It's been a while now, I'm still searching for a server.
My first choice was Alabanza, but unfortanetly I hear a lot of complaints in this newsgroup. I even called them few times, left a message for a quotation, they never replied me back. I guess with the money there making, they don't really need more customers. That's why I'm not taking any further steps with them. Unless I wait a bit more see, if there going to drop there prices. If I ever do a contract with them, it has to be clear that they would higher there prices with the inflation. But than again I lost my confident in them. How could anyone double there prices just like that. Imagine the government doubling there taxes, because they need money for road construction.
Anyway...Anyone had any experience with cobaltrack.com, I might go with them in couple of months.

Thanks

We got one from Cobalt Rack abour 4 months back and have had very few problems. Many problems were from our own lack of experience with the Cobalt's GUI. E mail support is average 2-4 hours for a reply although phone support is not quite what it should be. We found that if we dial their parent company's support we get though much quicker.

All in all for the rates charged, they have been quite good.

When I e-mailed their sales department a couple weeks ago, they responded quickly.

If you do a search in this forum you'll find a few threads about them...

If I recall there was quite a few bad threads about them, do a search.

Who's their parent company, Grizz?

Also, their price is 10 times cheaper than Alabanza.
What's the difference in features other than Alabanza's automation?

Errrr well, you are kinda comparing apples and oranges. Alabanza servers aren't anything special (per se), but what is attractive is their start to finish automated CP. A Cobalt RaQ isn't as durable as the Alabanza servers, but aside from that, it runs Cobalt's RaQ OS, and is easy to use.

Their parent company is http://www.visuallink.com

As Chicken stated their parent co is Visual Link.

Ther RAQ's aren't nearly as automated as the Alabanza CP, but if works well.

Intel has a new product called the INS1010. It is cheaper than cobalt and does not use the mps chip set. It is easily upgraded from off the self RAM, etc.....

<<Admin notice : URL removed for self-promotion>>

[Edited by BC on 11-20-2000 at 06:07 PM]

The raq's arent automated enough at all to do serious webhosting, for example, manual signups, nothing is automated in that regard, somone comes to your site, and you have a signup page, that does one of two things, it either collects their information for signing up a new account, and puts it into a database or emails you the results, then you have to go and manually add them to the system, now lets say that its a weekend, and you've gone away to the desert, you come back and have 3 orders waiting from saturday, you go to fill those orders, send the users informaiton on how to access their new accounts, and they say forget it, we waited a day and didnt hear from you folks, so we signed up with someone at jumpline that had us up and running in 10 minutes.

SO.....

While the cobalt raq's are a good price you do lose the feature of automated signups, and could lose prospective business that way. We do use a cobalt raq from cobalt racks and are using a third party cc biller (ibill.com), so a person comes ot our site, hits the button that takes them to ibill which then collects their cc information, if it's good, it bills them, and gives them our "web good" page which has a form on it that has things like name, address, username desired, password, domain name etc. everything that we need to setup their account. They fill it in, and send it off, we receive it, and add their account to our raq. Sounds easy enough, but only if you have someone sitting on an open connection to the net 24 hours a day waiting for incoming orders (duh, gee thats cost effective)so were back to the original problem of automating the whole signup process, of which we have yet to see anyone do it on a cobalt raq. Im sure there are people out there that have had it automated for them, and probably have scripts that write to the correct files with the new domain name info and username etc and have the system setup the directories, but we havn't found that set of scripts yet. Wish we could, because we firmly believe that people want instant access, their hot to get started, they want it now, now now. Now how do we offer that on a cobalt raq?

I suppose if we wait long enough cobalt.com will come out with a solution, though Im not holding my breath on it happening anytime soon, they seem really behind the times at times if you know what i mean.

Now in regards to cobalt racks customer support: Well what can I really say, If I email sales, I usually get a response back shortly, usually the next morning since we usually are night owls and often write to people at 3am pst, but I have written to their support team, and have only gotten back one response out of 5 emails sent, and the one that they responded to was a cc to sales as well as support so perhaps that pursuaded them to get on the ball, but the response was (dos attack, denial of service), and that was the entire response to why our server was not responding yet their cobaltrack.com server was up and running fast as ever. Which leads me to believe that we may have a bandwidth cap on our server whereas they dont. Im speculating here, but I look at their site and it says nothing about their connection to the net, nor capping anything, not much info at all, which we are now interested in knowing so that we can post it to our own webhosting site, but can't find any of that info on their site, again email to support unanswered. I will say that their prices do look enticing, right now they have a special (guess it's a special), 99.00 for the first three months on a raq 4i, then 199.00 per month after the initial three months. But again, no automation, and tech support almost non existant. Strange, they have tech support for dialup customers, paying them 19.95 a month but not for hosts paying them 199.00 a month. Seems kinda backwards if you ask me.
Regards,
Bbox

I know a solutiuon for that problem!

buy a gsm, go to a company on wich you can take a email adress that emails the subject to your gsm. Now make a short PHP program and sent a email to that email adress.
Now you'll get a sms when a new client signs up!


pretty smart he!

Originally posted by Starhost
I know a solutiuon for that problem!

buy a gsm, go to a company on wich you can take a email adress that emails the subject to your gsm. Now make a short PHP program and sent a email to that email adress.
Now you'll get a sms when a new client signs up!


pretty smart he!

If I knew what the "heck" you are saying I'd be sure to say, YEAH PRETTY SMART!, but unfortunately I have no idea what you are saying. What is a gsm, and what is a sms?

Thanks though, elaboration definately appreciated!

Bbox

Hey yeah that is a pretty smart idea, can you suggest a company that has the sms service? I like that idea since Im usually connected if I go away for the weekend with a laptop, and If im at a clients offices I can usually plug in somewhere.

So, now all i need is the sms company service that can handle this, it wouldn't be difficult to just send the new message notification that we get now via email to two email address's, just have it send the full message to us, and send a shorter message to the sms.

Thanks
Bbox

I just want to clear something up - Alabanza didn't just double their prices at the drop of a hat, they were running a promotion over the summer which meant they haved their current prices, the promotion ended (As they do) and the prices went back to their normal rate (With a little bit added on shortly afterwards).

I keep seeing people saying that Alabanza doubled their prices so I had to get it off my chest. Also note that I have no affiliation with Alabanza other than being a customer that is leaving them.

As for the SMS try http://www.genie.com or http://www.orange.net (If you have an Orange mobile phone).

Thanks for the sms urls' much appreciated.

As far as alabanza having a promotional price then bringing it back to normal pricing, well......

We signed up for their service and received a server from them almost a year and a half ago, our initial pricing was worked out to $650.00 a month, now a year and a half, (almost a year and a half) later, the price increase took a $650.00 account and made it over $900.00 while thats certainly not doubled, it is a hefty increase, and again it leads me back to my original thoughts on the subject, that Alabanza does some huge business, they have such clients as xxxx that have (ive heard) over 100 servers with them, at that amount of servers you can't just up and say, Im outa here, and move your whole organization, all clients sites, and all 100 servers to another dedicated server supplier, nor could you move you co located servers (100 of them) to anther co location facility without serious disruption in your services. I think this is what Alabanza was betting on, sure they would lose smaller operations like me, that only has 25 clients on the server, but they knew they wouldnt be losing the big boys that are with them, they counted on this, they knew this, they are living proof that the big boy can do what he/she pleases.

Im not pissed off at them at all, afterall, were not doing this hosting stuff for fun (well, I suppose some people are), but most of us do this to make some money, and thats why their in business, to make some money, so raise the prices Alabanza, it only makes people look elsewhere when the competitors are now catching up to them as far as automation, features, reliability, support and performance are concerned.

Anyway, that was longer than I wanted, but wanted to get it off my chest now. I feel Sooooooooo much betta!

Bbox

Bbox, first I'll say that I do believe someone has created some sort of auto-setup script for RaQs. I saw something about it adding DNS entries and setting up the account. Now don't get excited, I haven't the foggiest where I saw this. Not even a clue.

Another reason not to get excited... your ibill accepts ccards, but other than being able to specify a 'thankyou.html' page, can you determine if the sale was successful right after the sale? What I mean is, if you do happen to find info on the script I mentioned, you might have trouble with people signing up and getting accounts for denied transactions as well as successful ones.

Gosh, I sincerely wish I knew if such an animal existed.

As far as ibill is concerned, the way I've worked it out is that it works rather like this:

Joe comes to the website, and clicks on the button to signup, they are shown a form from ibill asking for cc information, they fill it out, ibill then checks the card, and either it's declined or approved, if declined they are shown a page stating the purchase has been declined, and sorry, try again, if approved, the card is charged, the charge is then placed onto our account as a credit, and they are shown a page that says, thank you, your purchase has been approved, your card has been charged, please fill out this form to setup your hosting account.

So, as far as I know, they will only see the real signup page that gets currently sent to me via email and written to a simple text database on the server if their card is approved and charged.

Thats the way Im seeing it at this point, only time will tell, we have used them in the past ot sell cgi scripts, and had instand downloads, right after the card was approved, they were shown a form to fill out, our "web good page" that signed them up as members and sent them an email on where to download the programs from. We never had a chargeback in 2 years of doing it.

So, I think this method will function, though we have also signed up for another merchant where we would have to do the billing ourselves on a virtual terminal, which seems to me even more work and even less automation since we would have to take their card and run them each month for each client whereas ibill will do it automatically for us every 30 days, and if it gets declined, we immediately get an email notification of the declined transaction where we can take appropriate action and suspend the site, and or send a message to the client and see if they want to put it on another card, or cancel their account.

So, anyway, if you come across that automation for the raq, please pass it along, it would sure be usefull.

Re: SMS

I have a manual sign up system and use the Nokia Communicator (mobile phone).
It comes with web and pop3 e-mail.
All my welcome e-mails are set up as web templates. I just go to the web page fill in the blanks and send the message to the customer.
It fits in my pocket and even works in other countries.

Gordon

Bbox, one reason I didn't pay much attention to this was that I don't run DNS on my machine. It is run from a seperate machine so the script wasn't all that useful to me. If I do come across it, I will surely pass it on.

Also, I use instabill, and have to check, but I don't think it offers that same deny/accept option. Maybe I should switch.

ibill is a really good solution for selling soft items, non physical items, though they also have solutions for selling physical items as well.

It's the realtime cc processing that makes it all work, since if they cant approve the card and charge it, they cant give a webgood page to be displayed, this eliminates any problems of people signing up getting premature access then having to have us cancel the account later on.

Of course the Internet is full of fraud, and people use other peoples credit cards all the time since they dont have to show ID's to an online merchant, so the chance of fraud is always there, and unfortunately it may not even show up for a month, in which case someones gotten a free months hosting, and if they were doing fraud to begin with then who knows what they had on the site.

Bbox

It's the realtime cc processing that makes it all work, since if they cant approve the card and charge it, they cant give a webgood page to be displayed, this eliminates any problems of people signing up getting premature access then having to have us cancel the account later on.


One of the things that makes web hosting a safe bet for ecommerce is that if someone does sign up fraudulently you have not just posted them a CD/ Camera / Set of encyclopedias which means your losses are minimal.

I use real time authorisation, but even if one slipped through I can remove their account and will only have lost a few cents.

Gordon

Originally posted by GordonH
One of the things that makes web hosting a safe bet for ecommerce is that if someone does sign up fraudulently you have not just posted them a CD/ Camera / Set of encyclopedias which means your losses are minimal.

The thing that worries me most, is the amount of people that must signup everyday with fraudelent cards for webhosting, and if you dont discover it in say a week or two, what have they been doing on your server(s) in the last week or two.

While Im just a small fry, so I would visit every site that signs up for service with me, but what about some of the others here, the larger boys and girls, do you check each domain after someone signs up and see what theyve got going on there, or do you just let them be? I dont mean to say that you would go snooping in their file space, but rather just checking to see what they have going on on the website. I get some serious spam about youve been handpicked to appear in the georgias council of bull whos who, please come to this site and fill out this form. Mostly that has appeared on free sites, but it has come in once or twice over the last year or two where it's on a paying account somewhere. We have strict rules about spam, probably so strict because I hate spam so much, but still, they could have all kinds of stuff up that you never even know about, for example, you could go to their index.html page and it says, "Here I am with my dog spot on our vacation to mexico last year" No links anywhere else, but if you viewed their ftp space you might see all kinds of porn and racist remarks etc in other files that are not linked off of their home page, but that they are still promoting through their friends, and spam, and newsgroups etc.

So, do you all check your hostees file space at anytime or wait for abuse to happen then take action?

Thanks,
Bbox

<< edited by kunal.. removed the total bold in the message :) >>


[Edited by kunal on 11-22-2000 at 12:30 PM]

May be worth noting, that if we can script a auto setup script for linux redhat, there is no reason why the same can;t be applied for a raq.

As long as you understand how the raq processes work, it should be fairly easy to engineer an auto setup script- after all, its just editing conf files and restarting services.

Also I heard a rumour the other day that someone had got the raq interface working on a standard server....anyone know anything about this?