Acenet VPS Review 2020

Item: Acenet
Rating: 7
Author: Jonathan Kerns

On the surface, Acenet seems like a winner. Their VPS service starts at a pretty competitive price and the specifications of each plan are quite good. They also refund you if you are not satisfied with their service, and even compensate you for any downtime. On a side note: it’s a good thing that these are in place because, with a wildly inconsistent uptime, there is a good chance that you might rely on one or both. Even more pressing is their customer support – or lack thereof. To be precise, agents are slow to respond and a lot of them are quite unhelpful. In light of these shortcomings, is it still wise to pay attention to Acenet’s VPS offerings? Keep on reading to find out!

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Jonathan KernsFebruary 24, 2019

Pros

Starter Plan: While not the cheapest around, Acenet’s base VPS configuration, the XS, is certainly competitive, in both price and specification. For less than $30 per month, you get decent storage, RAM, and bandwidth allocation.
Configurations: The five VPS configurations that Acenet offers are varied enough that most businesses will be able to find one that fits their needs. In short, there is something here for everyone – from small businesses to much larger companies.

Cons

Uptime: Acenet’s uptime is quite a mixed bag – and many customers can attest to this. At times, they manage to provide solid, if average, uptime, but numerous users have reported that they have experienced frequent downtime, as well.
Price: While Acenet’s base configuration is on the more affordable side of the spectrum, most of Acenet’s VPS offerings are clearly geared toward medium to large businesses – and most of the prices reflect this. Meanwhile, add-ons like the cPanel license further drive the prices up.
Support: Acenet’s customer support team can only be reached via ticketing submission, so don’t expect to be responded to quickly. In fact, multiple customers have complained about the slow – and often unhelpful – customer support.

The Data Centers

Acenet guarantees it users 99.9% uptime and they seem make good on this guarantee by investing in their hardware and datacenters. Sporting hardware such as RAID-10 SSD redundancy, quad processor nodes, CloudLinux 6 64-bit Linux operations systems, and undergoes 24/7 monitoring, Acenet certainly seems to provide the best hardware to support their servers.

More than that, they also use pressurized cold aisles that push cold air into the server cabinets to ensure they do not overheat, while internal server fans pull in cold air and exhaust hot air out the back. The power supply in the data centers is also redundant and each is connected to a separate diesel-powered backup power system so they can keep running in case of power outages.

With all of these measures, you would think that their uptime would be consistently rock-solid. In truth, it is anything but. If you get lucky, then uptime won’t be a problem, but if you aren’t, like many others, then you might experience lots of downtime. It’s a shame, really, because when everything works, the uptime is actually quite good. At the very least, their uptime guarantee should act as a pretty sufficient safety net if you wish to take the risk.

Pricing

One of the things Acenet manages to get right is the variety of VPS configurations they offer. Currently, they offer five different VPS plans, so everyone from small to medium businesses will be able to choose one that fits their needs and budget. Their most basic configuration, the XS, for instance, starts at a pretty good price point. At $25 per month, you are looking at a setup with a 2-core vCPU, 48GB enterprise-grade SSD storage, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB monthly bandwidth.

Compared to the base configurations offered by other companies, Acenet’s price is quite competitive, especially considering the features on tap. Meanwhile, for those who can spare a bit more, the $50 per month Small plan bumps up the specs significantly. If your needs surpass what the XS and Small plans offer, then the Medium, Large, or XL should be more than enough, especially with specs going from 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, and 2TB bandwidth, up to a maximum configuration of 32 vCPU, 64GB RAM, and 8TB. For reference, below is a quick breakdown of their VPS plans:

	XS	Small	Medium	Large	XL
Price	$25/mo	$50/mo	$100/mo	$200/mo	$400/mo
vCPU	2	4	8	16	32
RAM	4GB	8GB	16GB	32GB	64GB
Storage	48GB	96GB	192GB	384GB	768GB
Bandwidth	500GB	1TB	2TB	4TB	8TB

As an aside: while Acenet’s VPS services starts off at a good price, you should be aware of the add-ons they offer, because these could significantly drive up your monthly cost if you are not careful. For instance, the cPanel add-on will set you back $12 per month, and if you want to purchase their Managed Services Bundle, then you would have to fork over $99.95 per month. As such, if you need to go for their add-ons, make sure that your budget can cover it. Otherwise, you may end up biting off more than you can chew.

Guarantees

Acenet provides a standard 30-day money back guarantee, which entitles you to a full refund, so long as you cancel your subscription within the said 30 days. Beyond that, they also offer a 99.99% service level guarantee, which assures that you are issued a pro-rated credit if you experience any downtime. This is pretty handy, especially since their uptime is known to be inconsistent.

Customer Support

As mentioned previously, Acenet’s support team can only be reached via their ticketing system. The lack of phone or live chat options is made even more glaring because their agents seem to take forever to respond to ticket submissions. Having one live one-on-one support option would have made a huge difference here. On the bright side, the self-help resources do provide decent information – though the VPS section could use more meat. Still, this section gets the job done.

What's the Verdict on Acenet?

There Are Better Options