My understanding is that Alabanza hosting costs about $400 per month from the postings Ive seen here. Yet, when I e-mailed them about their prices (since their website doesnt have a price page- why you folks do business with a company that doesnt post prices is beyond me) and the reply said they have a SUMMER SPECIAL, only $400 a month, can someone clarify this?

Unless it's changed it's $475.00 per month, for the first year, then goes up to $800 per month from then on.


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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com

There's a good reason they don't post prices, if they did then people who sign up to alabanza hosts could see what the hosts are paying.

My Gosh!!!
800 a month??
Your kidding right?

How much bandwidth does it come with?

*can get a 1mbps line from VDI onto his package for 500/month..................*


Daniel~

Thanks Mike. You are correct. I may start with a RAQ3 for small sites and Alabanza for larger ones. We've (my partner and I) have been reselling from almost a year now, doing rather well, BUT we have to leave our crappy host, they are just the worst. Bad service, idiot supervisors who only know how to say "it's policy" when they goof up.

Daniel- it comes with 50 gigs
Greg- good point, but still a bit shady for me.

WOW

50gig? geeze thats 8/gb for the first year and 16/gb for all the years after that.

Whats their extra bandwidth cost?

Daniel~

Now obviously you could (and probably *should*) upgrade plans instead of this, but:

Traffic Overage Fee:
$10/GB per month over server allotment

A bit pricey eh? To me, Alabanza is like OLM. By far not the cheapest, but good at what they do. You just don't have to worry about that single pipe crap at Alabanza. :)

By the way, I am guessing that problem has been solved, though I emailed VDI and never heard back from them. This is the second time in about a year I decided to ask them something with no reply. I know you like them Daniel (as well as the other VDI'ers), but I just don't share that opinion.

:) yes their getting much better.

The single pipe problem will be resolved in about 3 weeks when MCI comes out to add their DS3 so we will have two lines, plus the Sonet comming later this year :) :)



------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

In terms of billing though I have yet to see anyone come close to Alabanza. Automatically charges, emails clients, suspends late payers, harasses people for you, auto charges and sets up new sites - all with configurable parameters. A god-send if you will have any serious size customer base. We have been very happy since our move to them (off crappy RaQs - sorry RaQ fans)

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Chris Marks
KBS Web Hosting (http://www.netfronts.com) http://www.netfronts.com

BTW - by harassing I'm talking about those ever present folks who don't pay....using your bandwidth and cpu cycles, no intention of paying -oh you know who you are!!! Sorry, got a little excited there :)

[This message has been edited by marksy (edited 07-17-2000).]

I started with a RaQ2 then moved to a RaQ3, so I know what I'm talking about (sort of). The RaQ's are GREAT for a new small company. But you get a few large sites with heavy CGI and they tend to bog down.

We switched to Alabanza because of several factors, the first being their AMAZING control panel and excellent customer support. Since we switched, I went from getting 5 to 10 tech questions per day to 1 to 5 per WEEK. The servers are also VERY fast. Pentium III 550Mhz / 512MB of RAM / SCSI hard drives / Weekly full backups and daily incrimental backups (RaQ's don't have any REAL backup means). They also do ALL of the DNS management, which makes my life easier. Plus the control panel is fully automated and can have accounts setup within 15 mins, without human intervention (though I don't do it).

Remember, you get what you pay for. E-mail them. They have a demo of the sysop control panel. You'll be very impressed. I was.


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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com

[This message has been edited by MikeA (edited 07-18-2000).]

Alabanza sounds good for a starter company but still way way to expensive. @ that price they better be paying the people that answer the phone 75,000 a year if not more lol.(frontline techs).

I may be backwards or just stuck in my way, but I don't pay anybody to do something I can do myself (including programming a control pannel and so forth, or support ect :)

VDI's been great, anytime day or night I can have someone @ my server reading off the console screen to me to fix any problems that occur. Their control pannel wasn't the best in the world to start but after giving the programmer a umm little encouragement 99.5% of all bugs are now gone :).

Network uptime has been well over 99.85% this month and last. It will be even better once MCI gets there in a few weeks.

I guess I'm just stuck on VDI hu? (you looked @ their prices, quite the good price structre, 3500 a month for a 8mbps line with hosting for 25 rackmount servers included. not bad eh? 500 per 1mbps after that :)




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Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

So i just contacted Alabanza, and they only have that 1 server config besides the RAID plan.

And they won't upgrade the ram for any price! Even a year from now! Phone and ask!


They said the one plan they sell is the "perfect plan", and they will not add ram to any server at anytime, they must all be the exact same from now on.


I told steve that 256 ram was part of the perfect plan last year, and 512 is in your plan this year, so how anout next year?

He said i would have to upgrade to the RAID plan because they will never upgrade the ram on any servers.


I told him they could make more money by letting people upgrade their ram, but he said then the techs get confused.

I have to agree with Daniel on this one. VDI is a great company. Hey, they will even let me drop by the operations center whenever I want to :)

------
Quags

So c'mon then, cough up that VDI URL!


I want to check them out.

www.vdi.net (http://www.vdi.net)

if your looking for 1 or two boxes I can get you the hosting cheaper. But if you want a lot of boxes go for it, HOWEVER , Going direct with VDI is only for Hosting Companies, anybody else has to settle with a middle man ;0

But I'm good I promise *lol*

Contact me if you have any VDI questions Greg.



------------------
Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

<HINT>
If you bargain with Alabanza, you can get their bandwidth prices down significantly. I can't post the exact price here but just let me tell you it's worth a try.
</HINT>

I am confused by these prices.
If Alabanza "resellers" are paying $16 per Gig (800/50), how can they afford to sell hosting so cheaply?
For example, below10host charges only $9.95 for up to 6 Gig of traffic (Ultra Plan).
That would be a loss of 6x16-9.95 = $86.05 per month on just one account.
Am I not understanding this correctly?
Or are they just hoping that the majority of users won't use anything like their full allotment of bandwidth?

Simon, they play the law of averages. Your average website uses less than 500 MB per month of bandwidth.

Certainly, if everysite they sold used the max bandwidth, they would have some problems.

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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com
http://www.resellerinfo.com - A free reseller information site (coming soon!)

To back up my collegue Daniel here, VDI are getting to be a premier provider. Since the switch to level3 we've seen little network downtime and I've been more than happy with them.

3 weeks from now the WebHostManager package (available to resellers and box owners) will have more features and behave better than Alabanza's. (I don;t exaggerate, ask myself, Daniel or one of the team for a demo).

Best Regards,

Jordan
Ultraspeed UK

jordan@ultraspeed.co.uk
ICQ: 4310664

Jordan,

I guess you mistakenly typed your ICQ uin. I thought it is suppose to be triple 6 rather than 2 (43106664)?


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Andrew Chen
weishen@pl.jaring.my

Personally, I've never liked Alabanza. Too expensive and their CP is boring with little progress. They can charge that much because they have little competition. That will soon change and my experience is that more decent ones are coming our way. Heh, yes it's very automatic and nice but you are payig a premium for that service aka, you need alot of clients to make it worthwhile.

There are CP's out there that will do billing, DNS, auto creation of accounts etc, limit your work to zero and still have fun. Just look around.

If only VDI could re badge their CP, get some decent design built in and re structure the hole lot... It would boost the sales with 3X.

I Agree the alabanza control panel is a bit boring but it does the job and that should be all that matters. I'm sure that if a host at alabanza wanted they could redo the control panel themselves with somework. I maybe wrong about that but i would assume you could.

I would have to agree with Coreace. I find that Alabanza is very expensive and their control panel is kind of lame and boring too (appearance). Well, from what I heard from most of the Alabanza based hosts, they won't be able to change most of the graphics in the control panel.

Personally, I like VDI pricing and control panel far better than Alabanza. The only thing is that I can't really trust on their reliablity.

Just my $0.02.

Originally posted by Andrew Chen:
I would have to agree with Coreace. I find that Alabanza is very expensive and their control panel is kind of lame and boring too (appearance). Well, from what I heard from most of the Alabanza based hosts, they won't be able to change most of the graphics in the control panel.

Probably because they can't figure out how to do it. We've changed ours and altered some of the options on the cp to better reflect what we want certain options to do and created specialized cp functions for the reseller cp, etc. Mike at webauthorities has changed his graphics, jumpline theirs - it's not impossible.



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Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostmatters.com

Won't alabanza tell you which files to edit to change the layout?. if not thats abit shady, i know you can change cobalt ones if you want to dig deep enough into the code.

If you poke around in the DSM a bit in the Option Groups, it's all right there. No big secret.

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Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostmatters.com

So how come hosts leave that yucky top part on the cp it's ugly and i personally think cp's look better in non-frames i do like the one at webfusion.com.

Drat i gotta make a new style site now jumplines is kinda the same as mine damn!.

Ahhhh, don't get me started on WebFusion, we'll be here all year (and some of next).

The top part of the control panel can be changed quite easily if you have the inteligence to do it (I assume you mean the content of the top frame?). Although the DSM upgrade did make it slightly more difficult (You have to do it by hand now in the database rather than by using the DSM).

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Karl Austin
KDA Web Services

There's another reason to keep that top frame there - quite a few people would never be able to find their way back to the main menu without some sort of link up there. :)

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Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostmatters.com

Whats wrong with webfusion ? they must be doing something right.


Originally posted by KDAWebServices:
Ahhhh, don't get me started on WebFusion, we'll be here all year (and some of next).

The top part of the control panel can be changed quite easily if you have the inteligence to do it (I assume you mean the content of the top frame?). Although the DSM upgrade did make it slightly more difficult (You have to do it by hand now in the database rather than by using the DSM).

they spammed me the other day, and i was never associated with them!!

Well a while back WebFusion held one of my cleints domains hostage (They took over the Tag for the domain without asking) and we had to get Nominet involved to get them to let go of it. My client was with them for 3 days during which we had about 2 hours of web hosting service. I will let you draw your own conclusions.

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Karl Austin
KDA Web Services