NetDepot In 2018: How Would NetDepot Clients Review Them?

NetDepot Introduction

NetDepot has been providing web hosting services since 1995. Located in Houston, Texas (with another office in Atlanta, Georgia) they provide dedicated and cloud based hosting with a growing network of datacenters throughout the United States.

They provide a full range of high-level services for customers of all sizes. The core of their system is a public network composed of various redundant providers. On top of that, they have built a private network for customers who need virtual private networks (VPN) and other non-public services.

NetDepot is part of Global Net Access (GNAX). When GNAX sold off its colocation services, the company decided to put all of its remaining dedicated and managed hosting services under the brand name of their subsidiary NetDepot so as not to confuse customers.

Services & Specializations

NetDepot is very targeted in the services they offer. They do no domain registration, traditional shared hosting, or even colocation. They are focused on dedicated and managed hosting services. These are all distributed over their US-based datacenters. But NetDepot is also part of a content delivery network (CDN) made up of roughly 50 datacenters throughout the world.

Dedicated servers come by default with 1 Gb/s redundant network — with backend connectivity to NetDepot’s private network. Users can access them remotely with reboot and KVM via Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). They can run Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows 2008, although a licensing fee must be paid for the Windows platform.

All cloud servers are based upon a fully redundant large capacity core network. They use only solid state drives on their hardware. And all the hardware is redundant. All of this means that the cloud servers and highly reliable. All servers are available with Linux or FreeBSD operating systems.

Cloud servers can be purchased on a monthly or hourly basis. NetDepot provides extremely competitive pricing.

In addition to these core services, NetDepot offers backup, fully managed dedicated servers, various Cisco Firewalls.

Infrastructure / Datacenters / Network

Currently, NetDepot has three datacenters in Dallas, Atlanta, and New York. But they are in the process of opening datacenters in Chicago and Los Angeles. All datacenters are connected to multiple 10 Gb/s internet uplinks. All of the facilities are secured with physical force prevention and 24/7 staffing. They also include redundant network and power systems to assure 100% uptime. At its New York datacenter, NetDepot highlights its low latency of less than 5 ms.

The NetDepot network is provided by a number of carriers, including: Zayo, GTT, PCCW, and Cogent. These are combined in a redundant configuration to minimize the possibility of network outages. This redundancy extends to the design of the hardware at the rack level, where Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and other technologies are used to assure connectivity. Finally, only the best hardware is used at NetDepot’s datacenters, including Cisco, Brocade, and Juniper.

NetDepot is committed to IPv6. All new servers are set up with a dual-stack approach allowing them to operate with IPv6 while still being backward compatible with IPv4.

Many commercial clients need access to private networks. As a result, NetDepot provides a “network within a network” approach to create a private network inside its public network. All the datacenters are connected via this private network backbone. This allows users to move secure data around without it interfering with traffic on the public network.

Support and Customer Service

NetDepot provides 24/7 technical assistance via ticketing system and telephone. In fact, they provide direct telephone access to all of their datacenters. In addition, they provide migration assistance and other consulting services.

Security & Backups & Server Monitoring

NetDepot datacenters are staffed 24/7 with monitoring at a network operations center. The datacenters are also protected in various ways against physical threats such as fire and temperature.

NetDepot uses R1Soft Server Backup Manager, which provides continuous backup at the block (rather than file) level. Customers pay based upon the size of their data use. It can also be used to backup specific parts of a server, such as the databases.

Uptime Guarantee

On its cloud servers, NetDepot guarantees a 99.9% uptime or your money back. On its dedicated servers, it provides a 100% uptime guarantee on its power and network.

Billing & Payment Policies

NetDepot accepts all major credit cards, PayPal, and Bitcoin. Their cloud services can be purchased by the month or by the hour.

NetDepot also offers a reseller program. It provides discounts on server use, starting at 10% and going up to 25% for resellers using 36 or more servers. There are other benefits to the reseller program, such as discounts on overstock inventory.

Summary

NetDepot provides high end web hosting services for clients of all sizes. In particular, they offer cloud services billed by month and by the hour. Their entry level cloud hosting is extremely competitive — as cheap as many traditional shared hosting plans. But they provide an almost limitless path to growth with a solid US-based infrastructure and access to a large worldwide CDN.