There are many threads from some months ago ripping on bobcares.com for not responding to sales inquiries for weeks at a a time. Just thought I would provide an update to say that it appears they have improved:

I sent a question regarding their support of H-Sphere and heard back within a couple hours. (And yes, they do support H-Sphere.)

Anyhow, I have not yet contracted with them for support but when we are up and running we may go this direction. Thought it would be fair to provide an update on them, because I ALMOST did not even bother contacting their sales based on the previous postings. Glad I did.

They ask for root passwords. I'm concerned...

Originally posted by ethos
They ask for root passwords. I'm concerned...


Well, how could they administer your servers without the root passwords? They're an established, reputable company. I wouldn't worry about it.

Well, how could they administer your servers without the root passwords?
Most support questions don't require that. I'd be better paged for the rest.

Originally posted by ethos

Most support questions don't require that. I'd be better paged for the rest.

ethos ... you pay bobcares to go to your control panel instead of your users ? most support questions of hosts with control panels and well educated users _does_ require root...

Giving them root passwords is supposed to help them provide a quality solution, im sure they would be glad for you to pay them and they will just contact you when their is a problem, less work for them.

They do sign an NDA as part of the contract (not that it would really matter if they were a dishonest company) but more importantly, they would be out of business in a heartbeat if they started screwing with machines or doing anything remotely "bad" with their privileged access. In any case, outside of their previous problems responding to sales calls, I have read nothing but good things regarding them on these forums. Not to mention, if you want to outsource support affordably, they are the only thing going right now. Correct me if I'm wrong...

Originally posted by tbroeker
Not to mention, if you want to outsource support affordably, they are the only thing going right now. Correct me if I'm wrong...


I couldn't agree more. My company's virtual hosting support is handled by bobcares and they have been doing an outstanding job. Previously we used Cylynx, in which we had horrible experiences.

.

I sent them a sales question on sunday, haven't heard back from them yet.

Originally posted by tbroeker
but more importantly, they would be out of business in a heartbeat if they started screwing with machines or doing anything remotely "bad" with their privileged access.

Let me know what you would do if they do indeed screw up your machine. How would you sue them and shut down their business in a "heartbeat"? I find it already more difficult to sue somebody out of state and you really think you can shut down a business overseas, in a "heartbeat"?

Originally posted by FHDave
Let me know what you would do if they do indeed screw up your machine. How would you sue them and shut down their business in a "heartbeat"?

Okay, a "heartbeat" was an exaggeration. My point is that if they had a reputation for screwing up machines it would quickly be posted here, on Usenet and elsewhere on the Web. They would not be a viable business for long if that reputation existed. And if they screwed up my machine, I would do the same thing I would do if one of my own support staff did so: Restore the machine from back-up if necessary, cut off access, and find another solution for support.

Bobcares is a reputable company, and thus this whole thread is a non-issue. They respect their root priveleges, and do not mess with anything in the 'gray area' without first consulting you. For example, they will not recompile php to support a client's request without first getting your authorization.

Root access is the only way that they can administer things. How exactly are they going to change ANY settings in ANY account without knowing that account's password? The only other alternative is to provide a complete list of passwords for every account, however this really is not reasonable, and they still would not be able to fix anything that is a server issue and not a website issue.

Try this - give yourself an account on your server without root privelege. (Just setup a random user named Bob or something). Now try to use that account to administer the server. Try to change the name of an html page on someone elses account. That is a very basic thing to do, and if you don't have root, you won't be able to do it. How do you expect Bobcares to administer the server if they have an account such as this?

I think the point that tbroeker was trying to make is that if Bobcares starts screwing around with their root priveleges, every single one of their clients will drop them immediately. If they don't have any clients, they are as good as dead. The fact that they have been in business (As bobcares.com) for a year now and have many clients that will vouch for them shows that they do not mess around with their clients' servers.

vox-fred - I don't doubt that you found bobcares' support less than ideal during the first couple of months that you hired them. It does take them a bit to 'get a feel' for your hosting operation. During this timeframe they will answer a couple of questions incorrectly or forward something to you that could have been answered by them. However, after they have been looking after your servers for a while they get the hang of your offerings and mistakes do not happen very often.

Now, obviously it would be better to have your own staff handle all of your support requests, but this is simply not feasible for many hosts. Even though Bobcares does stress that they have good english, (and they really do considering they are from india), I can sometimes see where they're english is a little lacking. It is never any mis-spelled words or incorrect grammer... just typically something that is "almost right" and probably IS right depending on what part of the country you are in or what part of the world you are in. I am talking about them saying something like "please be patient with us" to a client when they should say "please give us a few minutes". The first one comes off as a little harsher than the second (please be patient comes of as "YOU need to be more patient" rather than "WE are having troubles, so please give us more time").

Bobcares is a good company and has been for quite some time now. If you are looking for outsourced support, I really do think they are the only viable alternative for the small host available today. Hopefully I don't sound like I am trying to sell them or anything... but you can always give them a try with their trial period and if you don't like them, just don't sign up. If it makes any difference to you, I have met MANY people that love bobcares' service, but have not met many people that do not like their service.

.

That would be one company you woulnd't want to piss off if you actually used their services =)

The experience I had with them showed that really they don't know what's going on, not saying they don't know what they're doing, they just don't offer that touch that you would expect.

Its robotic, unfeeling and limited?

vox-fred:

Can you post some specific examples?

If you arent willing to support your customers don't run a hosting company. This is the most important factor. Your customers will not stay if they can't talk to the admin. or some form of support within your company

I would not go with a host that has a hint of 3rd party support who's answers are unthorough and broken English. This is what I've encountered at a past host, and they used someone in India for support. Their response to questions were like autoresponders.

Bob doesn't care.

Hi!
I wasn't very keen on answering ... But today I was talking to a client of mine who suggested we must defend ourselves.. So here it goes.

1) Rax - I wonder why bob does not care. I'd really appreciate it if you can let me know..

2) Outsourcing is a concept. It is cheaper than having an in house staff... People outsource servers because it is cheaper. The quality has nothing to do with it. You can have in house staff who are worse than any tom, dick or harry or that matter... Outsourced support means getting a more experienced group of people who have worked and know the industry better than many. It means lesser strains and no training or infrastructure requirements..

At bobcaers we do value quality and want to give the best to our clients. We put in our best and know our clients are happy otherwise we would have had atleast 50 posts with angry customers now... ;)

3) Being in India does not mean bobcares alone. India is a big country. Some of the competition sites are also Indian based. For all you know you may have been supported by them....

4) Being Indian does not mean broken English. As India was a British colony all Indians do know Englishquite well... However, the accent is different. Also, the slang would vary. It is like Chinese food. Every country has Chinese food to their local taste. The original Chinese stuff is very different. Ask any Chinese that ;)

5) Root passwords are required for doing admin works. If you want you can avoid giving us the root password but then the 6 hour resolution guarantee would not be very valid. We do have 1 customer who did not give us the root password. It does not bother us much. All this is more about faith. If we were to mess up that way we would have done that ages ago and I'm sure I would not be have been posting here now...

6) As far as bobcares goes. We now support about 49 hosting companies and 3 datacenters. So the list is quite big... We have happy customers. We have had some bad occasions but everybody has it... We do about 1700 tickets a day with an error factor of about 3-5 incidents per week. So the percentages are good. But we want to be better. We are working on getting ISO 9001 by this December which I'm sure would make things better... COPC and CMM would follow... We are setting high standards for us as well as the industry. We do realize that on the way we may make mistakes and have unhappy customers but all those who have explained their problems to us have be looked after well..
I do not remember any company talking about a 1 hour response time guarantee or a 6 hour resolution guarantee before we did.. Now we see many. We are happy that there is competition as only then the industry is created... I'm sure with time things would be tougher but bobcares has its own niche where we are happy. Our goal has always been happy customers and we'd always have it... :)

Mods I hope my post did not look like a marketing post. If yes, let me know and I'll delete it asap...

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

P.S. I am in a slightly crazy mood... ;)

Originally posted by justsilly
If you arent willing to support your customers don't run a hosting company. This is the most important factor. Your customers will not stay if they can't talk to the admin. or some form of support within your company


Personally my company, and I am sure a lot of others who are using bobcares, are not having them take over support 100%. Our clients are still able to call us, talk to us on aim, icq or whatever, and generally get an admin everytime. We are using them for general email requests. Bobcares gets to handle questions like why can not I connect to frontpage, while the admins have more time for general server work. By the way great job bob ;)

The relation with bobcares is more of a team effort than just saying that bobcares is our support period... One has to work as a team and then it would be successful. Think of us as a remote team working with you in your venture...

Thanx Kottonmouth . We really appriciate it... :)

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

I ask the question to other folks. Will you hire someone for $135 a month in the US or Europe to work overnight? I don´t think so.

We are thinking about using BobCares for additional support since our company is growing at a decent pace. I do have a question I hope can be answered here. I do have our own support people, and would like to use Bob Cares for additional support. Can bob cares use our own support system so there is no conflict between our staff and bobcares (don't want 2 people answering the same issue on initial response). For those that our partially outsourcing, how do you determine what goes to your staff and what goes to Bobcares..

The relation with bobcares is more of a team effort than just saying that bobcares is our support period... One has to work as a team and then it would be successful. Think of us as a remote team working with you in your venture...

I also like this attitude, and others tell me that your attitude makes a difference. I'm looking to compliment our current support staff, not replace it ;)

Originally posted by Kottonmouth



I couldn't agree more. My company's virtual hosting support is handled by bobcares and they have been doing an outstanding job. Previously we used Cylynx, in which we had horrible experiences.

Hello friend,

May I ask you:
- How long you've been working with them ?
- Are they prompt in responses ?
- How fast is their responses ?
- How many % of the tickets were resolved ( the solution was sent ) ?
- How's the way of comminucation ? Are they kind with your clients ?
- Any problems yet ?

Your response to my questions are highly appreciated.

Have a great day!

Originally posted by megagente
I ask the question to other folks. Will you hire someone for $135 a month in the US or Europe to work overnight? I don´t think so.

I'd suggest searching google on "currency conversion". Interesting enough, the last time I checked the US Dollar to Indian Rupee exchange rate was 1:50. So tell me, would you hire a US or Europeon tech to work for $6750 a month overnight?

I am not a client, nor do I have anything to do with bobcares, but people seldom realize that in some countries "rich" is $600/month.

BobCares sounds like they're from Brooklyn, NY:D

We would be Florida next month ;)
amar

Originally posted by bobcares
We would be Florida next month ;)
amar

Please do explain this comment! Are you guys moving to florida? :confused: :eek: :confused: :eek: :confused:

We are expanding...:)
We thought we'd get our marketing and the frontend works from the US. I'm sure all our clients would feel more confortable this way..
The work would be done remotely from India.... :)

Regards
Amar

That sounds very good Amar, you've already built a great foundation... you're sure to succeed in the future. Just ensure that your staff are always answering with full replies and not taking any shortcuts, only expand if you can by hiring more staff when need. Overall, just keep the standards high and you'll get more clients.

Alan

Thanks Alan for the kind words.. :)
We are really putting in our very best.
By this December we plan to be an ISO 9001 company where the chances of errors for every single ticket we do would be minimal (if not nil). I hope we can achieve it at the earliest. Our QA is making major improvements to the working too. Quality has to be a part of life for any tech support admin.... :)

When we get down to tech support we do not realize the amount of background work that one requires to run such a system.
Just being good in tech and customer service is not everything. A good tech must be able to handle all situations and do it the correct way always... We have learnt a lot in the last 25 odd months and are now in the process of standardizing every aspect of it....

It's like in the good old days making a car a day was a good thing and an experienced group could make a good car. But ensuring that with volumes was a tough task and only those who kept high standards survived in the end... They had to be sure that each car they made met the standards set by them... Each process has to be standardized so that the human error factor is reduced to zero or close to it... This also ensure that each car that is manufactured is perfect.....
What was true for cars is true for hardware and for support services as well... Learning and using the knowledge acquired in the right way is very important... :)

Have a great day :)

regards
amar

Since the currency conversion obviously helps your profit margins, when you move to U.S., will U.S. customer prices rise??

Hi!
Mostly the prices would not change as most of the work would be done from India. However, we do hope that the customer base grows as a US presence would give more confidence to many hosts in the US.... :)

Have a great day :)

regards
amar



Originally posted by jdp29053
Since the currency conversion obviously helps your profit margins, when you move to U.S., will U.S. customer prices rise??

Good luck with your presence in Florida, Amar :)

Thanks Jeremy... I've heard a lot of good things about FL

Amar:

Where in Florida?

Originally posted by bobcares
Thanks Jeremy... I've heard a lot of good things about FL

way too hot there, and winter without snow :(

hostpath - We'd be in Tampabay.. Are you in FL ?

Vipsnet - The "no snow" part is the one of the best things about FL... :)

Have a nice day :)

Regards
Amar

Originally posted by bobcares
hostpath - We'd be in Tampabay.. Are you in FL ?

Vipsnet - The "no snow" part is the one of the best things about FL... :)

Have a nice day :)

Regards
Amar

No kidding. Who needs snow anyways? I grew up in Rochester, NY - the snow capital of the US. It has the dubious honor of being the large city (>1 mil population) with the most snow fall per year in the US. Uggh.

I got the hell our of there 5 years ago and am now in Northern Virginia. We get snow once, maybe twice per year. Its still more than I want to see.

The "life plan" is to relocate the family to Hawaii in 5 years or less. The way things have been with the hosting business lately, that is a very realistic goal.

All I need is my pager, cell phone and DSL and I can do this from anywhere on the islands. :-)

Take care,

Brian

Amar - I'm on the east cost of Florida (Fort Lauderdale), so, welcome to Florida! I'm in the early stages of setting up a shared hosting company, and I'm definitely considering your company based on the response I've seen here.

Originally posted by bobcares
hostpath - We'd be in Tampabay.. Are you in FL ?

Yep, I'm in Tampa.

BTW: Tampa Bay is a body of water -- if you're in Tampa Bay, you'll be all wet. The combined region is called the Tampa Bay Area and didn't get that nickname until the arrival of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL franchise in 1976. The city itself is Tampa.

Originally posted by ethos
They ask for root passwords. I'm concerned...

A solution to this problem would be to provide Bobcares with SSH access to your server vice telnet access. All that would be required is for Bobcares to send you their SSH key to be placed on your server. This way Bobcares would be able to login as root, without actually having the true root password.

NOTE: This method is still not totally secure, but does provide some protection. FIRST, I'm NOT saying Bobcare will do the following, its just for hypothetical situations.. If Bobcare wanted to they could still run a password cracker on the password file to gain the password. They could also just change the root password themselves. Again though like was already posted, I seriously doubt Bobcare would do such things, and if they did it would be already publicized here on the forum.

Another solution but harder to implement would be to setup sudoers. This way you could provide Bobcares with certain root access privaleges without actually having full root access. Like I said this would be hard to implement and would take some time, but is possible. Also in setting it up you would have to be careful not to give access to a program that would allow root access to be obtained, thus defeating the whole purpose.

I personally would prefer to do the sudoers vice giving out my root password. Thats nothing against Bobcares though, it wouldnt matter what company it was. Its just a personal and maybe somewhat paranoid thing.

Hope this was of some help, and I too after reading about Bobcares will look at possibly using them in the future. Keep up the good work.

Haha, I still do live in Rochester, I too am planning my way out of here. Not that its such a terrible city, but snow just ain't my thing:) Las Vegas... here I come!!!

Amar, Good luck with your US offices. One question I don't believe I've seen answered....

Who is Bob?

Originally posted by bobcares
hostpath - We'd be in Tampabay.. Are you in FL ?


I live in Tampa as well, welcome aboard. I guess I know who to come to whenever I need outsourced tech support for a hosting company :)

Hey ,

Can anybody guess who bob is... :)

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

Who is Bob? [/B][/QUOTE]

Originally posted by bobcares
Hey ,

Can anybody guess who bob is... :)

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

[b]Who is Bob?

Does Amar in Indian = Bob in USA ? I do not know.

No.
Amarjyoti means immortal light.... ;)

amar

Originally posted by AceWeb


Does Amar in Indian = Bob in USA ? I do not know.

Originally posted by bobcares
No.
Amarjyoti means immortal light.... ;)

amar



I see.

So who is Bob in BobCares ? A Cat? ;)

Maybe Bob is the Uncle Sam of India.

;)

I keep trying to get in touch. Where are you Amar? PM me, so I can give you some money!

maybe bob is a generic name like John Doe in the US, and it's like bob is the name of any particular individual giving support, anonymously with a name. :eek: