danson
03-20-2005, 11:29 AM
*OVERVIEW*
This project gives an extensive chronological account of my experiences with Acunett starting at pre-sales, through ordering and to ongoing support. I will be editing and adding to this same top post to keep things together. I hope there is not maximum post length. I'll reserve a few slots just in case. Feel free to comment.
This article takes a lot of work to maintain. If you find this article helpful and it convinces you to try out Acunett do let them know this "article by danson" helped your decision!
Index of Events
============
Sept-2004 - Initial Contact
20-Mar-2005 - Back in touch. Presales Questions (Interrogation)
21-Mar-2005 - Ordering Details
31-Mar-2005 - Order Placed
*******************
09/2004 - Initial Contact
*******************
Hearing of Acunett via Webhostingtalk.com I contact them to install the APF firewall on my server. Rob kindly offered to install BFD for free. Ticket Timeline:
05:44 - Order Placed
05:52 - Order Confirmed
06:00 - BFD installed
06:02 - Problems reported with APF intall. Investigating. Kernal update advised. ($25). Problem detected with /etc/resolv.conf - advice given.
10:34 - Kernal update permission requested.
10:43 - Permission wrongly given (by Rob - not by me!)
10:44 - Response from myself saying so! Then agreeing.
02:18 - resolv.conf fixed by acunett.
02:20 - Determined that the machine was a VPS so kernal update impossible!
The fact that the server was a VPS was stated beforehand but the VPS was just running an old kernal. As a result the $15 was held in credit against a future order.
Review: Acunett went above and beyond giving a fantastic amount of care and attention. Only mistake was authorising a paid kernal update without asking me. Definitely not on but I expect they learned from that now.
-------------------------------
******************
03/2005 - Back in touch
******************
Having tried a competitor with unsatisfactory result I decided to have another look at Acunett. When I consider using any professional service I grill them with pre-sales questions. The following is an account of the answers received. I paraphrase for readability. The initial batch of questions was submitted by email on a Saturday (19/03/05). The first response came from Rob at 3pm the next day (Sunday). Subsequent questions were answered within 60 mins.
[Q and A's moved to post 2 in this thread]
Review: All questions were answered very fully and surprisingly quickly for a weekend email exchange. A common fault is to miss out answering the odd one in a response. I helped them to avoid this by numbering my questions. Some of the followups which had multiple questions in a paragraph resulted in missing answers but nothing too serious. Overall impressive.
Addenum: I later found out that all of the above happened whilst Rob was on HOLIDAY. There was a total of 22 emails exchanged over 2 days. This is the type of person you expect to find running a business and certainly builds confidence.
*********************
21-Mar-2005 - Ordering
*********************
I am a current customer of tranxactglobal.com (Gnax) - a well respected dedicated hosting company. As it happens Acunett is an agent for gnax so I could be confident that their servers were of good quality and hosted in an excellent datacentre. I decided to purchase a new, low-end, dedicated server with Acunett, on which I could then try out Acunett's management. I will also be moving an existing GNAX server to Acunett.
An email was sent to Rob who (still on holiday) honestly suggsted reservations about setting up a server without a control panel. There were certain things I needed doing which Rob felt would be aided with a CP in place as Acunett's experience with manually configuring my specific setup was limited. These issues, however, were resolved - for advanced things that Acunett were not absolutely confident in doing I would either do them myself or get some consultation.
The order was placed. Rob get's back tomorrow evening. I will measure setup time starting from then and cover how thorough a job they do.
*********************
31-Mar-2005 - Ordering Cont.
*********************
It turns out that I cannot get the server I specifically want through Acunett. No fault of theirs. As such I purchased the server separately and will use Acunett's management services. Unfortunately this means that I must forgo the 15% discount but such is life.
The 10 day delay was due to enquiries to determine the above and the setup delay of the server by my independent host (5 days).
The server login details were sent through today 14:30 GMT. A vanilla CentOS machine. A chat with Rob on MSN confirmed everything that I would want installed on the server and I was told (via ticket reply within 3 mins) that they would get to work on it within 24 hours.
...continued [Server Setup review next]
This project gives an extensive chronological account of my experiences with Acunett starting at pre-sales, through ordering and to ongoing support. I will be editing and adding to this same top post to keep things together. I hope there is not maximum post length. I'll reserve a few slots just in case. Feel free to comment.
This article takes a lot of work to maintain. If you find this article helpful and it convinces you to try out Acunett do let them know this "article by danson" helped your decision!
Index of Events
============
Sept-2004 - Initial Contact
20-Mar-2005 - Back in touch. Presales Questions (Interrogation)
21-Mar-2005 - Ordering Details
31-Mar-2005 - Order Placed
*******************
09/2004 - Initial Contact
*******************
Hearing of Acunett via Webhostingtalk.com I contact them to install the APF firewall on my server. Rob kindly offered to install BFD for free. Ticket Timeline:
05:44 - Order Placed
05:52 - Order Confirmed
06:00 - BFD installed
06:02 - Problems reported with APF intall. Investigating. Kernal update advised. ($25). Problem detected with /etc/resolv.conf - advice given.
10:34 - Kernal update permission requested.
10:43 - Permission wrongly given (by Rob - not by me!)
10:44 - Response from myself saying so! Then agreeing.
02:18 - resolv.conf fixed by acunett.
02:20 - Determined that the machine was a VPS so kernal update impossible!
The fact that the server was a VPS was stated beforehand but the VPS was just running an old kernal. As a result the $15 was held in credit against a future order.
Review: Acunett went above and beyond giving a fantastic amount of care and attention. Only mistake was authorising a paid kernal update without asking me. Definitely not on but I expect they learned from that now.
-------------------------------
******************
03/2005 - Back in touch
******************
Having tried a competitor with unsatisfactory result I decided to have another look at Acunett. When I consider using any professional service I grill them with pre-sales questions. The following is an account of the answers received. I paraphrase for readability. The initial batch of questions was submitted by email on a Saturday (19/03/05). The first response came from Rob at 3pm the next day (Sunday). Subsequent questions were answered within 60 mins.
[Q and A's moved to post 2 in this thread]
Review: All questions were answered very fully and surprisingly quickly for a weekend email exchange. A common fault is to miss out answering the odd one in a response. I helped them to avoid this by numbering my questions. Some of the followups which had multiple questions in a paragraph resulted in missing answers but nothing too serious. Overall impressive.
Addenum: I later found out that all of the above happened whilst Rob was on HOLIDAY. There was a total of 22 emails exchanged over 2 days. This is the type of person you expect to find running a business and certainly builds confidence.
*********************
21-Mar-2005 - Ordering
*********************
I am a current customer of tranxactglobal.com (Gnax) - a well respected dedicated hosting company. As it happens Acunett is an agent for gnax so I could be confident that their servers were of good quality and hosted in an excellent datacentre. I decided to purchase a new, low-end, dedicated server with Acunett, on which I could then try out Acunett's management. I will also be moving an existing GNAX server to Acunett.
An email was sent to Rob who (still on holiday) honestly suggsted reservations about setting up a server without a control panel. There were certain things I needed doing which Rob felt would be aided with a CP in place as Acunett's experience with manually configuring my specific setup was limited. These issues, however, were resolved - for advanced things that Acunett were not absolutely confident in doing I would either do them myself or get some consultation.
The order was placed. Rob get's back tomorrow evening. I will measure setup time starting from then and cover how thorough a job they do.
*********************
31-Mar-2005 - Ordering Cont.
*********************
It turns out that I cannot get the server I specifically want through Acunett. No fault of theirs. As such I purchased the server separately and will use Acunett's management services. Unfortunately this means that I must forgo the 15% discount but such is life.
The 10 day delay was due to enquiries to determine the above and the setup delay of the server by my independent host (5 days).
The server login details were sent through today 14:30 GMT. A vanilla CentOS machine. A chat with Rob on MSN confirmed everything that I would want installed on the server and I was told (via ticket reply within 3 mins) that they would get to work on it within 24 hours.
...continued [Server Setup review next]