Bump or AU crowd

:2 cents:

cess is correct about rsync which is what we use when we can. Many times a customer only has FTP access which makes a move a little more difficult, but either way - whether using rsync or FTP, we always take care of permissions, etc during the move

Are you still having downtime problems? I havent noticed any natnet downtime lately?

National Net is up here in Sydney..

This is true, in the past 10 years I have only noticed once that my natnet sites were down. The very first thing I did was check Cnn.com cos I believed that something huge had happened in the USA and thought someone might of nuked it.

Turns out it was my local ISP having a burp and not National Net at all.

Did anyone mention

NATIOANL NET ROCKS!

For the most part NatNet is great... am I 100% satisfied? No.

There have been a number of occasions since we moved to them where settings/permissions get changed on my servers... and noone knows who did it. Granted... I have non standard server setups... but I don't see why someone needs to change something that has been working for over a year or more.

There are many times where I have a ticket in and the first tech leaves and another tech takes over the ticket and fucks up the request because he didn't read the ticket well enough.

Sometimes they tell me that a user doesn't exist on the server... when I know for a fact it does and after I show them the ticket where the user was created then they apologize for the confusion. I understand mistakes are made... but why post in the ticket that the user doesn't exist when it does... obviously they didn't check properly.

Their servers run great... there is no doubt about that. If you have a simple tech support request... they are among the fastest support of any host I have ever used... hands down. If you are an advanced user or require a different setup than their standard setup... be prepared for some stress... but be assured it will work out in the end. They are very patient and will work it out... I can be an asshole sometimes (when things get fucked up) and they never even flinch. If it is something they are having a hard time understanding... they call me. I am not 100% satisfied with my experience because some of the problems I have had were completely avoidable... but they have always taken care of it in a very timely fashion.

This isn't showing up in any of our monitoring so I have to assume that it is something with your local ISP. If you would like for me to have my networking staff contact your local ISP I will be happy to do that for you.....just shoot me a trace route and I will have them on it right away. My email is tony (DOT) morgan {AT} nationalnet ( DOT ) com


--T

I appreciate your position and I am happy that you are a customer.....but I want to try harder to get to that 100% mark. Would you consider having a phone call with me on Monday to discuss these situations and let me see if I can make some policy changes that will make you 100% satisfied? I dont every want a customer to be less than 100% satisfied so I will work hard to get there, I promise.


--T

For those that don't know - that is called excellent "customer service"

I am going to be slammed with a million things on Monday. Our account is "AR Innovative ApS" and if you read through some of the tickets you might be able to see what I am saying but some of it occurred on the phone.

Here is a small example of what I went through this week with one of the techs. One of our servers hosts almost 100 tgp sites and I woke up yesterday to find that all of them were broken. At first I thought it was lighttpd which we use to serve the thumbs (separately from the pages)... it later turned out to be 2 issues... first was that somehow the database user lost all of it's permissions... I was getting an error in Smart Thumbs that said, basically:
The tech kept telling that nothing was wrong with the user permissions and posted this after saying he had fixed the CREATE TEMP TABLE permissions problem. See anything wrong with it?
The user doesn't have any permissions EXCEPT Create_tmp_table_priv. So I informed him of that problem and he fixed it...

The next problem was that I was getting this error in the mysql log in Smart Thumbs:
Someone changed the permissions on /tmp and caused this error. This is what the tech said. (notice he is still saying it wasn't the mysql user permissions)

I didn't mention the most important part of it... we are talking about a network of sites that trade traffic... so the downtime yesterday cost me between 15-20% of my traffic volume... and then I am due to have more downtime tomorrow due to the move... these sites can be sensitive... so basically... between the downtime and the move I have lost a considerable amount of traffic over the next x number of days it will take me to recover that lost traffic volume. This is a significant loss probably nearing 7 figures in lost traffic numbers by the time it's all said and done.

Never had a problem with any servers we have at NatNet

The true test of whether a company is honest and "stand up" is how they treat you when you're leaving.

There are alot of hosts that will bend over backwards for you to get or keep your business, but not so many that will respect you when you decide to leave.
I've had hosts demand final payment early and threaten to shut off my servers if I didn't pay when I notified them I was leaving (and I had never been late with a payment, ever), I also had a sales rep from another host hound me 5 times a day, every day, during the week before I left and the week after I left, to the point that I finally had to block calls from their phone numbers.

I have heard stories from other people that when their host heard they were moving, they shut down ssh access to their servers and/or refused to cooperate with the techs from the new host who needed to move stuff. The names of some of the hosts who pull shit like this would surprise you.

Anyways. I hosted with natnet for about two weeks a few years back when they had a price match sale. My account was setup by a salesman named Jack who is no longer with them and didn't last very long, for good reason.
He and I agreed on a certain setup, but the proper information wasn't passed along to the techs so the setup wasn't done right.
Long story short, I called Bill and asked him to let me out of the contract I signed because I wasn't happy with my experience to that point. He was obviously agitated and said it wasn't fair that I wasn't giving him a chance to "make it right" and said that "we don't lose customers over service issues", but he did let me walk away, when technically, he could have been a jerk about it and made me fulfill the 1 year contract.

When a company would rather have a happy ex customer than an unhappy current customer, that says something.

every tech makes a mistake here and there its unavoidable the nice thing about nat net is when a mistake is found it usually only takes a few min's for it to be fixed.

once you find it tho and explain what needs to be done.

... and I remember that conversation and you're right - I was not happy with the situation at all because we just don't lose customers because of service, and unfortunately, we failed you due to lack of communication issues. You mentioned Jack and that he had done things incorrectly, but at the end of the day, as President of the company, I have to step up and take responsibility for those things because I'm the one that hired him.

We have a saying around here... "We will treat you just as well on the last day you are a customer as we did the first day you were a customer".

I can't tell you the number of customers that have tried another hosting company only to come back to us because we made sure they left on great terms :thumbsup

Then how about Tuesday? Like Tony said, and I agree, if you're not 100% satisfied, then we have a problem and it's incumbent on US to do whatever it takes to make you satisfied.

Please let me know when we can schedule a call to discuss, because putting this off is not something either Tony nor I wish to do.

I have spent the last hour or so scanning all tickets for the past two years and of the 150 tickets or so, it looks like about 10-15 are trouble tickets. In my quick scan, other than the one you showed in this post, I'm not seeing huge problems - but I'm sure I'm missing things that you have first hand experience with, so a discussion with you would help bring that to light.

Again, our goal is 100% customer satisfaction at any and all costs. In fact, our mission statement is "To satisfy the customer at any and all cost" :-) The more we learn about our mistakes (and until I can get rid of these damned pesky humans, we're going to make a mistake or two) the better we can get, which helps ALL of our customers :thumbsup

-- Bill

In all the years I have been in business I can tell you all that Tony is a stand up guy, and runs a very tight ship. Issues may arise from time to time, it's how they are handled that counts. As a competitor, and friend I have a lot of respect for how his company is run. Any hosting provider that has been in the game as long as we both have, throughout all the industry changes, technical advancements, economic up's and downs, and is still a leader in the game deserves to be recognized as such.

Tony.. Best of luck with the new data center! It looks amazing! Congrats!

[email protected] =))

Buy me a flight to the Atlanta show and set me up with a free room.
I visited the old data center and I want to feel more secure about the new one
:)

LOL!!!! I'll do that Pat, but I miss Curacao, so you'll have to buy ME a ticket back to there as well as a room. Do that, and we have a deal :1orglaugh

-- Bill

Thats so typical NatNet...always coming back with the right answer in a few minutes!
:mad:


lmao :thumbsup

Well they are getting me set up. A guy called Sean took care of me and he was very good. I will do my first review once the move is complete, with first impressions and saying how seamless it was. Moving will be a headache, it always is, but how much of a headache is what matters. Host's can't make it a walk in the park but they CAN ease it alot which so far with account setup (touch wood) they are doing.

SweetT can you let me know your email addy and I'll email you when I do a review.

Hey...this isn't about a "right answer" - I'm just trying to get a free trip to Curacao LOL!!!!

-- Bill

Nice, Marc. I am confident you will be happy. In fact, Bill (LBBV above), just sent me an email telling me that he isnt going to mention your name or your account number to any of his tech staff. He said "If it is going to be a test, lets make it a REAL test" so to them you will be just another customer. (No, they do not frequent the boards)

Feel free to email me anytime: tony (DOT) morgan {AT} nationalnet ( DOT ) com

I would be happy to talk to you anytime.


--T

Thanks, Mike. You know that I have huge respect for you and your operation, as well. I say there is plenty of business for everybody that runs a good operation like you and I and a handful of other companies.

Did you get my email last week? I replied to the very nice one you sent me....classy as always, Mike!!

--T

I'm good with that. Can you just tell Sean not mention it as he does know the story (sorry I thought it was funny how little I'm paying for this and he seem niced)

It's 10/10 so far.

I've recommended a lot of people to National Net in the past. No one has ever come and said anything negative about them to me after I sent them over.

BUT.

I've attempted to contact them several times regarding colocation services and never received any response to my inquiries.

The sales email link on these pages is broken too, fyi: http://natnet.com/colocation.html & http://natnet.com/contact_us.html

Maybe it's because I'm Canadian :|

Hi

What email address were you emailing? I cannot imagine anyone in my sales department ignoring an email so the only thing I can think is that it was to an email that doesn't exist?

If you're still interested, please email sales (AT) nationalnet {DOT} com and cc bill (AT) nationalnet {DOT} com and I'll make sure you get an answer.

However, for the record, we do like Canadians and we make sure their servers are in the colder part of the data center so that they feel at home :-)

I see the broken link - thanks for pointing that out and I'll get that corrected now.

-- Bill

Thanks Bill, I'll give 'er another shot and cc you as well.

A few people who know what I'm paying (which is is 50 bucks a month - I paid my ex host $100 and they halved it) have said that Nat Net can't possibly match this, I will prove to you that they have. I didn't believe that they would folllow through but they have. Frankly, it's a silly price to charge and I'm amazed that they folllowed through.

I think that they are crazy. But they offered me a deal and delivered on (what must be) a loss making deal.

Tell me what screen shots you want and I will post it.

I will be honest about my reviews. I have a contract for 12 months so even if I hate NarNet, they HAVE to honour the deal. And I promise that I will never kiss ass and say what isn't true.

So far It's 10/10 and I hate to do a perfect review so i will look for anything I don't like (but so far I've honestly found nothing.)

Right now, I'm worried about loosing my control panel so we see if that works out as they promise. But they are answering emails in less than 4 minutes which is perfect for me.

NatNet is a very good host and i have had two servers there for quite a few years..
but the fact that they are giving you a much better deal than i get with them, really bothers me...

HAHA!

They are putting their money where their mouth is. They can't be making a profit on this deal. I respect what they are doing here as they know that I WILL call them out if they suck, I've shown that I will call them out on this board already. They could have a drama thread on the biggest adult board about, every month (if it goes wrong) and it will cost them to have that - they must be pretty sure of themselves?

It shouldn't bother you. Their answering their critics and taking a huge gamble at the same time.

I'm sure they love you mentioning on the board that you're paying 50% of what you used to, not to mention it's only $50 a month.

Today I made a stupid mistake with wordpress taxonomy on a big blog. Then spent an hour or two digging myself a deeper hole.

Then I remembered I have daily db backups with Nat Net. Re-instated yesterdays db and I'm all good, only damage is a few lost comments and I could put those back if I cared :)

Thanks Nat Net

Hey Shemp...

Thanks for the kudos and I truly understand where you are coming from on this....you have been a long time customer and one that we sincerely hope to keep forever!!

I can assure you that the deal that we are giving to Marc Jacobs will be a loss every month...but the reality is that it will end up costing us less in an entire year than running a single one page ad in one of the trade magazines so I will pay for it out of a marketing budget. The other reason that I did it, is that I felt bad for discounting Marc's perfectly legitimate questions because I remembered his nick name incorrectly from a previous thread. This was a way for me to make up for that mistake while at the same time putting my money where my mouth is.

I hope that you can understand this marketing strategy, Shemp, because I would hate for you to be even the slightest put off by this since you are exactly the type of customer that we love having.

As always, thanks for your continued trust and your business and if there is anything that I can for you please let me know!!


--T

Hey T :)
i should have counted to 10 before i posted...
but i will be in touch...