MDDHosting Review – Highly Reliable Cloud Hosting

I've been using MDDHosting since 2011. During all this time, they've gone through many changes when it comes to their hosting plans, server specifications, and website design.

One thing has been constant throughout all these years, however. Quality of support. Their technical support, especially, is one of the best in the shared hosting space, and that has always been the case since 2011.

Over the years, they've upgraded their servers with newer, faster and more capable hardware, expanded their team to include more support staff, and introduced a plethora of new (and actually useful) features like Let's Encrypt, LiteSpeed Cache support, and StorPool-powered servers with a 1000% uptime guaranty (not a typo).

If you're interested in signing up with them, this entirely revamped version of my MDDHosting review will help you gauge how well they do in areas like site speed, uptime, included features, performance/cost ratio, and quality of support.

MDD's shared servers are incredibly fast, and consistently so. When it comes to performance, they'll definitely be in the top 5% of the web hosts that I've tested.

As you can see in the screenshot above, a moderately heavy (but well-optimized) page loaded in just over 400 ms, which is a really great result that you don't usually achieve on most other shared hosts' servers.

This impressive speed can be attributed to a few things:

• LiteSpeed Web Server, along with support for the LiteSpeed Cache module, which is the fastest and best caching solution for WordPress, in my experience.
• Fully SSD-powered servers, resulting in fast I/O times.
• Support for the latest PHP version (7.2), which performs faster than even HHVM.
• StorPool storage platform allows user data to be stored in multiple drives at the same time, and the distributed nature of the platform ensures that the data can be accessed from multiple drives at the same time, thus hugely boosting I/O operations per second (they claim a 900% increase vs. non-redundant storage solutions).

It shows that they give site speed a lot of importance when you consider that they offer LiteSpeed Cache support even for their cheapest plan, even when the LSCache Module likely costs additional money over the standard LiteSpeed web server license.

It's also worth noting that they're extremely proactive when it comes to server performance. Over the last 8 years or so, they've upgraded all their servers quite a few times to allocate faster hardware and better or newer software, with an aim to improve performance and reliability even further.

Don't just take my word for it when I say downtimes aren't even a thing with MDDHosting. The screenshot above shows the uptime stats for the last 30 days of one of my sites hosted on MDD.

I logged into the dashboard of one more uptime monitoring tool that I use just to eliminate any potential goof-up of the first one. And here's what it showed:

As you can see, the site in question has been up for almost 4,000 hours straight! That too could've been for just a few seconds instead of 1 minute as reported by the tool, as their test interval itself is 1 minute. There's also the chance that this minor slip-up was caused by either CloudFlare or some broader DNS issue.

So, clearly, uptime is exceptional on MDDHosting. If you have a very valuable site that you want to host on an extremely reliable shared hosting platform, MDDHosting should be one of the first options that you consider.

It shouldn't be a surprise, however, as they're the first host that I've seen offering a '1000% Uptime Guarantee'.

They explain that they're able to guarantee such a hard-to-believe amount of uptime (which might even make people skeptical) because of their StorPool-powered 'cloud' hosting servers, which are 'self-healing', thanks to data redundancy.

In simpler words, your website's data is mirrored across and served from multiple SSDs which are all interconnected and synced in real time. Whenever a particular drive fails, your site is instantly served from the other drives that also have your site's data.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I've so far created a whopping 80 support tickets in my 8 years with MDDHosting. Unlike most other shared hosts, their technical support is super fast, even at 3AM in the night (their time). I've always gotten the first reply within 5 minutes or even less, and the whole issue sorted within an hour, mostly.

It's worth noting that very few of these 80 tickets were about any issues specifically related to their service. In most cases, I opened a ticket to get a technical query answered by their capable support team, or just for advice related to things like site speed and SSL, in the initial years with them.

In some cases, I created the tickets for issues caused by me, such as a HTTPS to HTTP redirect loop, non-renewal of a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate due to a .htaccess settings mess up, etc.

At the beginning, and I'm talking about when I first signed up 8 years ago, most technical support queries would be answered by the extremely knowledgable owner of MDDHosting, Michael Denney, himself. But nowadays, they've also got a very capable tech support team who are just as efficient and joy to deal with.

In addition to their 24 x 7 x 365 tech support via email and support tickets, there's also live chat support. They also offer phone assistance for billing and sales related queries from 8AM to 4PM ET, Monday to Friday.

The screenshot above shows the cost and specs of current cloud hosting plans from MDDHosting. Now, this is an area where you can be slightly unhappy with them, because their plans are not the cheapest around.

Although, on the plus side, if you were looking at their cheapest plan called 'Cloud Starter', even though it comes with just 0.5 CPU cores of processing power, it doesn't actually have a limit on the number of domains that you can host on it. This is uncommon for shared hosting plans at this price point, as many other hosts allow you to host only a single website on their starter plans, even when they're offering more server resources.

However, I'd recommend the 'Cloud 1' plan for most people with medium-to-high traffic websites. As it's always good to have a bit of headroom when it comes to web hosting. It also comes with 'unlimited' storage space (which just means that there isn't an arbitrary storage limit, but of course you can't expect to host terabytes of data on a $10/mo plan).

If your site runs on WordPress and is well optimized, the 1 Core and 1 GB of RAM allowance should be more than enough, especially considering how much of a difference the presence of LiteSpeed makes.

If you're looking to spend even more and looking at their $19.99/mo plan, however, I would recommend ExonHost's $19.95/mo Turbo Diesel+ plan over that one (read my review of ExonHost). That's because it comes with 2x CPU cores & RAM, and more than 3x Entry Processes. I'm currently a user of that plan, and I'm extremely happy with its performance.

Other Points

Here are a few other points about MDDHosting that I couldn't write about in the previous sections.

No Upselling

Endless upsells are a real pain with most cheap shared hosts, especially those owned by EIG, but that's not the case with MDD. They're extremely transparent right from when you first sign up with them.

I don't remember them ever trying to sell me anything at all (irrespective of whether it's useless or not) since I first signed up with them.

Offsite Backups for Free

Many shared hosts either charge separately for offsite backups or charge when you need to restore a backup. MDD does neither, and you can restore the backups partially (file/folder level) or in full, from their offsite backup solution which keeps your entire site data stored for at least 7 days.

CloudFlare Railgun Support

If you're a CloudFlare user, you probably know that their performance-enhancing RailGun feature costs around $200/mo. You can get it for free if you host with MDDHosting, thanks to their partnership with CloudFlare.

If you do utilize this rather advanced feature, the connections between your MDDHosting server (origin) and CloudFlare's CDN servers will be faster, resulting in a faster performance overall.

Free SSL for Lifetime

They offer both Let'sEncrypt and cPanel's very own AutoSSL for automatically installing SSLs for your domains, for free. It doesn't have any hassle of manual renewal, either, as it's renewed automatically as well.

It's needless to say that I'm more than satisfied with MDDHosting's quality of service and features of their shared (cloud) hosting plans.

Apart from the things that I've already mentioned, I especially like their strive to make their overall offering even better for the end users. It's not a surprise considering they mention in their 'about' page that they don't view their customers as dollar signs.

It resulted in them upgrading their servers with new hardware and software whenever there's a new way to make them even faster, or even more reliable. It's definitely a welcome change in a world where most low-budget web hosts forget about customer satisfaction as soon as the money-back period is over.

I hope my MDD Hosting review has offered you some practical insights about their service, and hopefully you're now less confused about their performance in various crucial areas of web hosting. 

If you do decide to sign up with them, you can take advantage of the coupon code - TECHTAGE50, which will give you an instant 50% discount on your first bill. Especially if you pay annually or biennially, this can save quite a bit of money when you sign up.