I am looking for a top quality PHP/MySQL hosting company, starting with a top level shared service, but moving onto a dedicated managed server in the next few months as I have very specific ip addressing and application requirements.

Site5 seem well respected here so I sent them a pre sales enquiry yesterday morning at about 8am GMT. I received a tracking ID soon after but have heard nothing since. Is their service really this poor or have I got them on a bad day?

Top quality support is crucial for me so I am concerned that poor responsiveness at a pre sales level is indicative of poor after sales support. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Chris

It's been discussed before with varied results. While some are quick to judge on response time to any request; others may point out that pre-sales are of the lowest priority. You will just have to wait for a response and draw your conclusion from that.
But, since you asked, "Top quality support is crucial for me so I am concerned that poor responsiveness at a pre sales level is indicative of poor after sales support. Any thoughts?"
I'd vote, No. I don't believe that it is indicative of poor service 'afterwords'. Although it could be reason to be more critical when assessing their response.

If it takes longer than 12 hours for a reply on any question, pre-sale or otherwise; I'd start looking elsewhere. Why would their entire office be dead on a weekday? It sounds a little fishy, or he has a serious shortage of support representatives.

Hmmmmm, this sounds odd. Site5 have a very good reputation here and in other forums. Although I've never had any business dealings with them myself, I have sent inquiries to them on a couple of occasions and have always received a very prompt and full response.

It's possible they were just having an especially hectic day, or maybe your ticket was the 0.1% that falls through the cracks. Who knows. Either way this isn't representative of my experience with their pre-sales.

Good luck with your search,
Simon.

Thanks for the thoughts so far.

I have still not heard from Site5.com so I am now open to suggestions for a good host that meets these requirements:

Fixed ip address that I can advertise to my customers so that my web app can securely access networking equipment behind their firewalls

Run cron jobs

Have the web server instigate telnet and ftp sessions with the remote networking equipment

Have cast iron SLA's with max verifiable uptime as I have to provide SLA's to my customers

Have responsive and knowledgable support, skilled in PHP and MySQL

Allow me to keep the same ip address as I move from the shared hosting to a dedicated server in the next few months (this is a nice to have)

Not much then!

Thanks

Chris

Well I changed to Site 5 after problems with Hostpacket, and they answered my pre-sales enquiry in less than 8 hours.

Send another enquiry and give them another chance. Your original one may have been missed somehow.

Chris you should resend your Pre Sales query and see what happens. If you want to proceed with finding an alternative host then you would be better off posting in the Web Hosting Requests Forum (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=32) :)

Site 5 has a good service and support. You can go ahead with them.

To be fair to Site5 - I did eventually get a reply to my pre sales enquiries about 36 hours after raising the question. I feel wary, even though they have good support here, and will, unfortunately, keep on looking.

Thanks for all the advice

Chris

Try http://fluidhosting.com. They seem good.

Speaking from experience?

Just curious.

Yes, I got a free test-drive acct there, and the support was good, and the site was fast and the connections reliable. They offer 100% SLA guarantee, and use one of the best data centers, Internap.

The reasons I didn't stay were because they use Hsphere, and I prefer CPanel and their shared SSL didn't work on my browser. I also wanted a reseller account, and did not notice until afterwards that they did't offer that.

Thanks, Chris - I'll check fluidhosting.com out.

I'm still trying to resolve a technical issue ie ensuring that my customer firewalls only see one ip address from the web server - it seems many hosts have server configurations that arbitarily present several ip addresses to the firewall from a web server (though I'm confused as to how this can be).

Would this be the case if I used a dedicated server?

Thanks

Chris