A few years ago we had a hard drive failure on one of our servers. It took something like 3 days to get the server back online and then a few more to get it fully restored. My host at the time: RackShack/EV1 Servers/The Planet. I was off their network shortly thereafter.
Today we again had a hard drive failure on one of our servers. My host alerted me to this, swapped out the drive, restored the data and had me good as new in about 20 minutes. My host this time Nat Net.
Butch Dixon uses a freelance video editors who uploads his stuff to one domain, but I need the content in my member’s area, which is on another domain. I just put in a ticket asking Nat Net if they could move the videos (otherwise I would have had to download them all, then upload then again). I barely got back to my e-mail program and it had been taken care of.
I host with Way3 and I love them. They respond quickly and never had issue with them. A bit expensive others would say but hey, quality service comes with a price! The extra dollars I spent resulted in better uptime and greater productivity.
I’m such a n00b when it comes to hosting.
It all completely confuses me.
I have discovered that you get what you pay for though. I’m with Arvixe for hosting some of my blogs (b8m8 is with them too), it’s cheap, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth… and easy to understand on the surface.
But the support isn’t good.
Ask them a question and the very first thing they’ll say? “Upgrade your service, that should fix it!”
Another big thumbs up for NatNet, the other week they noticed one of my servers was running a bit slower than normal and they informed me that if I allow them to do a kernel upgrade, they will then be able to install some new caching tools and it would speed things up. Most other hosts would have pushed me for a server upgrade. But instead, they did all the work (with no extra fees) and now my server runs like lightning.
This is not the first time they have been proactive which is something that I really appreciate!
i’m very happy with hosthead - after years of hosts with various issues or problems, hosthead is so painless. they’re affordable, take care of problems fast, and when our harddrive died, they had us back online quickly using our backups. we’ve been there for 4 1/2 years, and have no plans to move on.
I gotta say I just had an incredibly pleasant experience with my host - DedicatedNow… I’ve been doing colo with them for over two years (plus I added a managed firewall to the mix a year ago). I’ve outgrown the server I use for porn and wanted to switch to a managed server. A friend of mine here in NY does hosting and there were a number of advantages to switching to him. Well, it took forever to work out the details with him. Then his guys racked the server just before Thanksgiving, but didn’t have it “ready” for me until a couple days ago. It was at that point I realized there was a huge misunderstanding on the level of support they were planning to provide and things just weren’t going to work out. Luckily he offered to refund my deposit money, but then I had to scramble to find another solution…
The easiest solution was to stay where I was, so I checked out DedNow’s options and found them really easy to deal with. You can spec your server online. Most of the questions you’d have are answered on their site, and their specials were great… The server I’m getting is a quad core i7 with 6TB of bandwidth and 12GB of RAM included in the price. The remaining questions I had were answered in a chat session this morning - all as I hoped (some better than I hoped). Instead of waiting 5 weeks for them to configure the server it’ll be more like 5 hours. On top of that support is exactly what I was looking for - they deal with tickets usually within 15 minutes (which I’ve already experienced). You can ask them to do just about anything on the server. There’s a long list of stuff they do for free plus anything that takes less than 15 minutes is free. I’ve bought a support plan that gives me 5 hours of additional time (for stuff that takes longer) - but I’m only locked into the support plan for 3 months - not a year or two - so I can lower it if I find I don’t need that much.
It’s just nice to see things work the way they’re supposed to. I know a lot of you are happy with NatNet. Personally I had a horrible experience with NatNet when I tried to use them for colo a couple years ago. I don’t trust them at all. So if any of you are looking for a non-NatNet host that still owns their owns their own (huge) datacenter, and has great service, check out DedNow…
