I'm looking at their linux 1 package, as it looks really attractive, and I've searched these forums, but really haven't found any info or them, or any customer feedback. I was wondering if anyone is using them, and how is the support, network, and how would you rate your overall experience?

Thanks
Steven

I have ordered a server with them. I called Clint (using the contact information on the website) before and after I ordered, and he has been very friendly.

My server isn't up yet, but should be up this evening -- Clint has been very good about keeping me updated on the status of setup.

I'll post more information as I know it.

I signed up with ACS datanet about 1-2 weeks ago. The server was up in about 2 hours since he had a spare. Network seems pretty fast, around 80KB/sec when I download from my server. Clint was very friendly when I called him and has been great with support over email. So far so good.

do those servers come with a web-based control panel?

I believe Webmin can be installed at no charge, but other than that I don't think so. I'd recommend calling Clint and asking him.

Dan

As promised, I got my brand-spanking new server this evening from www.acsdatanet.com (http://www.acsdatanet.com).

I did a traceroute and saw it's in the same datacenter as ACSDataNet.com (which I believe is www.pajo.com (http://www.pajo.com) ). Awesome ping times.

Awesome first impressions from talking with Clint.

For the money, I'm not sure you could go wrong. Granted, these aren't going to be super high-end servers (you should understand that before purchasing) -- but I'm not sure you can beat the value. I should also mention that Clint had no problem installing an extra stick of RAM (for an additional setup-charge) at my request.

Dan

It doesn't look like their colocated at pajo from the traceroute. Looks like they're getting their link from Pajo.

hmmm, I might be interested in that $49 linux plan plus an extra 64 megs.

It doesn't look like their colocated at pajo from the traceroute. Looks like they're getting their link from Pajo.

I was wondering what the difference was between getting a link from Pajo, or colocating at Pajo. Also, how can you tell just from the traceroute?

Thanks,
Dan

Maybe I should say ... it's a possibility they have link from pajo. The reason why I said that, it's because I know their office building, and I also know that on that same floor . there's a data center. I used to work for a company that built the data center there along with two other facilities within a block away from that building. The company used to be a CLEC and filed chap 11 few months ago, .. so they have everything there such as diesel generator, batteries etc. Not counting about 17 T1 circuits, about 5 DS-3, 2 OC-3, and 3 OC-48s... that's in one facility alone.

Oh. about 250 strands of fiber between the three facilities.. hehe.. nice huh ? :)

I know that the company was selling everything including equipments and I doubt acsdatanet got everything. But with the data center like that .. why colocate ?

I just ordered from them. Clint seems pretty nice. We'll see how things go.

well thanks for all of your replies everyone, as they have been very helpfull. I was wondering if anyone who is on a dedicated hosting package with ACSdatanet could supply us with some IP addresses so we can ping the server and run traceroutes, so we could test the speed etc..

Thanks again
Steven

Clint's a real nice guy! I'm sorry I didn't speak earlier. In my first post here I explained I found a crappy host and needed to find another. It was with acsdatanet. I was afraid to mention the name because the card I used to buy the server with hadn't been credited. That's right, I asked for my money back(Per his 30 day money back guarantee). Well guess what? It's still not credited(weeks later) and it's now having to be disputed. Thanks Clint, you're an honest and swell guy. And thanks for always answering your phones and emails after I paid for the server. Also thanks for the lies...one after another. It was great to have a server that was up 50% of the time too.


I hope that since my experience, those of you that have signed on, get the services he has promised. I too was sucked in by his smooth talking and friendly gestures. I wish what happened to me does not happen to you folks. Sorry I wasn't able to get this message out sooner. All I wanted was my money back and who knows how long that's gonna take now. If the sites you're transferring to their servers make up your livelihood, re-think it and only use these servers for entertainment purposes. If they're not just a temporary ploy anyway. Who knows?

You get what you pay for guys and in this case it was way too much if you ask me. I really hope he proves me wrong by crediting my card and giving all of you the services you've paid for.

Hmmm... well, I guess I'll see how it goes...

i too talked to clint on the phone
He seemed like a really nice guy and seemed to know what he was talking about. I really got the impression they provided a great service, however I will wait for some more updates on the people who just ordered a server with them

I'll let you know how things are going when my server is setup. He said it shuld be ready by saturday.

Every host has at least one nightmare story. Don't let my post scare any of you that have already paid ACS for a server. This happened a little under a month ago. A lot can change between then. I know at the time I was with them, Clint was having staff problems. Maybe that has been fixed. It's also a very new company.

I needed to vent and I probably should've saved it for the punching bag rather then these boards. I'm not one to bad mouth anyone and feel guilty for posting it.
I just want my refund and I'm tired of all his excuses of why it hasn't been sent thru. Everyday I call and I get a new excuse of why it hasn't been done. A few weeks is ridiculous when he promises to send it thru each day I call. He promised me again today. :) Who wants to bet he has another excuse for me tomorrow?

<<MOD NOTE:>
Any chance of getting some details from you as to the server name, or anything? I'm not trying to pronounce you guilty before proven innocent, just that I'm at least attempting to get posters to back up their stories (either good or bad) with some information.

Please note, I don't mean to pick on you, it would be helpful if everybody in this (and every) thread provided some type of info regarding their good or bad comments.
<</MOD NOTE>>

Only up 50% of the time ?? ..hmm... that's not good

That was the deal breaker. It was the uptime that killed me. Now truthfully it was up more then 50% but, really not by much. I noticed when my server was down so was acsdatanet.com. The first outage I let slide. The second one that lasted for hours is when I decided I can't gamble with my site just cos the hosting was affordable. Of course, a large part of my concern was the fact that Clint never called back when promised and was hard to get a hold of during my status as a client. That goes for emails too. But, like I said, things may have changed. It was nice to think that I could get that type of server for that price. If the server was up 99% of the time, I think I would of let the lack of support slide. It's funny, but because of the lack of support, I was forced to learn a lot on how apache and webmin worked on my own. This was a learning experience in more ways then one.

I can say one thing....the server was fast.

It's a shame I have to pay almost triple what I was with acsdatanet for almost the same exact server now. But...

I'm not sure what you're asking. My server was taken down once I made the request for a refund. I get an Invalid syntax error when I try to access the ip. I promise that what I say is true about the refund. I have 100 disappointed volunteer editors that can verify my story. They loved the speed of the server, but all helped me make the decision to pull out cos of uptime and support. I even had them start to add listings through the Ip address given. They also have to listen to me everyday complain about not being able to get my refund as promised. I seriously doubt ACS is trying to hold or pocket the money I paid them but, I am starting to get a little worried. Only because the refund was promised a while back and they continue to promise me everyday that it will be taken care. Only to find out the next day that it hasn't. It's gone on for too long. I really wanted to wait until I got the refund to tell others what I thought of them. That might take forever though.

I can only assume that you think I might be a competitor of theirs. I assure I am not. For proof you can email me or send an instant message and I'll send you to the message board that explains what I've had to go thru to find a host with my editors. The forum we have set aside for this discussion will also tell you the problems we've had with our first host :)

I have not had a minute of downtime that I am aware of so far. I don't know about the support though since I have been running FreeBSD/Linux for a while and just setup everything myself and didn't need help.

I'm a customer of acsdatanet.com for about 1 week now. Clint is quite a nice guy, I suggest you to either give him a phonecall or write him by mail.

I asked him to upgrade our server from 64 MB to 192 MB (additional 128 MB Ram), then one hour later I got a mail from him where he apologizes that he ran out of 128 sticks and he installed an additional 256 MB instead - at no additional cost. And the server was up in about 4 days (it was at the weekend).

My server configuration is completely customized. I sent him a list with the apps I wanted to have installed (such as Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, ProFTPD, SSH ..). And yes, Webmin is installed, too, which allowes me to easily administrate the machine on a webfrontend. He forgot to install mod_gzip, but I'm sure he would have done this if I asked him to (instead I did it by myself, it just took 5 mins).

I cannot give you any information about uptime because of the very short time I'm a customer of him, but whenever I wanted to acces this machine this week, it worked. You can keep track on my website, http://www.danielsan.ch/ , but please don't produce too much traffic.

And another thing about speed. Yes, it really looks like acsdatanet.com is connected to pajo.com, but I'm sure it's a co-located server. Have a look at the speeds:

--- snip ----------------------------------------
debian:/home/daniel# wget ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com:21/eudora/servers/unix/popper/qpopper4.0.3.tar.gz
--11:32:40--
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/qpopper4.0.3.tar.gz
=> `qpopper4.0.3.tar.gz'
Connecting to ftp.qualcomm.com:21... connected!
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD /eudora/servers/unix/popper ... done.
==> PORT ... done. ==> RETR qpopper4.0.3.tar.gz ... done.
Length: 2,326,127 (unauthoritative)

0K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 2% @ 467.29 KB/s
50K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 4% @ 657.89 KB/s
100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 6% @ 595.24 KB/s
150K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 8% @ 735.29 KB/s
200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 11% @ 704.23 KB/s
250K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 13% @ 847.46 KB/s
300K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 15% @ 704.23 KB/s
350K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 17% @ 714.29 KB/s
400K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 19% @ 657.89 KB/s
450K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 22% @ 602.41 KB/s
500K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 24% @ 666.67 KB/s
550K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 26% @ 641.03 KB/s
600K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 28% @ 588.24 KB/s
650K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 30% @ 588.24 KB/s
700K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 33% @ 561.80 KB/s
750K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 35% @ 735.29 KB/s
800K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 37% @ 649.35 KB/s
850K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 39% @ 757.58 KB/s
900K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 41% @ 666.67 KB/s
950K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 44% @ 617.28 KB/s
1000K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 46% @ 520.83 KB/s
1050K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 48% @ 675.68 KB/s
1100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 50% @ 531.91 KB/s
1150K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 52% @ 694.44 KB/s
1200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 55% @ 617.28 KB/s
1250K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 57% @ 714.29 KB/s
1300K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 59% @ 694.44 KB/s
1350K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 61% @ 666.67 KB/s
1400K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 63% @ 735.29 KB/s
1450K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 66% @ 632.91 KB/s
1500K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 68% @ 617.28 KB/s
1550K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 70% @ 595.24 KB/s
1600K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 72% @ 862.07 KB/s
1650K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 74% @ 666.67 KB/s
1700K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 77% @ 657.89 KB/s
1750K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 79% @ 543.48 KB/s
1800K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 81% @ 892.86 KB/s
1850K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 83% @ 641.03 KB/s
1900K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 85% @ 684.93 KB/s
1950K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 88% @ 769.23 KB/s
2000K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 90% @ 581.40 KB/s
2050K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 92% @ 746.27 KB/s
2100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 94% @ 588.24 KB/s
2150K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 96% @ 675.68 KB/s
2200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 99% @ 735.29 KB/s
2250K .......... .......... . 100% @ 720.28 KB/s

11:32:47 (654.08 KB/s) - `qpopper4.0.3.tar.gz' saved [2326127]

debian:/home/daniel#
--- snip ----------------------------------------

keep in mind, that the 145 MBit/s OC3 backbone isn't only your's alone (it's not dedicated), but it seems to be fast enough.

You might be interested in watching some sites hosted or colocated at Pajo, the datacenter on which it seems that ACS datanet leans on:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/hosted?netname=ARIN-PAJO2,208.179.0.0,208.179.255.255

It might be a rough indication of the uptimes and speed you could expect from them. I am personally interested in the plans of this company and might take a dedicated from them, but I would like to hear some more all around.

Bye, :)

Clint setup my server yesterday. It only took a couple days, just like he said. So far, everything has been excellent. It's a quick connection and he installed the things I asked for, including an extra 64 megs of RAM (setup + $15).

good good

Be sure to keep us posted on how its going

will do

Yes. I am also very interested in this company. Which package did you each get?

Do you think the low end server would be good enough for basic Mom and Pop type, low bandwidth websites?

Using the web based control panel can one add domains and such?

Is there a place I can see documentation on the installed control panel and other software?

I have never had a dedicated server and would like to try. Right now I use a few hosts for all our sites, all Alabanza. Would it be much more work to manage them on a dedicated server?

They use webmin - http://www.webmin.com for their managing software. I picked up on it pretty quick, but there's still alot I don't know about it. It still requires a little Telnet and SSH experience I found out.

For newbies(like myself), I'd wait to go with ACS until they get some tech. support. Right now it's only Clint and he seems to be growing pretty fast. I NEVER got the support I needed.

BTW, I'm going to call my credit card company tomorrow to see if the credit went thru. I'll let all of you know the outcome.

I get between 130 - 140kb/sec while downloading from my server at ACS. The server pings at 30 - 40ms. I'm 2 hours away from ACS, but damn, it's quick.

Today I got confirmation that the credit went thru. However, it was only for the three months I paid in advance. They've kept the setup fee, which most hosts do. Now, no where on the site does it say that they'll be keeping the setup fee. Only mentions a 30 day money back guarantee. It put me under the impression that all monies paid would be refunded if not satisfied with the service. Another thing to add is the server was not setup like promised from our initial contact with Clint. What should I do? Eat the setup fee or fight for what I feel is false advertising? You all know my time with ACSdatanet was not a pleasant one. I'm ready to take this as far as I have too.

And for those that have emailed me from this site with the same problems, I urge you to let other people know by posting about it. Thank you for letting me know I'm not the only one that has had problems with them.

If people are emailing you with similar stories, yet keeping quiet publicly as others here talk about signing up, I'd be quite disappointed...regardless of who the provider was.

We've had a few prompt responses from Clint, and will probably take a server soon. So unless others are prepared to speak up FK, I'm afraid I would have to consider your bad experience as a one-off situation which every provider stumbles across from time to time.

Gary

In a previous post I mentioned: "Every host has at least one nightmare story. Don't let my post scare any of you that have already paid ACS for a server. This happened a little under a month ago. A lot can change between then. I know at the time I was with them, Clint was having staff problems. Maybe that has been fixed. It's also a very new company. "

Now that two others have emailed me, sharing their same experience, it's possible that something's rotten in ACS land.

The post above yours was also emailed to them. We'll see if it can get a response. It looks like the three of us opened our accounts around the same time. If they refuse to reply, I say go with ACS. The price is right and the servers are the fastest I've seen. Just do one thing. Make sure he has help with Tech. support and ask to speak with that person before you give them any money. Clint's not as quick to reply after your server is up, believe me. That's the best advice I can give you.

For some strange reason, I foresee Clint's age coming under fire next...

Gary

I really liked Clint in the beginning too. Why do you think I went with ACS? The price was the reason I called him and his personality was why I gave him my money. Even after that all of our conversations were pleasant. Including the one when I called and asked for a refund. Not at any time were our conversations hostile. Clint really is a nice guy. He just needs to ease up a bit on the excuses and learn to keep his promises.

This is something you're going to have to learn on your own. Never have I said to not use ASC. I've told you what happened to me and now you must decide for yourself if this is who you want to go with. I have nothing to gain by lying. I'm not in the hosting business. I was here to tell everyone the experience I had. I thought I was helping out. You think I'd ask for a refund, knowing I wouldn't find those prices any where else, If I didn't have good reason? I'm now paying three times those prices and for almost the same exact server/package. Granted I'm happier, but my check book isn't.

Currently, all sites on ACS Datanet are down (including http://www.acsdatanet.com ) for already half an hour. I don't know why, Clint can't be reached via phone, but I hope this problem will be resolved soon otherwise I still can get advantage of the 30-days-mone-back-no-questions-asked-guarantee.

ditto

I'm sorry to say, but you should probably get used to them.
I see in the future Clint making more money off the set up fees, he doesn't refund, then the actual clients he's able to keep. I guess I should of had him write out the guarantee before I went with him.

FYI -- it's back up now. Still no info on what happened, but the data link is back up.

Dan

I agree absolutely with Fartman regarding the support given by Clint. Clint, who is doubtlessly a nice guy, just gives too many promises he doesn't keep. Before placing the order (the cheapest Linux 1 package - I think someone asked), I asked him whether he would help us configuring the machine because I don't know linux very well. I assumed, after the basic installation would be done, I could set up users with webmin and edit the apache configuration (httpd.conf) by hand. I know MySQL and Apache quite well because I'm running these programs on Windows on my local machine. So there didn't seem any problem. I could slowly learn how to operate on a linux machine and maybe in the future update software packages, new kernel, .. whatever has to be done on the machine. But instead, not only he forgot to install mod_gzip (ok, that's not a big deal), but neither MRTG, nor QMail (SMTP) were configured (=didn't work). QPopper (POP3), wasn't installed either and our server didn't respond to the second IP (because it wasn't entered in the /etc/network/interfaces, as I found out later).

But what can you expect for this low price? Support is expensive! If Clint would have made clear that he cannot provide full-time-support to the customers, why doesn't he just say? It's not a big deal for me, I've got many good friends who know linux fluently and they are also kind enough to help me alot. I'm not blaming Clint for this - I still think he's one of the "good guys" and not one of these mean businessmen trying to trick you, but a little bit more honesty towards the customer would be appreciated.

All ACS sites are working again. This makes 1 h 15 minutes downtime for today. Anyone got a reliable uptime-monitoring-software? does uptime.netcraft.com work reliable? Anyone got a valid registration at http://www.watchmyserver.com/registration/index.php3 and willing to monitor acsdatanet.com? :)

By the way, this document could be quite interesting for all you Administrator-newbies:

"Introduction to Basic Unix System Administration"
http://www.soti.org/~tille/training/

www.qwkmon.com

@node9

thanks for the url, i'll check that out and post my results

@all

Just wanted to add one thing: Fartman's right (again, unfortunately). Before ordering our server, Clint responded quite quickly to our mails (within few hours). After ordering, it usually takes more than one day, sometimes he even skips questions.

I hope this will change soon. If the server runs smoothly (no downtimes), I'll keep it - despite the lack of support.

Hey, it took clint only 20 mins to answer my complaint :)

He's improving!

-------------------------------------------
Daniel,

We had requested some more ip addresses from PAJO. The new block that was
assigned to us was already inuse by another of PAJO clients. This caused a
loop in our router and the whole network was unable to get out to the
internet. They are assuring me that this will not happen again. I
apologize for the inconvenience.

Clint
-------------------------------------------

I'm sure he hates downtime at least as much as we do since his whole business relies on everything being up and running. Anyone know what caused the downtime?

I really don't expect much software support at all from him for $50 per month.

Read my posting, Gliebster :)

oh, thanks

I did see that but I thought it was a quote in your signature or something so I didn't read it. hehe. silly me.

Hello Daniel. Thanks for at least expanding on a few problems, rather than warning the masses without anything substantial to back it up with. I find it interesting that your experience deteriorated so quickly. Within the space of 4 days you went from praising ACS Datanet, to hoping your money-back guarantee was good.

So would you agree thaty if one doesn't need in way of support at all that this is still a wise choice for a server? Other than just above, nobody seems to have reported much in the way of downtime. And you yourself have spoken highly of the speeds.

Real information mate. That's all we need.

Gary

Hi Editor,

well you see, the problem about judging a host is that a customer cannot judge it completly objective and a non-customer can't do it either - it's a vicious circle. Let me explain: You just spent 300$ (a lot of money for your tiny budget - I'm attending high school now and I don't have a regular income. I'm sharing the costs with my cousin, who hasn't got a regular income either) on a dedicated server account (which was a dream of yours already a long time) and it's not completely the way you wanted it. Do you really want to make a fool of yourself and admit to the public that you just spent your whole money for a low-quality product? Don't you start getting euphemistic and just overlook small mistakes? You browsed the net dozens of hours, compared prices, read news articles (groups.google.com), forums (this one ..), telephoned/mailed with the guy and then suddenly you notice that your judgement has mislead you? Must anyone really know? Why not just pretend everything being ok?

Don't get me wrong, ACS Datanet isn't as bad as stated in the example - I exaggerated alot. ACS Datanet is a fine, decent company giving you a good offer for a very low price. Just the support isn't what I actually expected. I've been a customer of speedhost.com (some of you may know JoséQ) and although we had the 5$/mo account, we were treated like premium customers. Replies within few hours (absolute record: 3 minutes. hence, we even solved a problem in an IRC chat which took 2+ hrs) in spite of the different time zones (I'm GMT+1), accurate answers, good support (two years ago he installed the GD library just because of me) and he really was someone you could depend on.

And now I changed to ACS. Clint is very friendly and forthcoming (he's even on ICQ sometimes!), but not as quick and reliable as José was (José was at his machine 24/7. Sometimes I had the impression he was running a Support-BOT :)).

But ACS is actually fine, too. Except for the downtime some hours ago, which just made me furious. I tried to install QMail for several days now (I'm a complete linux beginner) and then a good friend returned back from holiday, kindly offering his help setting up the machine for me - then *bang* connection lost, host unreachable. dammit! Now he went so sleep and I have to wait until tommorrow.

I'll give you a more in-depth, hopefully more objective report on ACS Datanet (I'm monitoring the uptime with www.qwkmon.com now). But if anyone asked me for an advice, I'd definitively take the offer (but with at least 128 MB RAM in total, everything below is not enough). Just be aware that you have to learn alot by yourself if you're not already a linux professional. A "naked" linux system, even with webmin, isn't as easy to use as a cobalt raq [http://emea.cobalt.com/products/raq/index.html --> Demo]

"Thanks for at least expanding on a few problems, rather than warning the masses without anything substantial to back it up with. "

Wow, a snap at me for only sharing my experience. I guess if I wasn't a client of ACS, I wouldn't know the password that they give at sign up...right Gary? This just hit me on how I can prove I used to be a client. But, I have to say it's nice having to defend my posts when all I was trying to do was help. So here goes...and i suggest all clients of ACS to back me up so I can get Gary off my arse. Does the password start with the word loot?

Hopefully that ends all doubt. I also urge all clients to look at that password and think to yourself why it was chosen. It's possible it carries a hidden message. I hope I am way off here, but you never know these days. Clint finally agreed to refund my set up fee. I can tell you it wasn't for not spelling it out on his website. He said that setup fees are never refunded...it's an industry standard. How I got the refund is a whole different story and rather then having people like Gary not believe me, I'm going to keep this to myself. Just look at the beginning of this paragraph and use your imagination.

Originally posted by Fartknocker
Wow, a snap at me for only sharing my experience.

Not at all. An inference that you weren't being substantive enough.

Gary

Well, I just wanted to let you guys know that ACSDatanet tech support is really trying to 'out-do' themselves (or they're drinking a lot of caffeine) -- because I just emailed tech support regarding getting some new IP's and they emailed back in (*gasp*) 15 minutes !

Dan

You better back that up with some substantial evidence for Gary. :)

That really is an awesome turn-around. I honestly hope it stays that way.

CagedTornado,
I love the theme of your site. Nice job on the design and choice of domain. It's not easy finding good domains these days. You have to be creative and you've done that.

Originally posted by Fartknocker
You better back that up with some substantial evidence for Gary. :)

Touche! :-)

Gary

Ok, how has acs been for the last 10 days? Any more outages?

Not that I've noticed. Bandwidth has screamed, and I've been happy.

Dan

good to hear

i'll consider them if i dont see any problems within the next few weeks


we'll see

They seem to have been fine since that 1 hour downtime which apparently wasn't their fault.

I'm satisfied.

All,

PAJO Networks is:

1. An ISP in Los Angeles/Long Beach Californina. www.pajo.com
2. MPLS switched with Dual OC3 paths.
3. All Gigabit infrastructure, OSPF IGP.
4. They sell high speed TDM Circuits as well as Co-Location
5. 6000Sq Ft Data Center
6. Pajo has Facilities in One Wilshire as well for Cross connection purposes.

ACSDataNet is a customer of PAJO. They are Co-Located with thier own suite.

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

Originally posted by Alex@pajo
[B]ACSDataNet is a customer of PAJO. They are Co-Located with thier own suite.

Could you do us a favour then mate, and check to see if their mail server is working. :-)

Gary

Gary,

I posted the last response becuase I saw comments on traceroutes and questions on how ACS was hooked up. I tried to give a little "quick sheet" on PAJO.

As for getting his mail server on-line, that would be out of our hands and up to ACS.

All we can do is keep his redundant connections enabled and swiching quickly though the network. From his Egrees router he is MPLS switched though our system.

If you have networking questions about PAJO, or more data on us as an ISP I will answer them. I dont have any data on ACS, like I said he has his own suite and he is our customer, that is it ! Though I do see Clint come in and out of his suite often :>

Cheers,

Alex G. Paoli

:-)

I was just kidding ya buddy.

Gary

Originally posted by Editor
:-)

I was just kidding ya buddy.

Gary

No Worries.

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

Originally posted by Alex@pajo
6. Pajo has Facilities in One Wilshire as well for Cross connection purposes.

Hello,

Does your company share the same building w/ Colo.com, Alchemy, etc. ?

Thanks to Alex@pajo for the detailed information about the arrangement between ACSDatanet and Pajo.com -- I really appreciate it!

Also -- what is a 'private suite', exactly? Are they isolated from other customers? Do they just have their own private full rack(s)? Do they get a dedicated router/switch?

Thanks for the info,
Dan Esparza
ACSDatanet customer

Well I tried to call Clint as well as e-mail him a couple of times. I even filled out the order form. I have not gotten a response. I am not sure as to the reason, but it does not give me a good feeling about acs, but maybe I was just unlucky.

Originally posted by elijah


Hello,

Does your company share the same building w/ Colo.com, Alchemy, etc. ?

No, We have our own facilities. We are located at 700 Wilshire, on the 6th Floor. (Entire Floor)

As for One Wilshire we have a cage in the Meet Me room with 96 strands of Dark Fiber, which connects to us and then from our facility we cross over to Level3. These strands of Fiber are availble to us to any capacity, such as TDM, DWDM etc. We utilize Cisco's ONS 15000 systems for this.

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

[QUOTE]Originally posted by CagedTornado
[B]Thanks to Alex@pajo for the detailed information about the arrangement between ACSDatanet and Pajo.com -- I really appreciate it!

Also -- what is a 'private suite', exactly? Are they isolated from other customers? Do they just have their own private full rack(s)? Do they get a dedicated router/switch?

Hi,

PAJO has several COLO services:

1. Your own SUITE. Which is exactly that, your own room, with power, HVAC, Racks etc.

2. Full or Half/Rack space.

3. Shared Racks. (Controlled by PAJO)


ACSDATANET, have thier own suite with thier own racks. They are NOT sharing anything with any other customer.

PAJO does NOT extend customers computers/equipment back to our system. In other words, we dont just give ports out on switches and assign IP routed VLANS. A customer in COLO must supply a router (Or we will rent you one). This router will be cross connected to our switches in a OSPF zone we call COLO. These switches are then connected via multiple Gigabit feeds to redundant Area Border Routers (ABR's). From there they go into our CORE, then finally to the ABR of a zone we call BSAP. BSAP (Backbone Services Access Point), contains 7206 and 12000 routers which peer to our upstream providers. As stated this is ALL MPLS switched, so technically the minute ACSDataNet hits our network he is assigned a label and swithced dirtectly to the "exit". Thus 2 Hops.

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

Hey Alex, welcome to WHT! When you guys gonna build up something in Manhattan Beach? :D j/k

I'm sure Alex wouldn't mind either being contacted directly about questions, or he's given some info that for direct contact to learn more.

Pajo -- I'm at ACSDataNet - and one of your clients: 208.179.226.5 is running attacks (Code Red?) on my server!

More attacks from:
208.179.124.196
208.179.37.50
208.179.41.98 (www.reos.com)
208.179.166.51

And those outside Pajo...
208.62.65.187 (mail.negaresa.org)

ya know........
you could email him that
or something
is it really necessary to talk to him here

I have read this entire thread and it seems that some people have funny ideas of what support should entail for colocated/dedicated servers. I have always thought, even when I was a cto for a data center, that if you rent/buy/supply a box, you are in complete control and basically on your own supporting that box. I have been reading complaints that people can't get help with setting up webmin/apache/ et al. That confuses me, do you really expect to get support on your boxes at $50 a month or even $300 a month? Has the industry changed that much?

I really want to know as we are going to be adding colocation services soon. I want to make sure my offerings are in line.

What do you all want/expect from your colocation provider in terms of support. I have always felt support like that should be paid by the hour. Or quite frankly, why have your own box if you don't know how to run it?

We at one time, (about one year ago) did colo for $99 a month, then if you wanted admin time on your box we did it for $400 for 10 hours of support, that entailed basically anything you needed during that 10 hours.

node9 - ya know, I can do whatever I want. Geesh, why are people here so anal about "do and don't on the forum"? If I want to post, I post. You guys need to learn to respect people who aren't identical to yourself.

Originally posted by Chicken
Hey Alex, welcome to WHT! When you guys gonna build up something in Manhattan Beach? :D j/k

I'm sure Alex wouldn't mind either being contacted directly about questions, or he's given some info that for direct contact to learn more.

Chicken,

Hi, and thanks. I am trying to help some people uderstand the relationship of this provder and us (as the ISP). I am more than happy to answer any technical questions, send the email to apaoli@pajo.com.

As for Manhattan Beach, we have TDM circuits there (DS1 - OCx). No COLO facil. We do have a COLO prim in Long Beach !. BTW: ALL of our TDM circuits are MPLS switched from the PE out as well.

I hope you enjoy our network for those of you using it with this Web Hosting company.

ACSDataNET is a good group of people and we are happy to have them in our COLO.

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

Originally posted by StephenRS
Pajo -- I'm at ACSDataNet - and one of your clients: 208.179.226.5 is running attacks (Code Red?) on my server!

More attacks from:
208.179.124.196
208.179.37.50
208.179.41.98 (www.reos.com)
208.179.166.51

And those outside Pajo...
208.62.65.187 (mail.negaresa.org)

StephenRS,

Thanks, We have applied policies to those blocks. (PAJO policy is we shut down the hosts until the end-user fixes them)

Currently our COLO and Ethernet Handoff customers are filtered though a Class-MAP to "drop" all code red/Nimbda packets. (i.e. URL matches on *ida, *cmd.exe*, *eml*, etc).

Though this does not stop scanning on already affected machines, it will stop them from infecting anyone else.

The blocks you mentioned are TDM customers. We cant apply the filters due to limitations on POLICY-MAP filters and MPLS. (When a LABEL is attached to a packet vs, when the packet arrives) So all we can do is shut them down when we find out about it.

BTW: "technically" PAJO will only respond to requests made by the customers (i.e. ACSDataNet), however, Code/Red and Nimda are affecting us all, so in this case PAJO will repond to anyone who is getting attacked (scanned) by our customer base. We are doing everything possible to stop the spread of this. Go to www.pajo.com/support for a quick breakdown of the problem. As for any other problems you have with ACSDataNet, Please send email to ACS. (However, If I see something here while im looking ill try to help you out :>)

Cheers,

Alex Paoli

[QUOTE]Originally posted by smartbackups
[B]I have read this entire thread and it seems that some people have funny ideas of what support ...

From the perspective of an ISP who does offer COLO (And [self promotion] quite well thank you very much :>), SERVICE is the number one thing end users want.

We give as much help as possible up to just about doing it ourselves for the customer. (Though we don’t !!). The money is really in the BW the customer uses.

Typically, end users only need initial help, after that for the most part they are self sufficient.

Bottom line: Find an ISP OR a company who is on an ISP (i.e. ACSDataNet via PAJO) who know what the Heck they are doing.

Unfortunately, we (the industry) have begat many bad engineers and thus many bad ISP's who seem to blame everything on the Telco :>

Alex Paoli

Alex@pajo - Thanks for checking those hosts.

Originally posted by StephenRS
node9 - ya know, I can do whatever I want. Geesh, why are people here so anal about "do and don't on the forum"? If I want to post, I post. You guys need to learn to respect people who aren't identical to yourself.

Stephen, the difference is that this is a discussion forum, not a <insert host name> support forum. You posted a specific problem, to a specific person, and that is not what the forum is for. Sorry, but Node9 is correct in this case. This should have been emailed directly.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me and I'll explain further, (as even *this* isn't something that should be discussed on the forum :D). I've posted it to help others who might be confused as to what to post on the forums.

Chicken - I hear you, and I will honor what you say - but I don't agree - I believe a forum is best left "open" where people can say anything on topic (about hosting) and share their experience. It is like having an office where every time someone has to talk with someone they have to go into a private office and close the door. Especially when the information isn't sensitive, what is the big deal? -- I WILL FOLLOW WHAT YOU SAY -- I just think a lot of effort gets wasted on this forum telling people what to not say.

Back on topic:
As for ACSDATANet - we have been hit with 2 outages in the past 2 days - we are working with them - but it is not good. All are 10 to 20 minute outages... and we are getting hit with more of them this morning. Not good at all.

how can acsdatanet offer server+40GB for just $49 if a colo of a U1 server at pajo costs them $99?

ACSdatanet has stablaized in the last 24 hours.... Clint says that he is working to resolve the long-term causes of these frequent short outages.

NORRITT - I suspect it is much cheaper to get an entire rack than it is to purchase by the 1u.

Pajo said that Clint has a complete router and switch infrastructure, so it isn't like he is just putting servers in Pajo-owned racks. Pajo said that ACS has their own suite...

How is ACS these days?

well i emailed him a about a week ago RE buying a server. no response. needless to say im going elsewhere. not to say i wounldnt consider him again maybe . just to let u know :)

i emailed them too! no reply :rolleyes:

I'm with ACS for three month now. At the beginning i was quite enthusiastic about having 'my own server' and ACS offered this dream for a quite reasonable price.

Uptime is good, Hardware is good, Speed ist good, but support ist _TERRIBLE_. I'm absolutely _FURIOUS_ about clint's behaviour.

Background: After the news about the linux kernel root exploit last friday we patched our box and then had to reboot it, of course. *bang*. it locked up somewhere in the boot-up process and that happened about 90 hrs. ago! (almost four days).

Clint, or whoever is responsible for support at this company, kept ignoring our mails, phone calls, .. and I'm SURE that someone was at the office, because a few times the line was busy when I tried to reach him.

My suggestion: don't rely on ACS, if you want to run a serious business. We're loosing most of our customers now... Service is vital, and ACS isn't offering that, although they promised alot - they promised to help us with software installation and configuration, which we now did ourselves, because they never did it. And pressing the [RESET] button at our server, choosing the old kernel is a basic service, I think at least, you could expect from a web hoster. We even offered him to pay an additional fee just to receive that basic support, but we still didn't get any reply ..

I'll keep you informed .. If you want to know when our host comes back, keep PING-ing 208.179.100.198 ..

Originally posted by danielsan

Background: After the news about the linux kernel root exploit last friday we patched our box and then had to reboot it, of course. *bang*. it locked up somewhere in the boot-up process and that happened about 90 hrs. ago! (almost four days).


I feel for you. I did the same thing. That's one hard way to learn the importance of backing up and reconfiguring lilo.conf after kernel update.

@freakysid

thanks for your sympathy. basically, the old kernel is still there, just someone has to reboot, press ALT and load the old one .. now anyone got an idea how to do this remotely? :)

@all ACS customers

has anyone got an idea where clint could be? on vacation? i'm just wondering whether anyone has got a life-sign from him in the past few days. i'm really desperate.

daniel,
Wow , you are STILL DOWN!
PING 208.179.100.198 (208.179.100.198): 56 data bytes

--- 208.179.100.198 ping statistics ---
103 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

If I were you, I'd try to move out ASAP, you probably don't have your files, but start ordering that new server and get out quick, 4 days downtime with no one in sight to help is terrible.

5 days actually. I've put up a downtime-counter (it does NOT actually PING our host):
http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/

I can't just change the server, it took us many endless nights to configure the system just the way we wanted it to be, creating all accounts, setting up apache, mysql, qmail, vmailmngr, iptables, customizing phpmyadmin, creating a rudimentary control-panel ..

we started thinking about what could have happened:

1. clint's on vacation
2. he went bankrupt
3. he got injured and is now lying in a hospital (serious thought)

number 3 would be quite a big problem, because he's running his business on his own and nobody would be there answering all e-mails. i just cannot believe, that clint could ignore us /on purpose/, he seemed to be so kind ..

any help of you would be appreciated. if you know of clint, please reply to this thread or drop me a line: danielsan@gmx.ch

thanks alot.

http://64.21.76.37/cartoons2001/0915.gif

anyone got clint's private phone-number?

danielsan-
I feel really sorry for you. I actually filled out the signup form, but I never heard from Clint after that. I have sent him numerous ICQ messages, as well as e-mail messages. I read that you tweaked the server a lot, but I think that you should go with another company. Is 5 days of downtime acceptable to you, even though you spent a lot of time with the server? My answer would be no it is not. You cannot recieve orders, if you have clients, then they will be pissed off with the downtime, and it's the domino effect.

I'd take the others advice and try to get a hold of Pajo (sp?)

I feel for you man. If you've ever read about my experience with ACS, you'll see why I left. I had a fear that this would have happened to me. Something wasn't legit with Clint. It's almost as if he wants to lose his customers so he can charge the start up fee again to someone else for the same system. Afterall, we know at those prices, he has a waiting list. Not to mention his systems are just the basic loads. Nothing is configured at all. That's the only way I can see his business making any money. He keeps you real happy for the first month and them BLAM! He's gone. Now, I don't want anybody to snap at me for posting this. This is clearly just my opinion. I think it was the password he gave us in the beginning that made me suspicious.

as I just heard, clint is ALIVE and thus IGNORING MY MAILS/PHONE CALLS INTENTIONALLY. i wonder whether he has already formatted our HD and sold it to someone else ..

@Fartknocker

which password did he give you then? abc? 123?

could anyone please cast a magic spell to bring our server back to life?

.. sorry to spam this forum, but i'm _pissed_. 300$ lost . who do i look like? bill gates? I don't have a regular income. this server was meant to be a hobby financed by all the money I had saved ...

i know you're reading this forum, clint, because i gave this link to you (way back when i was still enthusiastic about you ..). how wrong i was ... better find a good explanation for all this ... and alex@pajo is that you? i can't imagine pajo talking so positively about you, they get complaints about ACS all the time ..

any good lawyers around here willing to give me legal advice?

He could just be overwhelmed with orders/support requests: http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1267/byt20010829s0001/0903_moshe.html ... although I'm not sure why he wouldn't hire someone to help.

Dan

>which password did he give you then? abc? 123?<

It was Loot2save. When I first asked him about it, he said it was an inside office joke. It's starting to sound like it's much more than that. JMO though. He told me to change it asap cos' they gave it to everyone when they first signed up.

loot2save LOL
*cough*

He gave me *cough* '14themoney'

Dan

My service has been great so far.

About a month ago, my box would lockup for 15-30 minutes at a time and then return to normal. After a couple times I called to see what was up. They checked into it and supposedly a fan went out and was causing it to overheat and lockup. They replaced it right away and since then, I have not had any downtime.

I'm happy =]

-Jarrod

my image of american companies has extremely deteriorated. It's a shame, because JoseQ (speedhost.com) was the best thing we could ever get, but Clint (ACS) is absolutely terrible.

i'm taking legal action now, our server is still not up after a downtime of 6 days and 16 hours now.

anyone got an idea what ACS could stand for? All your Cash are belong to uS?

Originally posted by danielsan
my image of american companies has extremely deteriorated. It's a shame, because JoseQ (speedhost.com) was the best thing we could ever get, but Clint (ACS) is absolutely terrible.

i'm taking legal action now, our server is still not up after a downtime of 6 days and 16 hours now.

anyone got an idea what ACS could stand for? All your Cash are belong to uS?

just because one company is bad doesnt mean they all are.

i was just talking about MY general picture of american companies (according to my own experience). speedhost.com was excellent (no, i don't get paid to mention them all the time - otherwise i'd be rich), acs the exact opposite. this makes 50-50.

but of course, node9, you're absolutely right. it is false to draw any general conclusions and judge other american companies. there's always a black sheep, and now it was my faith to discover it.

Ok, I'm going to tell everyone how I got my money back from ACS. After one week I knew it was time for me to cancel. Service sucked and the server was always down. I left messages, emails asking him to cancel my account. No replies. It wasn't until I had a friend call from another state asking about his services, did I realize he was purposely ignoring me. Possibly trying to get my 30 day money back guarantee to expire. Once my friend received a reply(phone call) from him, she cancelled the account for me. Whew...so I thought. It still took phone call after phone call to get my money back with the help of 4 different friends in three different sates. And 45 days later when it was finally called into the credit card company, my set-up fee wasn't included. He kept it. After I called him, he said it was an industry standard and that those are never returned. Industry standard...Yes, but it still needs to be in writing, which it was not! So I fought him on this for another few days. He wasn't budging. Then a thought occurred. His password that he gave me made sense. Loot2save! I just got scammed...I thought to myself. I called him and explained what I thought he was doing and wouldn't you know it....it was called in that day and I was given my 100% refund. Does this mean he was guilty of scamming me? No. Could he have been just trying to protect his image? Yes. But, how I put it was very clear.

Voice Mail: Clint, you've scammed me out of $150. Your password Loot2save says it all. Either I get my set-up fee back or I file charges for fraud.

What I thought was funny about the whole situation, was he replied to a sales request(my friends) before he answered mine. We both used the same email address to get a hold of him. He was ignoring my request to cancel on purpose. I can guarantee I'm not the only one that has done this. In fact I know I'm not. I've suggested this to others who have PM'd me with the same experiences with ACS. Now the funny thing is he can't even answer sales calls or emails cos' he knows it's really just someone trying to get a hold of him to ask for their money back. My guess is ACS is days away from going out of business. It is my opinion that If any of you are with ACS, reconsider. If you've been with ACS under 30 days, make sure you get your set-up fee back. Check his site, it's still a broken link and nothing is mentioned about him not refunding it.

Fartknocker

Hi there,

just another post on daniel's experience ... I'm the "culprit" who tried to update the Kernel to 2.4.12 (and set most of the server up in the first place) ...

The matter at hand is simply embarassing for ACS. Sure, I should have had more care in updating the kernel (i.e. do it on monday, not on friday, make sure Clint is there, etc.), but since the last few kernel changes went by swiftly and the recompile was rather urgent (we do trust our users; but better safe than sorry), I went ahead with it anyway. To this day I do not know why the machine hung -- the compile went by without a glitch (including lilo writing a new boot record, I mechanically add a && lilo to the end of the copy command; I have been burned by that once two years ago, and once is enough).

At any rate; After 15 minutes, I believe it was about 6pm German time (- 6 to 8 hours for US time, GMT+1 here), I fired off an eMail to Clint, explaining that the server hung and if he could please reboot it, ideally sending over an error message; I also told him how to boot the previous kernel, just to be sure.

Well, no answer ever came. To this day, he hasn't answered that eMail; I sent it again two days ago at the request of Daniel, since Clint asked him what the IP of his server was (this in itself is intolerable, but anyway). No bounce, but no answer either. So basically it's been just over 7 days since the incident, and there was no support whatsoever. Sure it's probably my fault that the server hung, but if acs boldly claims that they help "you if you f*ck up", I expect that to be the case.

Some history about my personal experience at ACS : The server was delivered rather promptly. It had Debian 2.2 installed, which we upgraded to 2.4 (woody) rather promptly. Back then it was rather easy to get ahold of Clint, he babysitted the reboots (it's not every day that you do apt-get dist-upgrade), all was fine. When I hung the server in a kernel upgrade (forgot a driver), Clint rebooted the machine promptly as well, sending over the error message. All was well.

I don't think we required any further support (but for moving around some DNS entries on ACS's servers) until last week. Service was usually good, but connectivity problems plagued the server all the time ... Nothing too major, but there were periods when you'd have a 5-10 minute "downtime" every 4-5 hours. Connections that had not timed out till then magically reappeared; it seems there were router problems. Unfortunately I haven't downloaded any of the rrdtool graphs I created to measure those outages over time; just imagine a graph in which pings to 8 hosts are graphed and every X hours (X being one-digit) there'd be a gap in the graph. In the last few weeks these gaps got few and small, but they were still there.
So if you rely on your machine serving requests all the time and not just let them time out, ACS is /not/ for you.

Up until last week (and but for those "hickups"), ACS was average ok in my book -- I'd even recommend them if you needed something cheap and weren't overly concerned with some small outages. Today I'd not hit 'em with a ten-foot cat5; stay away from ACS, it will cost you in the end. Well, it won't bite you when you manage to keep your server up 24/7 without reboots and support. I usually count uptime in months, but when something crashes I expect some sort of service, not just blank silent purposeful ignoring. The prices are good, the connectivity is just below average (you get a 10mbit connection to the switch and you can saturate that, but you can neither go beyond that nor can you expect it to be avaiable even 99% of the time), the service is sporadic and downwardsloping (i.e. terrible).

If you need any further details, feel free to drop a line.

Well maybe Clint will show some last dignity and get the server back up for salvaging (there was, after all, quite some data on it; including aforementioned graphs and the script to create them). I doubt it, but it might happen.

ttyl,
Eike

we finally hit the downtime of ONE WEEK:
http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/

(i know, grammar is not completely perfect: weekS. i'll fix that another time)

Well, well.

It seems I have a sad story to add to this already heaping pile of trash. My sad story starts about a week ago, when I was just starting to get a lot of business with my brand-spanking new hosting effort.

Farty boy and Danielsan... I hang my head in shame, as I admit you were right. I was wrong.

I guess I should have known better than to trust a server with someone as incompetent as Clint. Things really started to make me nervous when I started reading accounts on this thread at how unresponsive Clint was, and at the same time I realized that he hadn't gotten back to me about something as simple as 10 more IP addresses. That was last weekend. To this day, I haven't gotten addtional IP's -- but that's not why I'm writing this thread.

The icing on the cake happened last night. I was feeling pretty good about how things were going -- despite the fact that I was quickly realizing that I had to move to a new dedicated server hosting company. I figured I could get a new server and begin the delicate process of transferring clients to the new box. Well, leave it to Clint to screw something like that up. Around 6:00 pm last night, my site became very slow, culminating in the box coming to a complete screeching stop. Attempts to reboot the box remotely (using the 'restart' command) fail miserably. This in itself wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for -- you guessed it -- Clint Coxwell.

Needless to say, I'm a little 'put out' at the position this leaves me in. I just wrote an apology to all my clients -- knowing full well that there's nothing I can do to convince them to come back ... and all because of Clint Coxwell.

Apparently Clint is better at killing business than he gives himself credit for. At last count that's at least 3 passionate 'anti-clients' for ACSDatanet that will scream from the tallest mountain about how they should give Clint Coxwell (and his gigantic capacity for screwing things up) a WIDE BERTH.

PM me if you want more information.

Dan "I'll get even in my own way" Esparza

I first contacted ACS Datanet about 2 weeks ago inquring about service. I didn't get a response for a few days so I sent another email to which Clint responded:


Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 15:14:08 -0700
From: "Sales (ACS DataNet, Inc.)" <sales@acsdatanet.com>
To: Chris Martino
Subject: Re: Order Request

[ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
[ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ]
[ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Chris,
I apologize. I have been out of the office for a few days. Your server
will be up later this evening. I will email you the account info as soon as
the server is up.

Clint


The server never came up that evening as Clint had said, so I emailed him again. I have yet to receive a response.

After much more research, and spending alot of time lurking on this forum I decided to give ******* (http://www.*******.com) a shot. I fired off an email to their Sales department asking a few questions. About a half hour later Ed responded and answered my questions. After a few emails back and forth I decided to go with their Dedicated Silver package. As of right now the server is being setup and should be ready to go later today.

I can honestly say I'm glad I didn't waste any more time and money on Clint or ACS Datenet. Their business model seems horribly flawed and Clint seems slow and incompitent (to put it nicely).

I'll post a thread letting you know of my experiences with ******* once my server goes up.

Everything is working fine for me and has been... There are always going to be 'horror stories' for every host, which there is usually another side to.

jarrod - you are naive.

Get that bastard clint on the phone - and then say everything is fine. I've had a server down 7 from 8 days and am facing ruin.

Originally posted by seanmullen
jarrod - you are naive.

Get that bastard clint on the phone - and then say everything is fine. I've had a server down 7 from 8 days and am facing ruin.

I am naive? That doesn't make sense. My server is working fine for the past 2 months since I got it. Is it really broken and I don't know about it? K, thanks, bye.

Oh and btw, I have talked to him several times on the phone. Once he answered and the other time it went to voicemail and he called back in about 15 minutes.

Well, your server might not be broken now ... but as they say, "**** happens".

I would consider myself a pretty experiened Linux sysadmin (and software developer, for that matter). I didn't see it (what happened last) night coming.

What nailed me wasn't that the box came down. That should have been a non-issue. What nailed me is that neither I nor you have direct physical access to the box. Think Pajo.com gives a rat's a** about you if you're not Clint? Think again. What happens when Clint forgets to pay his bill to Pajo.com -- just like he 'forgot' to pick up the phone and give support. What happens when you need more IP's because your company is expanding?

Be as smug as you want, but you'll end up in the same boat eventually with that attitude.

Dan

Jarrod,
Didn't mean to sound insulting. Fact is, well, call him now and tell him to return my calls.

I'd like to call Clint to reboot the box. I'm assuming you talked with him today. Mind sharing what phone number you called?

Dan

Dan,

Check your private messages please.

Sean

I am am ACS customer, I currently have two _co-located_ servers there.

We have had no outages or problems for at least 3 weeks. I have had reports from friends that sales questions have gone unanswered - but my two servers (my own) are running perfectly.

Now - things obviously do not look good. And I have had my friends inform me of problems. So I'm looking at options.

Are there other resllers at Pajo's facility that anyone has found? At least as a backup so that if ACS did go under - we could quickly move our servers to another provider in the same facility? Even at 2x the prices Clint charges it is still a bargain for dedicated / co-located hosting.

Thanks.

Originally posted by StephenRS
I am am ACS customer, I currently have two _co-located_ servers there.

We have had no outages or problems for at least 3 weeks.


Watch out, apparently saying that your server doesn't have any problems is having an attitude & being smug instead of just stating a fact and you have to read a useless post about how your server will end up crashed because of it.

'CagedTornado',
All I did was state that my server has not had a problem and my phone calls are answered/responded to quickly. I have no idea about your level of service and therefor I did not comment on it.

What happens when any reseller forgets to pay his bill or forgets to pay his upstream provider? That is not a valid arguement.

I didn't wanted to mention it earlier, but we already talked to our credit card company eurocard (european equivalent to mastercard) and freezed our credit - we desperately hoped that our server would come back at least to get a backup, but after a downtime of 11 (ELEVEN) days, we finally gave up. we already ordered a new server at a local hosting company (http://www.genotec.ch/). They're quite expensive (170$/mo, 250$ set-up), but they're only 10 minutes away by car, so If there's a problem, I can be there quite quickly.


@fartknocker, Dan Esparza/CagedTornado, Smirks, seanmullen .. any other victim of ACS:

I'd really aprreciate it if we could work together to bring some justice to ACS. If we can prove that clint is running a dubious company, we would certainly get some money back from the credit card company (at eurocard all payments within the last 30 days are covered by their insurance). maybe we can get back even more..

at least the contract with ACS will be cancelled, so we can ensure that no new customers get fooled and ACS will be down in no time. no contract -> no money -> ACS is history ..

drop me a line: Daniel Lorch <danielsan@gmx.ch>

The only thing I need are your statements (copy paste from the forum is ok) and your contact address so I can print them out and send them to eurocard - there is no further obligation for you. If you help me, I'll help you. we should cover all major credit card companies - is anyone with visa?

Your help is really appreciated! thanks alot ..

sorry for you, jarrod, but it is only a question of time until you get fooled by clint, too. make sure you have a backup of all your data and no critical sites running on your box.

actually, it's a shame, because ACS would have had the potential to be a successful company, ..

jarrod = clint ?

sometimes I really have the impression that clint is using pseudonyms to make a good picture of himself and his company - or what do you think about Alex@Pajo ?

which site are you running, jarrod? (IP please)

I am Clint? Heh. I don't know why I am even replying to such a statement based only on the fact that my service has been acceptable, but oh well...

I am sure a moderator can check my IP and see that it is from K-State University.

My site is optimusdesign.com with several name based sites such as homesandcarsforsale.com, greatwaterco.com, reachingoutministries.com.


I am questioning your credibility. The service I have received and many other people on this forum has been exceptional. Your server has been down for 11 days and you are on this forum and calling your CC company? I would be sending emails and calling him constantly. There has to be more to the story...

I would be sending emails and calling him constantly
well, then guess .. that's what I'm trying to do ..

BUT HE DOESN'T ANSWER MY PHONES AND IGNORES MY MAILS. got it?

would you mind calling clint and asking him what happened to 208.179.100.198/199? do you see any webserver there? any life sign?

- sorry for being angry, it's not because of you. i'm just deadly furious.

thank godi didnt go with acs
=]

jarrod, what does it need to make you believe me? my site (208.179.100.198/199) being down? sean mullen's (208.179.100.150), too? Dan Esparza's box (http://www.cagedtornado.com) also ... coincidence? I don't think so.

for me it's quite difficult expressing myself in a foreign language - especially when it comes to a dispute like this where it is a MUST to be absolutely precise. i can somehow manage to WRITE a complaint, but orally I fail. Switzerland is quite far away from the States (I assume about 20'000 km) and I know nothing about your law and hiring a lawyer wouldn't be a reasonable decision either as the amount of money (300$) is just too small to be worthwile - and Clint knows that! I'm sure, he's an experienced impostor - as soon as ACS is down, he'll create a new company and the whole story begins again ..

if you're so extremely convinced about ACS being a good company, why not give him a call and ask him about the aforementioned sites. If he gives you a plausible answer, then fine - otherwise I'd suggest you to quickly find a new place. it would be a shame if optimus design (quite good, but get rid of the "Times New Roman" font at "Services") would be down.

danielsan - can you break down the $300? ACS is pretty cheap, $300 is for one month?

Node9,

You came very close though. I only wish we could've saved the others. They're happy now, but so were we in the beginning.


If you guys don't hurry and move your sites to another server, this forum is going to grow to well over 30 pages long. You know what I finally did? After Clint(ACS), I didn't want to take another gamble. I ended up going with the company that hosts this board. I've never seen this site go down. Cost me almost three times the amount per month, but the anxiety pills are no longer needed. So I broke even. :)

ACS = All Clients Suckers

There's something going on over there and it just doesn't smell right.

150$ set-up, 49$ for every month (August, September, October). This month's fee is covered by the insurance of eurocard, so we get away with a black eye and a downtime of presumably two weeks (our new server should be up at this Friday). Luckily we haven't moved any critical sites to our server yet, otherwise we'd be in big trouble now.

I will say it again. Mine and many other people's service is fine. I see no indications of ACSDatanet not being a reputable company. There are only a few people saying they are not, which is the case for many hosting companies.

Jarrod,

Did you take my challenge and call Clint?

Did you get to speak to him?


Come on - do it. Pretent your server isn't working as of right now. See you long it take s you to get a response.

"Hey Clint, I don't feel like minding my own business right now. Can you tell me the status of other people's server?"

That would be an incredibly ackward phone call and it is none of my business. Why would I call for you to see if your server is working when you can call yourself and it is frankly none of my business? Some people's credibility decreases with each post they make.

And my server didn't work once. A fan went out and it was locking up. He answered the phone right away, and 30 minutes later he called back saying he replaced the fan and everything should be working normally again, which is has been.

I'm afriad I've also had a very bad experience with ACS. Many instances of downtime. Many instances of very very very slow link speeds.

Clint was nearly impossible to reach. Especially by email.

Jarrod:

I've accessed your site both via my cable modem and my racksack raq and it is loading VERY slowly. For example, some of the images in the gallery took 2-3 minutes to download at about 2KB a second.

Pajo.com loads very quickly. Acsdatanet.com loads just as slow as your site. Just wanted to let you know.

Best wishes,
Greg

Hey, I thought I might chime in with my "experience" with ACS (I first posted on it @ here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23522), but here goes the rest of the story:

After getting in contact with Clint on the 15th, I finally got an email w/ login information to a box, however, immediately logging in, I knew that something was wrong. Instead of a Debian (custom partitioned) Linux 2 (AMD 900Mhz/40GB HD) box w/ 512MB RAM which I had specified and agreed upon, it was a straight Redhat install and the system was completely different:



[root@localhost /root]# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 124632 28520 96112 0 3624 15852
-/+ buffers/cache: 9044 115588
Swap: 265032 0 265032

[root@localhost /root]# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 16524084 2261948 13422744 15% /
/dev/hda1 54416 3485 48122 7% /boot

si result:
Processor #0 Information:
Vendor: GenuineIntel
Model: Celeron (Coppermine)
Speed: 668.208 MHz


That's right, we're talking about a Celeron 668Mhz/128MB/13GB system vs a promised AMD 900Mhz/512MB/40GB. I logged out and let him know and was told it was a mixup, although I'm not so sure about there. Over the next week, I was in intermittent contact, being promised that my server was ready or that I'd be given a call, but never got the login information. As of the past few days, I haven't been able to reach him at all, so I left him a email and voice message that our business was concluded and if my credit card has been charged, I expect a full refund since my server was never delivered.

I doubt I'll get one, as I haven't heard any reply from email (clint@acsdatanet.com), by phone (310.348.0052), or his cell number (310.213.9853), but as I have all the records of the transaction, I'll be expecting that I'll be talking to my credit card company about a "nonreceipt of merchandise" chargeback when my next statement comes in.

jarrod - maybe you'll have better luck contacting clint than me. I'm chalking this one up as a learning experience. Talking w/ multipleimage right now. Tim's been pretty responsive, hopefully things turn out better.

Jarrod,

<EDIT>. Incredible ask my arse.


BTW, there will be no ACS DATANET very,very soon. I will see to that.

Originally posted by seanmullen
Jarrod,

Your a dickhead. Incredible ask my arse.


BTW, there will be no ACS DATANET very,very soon. I will see to that.

Thanks for keeping it mature. And what does "Incredible ask my arse" mean?

I have nothing to gain by saying my server is working fine. You shared your experience, I shared mine. I am sorry if that qualifies me in your insignificant eyes as being a 'dickhead'.

aegir, Thanks for the notice. It loads fast from here and I got 200k/sec when downloading a file a while ago, I will check into it further though.

having looked at joining ACS i have followed this thread For AGES. and the more i read it the more it seems like Jarrod is really Clint /ACS ?:(

Jarrod,

I will explain as simply as possible in the hope that you will understand. I don't know why, but I would really like you to:

You have a server located in a facility which is totally unsupported.
Should you have any difficulties, your server will go offline and it will stay offline.

Maybe in the past this was not the case, but it certainly is the case now.

IF you had any concern for your clients, you would put this to the test. If you lack the confidence to make a telephone as suggested, just ring clint to see how much a gig of ram would cost (or any other misc sales enquiry)?

You won't get a response.

Now, think about this senario, "Hey, what if I wasn't just making a pointless sales enquiry, and my server was crippled and I need support?" What then?

seanmullen,

I will explain as simply as possible in the hope that you will understand. I don't know why, but I would really like you to:

My server has had trouble before as I have already stated. It was a hardware problem was fixed within 30 minutes. This was not very long ago.

Some of the stories have concerned me, but I have a daily remote backup and in the case that something does happen again, and it is a ghosttown at their office, I am well prepared to quickly move. However, for the level of service *I* have been receiving, this is a not a _major_ concern. Once again I can only speak for MY experience, I have not ever implied that these stories people have are not true, but there are horror stories for every host.


Mr. Laughing Cow,
I have already addressed that absurd statement.

Actually, you have implied that these stories are not true:

- am questioning your credibility

- Some people's credibility decreases with each post they make.

etc.

This all makes me glad we had trouble getting in contact with ACSDatanet a while ago...we placed an order but it fell on deaf ears.

We flashed an email away to his local BBB back then, and a letter arrived in the post yesterday:

"Although we have tried to obtain a response to your complaint from the company in hope of reaching a mutually acceptable resolution, they have ignored our requests."

I don't know whether the BBB has the same powers as our own Office of Fair Trading has down here, but one simply doesn't mess with these people. They'll close you down at a moments notice.

Oh well...a lesson learnt.

Leonard - We grabbed a box at Multipleimage, and Tim and his crew are extremely helpful. You'll do alright there.

Cheers

Gary

Originally posted by seanmullen
Actually, you have implied that these stories are not true:

- am questioning your credibility

- Some people's credibility decreases with each post they make.

etc.

Calling someone a dickhead doesn't fill them with confidence about anything you have to say.

Originally posted by Fartknocker
Node9,

You came very close though. I only wish we could've saved the others. They're happy now, but so were we in the beginning.


If you guys don't hurry and move your sites to another server, this forum is going to grow to well over 30 pages long. You know what I finally did? After Clint(ACS), I didn't want to take another gamble. I ended up going with the company that hosts this board. I've never seen this site go down. Cost me almost three times the amount per month, but the anxiety pills are no longer needed. So I broke even. :)

ACS = All Clients Suckers

There's something going on over there and it just doesn't smell right.

yea voxel uses above.net

above.net rocks, we use above.net west coast, they own.

Jarrod, I won't call or even assume you're a d*ckhead, but I'm not condoning the others who have. Soon you'll have the same things to say about ACS and Clint. I've never told anyone on this board "I told you so." When your day comes(Which it will), you're going to get a lot of those if you don't listen to their advice. I was really hoping I was wrong about ACS. The three emails/PM's I received after my first post about Clint was too much to overlook. And now former happy clients are being put thru the same experience we had. This isn't a case where a host has a few bad apples. I'm afraid there are more of us then there are of you. Let's not forget about the clients that have never been to this board. The ratio here is 8-2. 8 are furious while 2 of you are satisfied. Let's even consider outside this board that the ratio is 50/50. Is that just a few bad apples? You're outnumbered and they're only trying to offer you advice, including me. You must be a gambling man. If you're a hosting company, I would hope you'd care more about your clients. If this server is only for personally use, you're better off using geocities.

jarrod is not clint, unless he's on vacation or posting through a school server. Please keep personal attacks OUT of the discussion or we shall have to close the thread. This isn't about the people posting, this is about servers and ACS. Please keep that in mind...

On the 24th I received - some - service from clint.
Coincidently, danliensan's server was down for about 6-7 days at this time and I dont think he received a response then.

Clints ICQ has been offine permanently. His telephone number did not work whatsoever for a time, and now it appears to divert to a cell phone.

I have left messages, I have send emails. I would hate to estimate the number, but in the last 9 days I would expect the tally be be above 50. I have tried being both friendly, understanding and nasty - nothing gets a response.

As to jarrod's assertion that their is no problem, and that every host has few bad apples I will add that even the elusive Clint had this to say:

"Words probably cannot describe how angry you are right now. Please accept my apology and a month of free service. We will have the phone system back online tomorrow"

"I promise the service will get better. We just experienced some trying times."

So yes ACS by the admission of its owner is having troubles.

I imagine that they may be a good reason for Clints actions or rather lack of action. Maybe he had an accident, has a sick kid, anthrax, had a death in the family whatever.

If this is the case, I would feel pretty low about some of my comments.

However, how hard is it to get a tech to help out in such times? I for one get a tech in when I go on vacation, get sick or have an emergency. Its takes 5 minutes to find a tech, especially one skilled enough to press reset or at least answer the f$@#ing phone. I'm sure even his mom could do the job, and mom's work for free!

I have been taking calls all day (again) from people who want to know where there email and website is. It is not a pleasant experience, especially when I have no idea when it will be fixed.

When all is said and done, I suppose I should withdraw my dickhead comment. Please accept my apology Jarrod - you were the target of some misdirected anger.

Clint seems like a nice guy. I do hope he is and is not part of some larger scheme/scam designed to rip people off.

I for one would be happy to forgive and forget if he would 'sort things out'.

Originally posted by seanmullen

As to jarrod's assertion that their is no problem, and that every host has few bad apples I will add that even the elusive Clint had this to say:


For the... 4th time I think :angry: , my assertion is that there is not a problem with MY server, which there is not. Once again and again and again , there probably is a problem with your server and the others who are having problems but for some reason there isn't with mine. I am just stating that my service has been very good. Maybe I am just lucky.

As for the replies from Clint about having problems and such, I was the technical manager for one of the largest dialup ISP's in Kansas and problems do come up. Our longest complete downtime that was our fault (hardware failure) lasted 6 hours and if I remember right, maybe a little longer a couple times for individual services such as email, http, etc. Our longest due to outside influences was a full day due to an invalid disconnect order at SWBell. But if there is downtime for more than a couple days and the explanation is technical problems, then there is something else going on _probably_ and at least a more detailed explanation is due. I don't know how or why it is only affecting some servers if there are tech problems.

For those who are having problems, I wish you luck either getting your server up or in the move process to another server.

Ok, the first time I came across this message board was tonight after seanmullen pointed me here after some email messages. Here is my experience so far: I have 5 boxes colocated at ACS. I have 1 box that was rebooting every few hrs and was tracked to bad ram. I sent new ram out and Clint replaced it. After the code red worm, Clint reformatted 2 of our servers, installed Win2K Server and VNC so I could set up my access and get them online again. The other 2 servers have been just fine. BUT.... as of yesterday my access is about 2-4k, pages load so slow it isn't funny. Normally I would have put this down as a general net slowdown and not given it a second thought.

I contacted my boss and asked him to call Clint as he always seemed to be able to get ahold of him, no matter when it was. He says he has been unable to contact him for about 3 days now. He seems not to be worried, thinking he is on vacation and will return soon. I am not so sure anymore. One of my clients just called and cancelled his hosting with me because of the access speeds...wtf is going on? I contacted several other customers in the last hour who wouldn't normally complain if the roof fell in, and am not very happy with the results I received. Seems I may lose the majority of my biggest customers.... I should have checked this company out a long time ago... At least my servers are still up and they belong to me.... if I can get them shipped back before they are seized by the government or creditors....I may have to build new ones, ship them to another provider, move my stuff over, and pray they stay up long enough to let me do this.... Live and learn I guess.

This was an excellent company not to long ago and I recommended them to everyone.... I wish we knew what was really happening... Alex@pajo seems strangely silent.... since he sees clint coming and going..he said so...maybe he can shed some light on this as the ISP of ACSDATA.... or maybe he has and I haven't gotten that far in todays posts.. well thats my rant

Originally posted by Editor
We flashed an email away to his local BBB back then, and a letter arrived in the post yesterday:

"Although we have tried to obtain a response to your complaint from the company in hope of reaching a mutually acceptable resolution, they have ignored our requests."


I am pretty sure that doesn't worry Jarrod.

I have a clear picture in my mind: Assume a thunderstorm is coming close to the city of Jarrod. Warnings are released from radio stations, his neighbours jump in their cars and drive away but Jarrod sit's in his chair, relaxes and says to his wife "Why do you worry?"

The complaints about ACSDataNet being slow don't make sense to me. At least it doesn't jive with my experience over the last 7 days. My servers have been performing fine.

Perhaps we are off a different router? I am running _my own servers_ - so are you sure the problem isn't your server?

I put up a test file for people to download off my server. It is 8MB, so please don't abuse it.

http://testacs.roundsparrow.com/

Of course, if 5 people all download at once, it will be slower... but I was just able to get several hundred K a second without even trying...

Thanks for putting up hat link StephenRS. I was able to maintain an average of 85KB downloading this file. No, it isn't my servers. Today the speed is fine again. I did get some emails today from another hoster who's box dropped off line and all 40 of his urls are no longer active. Hey Alex@pajo , can you tell us the last time you saw Clint?

I was getting about 20 K/s, pretty slow if you ask me.

Originally posted by Walter



I am pretty sure that doesn't worry Jarrod.

I have a clear picture in my mind: Assume a thunderstorm is coming close to the city of Jarrod. Warnings are released from radio stations, his neighbours jump in their cars and drive away but Jarrod sit's in his chair, relaxes and says to his wife "Why do you worry?"

Do some people have a reading disability on this board? I said that I am concerned, not the point of dropping my server when I haven't had any problems yet, but I am prepared to do so if problems do arise. Please refrain from the pointless, unrelated, and rather stupid analogies.

I just did a test from Weinbar (one of my other servers) and I got 70 KB/second at 8:33am PST.

The problems people were reporting earlier was 2K or 3K/second....

And I can't get to www.acsdatanet.com or http://testacs.roundsparrow.com/ ... any luck for you folks?

Dan

Both my ACS servers just disappeared from the Internet.... started at 3:21 PST.

.. Download speed test result.

0 kps.


Jarrod, pinging www.optimusdesign.com....

Unknown host www.optimusdesign.com.

You'd better give acs a call.

not surprised.

Originally posted by seanmullen
.. Download speed test result.

0 kps.


Yep...that would tend to indicate that there's a problem. :-) Reason for concern even...

Cheers

Gary

Still down as of 3:55pm PST. I've paged support and left message 10 minutes ago. Waiting...

Welp, I'm down and it's pretty disturbing.

I personally haven't had any problem with Clint's support but hearing everybody else's problems, I am a little worried.

Last time I needed him, he replied within 2 hours and fixed something I had screwed up myself which threw my server offline. I was thankful for that.

I think maybe he's overwelmed with work..... too many of us... too little of him...... and maybe he can't always handle it. I wish he'd hire some support staff or slow down a bit.

subj:-(

Ok all 5 of my boxes colocated with ACS and Clint are now down and have been for awhile. No support... nice Clint, thanks :angry: :angry: :angry:

DrChaos - you have 5 colo boxes. I have 3 boxes colo too.

I am considering just moving my boxes to Pajo. Obviously they aren't as cheap as ACS - but same place...

Did you see my other thread on this?

Back up at 5:03pm PST. 20 minutes shy of 2 hours.

what was the problem? so about 2 hours downtime? still under 99.5% uptime guarantee if this is the only downtime for October ...

cheers,
:beer:

From the phone calls I have been on, this is only temporary to allow clients to retreive data. If you think this is a permanent up...don't do anything, but if you are concerned, get your files backed up.

Clint I love YOU!:-)

I want say - I have a very FAST and GOOD support from Clint.
But this 2 hour down time....:-( Is not good.:-( May be this payment for fast support.:-)
I like ACS.... and Clint too.:-))

Dr Chaos,

I've pretty desparate here. Do you know of anyone I can talk to about getting a server reboot to get files of ACS before they .....?

If you like, email me privately.

Thanks.

StephenRS-
Yes, just talked to pajo.... we have purchased a half rack and will be moving our servers over.

DrChaos - please email me at Stephen@Roundsparrow.com about the 2 win2k servers. Specs and $. Any interest in selling them?

Hi,

Has anyone been able to "locate" clint coxwell yet
or have any information on his whereabouts?



Thank you.

I am call & email to Clint... but never answer...

Calls, pages, and emails have gone unanswered.

The good news is my servers have been working perfect since the end of yesterday's outage.

Its realy bad...

I planing buy a second server on ACS, but now I must think buy or not.

I did sent a fax. The fax number wasn't working before.

Hey ... whaddya know. I actually got an email response from support@acsdatanet.com about my IP's!

How cool.

Now if only my server was up ...

Dan

I haven't got a proper answer for 2 weeks 4 hours 19 minutes 30 seconds (which also reflects my downtime). TWO WEEKS!

http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/

Danielsan my i ask how your downtime monitor works?

probably pings the server
until a response comes and then it stops and calculates the total downtime

that or it just makes some sort of tcp connection every whenever ????

@The Laughing Cow

my downtime monitor isn't actually a "monitor" (I think I mentioned this before). It's simply counts the difference between 10/19/2001 (that's when our server went down) and now (PHP):

time()-mktime(17,0,0,10,19,2001);

and then displays it. I regularily look at my server's IPs 208.179.100.198/199 and as soon as I see a life-sign, I'll stop the counter.

I haven't experienced any [serious] downtime for a couple of weeks now. I did have some periods of downtime some time ago (all less than an hour in duration). About a week ago I noticed that all of a sudden my box wouldn't respond. I tried the ACSDatanet site and it ALSO didn't respond. My site and ACSDatanet woke up again about 5 minutes later. It's a shame, but I didn't think about trying out the Pajo site. Oh well.

One thing I have noticed however is that my box is being slammed by Pajo/ACSDatanet IPs (208.179.xxx.xxx). I assume this is some sort of worm at work. I'm getting thousands of hits from these IPs and that HAS to be affecting the performance of my (our) boxes. I notified both ACSDatanet and Pajo about this a few weeks ago, but my box is still being slammed. Perhaps this is the reason for the temporary hiccup I mentioned above. Maybe it's the cause of some of the downtime some of you are experiencing?

Does anyone have additional insights into this? Clint? Alex@Pajo? Anyone else.

< So far I'm still VERY happy with ACSDatanet. I have to admit that this thread is making me nervous, but it's hard to argue with success. So far my box seems rock solid except for the ocassional hiccup. From what I've seen, all providers experience minor glitches, so I guess I don't have much to complain about.>

BTW - Has anyone ever noticed how many posts Chicken has? Over 6500!! How do we know that there's really such a person. Maybe he's a "PostBot".

Thanks for clearing that up daniel. If only i could find a way to ping servers via ASP/PHP. i hope ACS sorts itself out.

< So far I'm still VERY happy with ACSDatanet. I have to admit that this thread is making me nervous, but it's hard to argue with success. So far my box seems rock solid except for the ocassional hiccup. From what I've seen, all providers experience minor glitches, so I guess I don't have much to complain about.>

Hey Laughing Cow & danielsan, he said he was happy with the service too, I bet he is Clint also right?! :D

I have to admit that this thread is making me nervous

@ Abu Mami

I suggest you to have a look at the moderators-page:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/misc.php?action=about

@ The Laughing Cow

As far as I'm concerned, PHP doesn't support ICMP out-of-the-box (ICMP is required to do a PING). You could write a PHP-module, though - or even easier: do a shell escape! (passthru, backtick-operator, exec, system ..)

@ jarrod

don't make fun of me, jarrod :angry:. It's tragic enough to have lost a lot of money and work (not mentioning SEVENTEEN days downtime, no apologies from clint, lost data, lost mails, lost trust of our customers ..) ..

Things have gone great for the last 4 days at ACS... perfect for us. I still haven't heard from Clint on an email I sent.

Originally posted by jarrod
Hey Laughing Cow & danielsan, he said he was happy with the service too, I bet he is Clint also right?! :D
--- I previously replied ---
Sheesh. I'm happy because my box is working. (This isn't to say that everything is perfect). Jarrod, what's the story? Is one only allowed to participate in this thread if you trash Clint/ACSDatanet?
--------------------------------

Jarrod,

I hate it when I'm stupid. Sorry, I didn't understand your post at first. After reviewing this thread again, I see that we're sort of on the "same side".

Originally posted by danielsan
[B]@ Abu Mami

I suggest you to have a look at the moderators-page:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/misc.php?action=about

Danielsan,

I assume you're referring to my post about Chicken... I know he's a moderator, and that he's known for his high number of posts. But hey, doesn't the guy ever sleep?

Originally posted by The Laughing Cow
Thanks for clearing that up daniel. If only i could find a way to ping servers via ASP/PHP. i hope ACS sorts itself out.

You don't need to ping it. Just use the fsockopen function in php to open a socket to the server on the port that you want to test. If the socket is successfully opened then whatever service is running on that port is active.

@ The Laughing Cow, Marty

this would probably look like this:

<?php

function is_up($host,$port=80) {
return fsockopen($host,$port,&$n,&$s);
}

if(is_up("myhost.com"))
echo "it's up";
else {
echo "uh-oh";
mail("sys@admin.com","uh-oh","hey, myhost.com is down!");
}
?>

this will check, by default, whether a webserver is running on port 80. you can change this port to anything you want (port 110 to check whether your POP3-daemon is still running, port 25 for SMTP, port 21 for FTP ...);

is_up("myhost.com",25); // SMTP

I extended the above script to a general services-check. have a look at it here (the script takes some time to load, please be patient):
http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/host_up.php

if it shouldn't load, get the cached output here:
http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/host_up.html

and the sources here:
http://www.danielsan.f2s.com/host_up.php.txt

as you see, we haven't installed a POP3 yet.

enjoy.

oh i forgot to mention that the script doesnt actually CHECK the output of a server - it only looks whether it is RESPONDING or not.

so if your webserver would reply "401 Unauthorized" or something like that, you will still end up getting a 'positive' (meaning "blue") answer. but it should be an easy task to extend this script (just parse the result of is_up()).

oh and by the way, did I already mention, that our server at ACS is still down? my script says:

2 weeks 4 days 18 hours 10 minutes 31 seconds

Why haven't you moved on to another host?

Originally posted by danielsan
I didn't wanted to mention it earlier, but we already talked to our credit card company eurocard (european equivalent to mastercard) and freezed our credit - we desperately hoped that our server would come back at least to get a backup, but after a downtime of 11 (ELEVEN) days, we finally gave up. we already ordered a new server at a local hosting company (http://www.genotec.ch/). They're quite expensive (170$/mo, 250$ set-up), but they're only 10 minutes away by car, so If there's a problem, I can be there quite quickly.


Ummm.... he already did.

I guess the question is ... why haven't you? Oh, that's right. We're all blind. No illiterate. We didn't read the part about you not having any problems yet.... that's right -- sorry.

Dan

Uhh sorry... I missed a couple sentences in a reply several pages back when all he has been talking about lately is how his server is still down. Now if he said it over and over in almost every post, then I would be as bad as you :(

(give snotty little replys, get snotty little answers)

yes, we actually gave up after one week downtime and ordered a new server at genotec.ch. but the point is, clint owes us:

- 18 DAYS of uptime (or our money back)
- an apology
- our data

by the way, I did a minor modification in my 'host_up.php' script. I replaced GET by HEAD in the webserver-check. it doesn't influence the output, but the webserver has to send less data (only header).

An incredible thread.
It gives me a warm fealing about my current host and that I didn't choose the cheapest one.

I am also pleased with my choice so far.

GUYS can we just DROP this thread......
i mean come on
daniel thank you for informing us of your downtime every hour, ACS isnt a reliable company

we get the point

A bit of a follow-up.

Last week, Clint (FINALLY) got back to me.

Yes, that's a full month of downtime I would have had without ANY feedback. (Note that I had already moved to a new datacenter).

Turns out (after he looked at the box) the drive had gone bad.

Dan

very interesting thread.

ACSDatanet better get their act together fast.