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.
This post was last modified on June 15, 2021 8:22 pm
View Comments (9)
I purchased service with Linuxfox after reading your previous review. It's true they have great speed and fast turnaround on their support tickets. However, they have continual issues with their billing process. I always pay them the same day they send an invoice, then the invoice remains in unpaid status for a couple days before they mark it as paid. But for the most recent invoice I received on Sept. 18 (due date Sept. 25), which I paid immediately, I just received a past due notice yesterday (Sept. 25) which states that this is the "first invoice overdue notice". I immediately opened an inquiry and sent proof of payment, but have heard nothing (as of Sept. 26) and my account is still showing as overdue with the invoice still showing as unpaid. If they interrupt my service because of this, the world will know about it.
You can find alternatives here https://thishosting.rocks/best-cheap-managed-vps/
To update - basically if you have paid and then get an overdue notice, it's probably because of their manual billing, and the person handling the billing is out of the office or hasn't caught up. So you have to ignore the automated alerts about being overdue because the manual recording hasn't been completed.
I've continued with LinuxFox, and am still satisfied with their service. The billing quirk is tolerable, as the manual process is more secure, even though the automated billing emails are not always up to date. So I've updated my rating of their support because they have recently improved it significantly. When you price shop LinuxFox is still extremely affordable when comparing what you get. And if you can afford to prepay for a year or two, then the savings is incredible.
Dear Paul,
I am glad to hear that you are happy. Thank you for your feedback.
Regards,
LinuxFox Management
Dear Paul,
I hope you are doing well today. We do not generally check public websites but a friend referred me to the page today.
Please note that we update all invoices manually which can take a few days for the payment to be updated. We do not suspend accounts even when customers do not pay for months, let alone weeks or days. When you have already paid, the question of suspension does not arise because the billing team checks for all transactions manually before suspending any account.
Please be informed that we did not suspend your services ever. Yes, the system might have generated automated reminders though. I do apologize for the same.
You have been a loyal customer for long. You appreciated our services in almost every ticket. I am glad that are happy with our services. Your glowing review is now online on our website http://www.linuxfox.com too.
We look forward to putting the same smile on your face over the years to come.
All the best!
Regards,
LinuxFox Management
When they first transferred our sites, they lost data. They take your money automatically through a PayPal subscription and then send you late notices, don't ignore these late notices, open a ticket every time, we didn't and got suspended, even though we had paid. They lie, they make things up, they add things into the system that weren't there before, I have screen shots. They take your monthly amount from PayPal, keep it and then suspend you. They they ask for more to get you unsuspended, you pay what they ask to get out of suspension and then they have trashed your content/data and then state you were actually terminated. If you are actually terminated, then why did they acknowledge receipt of payment and how did we get back in days later to open a ticket to beg for our websites to be restored. They will not restore your websites. Please stay as far away from this company as you can. It's not worth all your hard work going up in smoke.
It's been quite a while since we did the review and something may have changed, we've had multiple negative reports about LinuxFox. We tend to not recommend them either.
You can try and dispute the transactions via PayPal and submit all your screenshots and proof.
Dear TL Cais,
I am sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Please note that cPanel changed its licensing structure in 2019, applicable to all providers globally. We sent several emails since 2019 about the price change which can be verified by logging into your account and checking the emails section.
Here is the link on cPanel's official website that describes the change in July 2019 - https://blog.cpanel.com/account-based-pricing-updates/
We sent 29 reminders about the overdue invoices you had over several months where had not been paid. Unfortunately, we do not keep servers active for long without the payment. Still, we did keep your server online for two months and sent 29 reminders.
Please check the number of reminders we emailed. I hope you will agree that we have been fair.
27/02/2020 09:00 Third Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
26/02/2020 09:00 Second Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
25/02/2020 09:00 First Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
20/02/2020 22:12 cPanel Alternative, Zero Extra Cost - Special Offer (Limited Slots) Resend Email Delete
19/02/2020 09:00 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
17/02/2020 09:00 Customer Invoice Resend Email Delete
16/02/2020 10:54 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
16/02/2020 10:54 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
15/02/2020 09:18 VPS Offer - First Month Free - Last 4 Days Resend Email Delete
15/02/2020 09:00 Invoice #2410 Updated Resend Email Delete
15/02/2020 00:04 Service Suspension Notification Resend Email Delete
15/02/2020 00:04 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
15/02/2020 00:03 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
14/02/2020 00:03 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
07/02/2020 11:31 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
01/02/2020 11:44 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
31/01/2020 11:17 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
28/01/2020 11:33 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
26/01/2020 09:00 Second Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
25/01/2020 09:00 First Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
22/01/2020 01:23 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
20/01/2020 00:03 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
19/01/2020 09:00 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
17/01/2020 09:00 Customer Invoice Resend Email Delete
17/01/2020 00:23 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
14/01/2020 22:36 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
13/01/2020 01:31 VPS Offer for Old Customers Resend Email Delete
12/01/2020 11:22 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
11/01/2020 09:00 Third Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
10/01/2020 16:26 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
10/01/2020 09:00 Second Invoice Overdue Notice Resend Email Delete
09/01/2020 11:16 Invoice Payment Reminder Resend Email Delete
09/01/2020 09:00 First Invoice Overdue Notice
After realizing that the server was offline when you made the payment, it was already too late. We want all customers to be happy, so in consideration of our intention to make every person glad we offered two months of free validity for something where we did not have any fault.
I am sorry that you lost your websites. We did everything we could to make you aware that you had an outstanding account balance since 2019. Please feel free to send the backups from your local computer to us for free restoration.
At this time, your VPS is still online even after you disputed the last two payments in addition to the free months being credited.
For any help please feel free to contact our 24/7 support team.
Regards,
LinuxFox Management