Memset

Rather than being a subsidiary of a telecoms organisation, Memset is a privately owned company. One sign of this is its generous nature - it offers free hosting to any registered charity in return for a "hosted by" link on their website.

It also takes an unusual approach to support. Rather than offer an all-in bundle, Memset has three bands: Basic, Premium and Fully Managed. Anything outside the level of support offered is available at a charge.

Its out-of-hours rate can be as high as £149 an hour, but Memset also offers an SMS-only system: the customer uses the web support panel to raise a support ticket, which then texts an engineer. Memset reckons on a response within 15 minutes. It's a decent solution, but if you're in a remote area and a client rings to say its web server is down you might be a bit stuck. Normal office-hours support is via a freephone number and email.

Memset allows its customers to stipulate the exact specification of virtual or dedicated servers from scratch, as well as the bandwidth and support package required. For the control panel, Memset uses Centos for its virtual and dedicated server offerings. This is a competent control panel, although it would be nice to see some wizards to help with the initial setup.

When it comes to providing servers, Memset's product range is powerful. The top-of-the-range server is a twin quad-core Xeon with 4TB of RAID5 storage and 16GB of RAM. Full clustering is also offered. Even its virtual server offerings are customisable via the web, although there's a limit of 192MB of RAM and only RAID1 available (which is fine for web hosting).

Memset is unique in using Xen and VMware, which allows for a greater range of customisable options as well as "burst RAM" for times when your virtual server is busy. The company also offers several firewall and monitoring solutions.

Memset's offerings make it easy to recommend the company if you just require hosting, but it doesn't currently offer a lot of search engine optimisation or ADSL sales, or even help with domain registrations. What it does, though, it does well - and for straight hosting it's at the top of our list.

Author: Mark Newton