RDO Servers is a website hosting company based in South Carolina, United States, that offers a wide variety of hosting solutions. They started operating in 2009 as a faith based company.
Their company offers domain registration, shared hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting, and dedicated hosting plans. They also sell SSL certificates, server management plans, and help desk support plans for website hosting companies and hosting resellers.
In this article, I would like to take a closer look at RDO servers for you and show you what the company offers.
Available Hosting Plans
Although RDO Servers offer a number of different hosting options, their home page heavily promotes their shared hosting plans. It is easy to understand why they do this as they have some amazing deals for shared hosting customers.
Their starter plan is the blog hosting plan. That offers 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. It's a fantastic amount of hosting resources for only $4 per month. This plan is limited to one website being hosted, but it only costs $4 more to upgrade to their professional plan to allow up to fifteen domains. That plan also increases storage to 50GB and bandwidth to 1,000GB and adds weekly offsite backups.
Their business class hosting plan costs $15 per month. It offers 100GB of storage, 5,000GB of bandwidth, daily off-site website backups, and an unlimited number of domains and databases.
The shared hosting market is certainly the most competitive area of the website hosting market so there are a lot of great deals to be found online, but there is no doubt that RDO Servers are looking to be known as one of the most cost effective hosting solutions online.
Their reseller hosting plans are a good option for those of you who want to make a little extra cash from selling hosting to friends and family. They are a great entry point into starting your own website hosting company too.
From a hardware point of view, reseller hosting plans have the same kind of setup as shared hosting plans, but they do tend to offer a little more resources.
All reseller plans allow an unlimited number of domains, email accounts, and databases. Overselling is allowed too, which is great as it means you never need to turn down a customer. Daily off-site website backups are generated every day and each plan is configured to work with CloudFlare's content delivery network. Resellers also have the option of choosing Plesk or cPanel as their hosting control panel.
RDO Servers have three Windows and three Linux based reseller hosting plans. Their Windows plans allow ASP.net to be used and use Plesk as their control panel, though most customers would probably be better opting for one of the Linux plans.
The starter plan costs $10 per month and gives you 15GB of storage and 1,000GB of bandwidth. Upgrading to the $20 per month power plan increases storage to 50GB and bandwidth to 2,500GB. Their professional plan costs $30 per month and offers 100GB of storage and 5,000GB of bandwidth.
When you have outgrown your shared hosting plan, the logical step is to upgrade to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan. The number of customers hosted on a server is much less on a VPS plan compared to a shared hosting plan. You therefore receive a larger share of resources.
VPS plans are also setup in the same way as a dedicated hosting plan, therefore you have a lot more control over what applications are stored on your hosting space. You have much more control over your hosting allocation too; whether it be configuring domains or analysing how websites are performing.
RDO Servers' VPS hosting plans start from only $15 per month; which makes it one of the cheapest VPS hosting solutions online.
Their starter plan will get you 25GB of storage, 1 CPU Core, 500GB of bandwidth, 1GB of RAM, and a dedicated IP address.
Their more expensive VPS plans offer more storage, bandwidth, CPU cores, and RAM. For example, their enterprise plan costs $85 per month and allocates 250GB of storage, 8 CPU Cores, a whopping 5TB of bandwidth, 12GB of RAM, and four dedicated IP addresses.
RDO Servers dedicated hosting plans start from $199 per month. That will get you a quad core CPU with eight Threads, 8GB of RAM, two 1TB SATA hard drives with HW RAID, and 20TB of bandwidth.
A dedicated server will give you complete control over the server and ensure that only your websites are hosted on it.
I was a little surprised by the pricing of their dedicated server plans. RDO Servers sell some of the most cost-effective shared and VPS hosting plans on the internet, so I was surprised to see that their dedicated hosting plans are not competitively priced. They are not expensive, far from it, though at that price there are a lot of other companies that offer dedicated hosting plans with more resources.
Of course it is important to remember that in the hosting world cheaper is not always better. You do sometimes get what you pay for.
When I queried their dedicated pricing structure, RDO Servers said to me:
“We don't try to compete on price (although we will be lowering those prices a bit soon). The difference is our network, and our support. All of our dedicated servers are in a locked cage in a Tier3, 24/7 staffed, datacenter in Charlotte NC. The datacenter is 2N with a fully collapsible core network, and we extend this level of redundancy all the way to the servers. All servers and network gear use A&B power and we can even provide redundant uplinks to any of our servers. This level of redundancy and our excellent 24/7 proactive monitoring and support, is why our customers don't mind paying the extra.”
All hosting plans come with a thirty day money back guarantee. All plans are managed too so you can open up ticket requests any time you need help with something.
The Account Area
The team at RDO Servers kindly created an account for me so that I could poke around and see what they have to offer.
The account that I was set up with used cPanel as the control panel. The famous X3 cPanel theme was available for section, but I loved the paper lantern theme that was activated by default. It has a clean design and is easy to navigate.
Everything you would expect from cPanel is available, from database and file management to domains and email configuration. There are a lot of great stats applications activated and the Softaculous app installer allows you to install scripts such as WordPress and PrestaShop at the click of a button.
I was also pleased to see the inclusion of a number of additional features. There is an option to restore backups using R1 Soft's software and the integrated support for configuring CloudFlare is superb.
A number of security apps are available too such as a virus scanner and IP blocker.
Final Thoughts
RDO Servers do sell a variety of hosting plans to customers, however the low price of their shared hosting and VPS hosting plans suggests that they are targeting those specific markets.
With shared hosting plans starting at $4 per month and VPS hosting plans starting at only $15 per month, RDO Servers offer fantastic value for money. It sounds like they have a great set up for dedicated hosting customers too.
Those of you who are looking for someone to help manage your unmanaged VPS or dedicated hosting plan should also check them out. Their VPS management plan costs $21.99 per month while their server management plan costs $60 per month.
I recommend visiting RDO Servers if you are looking for a new hosting company. Be sure to contact them beforehand if you have any questions about their plans.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin