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Looking to Move from EV1?
IgD asks: "Our small company has been a customer of EV1 for well over a year. We have a single dedicated server (a Red Hat box) and pay about $150/month. We get about 400 gigabytes per month for our bandwidth limit. Up until the SCO fiasco, we had been generally pleased with EV1. For obvious reasons we decided to move on. We didn't make the decision lightly. Migrating our server is going to result in a terrible inconvenience. The subject of EV1 and SCO has been covered in multiple articles here on Slashdot. Many have discussed moving to other providers such as ServerMatrix.com and ServerBeach.com. Dear Slashdot, where should we take our business?"
This article takes the 'Slashvertisment' to an absurd new level.
Photos.
I don't work for (X company) but I believe that (X company) is much better than (Y company) because they provide (X service) where (Y company) is lacking however blah blah blah.
If you dislike what EV1 did, then castigate them as a paying customer. Honestly a boycott of their hosting services sounds rather brash, especially with all the nightmares I have heard from people who screw it up. Ev1 to their credit had a long list of SATISFIED customers, who are now "reluctantly deciding" to leave. It wouldn't be a choice in my eyes, I hate SCO but they already got their money.
Sago Networks
750GB transfer a month 1.8ghz Celeron just $99/month, no set up fee. I've been using them for a few months now, no problems.
--
Free Linux Shells
NicoNet 2000
Shouldn't be hard, pick a open issues site and see who hosts them? That's part of the reason some of them do it, for exposure, good karma, brand awareness, etc.
Underling: "Oh yeah we got a lot of complaints about our decision to do X"
CEO: "Are they leaving? Refusing to pay? Looking at alternatives?"
Underling: "No"
CEO: "Then stop wasting my time".
Voting with your wallet. You are voting in favor. I can't really see any differently. Sending emails to them is like saying you hate bush but still vote for him. Your opinion don't count. Granted neither does mine as I am not a customer at all :)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Granted, that (shill) Speakeasy (/shill) offers it....
This sig no verb.
You should have bought a Prius instead! And for god sakes, buy more than one car for your company next time!
Shirley, you jest.
Ever try getting any email out of serverbeach?
They are almost universally blocklisted.
I know there's lots of fellow geeks who could do blindfold narration on how to make my home PC into a global webserver and thus save my $6/month webhosting fee.
The trouble is, the villanous but typical corporate curmudgeon Comcast is my ISP. They have in their rules that I'm not to run a webserver from my home. This is so they can provide max bandwidth to residential customers and charge a flat fee.
I understand this (though I don't like it), but I am beholden to them because they are the only viable option. Yah, there are others but they're more expensive than $45/month for 1.5 mbps.
It seems like the only thing stopping you from running your own webserver is the ISP, since the hardware could run from a rack in your basement.
What I'm wondering is, is there another option? How much does Comcast charge, or any other DSL provider charge, for a 'business' connection that allows for running a webserver, not just surfing the web?
It really is a rip-off here, and I'm wondering if there's enough competition yet to allow for the minimization of these charges? The last time I checked about 2 years ago, Ameritech wanted $2000/month for a T1 to my residence, plus installation charges. That's kind of high (especially vs. $45/month for the same technical bandwidth, never mind sharing with neighbors). I'm 'just browsing', which uses lots less than T1 on average, a random company or personal webserver might use only half a T1 on average, but would like the reduced time-to-render of T1 versus dialup speed...
-- Kevin J. Rice
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
i would move my site hosted at EV1 to ServerBeach but they don't allow adult content.
I may be self adversiting, but we offer excellent service and deals for people who want to have dedicated servers or have VPS server. So..give it a spin and I think you might like it.
:)
:)
Plus, I work there as Head Tech and we have excellent crew there. Come on over.
BTW...Don't DoS us.
-- Amazing how the Internet still humms along.... -- Dispite all the flaws of Micro$oft in their software!
ColoGuys have treated me well. I have a 1U server running there for $200 for 1mbit and no usage limit. Unfortunately, I signed at a bad time :( The price is now $100 for 1U/1mbit and $250 for 1U/5mbit. I've had.. one outage, I think, and was able to reach their support people quickly, so I'm pretty happy. They also provide dedicated servers if you don't want to ship them your own. I admit, I don't use much bandwidth per month, so I dont know if my experience can be related to yours in any way at all.
Your local telco should be able to provide you with a T1 for roughly $600-700 per month, although it is not uncommon to see them priced at $1,000-1,500. Resellers can sometimes drop below that. Of course, your initial cost for equipment will probably run your first month into the thousands, so a T1 might not be the best option.
I have several clients who own and operate their own web servers using nothing more complicated than an SDSL line, a router, and a dedicated Mac or PC. (DO NOT plan on using your server as your desktop machine!) This is slightly more expensive ($70-200 per month or more, depending on bandwidth), but generally includes one or more static IPs, and willingness to let you run anything you want, so long as it's legal. Call all of your local DSL providers for pricing, terms, and availability, or check with DSL reports to see who's in your area and what people say about them.
Of course, if you're concerned about costs and reliability, just stick with cable and use a host. $6 a month isn't much, and it's well worth not having the same headaches as running a server. Almost no cheap ADSL or cable provider will allow you to run a server; that's the reason they're so inexpensive. If you run a server, their bandwidth costs go up.
We moved to ServerMatrix.com after the EV1/SCO fiasco. :) So far so good. We're paying exactly what we were at EV1, but we get more bang for our buck -- including more bandwidth and a better processor.
They are very quick to respond to trouble tickets and their staff seems quite friendly. They even offer cross connects if you rent more than one server, which is something I don't believe EV1 ever did. We looked at ServerBeach, but they seem much more expensive and their support policy was a turn off.
I'm glad to see so many others are leaving EV1. To some it seems hasty, but at the end of the day it's just a matter of principle.
I recently moved from ServerMatrix's parent company, The Planet, because of their poor customer service and new billing software, which refused to take my credit card. Interland didn't have a problem with my card, and customer service has been great so far. They have "self-managed" servers for $69/mo, with 500 GB of transfer, running RH9. Cologuys was mentioned in a previous post for a colo solution, and I used to work for another company that had a cage in the same datacenter, Colo4Dallas, which isn't a bad site, but one of the main bandwidth providers for Colo4 is Cogent, which has had many complaints about the network reliability. Besides, if you're coloing a large number of machines, you'd probably be better off going straight to Colo4. Both The Planet and Colo4 are right off Stemmons Freeway (I-35) in Dallas, TX, as is the Infomart (warning, flash heavy site!), where The Planet started before they bought the old Inflow datacenter. They helpfully provide a listing of thier tenants, so you can possibly find a good deal going through the list.
I would strongly recommend against any of the DTI owned companies (affordablecolo.com, affordabledomain.net, affordableservers.net, or dtihosting.com), as I have worked with them in the past and witnessed the unplugging of live servers from power strips so they could be rearranged in a rack for the amusement of the one senior technician they had - the 21 year old owner. Webhostingtalk.com has many, many, stories from former customers of DTI - search for cbaker17, the owner's handle, to find them quickly. For that matter, I'd recommend researching any company you're looking into on WHT.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
I struggled with this for quite a while until our little company went with a dedicated @ http://www.server4you.com/us/ we have a small hosting company, a few e-commerce sites and more and have never had any issues. One planned network outage and one unplanned in 6 months time.
BUT Setup took weeks, maybe a month. They simply had way more orders than they could handle @ $49/month. Setup is $149.
Drop me an e-mail if I can answer more questions, going to a new host is always scary. If someone has found a better host at a better deal, I wanna know about it too.
Other stats you might care about:
Bandwidth Included
700GB per Month
Switch Port
100Mbps, burstable
Network Uptime Guarantee
99.999%
If it helps at all.
I'm currently with serverbeach (have been basically since they started), they provide a good product, though one thing that I don't like is their inflexibility, if you need additional resources you can't get it.
As I will be needing this flexibility I will be moving to Server Matrix.
I had been looking at EV1 though clearly their decision lost me as a customer.
sco has been suing people it has contracts with. in one of the first post-ibm lawsuit investor conference calls i heard a sco exec say that they would be "enforcing their contracts."
have ev1 customers ended up entering a contract with sco? has ev1's license purchase actually made their customers more likely to be sued?
if i was an ev1 customer i would get my contract details from ev1 and i'd consult my attorney. in addition i'd request *written* clarification from ev1 on my *specific* contract to describe how their license purchase affects me.
and in reality i would **also** change my hosting provider so as to reduce my legal danger.
supposedly microsoft is going to end up bankrolling sco to the tune of $100 million. thats a lot of lawsuits and it looks like sco are going after more then ibm. so i would want to be as far away from any sco contracts as possible.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
I must be mr. stupid then, tell me what the 'obvious reasons' were.
Do yourself a favour: don't make that move unless you really know you want to.
After all this has blown over and you're stuck on a lower spec host, you'll be wishing you could have just stuck it out for a while.
More seriously, the two times I've changed web hosts have been the cause of more problems for me than anything else I've ever done online. I've had to fight all the way to get domains transferred properly from one company to another. and I've still got one that is in limbo that I'll probably never be able to use again.
One company updated the DNS to point to the new host, but never released the tags. I was too inexperienced to know the difference until it all went wrong when the new host upgraded my server. They'd gone bust in the meanwhile, and the tags were in limbo - no-one had the authority to release them (except the registrars, who weren't interested).
The second company released the tags (after I'd double checked), but didn't update the billing details, so I never got a renewal notice until it was too late... by which time a domain squatter had stolen one of my domains.
So my advice, from bitter experience, is to stick with what you've got, unless you're absolutely certain. And if you do move, make sure you go to the right place, because if there's anything worse than moving once, it's moving twice.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I just opened up an account with 1and1.com. I have their Root Server II package, which, for a $99 setup fee and $69 a month, I get:
Response times are excellent, and their 24/7 tech support has been quite helpful and always very friendly.
They have several dedicated packages, both managed and unmanaged.
If you do decide to go with them, consider using my referal link.
I have recently decided to go back to a colo I have used in the past and couldn't be happier. Was hosting it internally but costs for the internet connection started getting higher than I was willing to pay.
IIC Internet is the hosting company I currently use for dedicated servers. Since I have been doing business with them I couldn't be happier.
I looked around and these guys are the best I have found. After reading through the fine print on many of the other hosting companies out there, I couldn't do business with them.
EV1 I couldn't do business with because they never had servers in stock to purchase. RackSpace I couldn't use due to the agreements being very vague on what "Adult Content" is. (I host websites for night clubs and that might be on some planet "Adult Content"). And I went through others during the evaluation process.
I haven't been happier since I have used IIC Internet
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
It just occurred to me that OSDN should really get into hosting. Considering the massive contributions they make to OSS (especially sourceforge), I would be happy to support them.
I'm currently buying shared hosting from an EV1 reseller. My contract isn't up for a couple of months but I'm ready to go as soon as I find a new home.
EV1 is very similar to the date rape victim here. I don't think you should punish them by lost business. Instead, continue to support them and voice your frustration in writing. If you are happy with their service, but not happy with their policy, allow them to change before making this call.
If I happened to use your Redhat server for something important to me, then I'd be mighty pissed if you moved providers for no real good reason.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
For those who don't know where their hosting ultimately resides, ping your server to get the IP address, then use the IP Whois at DNSStuff.
www.arsalon.net
Theplanet is based in dallas, right across the street from American Airlines HQ. Its a very big facility. They have a VERY good deal on SERVER MATRIX. You can buy your managed box for very cheap and they have all sorts of service options and every server is Redhat Enterprise Linux Version 3.0 Lots of custom services available. And they manage your server too! Firewalls galore, lots iof service, very cheap. This is the fastest growing hosted provider in the US of A for a reason! And if you are leaving EV1, THEPLANET is fairly close (trip from houston to dallas). Being physically proximal can help one expedite things. I love them and they arent jerks about AUP. And the uptime and latency is good. Gamers would like it there. I hope they just get bigger and bigger and put those jerky companies to SHAME as they do now! LONG LIVE PLANET.
The 6th floor museum about JFK's death is there too, so you can visit them andthen goto the 6th floor museum. I love dallas, they have good pork ribs and lots of nice looking ladies, lots of clubs and bars and "gentlman's" clubs if you are really gross looking or super fat. But its got something for everyone.
The scene of the landscape does change, so it's good to re-evaluate things every now and then. If there's a better deal than EV1 out there right now, it's worth trying out. [shrug]
May we never see th
If EV1 really was concerned about customer upset (and they've claimed that they were, and thought that it was minor), they could easily have asked for feedback. They closed the deal without letting any of their customers have a chance to give them feedback. I realize that they're now between a rock and a hard place, and that sucks, but ultimately they made the mistake -- some people just don't want their fees going in part to SCO to help attack Linux. I'd say that's a reasonable point of irritation.
EV1 might be able to get out of this by claiming breech of contract by SCO (who has clearly made claims about the specifics of the financial bits), but otherwise, they're just going to have to put up. They put themselves in a position where they can't easily remedy their mistake.
May we never see th
have ev1 customers ended up entering a contract with sco? has ev1's license purchase actually made their customers more likely to be sued?
There are reasons why one might not want to support EV1 now that they've bought licenses from SCO, but they do NOT include "EV1 clients are now more likely to be sued".
SCO is trying to encourage as many large Linux-using companies as possible to purchase licenses. Do you think sueing the companies like EV1, who get suckered into paying up, will help this cause? No, no, no. EV1 is actually right in thinking that they are shielding their customers and themselves from SCO lawsuits.
The trick here is that it seems pretty clear after a bit of research (thank you PJ) that SCO isn't going to prevail in any of these lawsuits, and when companies like EV1 take the easy way out instead of standing up for themselves, the money they give keeps that nasty bloated spider that is SCO from strangling in its own web for yet another month.
SCO will be stopped eventually. But they can be stopped sooner rather than later if we can convince companies in EV1's position to take the honorable path and stop feeding the troll under the bridge.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Take this to www.webhostingtalk.com.
I'm one of those that prefer to host my own domains, so I can't recommend a specific hosting company - however - I can offer some advice on what to do when you decide to switch hosts.
First, check out the suggestions by others, see if the allowed bandwidth-quotas are okay, what kind of platform they are running on, try to find out how many others are hosted at the same servers, what kind of software you may run on the server, and so forth. This is obvious stuff.
Then, and this is important in my opinion, check whether the hosting provider is blacklisted anywhere. Take a look at spamhaus.org, to see whether they are blackhat or whitehat.. also, do search through net.admin.net-abuse.email through google groups - to see whether there are spam reports about the provider. See how they resolved it - and if they resolved it. You really don't want to be stuck with an email provider that is blackholed by half the world.. not to mention that you _Really_ don't want to give money to spam supporters.
This is, imho, one of the most important things to check.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
How, again, did you lose your domains? Couldn't you just log into your account at your registrar and change the DNS settings, billing contact, etc?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Whatever you do, check them with drbcheck, to see if they are on a blacklist -- a lot of these places are notorious for hosting spammers and you wouldn't to blow a huge chunk of cash only to find that you can't get an e-mail out to most of the rest of the world..
I'm quite pleasd with ServerMatrix's service. Good uptime, fast network, low prices. Only miff is that their response times on trouble tickets is a bit low, but that's solved by 24/7 phone support via a 1-800 number. They have a 2-ring SLA, so you never wait on hold. Also if you live outside of the US/Canada, call them and leave your number and they'll call back on their dime.
As for their offerings, my biggest complaint is that there's no reasonable way to add more bandwidth to a server. For a 69$/mth server, you get 1000GB. Want another 1000GB? That's 500$. Yeah you can just rent multiple servers, but that means a lot of extra management work.
I have heard lots of good things from co-workers and sysadmins...
http://www.1and1.com
java guy, tech blog...
Anyone tried them? Seems to have great attitude and pricing.
A boycott may be a good desicion for a person, but not for a business. I don't have a clue why this guy wants to leave E1V. From what he said, it does not appear to be a good business desision. If E1V is providing the quality service at a reasonable price and, with the exception of the licence purchase, you are completly satisfied with them, it would not make good business sense to leave. It sounds like this guy's company is looking at moving in order to make a statment.... well making a statement does not show up on the bottom line. If you find another hosting provider with comparible service at a comparible price, then you are just injecting un-needed risk to your business without any gain.
The rational that I use in making purchasing decisions is completly differerent in my personal life than in my business life. In business, I make decisions for the good of the company only! If I cannot determine on how this a decision will benefit the company, it must be the wrong decision. In my personal life, though, I make decisions on many other criteria. Making a social statment is one criteria that I think is perfectly acceptable in my personal life.
If this guy is looking the move his personal server (non-business related), It makes sense. If it is a decision for your company, it is just plain dumb.
Obviously, if you are one of the companies currently being sued, it may (or may not) make sense to leave, but that is because your company has a stake in the issue at hand.