CartikaHosting In 2018: How Would CartikaHosting Clients Review Them?

Cartika Introduction

Cartika was founded in 1999 with a single reseller account. Their goal? Provide top quality application hosting and support.

But over time, their mandate expanded. Today, they’re a complete infrastructure managed hosting company with a range of services including web, IaaS, VPS, and dedicated server options for any sized company. And (with a nod to their own reseller roots) they continue to offer ample Reseller programs. With colocations in both Dallas, Texas and Toronto, Canada, they offer excellent speed for any North American company.

Services & Specializations

Cartika offers a giant range of services for anything from small businesses up to enterprise level corporations.

Unlike many of their competitors, Cartika offers both Linux (CloudLinux) and Windows (2012) hosting with cPanel or Plesk access, respectively (their reseller hosting runs on H- Sphere). Like a lot of hosting companies, Cartika scales their pricing based on the computing power provided. However, every single hosting plan does come with:

• Unlimited Domains
• Unlimited Accounts
• Unlimited Bandwidth

Furthermore, each plan is geared up and ready to be turned into whatever sort of website you might want with Softaculous 1-click installer giving you access to over 350 different scripts. This is, however, pretty standard among most hosting companies.

Cartika really stands apart from their peers with their range of solutions available. In addition to the anticipated shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated solutions, Cartika also specializes in healthcare and financial hosting solutions. For healthcare, they advocate strong HIPAA management and compliance, with both cloud and dedicated server options. For financial institutions, Cartika offers the best security they can with both SOX and FIMA compliance.

Cartika also offers network solutions like Mobile VPNS and Platform as a Service (PaaS), not to mention extensive ecommerce and CMS solutions.

Cartika Partner Solutions

Cartika partners with Cognency (who have been hosting ecommerce for over 10 years) to offer both Magento and ProductCart ecommerce hosting for any business or enterprise. And to keep you and your customers secure, they have a huge variety of SSL certificates from GeoTrust and Verisign to keep your transactions locked down.

Cartika also partners with the best CMS hosts in the world to make it easy to maintain a website over time. Quicksilk is a proprietary subscription based CMS that makes it fast and easy to get online. And for WordPress enthusiasts, Cartika partners with Canada-based WPCloud.ca, a WordPress hosting specialist. Cartika ensures that your website is forever in good hands.

Support and Customer Service

Cartika offers on premise 24/7 support with email, chat, or over the phone. You can call toll free, or you can call the specific centre where your stuff is hosted (Dallas or Toronto).

They also have a knowledge centre with over 175 articles and almost 250 help videos. This is both searchable and easily categorized, allowing their customers to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.

Finally, Cartika has a company blog covering topics like how to back up your cloud, what load balancers do, and the role of SEO in web design.

Server Security and Monitoring

Because of their focus on the healthcare and financial industries, Cartika is enormously invested in providing a secure environment.

For their security, the give every account proactive server hardening, Ksplice and WSUS updating and patching, spam protection, and real time anti-virus scanning. They’re also a PCI scan compliant host. They also provide and 2N A+B redundant power network for all of their clients.

Their healthcare and financial solutions also include additional security. In order to fully comply with HIPAA and SOX/FISMA with their:

• Certified staff
• Dedicated Juniper Firewalls
• SSL certificates
• Tier3+ to Tier4 facilities
• SAS70 Type II certifications
• Internal and external audits

Server backups

Cartika offers a range of server backup options with their Backup as a Service (BaaS). This enables every customer to choose onsite (LAN) or cloud backups. All of your data is retrievable, and you can restore individual files and databases – enabling granular data restoration.

They also offer snapshots or daily restore points depending on the level of security you opt for.

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

The uptime for Cartika is 99.9% for their shared and reseller hosting plans. For their dedicated and cloud hosting plans, they offer 100% network uptime (excluding scheduled maintenance). The rules surrounding this is covered in their SLAs on the Cartika website.

For shared and reseller hosting, the 99.9% covers unscheduled maintenance for the Cartika networks or datacentres. It doesn’t include isolated ISP or transit outages, since they’re out of the host’s control. Should Cartika fail to deliver on this guarantee in any given month, then their customers are eligible for a credit 50% of your monthly fee. Scheduled maintenance is exempt from the 99.9%.

For their dedicated and cloud hosting solutions are covered 100% of the time. This includes all infrastructure, cloud server host nodes, and dedicated hardware (processors, RAM, etc…). Should they fail to deliver on this guarantee, customers will be credited one day of service for every five minutes that the network is compromised.

Billing & Payment Policies

Customers can choose to pay monthly, quarterly, half yearly, or yearly, depending on the service offered. Payment can be made via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX) PayPal, or (in Canada) EFT. All of the pricing is done in USD and should a customer fail to pay within 10 days, their account is suspended. After 3 days, their account can be deleted and every on it is lost.

Cartika has an unforgiving cancelation policy. There is no money back guarantee, and there are no half month credits or refunds. They strongly encourage customers to pay month-to-month rather than a lump sum, where a partial refund could be granted, but it’s entirely up to Cartika.

Summary / Conclusion

All in all, Cartika is an excellent hosting company, especially for resellers or larger ecommerce websites. By partnering with fantastic CMS and ecommerce companies, and building a network with a tremendous focus on security, Cartika offers a premium service for those who need a little more oomph with their hosting. Cartika is a fantastic choice if security is a core concern (healthcare or financial), if reselling is your core business, or if you have a busy site and are looking for a managed, top notch ecommerce or WordPress solution.