Last time I wrote about Jumba was almost 6 months ago, and one of my websites is still hosting with them. I think it would be good if I can post some updates on their service. Overall, they still provide good Australian shared hosting with excellent value, however there have been quite a few issues surrounding Jumba lately which confirms “you get what you have paid for”.

Disclaimer: I am in no relation with Jumba except being their web hosting customer.

Reference Site: Oz Bargain Blog. A small blogsite that I have started a year and half ago to share some of the bargains and deals I and my wife found, but somehow picked up some traffic this year. Still small (and I would like to keep it that way). WordPress powered, and currently at 350 unique visitors a day and 1.5-2Gb data transfer a month. Hosted on Jumba since 27 April 2006.

The Good

• Good uptime: I am using Site24x7 to monitor the uptime, polling at 15 minutes interval. And it shows 100% over the last 30 days. I won’t say that it is always up, but I have never experienced any extended outage. If a page does not load, press Ctrl-R 2 minutes later would see problem disappears.

• Good network: I am on their Sydney server (although they no longer provide Sydney service), which has good peering connections. I can easily pull files at around 850kbytes/sec from my Jumba account — and it could well have been my ADSL connection limit.

• Good price: The “personal plan” that I paid for is no longer on the list of hosting plans they offer. How much did I paid? AUD$2.95 per month, prepaid 12 months, for a cpanel account with 500Mb storage and 5,000Mb data transfer each month. Their Australian business plans are still relatively cheap, when you compare with other hosting service providers.

• Good online community and support: Jumba’s Jumba’s forum has to be one of the most active online community I’ve experienced, and Adam their custom service manager is always around. If you have experienced an issue, log onto their forum, and there might already be a discussion that you can participate. Communication is always one of the best tools for the hosts.

• Secure Shell: Something I just can’t live without. Why hosts keep on insist FTP is enough?

The Bad

• Bad overselling: Running my domain name on Domain Tools shows there are 292 other domains on that server, and it is not even counting the sub-domains. Not as extreme as some other US hosts, but that’s still a lot of accounts.

• Bad performance: Well, I did write “great performance” in my initial review, but great is unfortunately no longer. Maybe not bad, but mediocre, especially over the last couple of days. Sometimes the site is very fast — after all it is a dual Xeon with HT at 3.0Ghz. However over the last few days WordPress will just hang there not loading sometimes, or loads very slowly. Cpanel is very slow, and today the load has been hovering around 5-8.

  I took a screenshot of cpanel reporting system status last night, and it does not look too good (also reported on their forum). Fixed itself after a reboot, but load issue soon came back again. There has to be “something” that drastically slows down the entire server, but I’ve not heard anything from Jumba yet.

• Bad Cpanel: Okay. It might be a personal issue, but I just hated cpanel. It’s not easy to use, slow, not intuitive, inflexible, potentially insecure, ugly, and uses significant server resources. Too bad most shared hosts have them.

Just to note that all bad points can apply to many other shared hosts as well. Most of them oversell, resulting bad performance, and most of them use cpanel. While Jumba is no exception, it just puts Jumba into the very same category — “cheap oversold shared hosting”.

The Ugly

Now it might get a bit offencive.

• Ugly reps: Not talking about you, Adam, but sometimes you do wonder why some other reps from Jumba is allowed to make those public comments that I will not link to. I know Jumba has been put through hard times in Australian forums such as Whirlpool, but signs of unprofessional-ism will only categorise Jumba as “kiddie’s host”. Good that it is getting quieter now.

• Ugly security: Not entirely the fault of their admins, but security on a shared hosting can be very tricky sometimes. First there’s cpanel exploit and client-installed Mambo/Joomla related issues. Then they try to run their servers through security audit, and implemented some nasty firewalls which block legitimate customers. Many useful function stopped working in PHP, and customers complained. Two weeks later they have to rollback the security changes.

  I don’t know their admins personally, but somehow I find they are more of “follow the book” kind of admin. Getting a multi-user Linux system completely secured is difficult, especially when SSH access is allowed, and there’s another beast (cpanel) to fight against. But some hosts seem to be more competent than the others.

Conclusion

Let me re-state what I have already said. Jumba offers good Australian shared hosting with great value, but ultimately you do get what you have paid for. Maybe it is because I only have a personal account, somehow I find it is only suitable for personal sites. As my site continues to grow, I am not sure whether my Jumba account can grow with it.

As I’ve prepaid 12 month for the personal plan, I’ll just wait and see. Meanwhile, I am still in the process of researching a suitable Australian VPS, which should resolve most my issues (performance, cpanel, etc).

Update

12 December 2006

The site mentioned above is no longer hosted on Jumba. It got a traffic surge this month (Christmas I think), and I have moved it to my VPS at GPLHost just in case it runs out of allocated bandwidth.