Squidix Review

Squidix is based out of Indianapolis, Indiana and they started providing web hosting services back in 2010. I signed up for a 10GB shared hosting plan with Squidix in July of 2015. They also offer reseller hosting, semi-dedicated hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated server as well as web design and development services. Right from the start I was impressed with Squidix because I requested a full cPanel backup to be restored on my new account and 5 minutes later it was done! Since then in the year I’ve been with them I haven’t faced any problems except for some downtime in late December when Linode (datacenter where my hosting account is) was facing DDoS attacks. There’s more on that further down the page. Overall Squidix has been a great web host that I continue to trust.

Speed Testing – Fast

I’m on a shared hosting plan located in Dallas, TX (Linode datacenter). Squidix also uses QuadraNet’s datacenter in Dallas,TX.

Dallas Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 758 milliseconds

New York City Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 1.05 seconds

Uptime – SOLID

Aside from DDoS attacks on Linode in December 2015 which resulted in 100+ minutes of downtime spread over Christmas week, my downtime records show only 26 minutes of downtime in the year I’ve been using Squidix.

August 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2015 – 99.957% Uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
November 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2015 – 99.69% Uptime (142 minutes of downtime) Downtime due to scheduled maintenance which required a server reboot to apply necessary updates on December 15th (5 minutes of downtime) and the DDoS attacks Christmas week (137 minutes of downtime).
January 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2016 – 99.995% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
April 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 10/14/2016 to report uptime for the months of July – October shown below.
July 2016 –  99.82% Uptime (82 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 – 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime) Scheduled system reboot to apply critical security updates
October 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 04/02/2017 to report uptime for the months of November – March shown below.
November 2016 – 99.81% Uptime (83 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 08/24/2017 to report uptime for the months of April – July shown below.
April 2017 – 99.86% Uptime (59 minutes of downtime) Some downtime due to routine scheduled maintenance in response to a critical Xen security advisory
May 2017 – 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 – 99.74% Uptime (111 minutes of downtime) 84 minutes of this month’s downtime was due to scheduled maintenance in the early AM hours of June 17th.
July 2017 – 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 02/12/2018 to report uptime for the months of August 2017 – January 2018 shown below.
August 2017 – 99.95% Uptime (23 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 – 99.78% Uptime (96 minutes of downtime) Notified almost a month in advanced on August 26th about the planned maintenance on September 20th.
October 2017 – 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 – 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)

Outstanding Support

Squidix has fast and knowledgeable support. Tickets are answered in minutes, not hours. As I said early, my initial cPanel account migration request was completed within 5 minutes and by the owner Sam Barrow. Looking back on my support ticket history when I experienced the downtime Christmas week, I received a response within 3 minutes, and another response from the owner 20 minutes after that.

Me (Client) 12/29/2015 11:10
Hello,
I was wondering if you could look into what’s been causing downtime for me this morning. Below is recent downtime I have logged.
Thank you for your time and help.
12/29/15 – 10:13am – 17 minutes downtime
12/29/15 – 9:20am – 47 minutes downtime
12/29/15 – 8:38am – 16 minutes downtime
12/28/15 – 2:48am – 11 minutes downtime
12/26/15 – 11:42am – 9 minutes downtime
12/25/15 – 2:58pm – 37 minutes downtime

Sreenath Vijayan (Staff) 12/29/2015 11:13

One of our service providers/data centers were facing connective issues and their engineers have fully restored it.
The servers are back online and your websites are loading fine now. We regret for the inconvenience caused.

Sam Barrow (Staff) 12/29/2015 11:33

Your site is at a server at Linode’s Dallas datacenter, they are experiencing a DDoS at the moment and working to mitigate it. Everything appears to be operational at the moment.
http://status.linode.com

Here are the status pages for the Linode Dallas connectivity issues on the days I experienced downtime in December: 12/25/15, 12/26/15, 12/28/15, and 12/29/15.

There was one scheduled maintenance to apply security updates to the server on December 15th that resulted in 5 minutes of downtime at 2:04AM for which I was notified about by email three days before hand.

Final Verdict

My invoice is due in 5 days on the 28th of July and I will be renewing for another year. Their pricing is reasonable considering what you get: fast loading speed; overall no issues with uptime (minus the December DDoS attack); and a dedicated and responsive staff. Over the past year of using Squidix I can say they are a reliable web host and I definitely recommend them.