had one problem in which a rogue script was chewing up bandwidth. Rochen notified us that we had a problem, and then worked with us to resolve it. It took some time, but they were on the ball and saved the bacon.

When individuals ask for a recommended hosting service, I almost always recommend Rochen for Joomla! It provides precisely what small companies need for a hosting site, with all the appropriate tools, at a highly affordable price. Moreover, they support their service with knowledgeable techs who actually care about their customers.

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.

I was with Rochen for 3 years and when there were no problems, everything was fine. But I believe the most import quality when choosing a hosting company is their level of support, and it is here that they failed me horribly.

My site was hacked and there were some Perl script running that caused Rochen concern with their server security. I can of course understand this. But they were arrogant with me in the support thread (my only way to communicate with them). They took my site down twice and both times left me hanging for hours upon hours. There was nothing I could do, as I was entirely at their mercy. Trust me, you do not want to be at Rochen's mercy, period. To say they have a terrible 'bedside manner' with non-developers is an understatement. I am in customer service and if I ever treated a client the way they treated me.... well, my boss would hear about it - that much I am certain.

It is my recommendation that you stay clear of Rochen if you are a non-developer.

This is very frustrating. It seems every week one the the three Rochen shared servers I'm hosted on is down. Of course, this always occurs during peak traffic periods when my clients will notice -- and complain. Worst up-time in 14 years of working with hosting services. And it seems to be getting worse by the month.

Their support is schizoid -- either they love you, or they hate you with a vengeance!

Oh, and I'm paying premium prices for all this happiness....

Love it when you have to tell them what domain you're opening a ticket for, when it's IN the ticket. That's just sets the tone for the type of half-ass support you'll get. If you don't have time to update a ticket within 24 hours it will be closed. Then you have to start all over again. The final straw was the point they told me to open a second ticket for another guy because the Joomla install wasn't working. I told them exactly where the install failed and they already had my credentials. They could have logged in as me and duplicated he error a million times but they wanted step by step instructions on what I did. They literally said, "Start with opening the browser." There is only one path to get to the install. It's not like I could have taken any different steps than the normal user. The answer is, they are condescending punks who act like brats when they don't understand a problem. I'll spend my money elsewhere. Oh, btw...the site when down because their server kept dumping logs into my site. Never got an answer on that one.

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.

server down-time is measured in hours rather than minutes and can't reach a human on the phone to report a problem. This is killing my business, I'm migrating my site and e-mail to another host just as fast as I can.