I'd appreciate any feedback on Dialtone services
server.....support

thanx
Susan :look:

For me,
Dialtone is one of teh best Hosting Companies in US. I have more then 20 Server at their Datacenter and everything is great, even i never saw an faster support.

Michael

they are really good. fast support. i had a server with them awhile back.

dunno if things are diff now.

I have had 3 hard drives fail with them in their IBM line.

Goodness: was it on the same box or different ones? what was the outcome? how did they respond to the problem? how fast was the issues solved?
thanx :)

What's the brand of those failed HD? Was it a hardware failure or human error?

We've been with DT for over a yr now and have had nothing but good uptime, good luck (NO Hardware failures), and excellent support :agree: :agree: Our biggest hazzard is our users, but for some reason we keep asking for more :)

I was not happy with Dialtone's support, their attitude, and most of all their contracts, which they wave in your face and threaten you with their lawyers when they are unable to make the customer happy and you want to leave them. Better to go with a company that satisfies the customer than requires a contract. The contract is only for their benefit, not yours.

I recommend you do a search on "dialtone", then go somewhere else.

Sorry i didnt post sooner.

It took them 34 hours to fix the first 2 drives and the third drive was fixed in a couple of hours.

They gave me 1 month free and free daily tape backups but that doesnt repair your rep. for being down for that long.

It took them 10 hours to decide that it is time to build a new server and then it took 14 hours for them to figure out what was wrong with their new backup system restoring 10 GB of data. It was giong about as fast as a dial up modem.

I took the free month and then canceled the server, it was the 334 i think IBM series, so it was about 700+ dollars a month server. We still have one server there but that is because we dont feel like moving all the accounts on it yet.

They were IBM Hard drives.

Originally posted by goodness0001
I have had 3 hard drives fail with them in their IBM line.
I had an IBM server with them and its hard drive failed after about a month. They used that opportunity to push their $75/month weekly backup service on me, which I really didn't appreciate (and didn't order).

At one time I was going to order several thousand dollars (monthly) worth of servers there, and on one server I wanted them to do a clean install of RedHat 7.x (instead of their "in-house" version of RedHat, which I'm not really sure what it is). Despite the amount of money I was going to spend, they insisted on charging me $75 to install the version of RedHat I wanted. I politely argued my case, they firmly refused, and I canceled my order. As soon as I did that they came back with an apology and said of course they would install it for free. I said no thanks. I personally don't care for that style of doing business.

I also don't care for their six-month contracts, in which you must cancel no later than 30 days before the contract ends or you're screwed for another six months. I prefer to do business with companies that are "on my side" and that means being flexible to meet my needs; in my experience, Dialtone is not one of these.

I dont want to make a bad name for IBM but I have heard from my friend who has over 70 servers that usually motherboards and a few hard drives has failed. And the failing parts are usually for the new servers..... makes me wonder

That's surprising because I thought IBM servers are very reliable, does this bad issue apply also to their X-Series servers?

As far as HD goes, I know Maxtor is always more reliable than IBM :)

That is what i had with them is the X-series.

As for dialtone, yes they do try to push every little sales pitch they can and they try to extract every dollar possible.

Also for a temp. period i was using their in house CP which is a piece of crap, no matter what they tell you and for me to get them to fix bugs on THEIR software, they wanted to charge me 75 dollars an hour...
.
You also have to watch out for their bandwidth scheme. If you dont pre-order it they want to charge you 4.00 per GB. If you preorder it then it is 2.50 per GB. As part of the deal, they offered bandwidth at 2.00 per GB no matter what i used.

I wish i would have choosen another company right from the start because they charge so much for setup fees and other companies you dont have to worry about that.

Some of their servers, they collect 30% of their actual cost right in the setup fee.

From the things I've heard about Dialtone they don't seem to be very good, I've heard a number of things such as they still use the old Red Hat 6.2 and if asked to upgrade the kernel, they say that they can't for some reason or another, since they don't want to do the job, but that's only what I've heard, so don't take that much notice of it.

If I had a choice of a web hosting company, I'll go with Rackspace instead of Dialtone. Now I haven't been a customer of Dialtone, but I am a customer of Rackspace's, so it may seem slightly biased. Even though, there is a single comment here or anywhere else that says anything bad about Rackspace, if you want something done, they'll do it. These two companies are quite similar and clearly competing in the same market, unlike Rackshack.

Just my thoughts :).

Alan

Ho247 makes some good points. DT is still using RH6.2 on new servers leased and it seems that definitely more people in the forums have had more troubles with DT than RackSpace.

That said, DT still costs less than RackSpace so there is a value issue there for some customers. Also, I would say problems w/ DT are the exception, not the rule. Other than that, the problems described above are Hardware problems and most companies will charge you to do custom work on your server (including RackSpace).

To a new customer on limited funds I can see how contracts might be intimidating. However, DT offers HUGE discounts for paying in advance anyway.

Dialtone will provide good support, and you will be rest assured that someone will always be there if you need a reboot.

They are just after the $$$ so just keep your guard.

That's true, their prices are now lower than Rackspace's, but a while ago I thought that Dialtone's prices and Rackspace's prices were about the same... it even looks like Dialtone are lowering their prices to get more of the market... or to look more competitive to Rackshack (even though they are in two completely different markets).

Alan

i've got a 800mhz box at dialtone, it's worked great from day one.

i only had one incident where someone hacked into my server and was launching DOS attacks throughout the network. who's fault was it? mine partly, because i hadn't applied the last 10 patches posted on the dialtone site.

connectivity is great, bandwidth quality is amazing, support is fast (but they'll always try to sell u something).

if you install mod_gzip on a dialtone box, the site will serve pages faster than yahoo/google/anyone else.

We've been with Dialtone for about a year now. Decent support good uptime. They can take a lesson or two in how to bill their customers though :). We've had bunch of billing issues with them when we were using our credit card to pay, so from get go just tell them you'll be paying by online check. Their bandwidth allotment is kinda low and their bandwidth price is kinda high.

Overall they are pretty well established and they know what they are doing, in technical department anyway. :)

Hello,
I have to vouch for DialTone. We have a server in there Data Center and it has been working great. We literally had downtime at all and this server has been running for the past 2 months or more and has worked better then a machine we have else where. I suggest you give them a try. Dialtone nor can I please just anyone. There is always going to be going " I don't want it or you can't please me". I suggest give them a try.

I had a server with Dialtone and I recently came back to them. They have improved tremendously. Their suppoet os very good, they do not charge only if you request assistance installing or fixing problems caused by you; their connectivity always been great. Also they have month-to-month agreements as mentioned by my sales rep. Roland. They offer plesk as a control panel for those who don't like their control panel ..like me .. got plesk now...it rocks. I would say give them a try, they are one of the few companies that always listen to customers and improve things...

Originally posted by ememex
i've got a 800mhz box at dialtone, it's worked great from day one.

i only had one incident where someone hacked into my server and was launching DOS attacks throughout the network. who's fault was it? mine partly, because i hadn't applied the last 10 patches posted on the dialtone site.
connectivity is great, bandwidth quality is amazing, support is fast (but they'll always try to sell u something).
if you install mod_gzip on a dialtone box, the site will serve pages faster than yahoo/google/anyone else.


Yes...my server on Dialtone hacked by DDoS attacks also!..who will pay my high traffics next month?

When my server attacked by DDoS , they said to add memory...!!! after that ..the second time they said DDoS attack

But they support very Fast!!!

Carefully with Traffics from Dialtone!!

Heh, it's almost kinda funny to read some of these, I can identify. I had a Raq3 at Dialtone for 2 years that I finally shut off, and still have a PIII/650MHz which I've had for just shy of 1 year. These are sort of departing remarks, as I'm probably going to cancel the other server too, but in favor of local colocation, not due to their service. I might purchase a low-end server with them just for redundant DNS/mail...

True, true, they really do seem to try to take every opportunity to sell you something; gosh they push backups and admin packages every time I talk to them. But that's sales, not service. Like others have said, they really do have people there all the time and I've never felt that the person at the other end wasn't knowledgeable. In two years I'm sure I never waited more than 5 minutes for a reboot even at 3am Sunday morning, (which did happen). And my Raq3 was regularly at 120+ days uptime between reboots.

And in defense of their daily backups/admin package, I did use it for 4 months or so, during which time I made a horrible error and corrupted my libc.so.1 or whatever file. Kills a box. After they tried to get in at the console they recommended a rebuild from scratch and then to restore files from the previous day's backup. My total downtime, from server crash to most sites back online: I think it was around 4 hours!

So yeah, while they can maybe be a pain to deal with, they've always been very fast and helpful with support. Plus I think I read that they started offering to install security patches for you by request at no charge, a plus for newbies not comfortable with kernal patching :)

Perfect? No, but I've been satisfied.

I have had servers with them for 3 years. I have had a VERY good experience with them. Support is superior to some of the other hosts I have been with...

They are a little more expensive which can be tough to justify, but contracts are meant to be negotiated. I have successfully re-negotiated my contract each time it expires....and now have a month to month contract.

I've been looking at dedicated servers in the UK and they are the cheapest i've found so far (has to be Win 2000) and appear to be quite good. But reading this topic, people have mixed opinions.

We're on a very tight budget, so would you recommend them for the price? (or do you have any other suggestions about that price - I haven't found any ;))

Thanks :)

DT has been very good. Normally I would recommend them for people wanting a great value. However, they have been recently acquired by Interland. Hopefully nothing will change, but you might be taking more of a risk if you leased a server with them now.

I was reading about that over on another topic, we wont be getting it for a few months - so i'll keep a close eye and see what happens :)