I read about their recent network troubles in their own discussion forum & today i saw this superb promotion. They call it lease to OWN.

http://servers.catalog.com/

If anyone have dedicated servers at catalog.com, could you shed me some light on what the real problem is?

aaron

I have a server with them the problem is there @home connection it has ben giving the fits its out of there hands other than breaking the contract with @home and using somebody else.
I think for the most part it has been worked out well I hope it has.

They have a sprint connection but its only a T1 and I think its been acting up to from the sound of things but then again thats not for sure it may be fine.

There tech suppport is great other than the problems in the last few days they have been great.

You might want to read the page a litle more carefully. It is not a lease to own. You purchase the server, and then get a cheaper co-location price from them. It looks like they are not leasing servers anymore, only selling them, and the requiring a one year co-location contract.

I was told today that they will still lease servers but that was by somebody in the tech dep not sales I will know as soon as sales returns my call and I will let you know for sure.

Rather than paying $249 a month, now I'm only paying $149 & that is a savings of $100. But it require a 12 month contract where as dedicated at $249 require a 6 month contract.

Lets assume a 12 months period

$249X12 = $2988
$149X12 + 999(server cost) = $2787

There is still savings + i get the server at the end of 12 months. The only thing is that I'm now responsible for hardware breakdown & replacement

This is how i see the deal.

If i'm wrong, please correct me :)

aaron

Its not a bad deal if you got 999$ to put up front. I myself think its a bad move on there part if they stop the leasing and only offer the lease to own. Not everybody has 999$ just to put out on a server.

[Edited by War on 11-28-2000 at 04:33 AM]

aaronx88,

Look at their order page. You have to pay for the server and the first month of co-location when you sign up, and then have to agree to co-locate with them for a year. They may still have other plans, but they are not listed on their site right now. In order to get the $149 a month special, you have to buy the server.

I think this is a bad idea also as I was going to get a server from them, but don't have $999. However it appears you still can get the old deal at https://ssl.catalog.com/~servers/cobaltorder.htm

Interesting Approach... Is Catalog.com getting away from offering managed servers? Or are they essentially charging higher initial fees in order to bring the recurring charges down. Does anyone know? At the end of the year can you take the server some where else?

Ive never quite understood the idea of lease to own a server, at the same rate that computers are outdated so are servers. So, why would i want to keep a server after 2 years of leasing it, other than for a paperweight on my desk.

Then to move that owned server later, what a logistical nightmare, can you imagine what your hosted customers would say if you tell them that the server is going to be down for 4 to 5 days. I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that if my server is located in kalamazoo and Im in los angeles, i cant just fly out there pickup the server, fly to the new colo house and drop it into place.

It's always best im finding out that you find a reputable company that has good if not great connectivity and stick with them until they screw you over and you have to leave. I cant imagine having to tell people that their sites will be down while we relocate our servers somewhere else.

My two jellybeans,
Bbox

Originally posted by brainbox
It's always best im finding out that you find a reputable company that has good if not great connectivity and stick with them until they screw you over and you have to leave.


ah... is that what the webhosting business has become? just stick around in a rocky relationship until they really mess up? :)

Well since IM still a newbie I dont really see any other options at the moment, take for example, put 150 clients on a machine, now find out that that company that you lease the machine from sucks, what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

Well, you can tell your customers your closing up shop, or you can tell your customers that the servers are going to be down for about 4 days while you move all of them to another server, OR??? You tell me, what do you do?

Bbox

We ended up going with Hispeed Tech and got a RAQ4i for alot better price!

Thanks guys

PS: Verio gives 50 gigs of bandwidth, and anything in excess (after the first few times you go over) they sell it in 50 gig increments for $195 a month...pretty good deal

AND they are offering a deal (well i told them it was between them and Hispeed, he offered to give me free setup fee and 10% off monthly)

hey brainbox...

i'm on your side, don't worry...

i feel bad that that's the way we operate, expecting to get lousy service until proven otherwise...

it's sad that the hosting business is like that, but i agree with you, it seems to be about waiting for your host to mess up, or to find out they were really 14 (not trying to start any age things, done that already... :)) and thought it would be fun...

i think we should all go work at mcdonalds... they promote quickly

Originally posted by PepsiCoke
We ended up going with Hispeed Tech and got a RAQ4i for alot better price!
PS: Verio gives 50 gigs of bandwidth, and anything in excess (after the first few times you go over) they sell it in 50 gig increments for $195 a month...pretty good deal

Is 50gigs for $195 really that good a deal, take for instance a host that charges 27.50 for 10gigs, x's that by 5 and you've got $137.50 for 50 gb transfer. Dont know what the going rate is on bandwidth, but it seems kind of excessive to charge in 50 gig increments especially if you only use an extra 15 GB's per month, they your paying for 35 extra gigs that you never used, which is a waste of $136.50.

That to me seems like an extreme waste of money. Perhaps if they sold it in 10GB increments so as not to waste your money would be better.

Also make sure that you have something in writing about "after the first few times you go over" as if that's not in writting then they have the absolute right to charge you that extra 195.00 the first time that you go over by even 1 byte. Im certainly not saying that Verio is a bad deal or that they would do that, but when looking for anything, you really need to get it in writting that that is their policy, and what does a "few times" constitute, is that 3 times or 2 times or 10 times, it's rather vague.

Im certainly not bashing the plan that you signed up for either, just interested if it's in writting, often times with any big corp, what one person states over the phone or in email is not truth and will not be honored by the company. Case in point recently, we struck a deal with our auto loan company saying that we would pay them the backdue on our autoloan on Monday and send them another check on Wednesday, the rep agreed to this. Later that day we got a call from their supervisor that stated that the rep had no right to make such a plan, and they would not honor it. I said it's your representative, she works for your company, she made this deal with us, she still stuck to her guns and said, sorry, she had no right to make such a deal.

So.......

Bbox

I gave notice to leave catalog.com a couple of weeks ago due to their ongoing network problems (pity, they WERE a good company, which I first used back in 1996). The network is not reliable at present, and they've had many weeks to fix it, and it's getting worse. (The server is also unreliable but that's another story).

When I got my dedicated server at Catalog (last year), they were month-to-month contracts. More recently they went to six month minimums. Now it's one year mimimums with the new buy/colocate deals. Sounds to me like somebody there is concerned about the churn rate (not suprising with these problems) and is looking at ways to lock customers in for longer!

The buy/colocate deals are great from catalog.com's side: the customer pays the cost of the machine up front and is then locked into a one-year co-locate deal whatever happens to the network in that time (and, "owning" the machine, they'll be relucant to move).

From the customer's point of view, it's awful. You're stuck with it for a year. Whatever happens. And a lot has happened recently.

All these deals should be looked at as "what's my downside if the server/service turns out to be totally unusable?" (as has happended to me elsewhere). With Catalog's new prices, for linux, it's $2,800 (or more). Quite a gamble, compared to something that is month-to-month.

Rob