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?"

Comments

Typical Reply

[Oriumpor]

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.

Re:Typical Reply

[Rick the Red]

EV1 paid 'protection' money to extortionists. Now the other extortionists will ooze out from under their rocks and try to hit up EV1 for a quick buck. Plus, protection money is never a one-time payment. Before long EV1 will have to raise their rates, either to cover this ever-increasing cost or to hire lawyers -- or both.

BTW, when you voiced your disappointment, what was EV1's reply?

Re:Typical Reply

[El]

No, a boycott of their services is totally appropriate. Nothing gets a companies attention faster than a loss on their bottom line. Having the few companies for whom this is an important issue change vendors sends a clear and need message to others contemplating taking the easy way out and giving in to SCO's extortion demands. Ultimately everybody is worse off whenever anybody gives in, since it sends a message to criminals that extortion, kidnapping, terrorism, etc. actually works as a business model -- it wouldn't if all victims had the courage to fight for what is right.

Re:Typical Reply

[Kvorg]

There is a very clear moral issue behind this: if you are certain SCO is blackmailing and their claims are void, then this company did not do their job and they invested their money in SCO, supporting further harrasing of free software and free software users.

So, if they think they should fund harassing GNU/Linux users, should they do that with your money?

Re:Typical Reply

[GoRK]

$1M is a hardly trivial amount of money for EV1 to have given SCO. I would seriously look into alternative companies if my current hosting provider starting flushing millions of dollars down the toilet buying nacent assets. That kind of behavior is going to end up costing ME money as their customer no matter how large or small my account might be -- the question is, will their bad decisions cost me more money in the long run than it will cost to switch providers in the short term?

If your servers/services are easy to migrate around, as they probably ought to be for any size company large or small, the expense of moving it could be very easy to make a decision like this.

How about this one: If you are a company that has a website hosted on an EV1 machine (covered by EV1's license from SCO) but also has a local server (or two or ten) at your office that runs Linux (not covered by any SCO license), you'd have to think really hard about staying with EV1. If you do, you are supporting the claim that SCO is correct and exposing your own company to to litigation. If you really believe this, you might ought to pay the huge fees to license your own servers! Remember, that any time a company gives into SCO's licensing demands, it creates more ammunition for SCO to use in court. If you stick with EV1 and silently support SCO, but rely on Linux/OSS on the side, you are simply setting yourself up for a world of hurt if SCO wins the case.

Sago Networks

[NicoNet]

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

how about any host that donates space to oss?

[avi33]

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.

Re:how about any host that donates space to oss?

[chrisl456]

Oddly enough, EV1 themselves falls into this category. PHP.net's main site is hosted at EV1.

Re:Slashvertisment

[Rick the Red]

Uhhh, I don't get it. What is he 'Slashvertising'? His web site isn't mentioned. He's not pushing his new host -- he hasn't got one. I don't understand your problem, nor do I understand the moderation it got.

And this sends what message?

[SmallFurryCreature]

I can just see this at board meetings:

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 :)

Sometimes your own ISP is an option

[dacarr]

Depending on cost and options, your own net.provider might be an option. See what they have to offer.

Granted, that (shill) Speakeasy (/shill) offers it....

Would love to run my own Webserver

[justanyone]

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

Re:Would love to run my own Webserver

[Rick the Red]

I never broke my word. My contract is with AT&T Broadband, not Comcast. Comcast changed the terms of service when they bought AT&T, but I never agreed to the change. This isn't the only thing they changed, either -- they lowered the storage for our web pages from 60Meg to 25Meg and they replaced our fixed IP address with DHCP. I have a signed contract, so they can't get away with that "you agreed to the change by continuing to use the service" crap, either. Maybe that's why they haven't "enforced" the VPN "ban".

The "no servers" rule was in effect when I signed up, so I'm OK with that, but these other changes are garbage.

$2000 for a T1 is extortion, and it's unnecessary

[ezraekman]

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.

ServerMatrix.com

[xheliox]

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.

Re:Slashvertisment

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but he's going to sign up under a different username and plug his /real/ company any minute now.

Or maybe my tinfoil hat's just coming loose.

ServerMatrix and others...

[Yert]

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.

Moving from Server Beach to Server Matrix

[stinkyelf]

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.

Re:Try out Hostforweb.com for your business

[itbwtcl]

Why the hell would you have a problem with people pushing their own hosting businesses in _this_ thread? The title virtually begs people to do exactly that. If you have concrete reasons we should stay away from his service, sign in with your actual UID and list them for us.

Are you buying from an ev1 reseller?

[insensitive claude]

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.

Re:Blame the rape victim

[digitaltraveller]

If EV1 is the rape victim, they are the rape victim that chose not to prosecute their rapist in court and gave the rapist $1Million to rape others.

Principals and integrity may not mean much to many big companies, but often small businesses succeed by steering clear of companies without any 'humanity'.

Supporting (even indirectly) a lawsuit against a gift economy that supports education and economic development (especially in poor countries) is in my judgement, inhuman.