RC Locations

Hi,

At this point in time we're having some thoughts about moving some of our locations into Texas. We're thinking of moving the following locations to Texas:

Illinois
Virginia
Florida
New York

All of those locations would be combined into Texas leaving California, Texas, and Washington, D.C for your available US locations. That covers the East, Central, and West coast. Then of course we still have UK and Asia as they are now.

In doing this it will allow us to provide more powerful servers (twice the power as now) and it will allow us to provide faster reboots and overall hands on server support from the data center such as system checks, upgrades, etc.

Please let us know your thoughts on this.

They would be spread out within Houston and Dallas but labeled as Texas in RC.

Thank you

[jun]

why moving?

Mainly because of the level of service we receive from The Planet in Texas, the quality of hardware difference, and one major thing is all of our backups are stored in Texas. If a hard drive fails we can do a bare metal restore at 100mbit/s over the internal network opposed to the average 10mbit/s for other locations in the states.

We will also be opening an office in Houston, TX later this year making it much easier for us to communicate with the planet as well. We currently have 85% of our servers there.

[zanass]

Originally Posted by H9Ben

Hi,

At this point in time we're having some thoughts about moving some of our locations into Texas. We're thinking of moving the following locations to Texas:

Illinois
Virginia
Florida
New York

All of those locations would be combined into Texas leaving California, Texas, and Washington, D.C for your available US locations. That covers the East, Central, and West coast. Then of course we still have UK and Asia as they are now.

In doing this it will allow us to provide more powerful servers (twice the power as now) and it will allow us to provide faster reboots and overall hands on server support from the data center such as system checks, upgrades, etc.

Please let us know your thoughts on this.

They would be spread out within Houston and Dallas but labeled as Texas in RC.

Thank you

Come on Ben you brought this up before and people did not like it, these data centers are fine, geez why not get rid of all the data centers except Dallas and then you can git rid of RC.

I think you need to fix all the other problems here before you create new ones....

The New York is one of the best data centers and you want to put me on a crappy planet server Houston/Dallas with more of a risk from hurricains, there has already been snafu at the Houston, now you want to put more data at risk.

God you just can't leave a good thing alone.

The reason I am still here is because of the NY data center.

You want to cut costs...get rid of the staff that do not perform.

Greg,

That is not fair at all. New York may be kept that's why this is a discussion board. It was not a statement but more of an open topic to hear what customers think. The fact is you say cutting costs but you missed the part where I said the servers will be twice the hardware as they are now. Instead of P4 2GB RAM they will be minimal Dual Core 4GB RAM for the same price. I've been in this industry for over 6 years now and believe me I wouldn't make a decision to hurt customers. The goal for us is to satisfy customers not annoy them and drive them away. If we did that we would be out of business.

None of those data centers can compare to the things we can do with Softlayer and The Planet. I would recommend checking out the planet's blog and looking at some of their videos just to see their corporate setup. We believe in the planet 100% and they have been around for years and years. I have been a customer of there's back when they first started servermatrix and that was a long time ago. Since then major things have changed, new people, new data centers, etc. The planet hosts over 50,000 servers and is a financially stable company. We have the ability to work side by side with server admins and much more.

What I'm doing is looking out for your best interest here. If New York is so good, why did they do an OS Reload on a hard drive that simply needed a File System Check? That mistake caused 9+ hours of downtime and extremely upset customers. The communication simply was not there and they would not do as we requested. So we end up with a brand new drive and 9+ hours of downtime. I'm not trying to single them out, it can happen to anyone but it's not the only issue we've had. Just like serverbeach null routing node28 for a week because of an "attack". We moved it to the planet and it had no issues what so ever. Once again, the communication over there is non existent.

Apparently you seem to think we have issues we need to resolve and I'm very curious to hear what they are so I can get them resolved. Please send me a PM with your overall thoughts of our service and what needs to be improved in your eyes.

Thank you

[zanass]

You asked me what my thoughts were and I stated them.

Greg V

[kirez]

After having terrible expirience with UK host i moved all my accounts to NewYork. Since then i have less complains although many users needed a notification to change IPs to access controll panel etc... If you decide to do this migration i I realy hope there wont be a downtime as my clients are sick of it already, especialy after DNS issues last week when all parked domains were pointed to the blue cpanel welcome screen

[niche]

Greetings
Ben - thanks for giving us an informed lowdown as to the Server Reliability & Communication Standards of the data host centers across the US | UK
Two issues comes to mind for me with the proposed migration to The Planet in Texas
1. Reseller Centrals fundamental selling point is that is does have a range of separate physical locations that allows any reseller to diversify (if they wish) there hosting accounts across these locations. The reason being if any one data center goes down (for any reason) then not all of your hosted accounts are affected.
OK so if the issues is that some (or most of the data centers are unreliable in service, communication, response time) then yes continued support of there service needs to be reviewed - however I believe Host9 should be working a lot more at getting reliable data center providers in the different Geographical locations - e.g onsite visit with audits of security, communication , backup proceedures, etc - with the end result being have reliable data center partners that you & we can trust.
2. When there is major problems occurring as with node 33 last week nad with the planet a few months back (the fire incident..) we as customers expect the backups plans communicated to us. eg. you should ideally have a published back ups plan available to all resellers telling them what will be happening when there center going down and eta for back online with normal operations.
What I have seen the majority of time is incorrect communication been provided back to me with what the real issues are, not eta and not backups plan steps communicated. So I am normally just left hanging while someone looks into what is going wrong - and support ticket information I submit initially not reviewed (because it is inaccessible?) and then normally 2 / 3 variations on what the problem is.

The Issues stems from
1. Unreliable communication & support service from data centers (as mentioned in point 1)
2, Unreliable communication & support service from Host 9 - due to lack of any formalized company wide back up, support proceedures being followed

If you can please focus on both the communication issues then Host 9 can become a reliable hosting provider with a great reputation and real point of difference service with RC

Regards
Karl

[primitiv]

I have to say the various locations (even within the US) are one of my favourites things about hosting here.

With the backup speeds, I would prefer they were not stored at the same datacentre anyway. Yes it may be a slower restore, but if something happens to one datacentre we won't lose onine servers and bckups at the same time.

The Planet have had issues before (not including the hurricanes etc), and they may offer good value for server specs, but they don't have the best reputation. I am happy to have them as an option (I have some of my sites there now), but please don't consolidate the other locations to it.

Please keep New York especially, but I like the options. If the servers are so much cheaper, then get better specced (CPU/RAM/HDD) there and let us know. Then we have a choice.

As long as all the Apache/PHP/MySQL/etc are the same versions on each server it shouldn't matter much, as long as each server is above a certain minimum spec.

My vote: 100% do *not* centralise any locations.

-Tim

[p268]

Originally Posted by primitiv

My vote: 100% do *not* centralise any locations.

My vote: 100% do *not* centralise any locations.