LinuxFox Review – Managed Hosting Done Right

LinuxFox

9.7

Speed/Hardware

9.9/10

Support

9.4/10

Pricing

10.0/10

Features

9.3/10

Pros

• Fast & secure
• Great managed 24/7 support
• Cheap
• Full root access
• True KVM virtualization

Cons

• US server locations only
• Some free migrations are limited

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Here’s our detailed review of LinuxFox – a relatively new managed hosting provider offering shared hosting, managed VPS, dedicated servers, and Odoo hosting services, among others.

About LinuxFox

First, let’s start with some information about LinuxFox. Their servers are located in Tampa, Florida, USA and managed by experts with more than 10 years of experience. One of the most important things you should look for when choosing a managed hosting provider is the customer support team. And LinuxFox has one of the friendliest and most knowledgeable support reps out there. They go above and beyond to help their customers with all kinds of problems with their servers. Learn more about LinuxFox and their network.

Hosting plans offered by LinuxFox

Here’s an overview of the hosting plans they offer:

• Shared web hosting – powered by cPanel with unlimited number of allowed domains. You get the usual features included in most shared hosting providers – 1-click installers, email accounts, backups, website builders etc. Their shared hosting plans start at $6 per month.
• Managed VPS hosting – what stands out here is that their VPSes are KVMs. So you get true virtualization as opposed to OpenVZ. You also get root access – which is not that common with managed server providers. cPanel/WHM is included for free with all managed VPS plans. Their VPS plans start at $35 per month.
• Dedicated server hosting – fully managed dedicated servers with a few hardware options to choose from. cPanel/WHM is also included in their dedicated servers. They start at $130 per month.
• Odoo (and other apps) hosting – they have various specialized hosting plans tailored to specific apps like Odoo, WordPress, Magento, and more. Pricing and features vary, but their plans have everything you’d need to host and use the apps they’re meant for.

LinuxFox’s features

These are some of the notable features that LinuxFox offers with all their hosting plans:

• Free migrations. Be it a dedicated server, or a simple WordPress website, they’ll migrate your data for free. Most migrations are totally free, but some migrations (like Odoo or migrating data without a control panel) are charged with a $15 fee after the first 2 hours. So if the migration process takes longer than 2 hours, you’re charged $15 per hour for each hour after that. Though most migrations take less than 2 hours, it’s best if you consult them beforehand for an estimate of how long the migration would take. You can read more about their migration process here.
• 24/7 support. This is a given considering they’re a managed hosting provider, but they do offer 24/7 support, and it’s quite helpful.
• 30-day money-back guarantee. Essentially, a 30-day trial. If you don’t like their services, you’re free to cancel and get your money back within the first 30 days. Note that the money-back guarantee is not valid for dedicated servers, domains, and SSLs.
• Dedicated 10 Gbps ports. Their servers are powered by dedicated 10 Gbps ports which should give you faster response times = faster websites.
• DDoS protection. All shared and VPS hosting plans include a DDoS protection for free. For example, if the attack is of 54 Gbps, 50Gbps will be blocked at the border router and 4 Gbps will be scrubbed through the network to ensure that legitimate users can still access the services hosted on the server and are not blocked.
• Proactive monitoring. They monitor their servers with a 10-minute interval. They monitor the server itself (ping) and the hosted websites (HTTP).
• All servers are properly secured. They make sure all servers are secure, including the services and daemons hosted on the servers. You can learn more about their Security Shield here.
• Community forums. They launched a community forum – you can join them and discuss anything related to their hosting services, or servers in general. You don’t have to be a customer to be a member of the LinuxFox community forums.
• Active in the WHT community. Although this is not a feature as much as it is a random fact – LinuxFox is an active member in the WebHostingTalk community – which does say something about the services they offer if they “withstood the test of WHT”. Web hosting providers with fewer customers usually give a lot more (dedicated) attention to their customers and their servers, which is great.
• A loyalty program. They have the LinuxFox Loyalty Program – which means when you spend a certain amount of dollars at LinuxFox, you get different perks. Check their page for more info.
• …and more. RAID-10 SSDs, backups, and similar features are pretty standard, so there’s really no need to include them all. But you do get everything you need, and more. You can go to their website to learn more, or just contact them via live chat.

An in-depth look into LinuxFox’s VPS plans

Once you sign up for a VPS plan at LinuxFox, you’ll get a notification email with all the necessary information about your server. You can manage your servers via the account area:

You can pretty much do everything from the account area including managing and monitoring your server.

As mentioned earlier, cPanel/WHM is included with all their servers, so you’ll do most of your work via WHM. You can manage every detail of your server using WHM, via a GUI:

We won’t go into details on what you can do with WHM (which is a lot!).

LinuxFox speed test

We tested their cheapest VPS plan (MVPS-KSUS1) which costs $35 per month and has 2 vCPUs, 6 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD Storage, and 10 TB Bandwidth.

We did a simple speed test at WebPagetest.org on a default WordPress website. No extra configs are done, nothing was changed from the default settings both on the server and on the WP website. You should, of course, do a better test and benchmark their servers with a script like nench.sh. However, with our test scenario, you still get the idea.

The default WordPress homepage fully loaded in 1.272 seconds. This is a great result, especially when compared to other WordPress hosting providers. You can view the full test here.

What we (don’t) like about LinuxFox

Finally, the pros and cons of LinuxFox.

First of all – we have to applaud their support services. The average response/resolution time for our tickets was about 20 minutes. It’s what matters anyway.

Their pricing is quite cheap and affordable, considering that you’re getting a fully managed KVM VPS with 6GB RAM and 2 vCPUs for $35 per month. And that’s the monthly pricing without a discount. cPanel is also included with all VPS and dedicated server plans – which is worth about $10, depending on what kind of license you’ll get and where you’re getting it from. You can still get a VPS without cPanel, in which case it will be $10 cheaper.

Based on the benchmarks we did, along with the simple speed test, they’re fast.

It’s quite rare that managed hosting providers support Odoo, and luckily, LinuxFox does support Odoo. They offer various Odoo hosting plans. With their support team that actually supports Odoo, they’re a great fit.

What we don’t like about LinuxFox is that some of the free migrations are limited to 2 hours of work time. Granted, it’s only a part of the migrations and they may take less than 2 hours, but still, something to have in mind for your next migration.

They also don’t have server locations other than the US one. So if you need EU or Asian servers, you’ll have to look for an alternative (for now). They do plan on adding servers based in the UK and India.

That’s about it from our review. All in all – they’re great, you should try them out. They have a money-back guarantee anyway.