Bowmore

During the years, I have had several issues with webhosts. So far I have not found a single one (in a shared/virtual environment) that can be relied upon. I would like to get an answer to my questions below please, if possible both from official sources and from customers. (and please excuse my tendancy to write too much, I hope you can sort out my questions anyway : )

I will host mostly my own projects, as well as possibly (depending on the answers) some of my clients that I have designed or developed for. I am primarily looking at one of the smaller reseller packages for now, to start out with.



#1 My current webhost took an entire week to get a server back oneline, and still lost all my data. (Crashed harddrive and corrupted backups) As compensation, I recieved 2 months for free. How would Surpass handle such a situation, and what would the compensation be? As you can understand, the amount of email and credability loss from customers are of catastrophic proportions.

#2 I currently have a seperate VPS account for a resource-demanding website, that webhost is very good at sending out information. For example, they send out an information email every time the server is rebooted outside the scheduled service time. How are surpass handling information to the customers? Will I get informed before hand, or at least after, if the server my account is on is rebooted or are experiencing problems such as downtime. Will I be informed if any of my domains/accounts are moved to another server? (My current webhost does not send out any information at all)

#3 When looking in the "Reseller Hosting Notices" forum, none of the servers has any problems reported. Is that forum not used, or do you delete the posts after each issue has been resolved?

#4 Is the email traffic hindered or restricted in any way? Are there any annoying spam filters stopping emails from reaching me? For example, my current webhost stops emails with attached .lnk files, something that causes a lot of problems. I am perfectly capable of handling virus infected emails, spam and other types of nasty email myself, without the help of the webhost thank-you-very-much.



I thank you all ahead of time for any answers or reflections, and I hope you forgive me if I add more questions at a later time.

Thank you,
Jan

Rai

#1. In all my experience here, Surpass doesn't often lose all data on a server. It happens, to be sure. Usually though, they have an intact backup from within a week or two. Compensation is up to the admins, but at the very least you can request to get that month back (http://www.surpasshosting.com/policies.php#d). What you need to realize is that server problems are not inevitable, even owners of dedicated servers have managed to send them offline for a period of time accidently. The internet is not infallible, and no webhost ever can possibly offer you complete protection and a guarentee that that kind of issue won't happen. If it is a catastrophic event, the best course is a dedicated server where you are in complete control of the server usage. I understand that's probably not within your price range though. So, all I can offer is my personal experiences. I've been on Pass14 for over a year and a half (a customer for Surpass for much longer) and I believe we've had one "major" outage in that time period. It lasted a couple of days, but I came out with my sites completely intact. Maybe that's unacceptable for you, but I personally survived it unscathed.

#2. Every reboot? No, you won't get a notification. Well, I can't vouch for VPS, because it's fairly new here at Surpass, but in general, you will not get a notification for every minor detail that happens to your server. When things of substance happen, yes, you usually will. Usually, if it's a planned outage for an upgrade, it will be announced beforehand. If it's extended downtime due to say a DDOS attack, it will be announced what happened and that it's being worked on. You will not get moved to another server unless you request it, or you do an account upgrade/downgrade that requires it (shared to reseller to WebDav to VPS). Communication is something that Surpass is always improving on, and if you're ever in doubt you can post on this forum, or send a ticket into support asking for information. They are always happy to oblige in my experience.

#3. The forums are all used when required. You are recommended to subscribe to the forum your server is on, and you will get notifications from this board about certain events. One main thing was a while ago we had a massive IP and DNS change on most shared servers, which many people missed and have had to complain about their websites going offline, only to be directed to update their DNS.

#4. In general, no. If a specific server is bombarded by spam, a filter may be placed for a period of time, to bounce the spam back and hopefully stop the attack. Surpass does not have a mass-filter system in place though. But I do not understand people getting upset over not getting their virus infected emails though... For every one person on the internet with the common sense to deal with those appropriately, there's half a dozen that open these emails, which then causes more to be sent out. And I find it a nuisance to be getting these. Heck, I've gotten almost 300 virus/spam sent to ONE email account in the last week, because someone on the silly domain decided to infect themselves. I'm almost ready to get rid of this account because of it. But I guess some people take it as a slight against their abilities if they aren't left to handle it all themselves. That's just me rambling my humble opinion though, in no way related to your question.

Any other questions you want to add, we'll be happy to try and answer for you.

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Skipdawg

Jan I'll give a humble customer side on this.

# 2 & 3 not relative to me or no experience with it.

#1 I have been with Surpass just shy of 6 months. A few little quirks here and there. Trouble tickets replied to so far every time in under 1 minute. Yes 1 minute. Longest action to resolve issue i can recall about 2 hours and that was late night.

day time hours my resolution has been on average about 20 minutes.

# 4 I have had no issues at all with my email at all that I have seen.

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Bowmore

Thank you both very much for your answers! I appreciate your views and experience. I have included some clarifications and explanations below, please do not take it as criticism - I am only trying to provide further information to receive as valid answers as possible.



I am aware that servers do sometimes go down and that hardware can fail, but I do expect a company that deals with hosting as their main business to have proper backups, both backup up data and spare hardware so a server can quickly be replaced. I understand a shared host in this price range does not come with an absolute guarantee, and that is not what I am after either. I just want a host that takes their operation seriously!

My reason for including question #1 was to try to get an idea of if something like that could ever happen at Surpass, or if they have.. not sure what to call it.. procedures to make sure downtime is as short as possible, even in a major situation like the one described.

One+ week of downtime as well as complete data loss is something I believe most companies would call a catastrophy, and is - in my opinion - not acceptable for any type of hosting service, no matter if it is a budget host or not.
No, a dedicated server is not within my price range. Not only does it cost too much, I do not feel I have the need for it. I only host smaller websites, most of them my own projects. With that said, I strongly feel I do not need to settle for less than acceptable quality just because I am not a very big player.

Yeah, a VPS is different from a shared host since all the vps accounts on one server may run custom services that may or may not start up correctly unsupervised. By sending out email notifications, they are helping the account holder to troubleshoot and verify the service operation. While this is not the needed on a shared host I strongly believe a company's effort to keep their customers informed of what is going on is a strong indicator to the level of service in general they provide.


The reason I ask is that I have had webhosts filter out important emails that has caused a lot of problems with contacts asking why I havn't replied to them. For example, the problem I wrote about in my original post with email containing .lnk files being deleted on the server.

Wow, that is great!


Again, thank you both for your input!