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Exabytes Hosting review (The worst web host I’ve ever used!)

Using Exabytes hosting in Malaysia is like pulling my own teeth out. Every single interaction leaves me dumbfounded that this company exists, still makes money and still has customers.

I feel sorry for the Malaysians, Singaporeans and anyone else who wants to get a website, goes to Exabytes, and is dismayed at how bad the experience of having a website is.

I feel sorry for the businesses that Exabytes are holding back by offering a poor product. The product is so poor which I can only presume is because of overloaded under-powered servers, and simply bad service.

Who are Exabytes?

Exabytes MY Cover Image (fair use)

According to TechCrunch “Exabytes Group is a leading web and eCommerce hosting provider that was founded on the principle of providing the best hosting solutions.”

They are based in Penang Malaysia, but have offices in Singapore and Indonesia.

Here is why Exabytes is the worst web host I have found in Malaysia:

Exabytes offer unreliable hosting.

The hosting by Exabytes is so flakey. Do you want your website to have downtime? You got it!

We use Uptime Robot to monitor our website uptime, and Exabytes is never 99.9% or 100% uptime. For a website host this is terrible.

From their website:

Exabytes agrees to use its best endeavors to ensure a 99.9% Network Uptime and 99.5% Server Uptime to the customers.

Uptime on Exabytes

99.8% uptime and this is during a good phase. I have seen it as low as 96%.

Real data from Uptime Robot showing downtime on Exabytes:

Downtime on our server

As you can see, there are daily / multiple instances of downtime. From 4-9 minutes each time.

There is regularity and a pattern to the downtime. So obviously some process is taking down their servers everyday. I told them this 2 years ago. Nothing happened.

The downtime used to be worse. In 2019, 20-30 minutes down EVER SINGLE DAY. What are you DevOps team doing (if they have one).

Exabytes hosting is extremely slow

Time to First Byte and server response time are critical for a fast website and well performing website.

From Google Web Dev – what is Time to First Byte?

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a foundational metric for measuring connection setup time and web server responsiveness in both the lab and the field. It helps identify when a web server is too slow to respond to requests.

And guess what? Exabytes servers are extremely slow.

Response time by a server should 25-500ms. As you can see the AVERAGE for an Exabytes server is 3017ms. This is so ridiculously slow. It’s like making your website an Axia in an F1 race.

Terrible response time speeds

Page performance is vital for good SEO scores. But related to this slow server performance, here you can also see Google Lighthouse picking up on two key metrics:

Poorly configured web servers
  1. Reduce initial server response time – the server took 2.35s just to respond to the HTTP request! Most websites are supposed to load within 2 seconds, but the slow Exabytes server does not even start in that time
  2. Use HTTP/2 is a protocol which hosts should be using now for some years, but the company still do not support it. Wow.

What does this mean? This means your website hosted with Exabytes will be SLOOOOOOOOOW. Don’t use them!

Exabytes hosting is under powered.

Do you want your website to crash every time you update WordPress or update a WordPress plugin?

Exabytes hosting is so under powered and poorly configured that even basic updates like updating WordPress core or updating WordPress plugins crashes your website.

I’ve talked to their support, upgraded PHP, increased memory, updated config. but it still happens every time. I can take a copy of the site and launch it on another host without issues. The issues only exist on Exabytes.

Exabytes servers are so slow even basic administration tasks like backups or plugin upgrades crash your website. Your website will be offline because their servers are so bad.

Exabytes support is useless

You ask a question, they ignore it. Live chat – if it works – takes forever to get anywhere.

And even then – they say “we have referred to another support agent”

A question here about an under-powered account was immediately pushed to another department with a focus on the backup (this was 1% of my support issue). These people do not care, they do not want to work, they are just thinking about what they will eat for lunch.

Lazy customer support

Exabytes support is NOT 24 hours 7 days a week

Contrary to what they say on their website, I’ve never had an issue answered outside Malaysian weekday working hours. And we open a support ticket at least once a month because of the terrible service we get.

I can only presume that apart from critical infrastructure issues, they have no support out of hours, so their website is lying to you (but that’s no surprise).

Exabytes do not respect your time.

Time is cheap in Asia, and they will make you waste your time.

Today I was 21 minutes in to a live chat before they even began to address my problem. 21 minutes.

This was actually what spurred me to write this article.

How to waste your life with technical support

Almost 10 minutes pass – from “I am looking in to this” to “I don’t even know what I am looking at”.

WHAT?

How can any company that doesn’t respect its customers still expect to operate?

If you are a web developer, and maybe you earn RM300 per hour as a professional freelancer, then this live chat call just cost you RM100! And you did not even get the issue fixed.

Unfortunately for me, I charge more than this, so for me to have my time wasted in such a frivolous manner really does make me frustrated and want to shout from the rooftops that Exabytes is a terrible Malaysian web host.

Are there other signs that Exabytes is a terrible company?

Yes there are plenty of signs that Exabytes is a terrible company:

They have no Facebook reviews.

Exabytes have turned off Facebook reviews, so customers cannot leave reviews on their page.

All the comments made are moderated and often removed so other users cannot see them. For instance, who is the page replying to here? No-one! The page cannot hide their own comments, so this is why they still show.

They talk to themselves

Plus they have terrible scores on other review platforms:

The review says it all

Which hosting company do I recommend for hosting in Malaysia?

With all honest and integrity I 100% do not recommend Exabytes. I am forced to use them as a client has their website hosted on their server.

With other clients, I have had a good experience with Server Freak. The packages are similar to Exabytes, but the support is knowledgeable and fast, the performance of the sites I have created have been fast, and uptime is so far excellent. So they are worth looking at.

Since posting this article I have also been told about ShinJuru and of course simply not using any Malaysian company for hosting.

Who are you using to host your website in Malaysia and do you have a good experience with your host? I want to try out more hosts.

For domain names, make sure you do not register domain + hosting with same company. This is “putting all your eggs in one basket”. So for domains, especially Malaysian domain, use a general search site like MyNIC to search for the domain you want and then register. Again, do not use ExaBytes!!

Take action

Please stop using Exabytes! If you have a conversation with someone about domains or them needing a website, don’t let them throw away their money on Exabytes. If you see the Exabytes booth at a trade show, please tell people how bad they are. If you see a Exabytes leaflet at a trade show, just swipe it on the floor.

Exabytes is the worst hosting company I’ve ever dealt with and I don’t want you to suffer the same.