Before reading this review further please see  this thread about MK Hosting USA at WebHostingTalk

Unfortunately MK Hosting USA appear to be on the verge of failure and despite initial great impressions, we suggest that you do not consider them as a hosting provider. Currently their members area, billing and support remain unreachable and all database driven applications are down – this appears to be due to a full partition on their server which nobody has seen fit to remedy and customers have no way of contacting them – this indicates the imminent demise of the service. If you are an existing customer you may find some help through the link to WebHostingTalk above. If you do not have backups of your data you could have some serious problems.

We apologize to anyone who read our review below and became a customer – this failure is unprecedented and came completely without warning from a company who had appeared to be solid and reliable. If service is resumed, the amount of downtime and lack of response takes them out of the equation for business hosting in our opinion.

MK Hosting USA is a relatively new name to me here at TCH but one I am going to become very familiar with in the weeks ahead.

This review is being written after only having signed up for an account a matter of days ago and in that sense it is perhaps too early to speak much about negatives, because in all honesty, I have yet to find any. That’s not to say that there won’t be any problems, ever; this is web hosting after all.  However, I thought it would be good to share my very positive experiences with the company so far and explain a little more about them and how I came to be a customer.

For many years I used Kiosk.ws as my hosting company and I’ve been pretty happy, as regular readers will probably already know. Their bundled web hosting and marketing services were, for many years, pretty hard to beat in terms of service, support, reliability and value.

In recent times Kiosk transformed into GVO and they have invested a great deal of time and money in upgrading and adding to their core services and embarking on a very high profile relaunch after moving from Canada to Texas and a brand new data center. During the course of all the upheaval however, all in the GVO garden was not rosy and after countless issues and problems I felt it was time to start seriously looking for new pastures. To be fair, GVO is not a bad company but like many relationships one party outgrew the other and the changes, whilst essential for one to grow, left the other feeling disillusioned and wanting more from life.

Having built several websites and mailing lists with GVO, as well as earning recurring affiliate commissions with them, it seemed a lot to give up and also a lot to try and replace.

Discovering MKHosting was one of those happy accidents, the circumstances of which are hard to recall. On seeing their website however, I was certain I had found a real contender for my hosting and marketing requirements.

The company are, in many ways, similar to GVO and whilst direct comparison might be unfair to both companies, the similarities are hard to ignore and their target market is indisputably similar. GVO offer a reseller hosting account, unlimited email autoresponders, lead capture templates and systems, video hosting and marketing services, VOIP conference rooms and a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions. The charge for their package is, at the time of writing, $45.00 per month.

MKHosting provide shared hosting with no limits on storage, bandwidth, email accounts, domains, FTP accounts or MySQL databases (no reseller account).  They also offer a complete email marketing service with unlimited autoresponders, a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions, a free domain for new customers (.biz) and  around $150 in PPC advertising coupons.  You’ll also get some basic rebrandable lead capture pages that can be easily integrated with your autoresponder service and for those wanting to build a site using templates, the company have teamed up with Hostgator to offer a library of over 4500 quality themes. All this comes in at under $20.00 per month.

This was well worth a look for me and I tested the waters, as I recommend all potential new customers of a hosting company should do, by firing off an email enquiring about the services and asking a few questions pertinent to my requirements and situation. I had an answer within twenty minutes (on a Friday afternoon) and it was positive, well written and to the point.

I began a series of questions via this ticket and replies came very promptly and were all from the same support guy who was knowledgeable and very efficient. It seemed that I had found a little gem and although I had decided to think carefully about my decision to move, I was so reassured by the responses that I decided the next day to pay my first month’s fee and initiate the transfer of my sites and domains.

This is always a nail biting time for a webmaster but the smoothness and simplicity of the move was impressive indeed. The fact is that the same support guy I had spoken to from day one, handled the entire move for me. I did not have to do a thing aside from provide him with required login information and the like so that he could access my various sites. All I did was kick back and answer a couple of emails and my sites were seamlessly moved to the new server, the DNS changes taken care of and in the space of a Saturday morning and early afternoon, the job was done.  More to the point it was done with no ill effects whatsoever, nothing was broken and to an outside observer you would never have known anything was happening.

I spent most of the day configuring my new autoresponder and email marketing toys, which, I have to say, may not be quite as user friendly as those at my previous host but are certainly way superior in terms of features. These tools are the best I have used and the statistical information is a match for any third party service. After a day of messing around I had pretty much mastered the system. The company were quite happy to allow me to import all my existing opt-in subscribers and the only reason it took a bit longer than I would have liked was due to the imperfect export facility from my previous autoresponders rather than anything else.

In addition to the autoresponders you also get a proper email marketing set up that provides a large number of templates for your broadcasts or newsletters . They cover countless niches and they are very easy to use.

As far as the hosting goes I have zero complaints so far. cpanel is the control panel of choice and I would not use anything else. All the features of my previous cpanel are there, including Fantastico Deluxe, plus a few new ones I didn’t have at GVO. OK, there is no reseller facility but I gave that game up a long time ago so it’s no loss to me. I have more of everything for less monthly cost.

Aside from the conference rooms and the Easy video Producer tools (Neither of which were important to me personally) MKHosting are providing me with the options to do way more than I could have done at GVO where I paid $25 per month for all services due to grandfather rights as an old Kiosk Platinum customer. However this came with pretty stringent restrictions on storage, bandwidth and things like MySQL databases (that last one is a real pain for a webmaster in 2010).

And so to the affiliate program – GVO’s much hyped opportunity is a genuine program and does reward active affiliates very well, as well as those who are fortunate enough to join under a big name networking recruiter and benefit from spillover. However, the pay plan with MKHosting is also very good and they actually pay a higher percentage to their affiliates for direct referrals at $6 a head. The earnings potential with both companies is good but in light of all the MLM focus recently over at GVO, I tink it’s become a harder thing to sell in all honesty and when times are tough, even if it does represent good value, close to fifty bucks a month is something a lot of people can’t or won’t commit to. I have sacrificed my monthly Paypal deposit from GVO in the quest for better service and a better user/customer experience. I no longer felt that it was worth holding onto the commissions when the trade of in recent times has been downtime and an indifferent attitude towards me as a customer.

If you would like to know more about all the features and services of an account at MKHosting, the marketer’s package is the sole option. Everything is laid out clearly and neatly for all to see, so you know exactly what your monthly hosting fees will get you. At this price point, you really would be hard pushed to find anything better.

If I have any criticism at all, I would say that the payment options could be explained a little more clearly on the site. You can choose to pay via AlertPay or Paypal but at the moment, Paypal customers have to do things manually and send a purchase receipt to the company to get set up – it’s no big deal, just a minor inconvenience. AlertPay users will have no problems but the site suggests that you must pay via AlertPay every month (as someone with little experience of the payment processor I found the issue a little confusing, wanting as I did to pay with my debit card). As it turns out of course, this is not a problem, and although the website showed the major credit/debit card logos the insistence on AlertPay was a little disconcerting – then again maybe I was just having a senior moment Ultimately it is easy enough to set up a free account with AP and you will need it if you want to receive commissions earned as an affiliate.

After a couple of days of exploration everything seems to work just as it should and, it seems to me, my sites’ load times are improved too. The MKHosting servers are located in the US, with the Planet, so in terms of data security and server monitoring etc. there should not be too much to worry about. This was one of my major bug bears with GVO in recent months where security issues were plaguing many customers and causing downtime of varying levels of seriousness. Unfortunately for me I suffered at the extreme end of the scale and whilst much of it was not directly the fault of the host, the responses to the issues were not good at all.  Combine that with very inefficient support and, to be frank, some pretty uncharacteristic bad attitudes from GVO staff in general and it starts to wear on you and your business after a time.

I’m hopeful of a much better experience at my new home and so far, they have certainly not disappointed me.

To sum up, if you want a very well featured shared hosting account along with a superb email marketing system, a great affiliate program and excellent 24/7 customer and tech support, you could do a lot worse than check this company out.

I will report back after a few months have gone by on how the glow of newness as stood up to the rigours of day in day out web hosting but for now, all is good and MKHosting win a big thumbs up and vote of confidence from TheCaymanHost.