Getting sick of these clowns

If I was posting as a consumer, I'd probably still be happy enough. Sure they accidentally wiped some of my spam and newsletters from my email one day, and it might be down once in a while... but it's cheap.

What irks me is that, whatever price they set, I'm speaking here on behalf of a business using the business version of the product. And as a business relationship, their performance has been utterly unacceptable (the only reason we didn't switch straight after the big email fiasco was that we have plus.net addresses hard coded into all manner of things and it would be difficult). However it's now getting to the point where I'm willing to undergo the week or two of hassle to make the switch.

But once upon a time, not actually so long ago, I thought plus.net were fantastic. What happened?

A few months ago, the Big Email Disaster happened. That was ridiculous. Some guy has two windows open, one for live, one for some test copy, and they're not even colour coded or anything? Nothing big and bright that says "mess with this window and you could kill all customer data"? Stupid in itself. So he wipes hundreds of GB of email.

Now, one honking big question: WHY the hell didn't they have backups?! Anyone who knows anything about basic backup routines would know that RAID is only useful if one of the hard drives fails - if you have a data error, that will get replicated to the redundant drive, rendering that type of "backup" useless. Therefore you need tapes, or a huge-ass external HDD, on a scheduled batch backup every 24 hours or so. Then ideally you store it at an external site, in case the place burns down. Not really rocket science...

So then they faff about with their "Data recovery" people for a good month or so, stating a 99% chance of data recovery, then basically say "nah, it's too difficult and most of it was spam anyway" - erm yeah, great, but what about those of us who were using IMAP? Kiss goodbye to some very important business emails.

You could argue that we shouldn't have been relying on their servers to store previously-read email, and you'd be pretty much right (we're now setting up Exchange and all the port-forwarding required for remote access and whatnot). However with quite a small budget ourselves (small non-profit org going through a rough time) it seemed reasonable to assume that an *ISP* of all people would be the one to rely on to keep our data safe. What a terrible assumption, at least for plus.net.

So that was annoying, but I put it down to a mistake at their end and a bad decision at ours. A couple of months later, i.e. earlier today, I'm trying to set up Exchange. And guess what! Huge lengths of email downtime, even the portal isn't working and of course the Customer Support line is clogged. This makes testing *very* difficult. Then it's supposedly repaired, but wait... test emails are taking _hours_ to get through!! What the hell is wrong with their email system??

This isn't the only problem we've had since the big email disaster, we've had several cases of slow emailing, email downtime, general access downtime etc etc. A few times I've tried to contact the customer support line, but either it's absolutely dead (no ringing, no nothing) or engaged. Obviously because they're having so many problems that they're overwhelmed with support calls 24/7 and can't answer them all.

I really hope all this improves soon, as I'm right on the brink of biting the bullet and changing providers. I have several "internal customers" (to use Management-speak) with important internet business, as well as actual customers in the form of business units in the same building who are sharing the connection - I'm not able to provide my customers with an acceptable level of service, because *our* provider is so atrociously bad.

I'm open to suggestions for another ISP which has similar fees, unlimited mailboxes, a static IP and possibly SMTP mail delivery (for incoming mail)

Personally, even though I'm incredibly happy with my current ISP, I just prefer the independence gained by getting my own domain name and getting my own web hosting account.

That way, my e-mail addy (an unlimited number of them, in fact) remains 100% independent of which ISP I happen to be with at any instant. Same goes for my web sites. I even use their SMTP servers, so even the outgoing mail is independent of the ISP's mail servers.

Total annual cost? About

Fair point, like. We're actually with Virtualnames for the domain name, but they don't really provide much in terms of mailboxes (I'd be interested to know any alternatives for a similar cost, but VN are extremely cheap)

At the end of the day I'm constantly battling against the finance people... as I said we're going through a rough time (redundancies required, etc). And if they get it into their heads that the ISP can provide it all without paying separately for hosting, that's what they'll *tell* me to do, regardless of my technical knowledge. I only convinced them to pay

Edited by deryk (Tue 29-Aug-06 22:48:41)

Maybe a silly idea but.....

If you host the domain with Virtualnames, are they the tag holder and control the DNS etc? If so then you should be able to setup the MX records there so that they point to your new Exchange box. This would get rid of the requirement for the new ISP to support SMTP mail. All they would need to do is allow incoming access on port 25.

I personally use 123-reg for the domain admin and macdomains for the hosting. On my 123-reg account I set the DNS to be macdomains DNS servers and can have multiple email addresses (pop accounts if requried) from there.

Nice idea.. thanks... I've never really gotten into MX records and such, but perhaps now would be a good time to do so.

Unfortunately some of us have been LLU'd without consent, so transferring is not exactly easy...

In reply to:

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I've never really gotten into MX records and such, but perhaps now would be a good time to do so.

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Yes, it would, as it would open up your choices, and give you back some control.

If you disconnect email and domain hosting from your ISP - there are plenty of other providers who do this better, and email you could do yourself - then all you need is a connection, and you are in a position to shop around and change this at will. Not easy stuff to deal with, which is why a lot of people take the route of putting all their eggs in one ISP's basket - never good business practice!

As the ADSL market matures, I would predict cheaper 'connection only' deals for businesses who don't need domain facilities.

Well, I just have to say thanks for this idea. I didn't know Virtualnames offered that service, but if you ask them they do indeed enable a section in the control panel. So, with the problems *still* ongoing today I decided to make the switch... I'd already been playing with Exchange anyway.

The lad on the phone (who always answers, nice chap, probably a soul proprietor) was as helpful as ever. Asked me "you do know what you're doing, right?" and I'm saying "errrmm.... I hope so, it's the first time I've done it but I certainly hope so!" (I'd have a bunch of angry staff and threats of sacking on my tail if not!) - well, it works beautifully!

It's not what I'd call a "transition", as with a domain it's all or nothing.. so it meant immediately converting the whole organisation over to Exchange/Outlook from IMAP/Thunderbird (I know not many make the transition in that direction, but IMO open source is just unfinished and not even remotely polished), dealing with those awaiting urgent email first. As soon as the MX record changes, new emails start to flood into the Exchange server, so it's definitely a case of prioritisation and working as quickly as possible. Luckily we only have about 20 staff so it's not going to be *too* much of a mad scramble, but I pity anyone who has to make that change for a bigger organisation.

Wow, I'm so thoroughly impressed with it. I'm quite excited, in that geeky kind of way. Send a test email through google mail and whoomf! It immediately appears in Outlook, about 1/100th of a second afterwards! Amazing stuff. I'm finally free of the slow and incompetent middle-men, and loving it.