Potential customer questions

[pdaPhoneHome]

Hi,

I have been getting very good reports from a friend who has moved his hosting to Rochen. I have been frustrated to no end with my current hosting company and am about ready to jump ship in the middle of my annual contract. Here is my laundry list of questions...

* How often do your sites go down for unplanned maintenance... what should I expect? When I say down, I mean that my site stops working. My current hosting company only reports their servers down if they are shutdown for some reason. I have had many times that my site was not usable, but yet they still showed that the server had been up for weeks. I'm looking for what I should expect for site availability.

* How much oversold are your shared servers? I have moved servers a few times and gotten good response following the move, but then performance went down the tubes after my traffic increased, yet I have the largest reseller account offered and am not using half of the bandwidth that I've purchased. Do you anticipate future growth when you load a new server?

* How often do you update the systems software, and do you notify the site administrators in advance so that they can plan for the changes?

* I currently have a phpBB based content management system that is home grown. I noticed that you can install phpBB, but my site is not the most current level of phpBB. Will this be OK (I'm one point release behind)?

* I currently have users on SquirrelMail. Will I be able to migrate them to the new server, or will they lose any mail on the server after the move?

* My site is running close to the maximum bandwidth of your largest reseller account. I'm curious where I go from there. I can't afford a dedicated server at this point, and I also don't have the time or skills to support it. I'm not actually going to resell... I just need a larger plan than you offer in your standard plans. Can you give me an idea if I could move up linearly beyond the largest listed reseller plan. I can afford going to the "per MB" rate if I go over the max.

* Please be honest on this one... Do you like to have customers like me that will actually use the bandwidth that they buy, or do you prefer to oversell to a bunch of small customers that never really use the bandwidth? This is important because I get the feeling from my current hosting company that they don't like people to have sites that generate traffic!

Excuse my bluntness, but I know how painful it is to switch hosting companies and I'm quite honestly dreading moving.

Thanks for your time.

[Chris]

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
* How often do your sites go down for unplanned maintenance... what should I expect? When I say down, I mean that my site stops working. My current hosting company only reports their servers down if they are shutdown for some reason. I have had many times that my site was not usable, but yet they still showed that the server had been up for weeks. I'm looking for what I should expect for site availability.
We make available completely independent uptime statistics provided by Alertra Inc. - a leading provider in website monitoring to all our customers.

Announcements regarding problems are generally posted the minute something happens via the 'Announcements' section of this forum. Through this medium we keep customers updated right from when a problem occurs, until we fix this. All our customers can also freely interact with both our staff and each other to discuss such problems, as they are occurring.

As for scheduled maintenance, we try and make customers aware of any planned downtime normally a few days in advance or at minimum 24 hours. We try and keep maintenance to a minimum.

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
*How much oversold are your shared servers? I have moved servers a few times and gotten good response following the move, but then performance went down the tubes after my traffic increased, yet I have the largest reseller account offered and am not using half of the bandwidth that I've purchased. Do you anticipate future growth when you load a new server?
Absolutely, this is a key point to server stability. We don't oversell any of our plans, if anything, we under sell them.

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
*How often do you update the systems software, and do you notify the site administrators in advance so that they can plan for the changes?
If it's a security update, we will generally do it as soon as possible. If it's a feature based update, that will affect the operation of customers sites, we will attempt to notify customers a week or so in advance. If it's an update which won’t affect the operation of the sites, we will give about 24 hours notice.

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
* I currently have a phpBB based content management system that is home grown. I noticed that you can install phpBB, but my site is not the most current level of phpBB. Will this be OK (I'm one point release behind)?
We no longer provide any kind of installation service for third party scripts. It simply consumes far to much support time. However, phpBB will run just fine on our servers :)

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
*I currently have users on SquirrelMail. Will I be able to migrate them to the new server, or will they lose any mail on the server after the move?
I couldn't honestly say. We don't provide technical support for third party scripts. Your best bet would be to ask SquirrelMail about this, as it's a question regarding their product :)

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
*My site is running close to the maximum bandwidth of your largest reseller account. I'm curious where I go from there. I can't afford a dedicated server at this point, and I also don't have the time or skills to support it. I'm not actually going to resell... I just need a larger plan than you offer in your standard plans. Can you give me an idea if I could move up linearly beyond the largest listed reseller plan. I can afford going to the "per MB" rate if I go over the max.
If you go over on Plan 5, we will ask you to either 1) move to a dedicated server or 2) purchase another Plan 1 (or whatever plan you choose) and we will add the resources for that on to your existing account.

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
* Please be honest on this one... Do you like to have customers like me that will actually use the bandwidth that they buy, or do you prefer to oversell to a bunch of small customers that never really use the bandwidth? This is important because I get the feeling from my current hosting company that they don't like people to have sites that generate traffic!
To be honest with you, it doesn't really matter. We don't oversell our plans. So whether all our available bandwidth is used or not, we still need to pay for it.

If there's anything else, please let me know :)

[pdaPhoneHome]

I guess I'm taking the plunge. I hate to loose 6 months of hosting, but the time I've wasted with it is killing me and giving my site a bad name. You can't buy back your reputation once you've lost it. Placing my order now....

By the way, I'm not sure if you have an affiliate program, but if you do, then I have a referrer name for you. He really sold you guys, so I'm excited now to be moving over. I'll give you his name offline if you have such a program.

I just paid. I just bought the smallest Reseller Plan for now and I'll upgrade after I get the site operational... no point paying more while I play. I do intend to go to the largest plan if that makes a difference on how you allocate an account. I'm having some trouble figuring out exactly what I'll need because the Googlebots were chewing through my site like a bunch of wolves and I finally got them to slow down to a reasonable pace. :D

[Chris]

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
I guess I'm taking the plunge. I hate to loose 6 months of hosting, but the time I've wasted with it is killing me and giving my site a bad name. You can't buy back your reputation once you've lost it. Placing my order now....
Got the order, you will probably be setup sometime this evening EST. :)

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
By the way, I'm not sure if you have an affiliate program, but if you do, then I have a referrer name for you. He really sold you guys, so I'm excited now to be moving over. I'll give you his name offline if you have such a program.
Nope, we don't have a referral program. Mainly because we prefer people to tell others about us for our service and not a cash incentive.

Originally posted by pdaPhoneHome
I just paid. I just bought the smallest Reseller Plan for now and I'll upgrade after I get the site operational... no point paying more while I play. I do intend to go to the largest plan if that makes a difference on how you allocate an account. I'm having some trouble figuring out exactly what I'll need because the Googlebots were chewing through my site like a bunch of wolves and I finally got them to slow down to a reasonable pace. :D
No problem, if you want to upgrade your plan, just open a ticket at the helpdesk and we can arrange that for you, with no downtime or interruption to the service :)

Welcome to Rochen :thumbs:

[pdaPhoneHome]

If you can get the site setup quickly, it would be great... my hosting company has been down almost all day and its killing me...

I can't wait to get over to you guys!

[pstuart]

Ok, I'll come out and say it... Welcome aboard Mike!

You obviously know what a big fan of Rochen I am and glad to see you take the plunge and drop the remaining 6 months of hosting with your previous host and jump to Rochen.

These guys are top notch when it comes to keeping the servers up. Obviously some times downtime due to routing and bandwidth are beyond their control, but judging from recent events, they are our advocates in getting the traffic back up and running.

So far I have had just over 3 months of completely stable 99.9%+ uptime and everything just plain works.

These folks know what they are doing and do it well. Can't wait to get you on the message boards and you'll see what I mean!

Welcome!

[pdaPhoneHome]

You're killing me Pat.... I've been down hard 5 times today!!! And 3 of them, I had to remind them to restart MySQL which caused me to lose another whole pile of visitors to the site. To be clear... I am NOT talking about Rochen, but my current provider that I think Pat will agree, I've been very patient with for months. Now that I've decided to jump, it erks me to keep seeing the site failing and running slow.

I'm thinking of pulling an all nighter to try and get things moved quickly. :cool:

[pdaPhoneHome]

Pat,

If you are still around, could we talk about how to easily move the site. Since you've done it a half dozen times, you could save me a lot of time. I want to make sure I get all the files, permissions, scripts, everything.... and I don't want to do it file by file.

I'll try to look you up on AIM later.

[pstuart]

I'm around, sorry I missed you earlier. Was AFK...

Should be around tonight...

Moving the site won't be an issue, I'll walk you through it... It's pretty quick actually, thanks to what Rochen has already set up.

However, open a ticket with them and request SSH access, if you haven't done that already... :)

[phark]

Welcome to Rochen, Mike...

I jumped ship halfway through my annual contract with my last host (FeaturePrice) and don't regret doing it.

Granted, you hate to loose the money when you paid for a year in advance, but trading in the headaches and downtime is well worth it.

The other Pat

[Martin]

Boths Pats, Both American, Both with American flags as avatars.
Could be clones!

[pdaPhoneHome]

If you guys can get my account opened soon, that would be great. My hosting company has my server down again and I really want to get it moved tonight. Thanks! :D

[Mikeablah]

Dot5Hosting? I heard about those guys. A friend of mine signed up with them and is leaving them as well. He's gonna be heading over here soon :)

[aquahost]

Hi Chris,
Any reson for offering only monthly hosting packages and not Annual rates where some discounts may be available ?

[Chris]

Hi Chris,
Any reson for offering only monthly hosting packages and not Annual rates where some discounts may be available ?You can find an explanation from me about this here: http://forums.rochen.com/showpost.php?p=40774&postcount=4

P.S. I have locked this thread since it is three years old but please feel free to start a new one if you have any questions.

Thanks for considering Rochen! :)