My Experience with Matt

Bryce W

Managed Customer
I have been meaning to do this for a while but here is a story/case study of my experience with Matt.

Rewinding a few years, one of my sites outgrew its shared hosting (https://www.technibble.com/forums/) so I needed to switch to something else. I ended up switching to Rackspace Cloud Sites which was good at the time as they babysat everything. The problem is that its fairly expensive.

This solved the problem for a while and I was fairly happy to pay for it (about $150 at the time). However, over the years my sites usage grew and grew which eventually pushed my hosting cost up to $320 USD per month. The hosting was also getting a little wonky with its SQL for some reason. It would cause a database table crash a few times a year and I'd have to go in and run the repair tools.

Also, I had been using vBulletin on one of my sites since 2006 and vBulletin got progressively worse and worse until the point where they were no good upgrade path for me. vBulletin was bloated, always had security updates and wasn't particularly good with SEO. I heard that most people were jumping ship from VB to Xenforo and it was on the Xenforo forums I heard about Matt who came highly recommended.

So I told Matt my requirements who recommended an $80 Linode server. I had my Rackspace monthly bill coming up on a few days and asked him if he could do the migration quickly, which he was happy to do. He set that up and migrated my forums. Rackspace was actually causing problems as it wouldn't dump the entire database which pushed the time Matt had to spend on it up a lot. However, Matt stuck to his original price.

Once it was up and running I asked a bunch of questions about the best way to go about certain things which he happily helped me with (some covered in the initial migration, some on an hourly basis). Even suggested some things that would made the server/forums better which was great because "I don't know what I don't know".

He doesn't "nickel and dime" you like many other providers and seems to be happy to answer quick questions or point me in the right direction. He seems to be someone who genuinely passionate about this stuff and it shows.

So, lets talk numbers:

My yearly cost on Rackspace before Matt: $3,840
My yearly cost on Linode ($80) with Matts monthly server maintenance (£15): $1236

PER YEAR SAVINGS: $2,604 (or $207 p/m)

The server is running flawlessly (no crashing table issue like on Rackspace, in fact, no server errors at all) and it is SIGNIFICANTLY faster. The forum members definitely notice the difference. Check it out yourself. So now its running Better AND Cheaper, the man is definitely worth the money.

I know he's actually doing work with the monthly server maintenance too because I frequently get updates telling me that he upgraded this or that.

Its not just about the savings for me either, its all a better user experience for my members. The combination of Xenforos features (which the members love) and almost instant server speed (thanks to Matt) caused my forum activity to go up significantly. The migration happened on Jan 10th.

TN-stats.jpg

If you are on the fence about going with Matt, whether jumping to Xenforo or switching servers, do it. So far its probably the best decision I have made in 2015.
 
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