MDDHosting Plaid hosting review

In this article, I’ll write about my experience with MDDHosting’s (affiliate link) Plaid hosting platform (shared and reseller hosting). More in the form of personal notes and a reminder than a real review (if it helps you – great; if it doesn’t help you – also great 🙂 ).
TL/DR: simply and plainly put – this is the hosting I would recommend to my mother if she were into building a website.

Status: Active
From May, 2019 – to July, 2019,
and from June, 2022 – ongoing

I’m currently hosting websites (including this site) with this provider. There’s no more honest recommendation than that.

Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):

1. Introduction and basic info
2. Security and stability
3. Technical support
4. Speed – performance
5. Prices and the available resources
6. Conclusion and recommendation
7. Apendix: Website/account migration

1. Introduction and basic info

In my MDDHosting Turbo Elastic Reseller Hosting review, I wrote in more detail about this company and how resources are provided for their reseller hosting.

Briefly: MDDHosting exists and has been in the business for decades, and based on my experience (and feedback from other customers), it offers reliable and high-quality service.

MDDHosting offers VPS, shared, and reseller hosting. Shared and reseller are offered on two platforms:

• Turbo
• and Plaid

The Turbo platform is rock-solid and fast, but the Plaid platform is the fastest shared/reseller hosting I’ve tried (on top of being solid and stable).

By the way, “Plaid” is a Spaceballs film reference (Amazon affiliate link). 🙂

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2. Security and stability

Security is very high. Starting from account isolation provided by CloudLinux’s CageFS, over good server configuration, to the brilliant Imunify360 software.

You can see the stability of this platform on my uptime status page:
status.bikegremlin.com

I really have nothing more to add on this topic – as far as I can tell, it’s all tip-top. 🙂

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3. Technical support

I can not praise this enough. I really haven’t experienced better technical support.

To illustrate, I’ll mention the “tricky” WordPress-related problems – when even I’m not sure myself if it’s something to do with the theme, plugin conflicts, my WordPress setup, or the hosting server.

When that happens, most providers will give you a standard answer: disable all the plugins, switch the theme to the TwentyTwentyTwo, and if the problem is solved, you’re on your own figuring out which WP-related conflict caused it. But MDDHosting support often takes the time to look into the logs, and even log into your WordPress backend (with your permission) in order to find the cause and solve the problem (at least for anything within reason, I wouldn’t expect them to fix a poorly built website for free).

In other words: technical support is hard-working, competent, and fast to respond. They have good knowledge and understanding of all the technologies and third-party services that their service relies on (Cloudflare, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed etc.), so I’ve never experienced the type of problems I call Catch-22.

Brilliant is the right word. 🙂

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4. Speed – performance

In one word: Plaid. 🙂
No, seriously, this is the fastest shared/reseller hosting I’ve seen.
Update, March, 2023: at the time of writing, HostXnow is a bit faster and takes the title of the fastest hosting I’ve tried so far.

I’ve been using the Turbo platform for months. However, primarily for the client websites, I wanted to switch to the fastest platform I know – so there are no compromises in terms of performance. That’s why I couldn’t wait for MDDHosting to, in addition to offering Shared hosting, start offering Reseller hosting on their Plaid platform.

My first subjective impression is that, even the less than perfectly optimized WordPress websites, “fly” in the admin backend. Likewise, cPanel and WHM panels work noticeably faster (feels as if I’m connected to a machine in my local network). This makes any website-related work very comfortable. But what about the speed and visitor experience? Here is a server load test, showing the shear performance (no caching or Cloudflare involved):

To get a more realistic view of the visitor performance, I run Octoperf load tests. These tests simulate 30 visitors browsing a site as if there is no tomorrow (opening a new page as soon as the current page is loaded, all 30 at the same time). The test site is made using WordPress, with a small WooCommerce shop.

The nicest thing is that the test site showed almost no extra resource load during the tests. Fast storage and processor dealt with all the requests as soon as they arrived, and well-configured caching made sure that there aren’t too many new requests loading them in the first place. I had to double-check the DNS to confirm that the load tests were targeting the right server – seriously. 🙂

Update:
With MDDHosting, service quality has improved over the years, and they keep working on improving it further. Case in point: MDDHosting’s MariaDB 10.6 optimization (their forum link) in October 2022.

Update:
MDDHosting have managed to implement secure Redis object caching (MDDHosting’s website link) for their shared and reseller hosting environments. It’s the only shared/reseller hosting provider that I know of which offers this.

So, I’m very pleased with the performance, but how much does it cost, and how many websites can I add to my Plaid reseller hosting account? Let’s look into that:

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5. Prices and the available resources

I’m using the smallest Plaid reseller package ( $30 base monthly price), and at the time of writing I’m hosting about a dozen (mostly WordPress) production websites. Here is the overview of the available resources and their average usage:

The package includes 25 GB of storage, 2 TB ( ~ 2000 GB ) of monthly bandwidth, and 25 cPanel accounts. Based on my calculation and experience, I can easily host at least twenty more websites, just paying extra for storage and cPanel accounts. Let me explain that:

MDDHosting’s Elastic resource allocation lets you get more when needed, at these monthly prices:

• Additional cPanel accounts: $0.40 a piece, monthly.
• Additional storage: $0.30 per GB, monthly.
• Additional bandwidth: $0.10 per GB, monthly.

The next, more powerful package, comes with a double base monthly price ($60), and double all the included resources (and the same price for extra cPanel accounts, storage and bandwidth).

Based on these prices, it’s best to remain with a cheaper package until you reach CPU, RAM, or process limits – it’s cheaper to pay for the extra storage and cPanel accounts if you need them (this is charged at the end of each month, based on usage). The only exception is the bandwidth – if you need more bandwidth, it’s cheaper to buy a higher-tier package (it ends up at $0.03 per GB, instead of $0.10).

MDDHosting allows overselling, and in the MDDHosting Turbo Elastic reseller hosting review, I’ve explained in detail how to keep track of resource usage. Read that article for details, here I’ll just post one picture as a brief overview:

This is very clear and predictable, so I’m not afraid of any unexpected expenses – and it gives a lot of flexibility. You can create hosting packages according to your needs – allowing a website to use, say, 3 GB of RAM and 3 vCPU.

In the HostMantis review, I explained in detail how to create hosting packages and set LVE resource limits.

Often when I hear hosting advice saying “you should upgrade to a VPS” I just laugh (is VPS really faster than shared hosting?). With a platform like this, you can harness some really powerful resources, good enough to run even a larger WooCommerce webshop. And it’s all under one reseller account, for easier management. 🙂

I like this – an email notification that one cPanel sub-account is about to exceed its allotted monthly bandwidth limit if the usage continues at the same average daily rate:

This allows me to either increase the limit, or double check and see what causes the greatly increased bandwidth usage for that account.

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6. Conclusion and recommendation

MDDHosting (along with VeeroTech) is a hosting provider I trust, and am delighted with their service stability. With the Plaid platform, it’s become the fastest hosting I’ve seen.

This is where I host most of my websites. I’ll update this review in case of any changes (either upgrades, or problems/hiccups).

Should you decide to try MDDHosting thanks to this review (or in spite of it 🙂 ), you can use my MDDHosting affiliate link, and thus support my work.
You can use the TRYELASTIC coupon code for a 25% discount for the first 3 months.

P.S.
I’ve also made a short MDDHosting review on the LowEndTalk forum – my favourite web hosting related forum. 🙂

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7. Apendix: Website/account migration

This is worth mentioning, after I’ve been using the service for a longer period. I was moving my websites manually, to confirm that it all works and that I can easily move websites to and from this provider.

However, manual website migration does take a bit more time and it can be a bit of a hassle. So, I did ask MDDHosting to move some websites for me, on a few occasions. It went smoothly, both with cPanel, and with DirectAdmin backups.

I think this information may be important to some users/customers, and I see that I had completely forgotten to mention it. 🙂

MDDHosting is awesome! 🙂

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