Bare Bones Reseller experiment
We run a bunch of dedicated servers but have a reseller account as an alternative email port and for employees to who want to run personal sites.
So we decided to take a flyer on a bare bones, priced too good to believe outfit based in Italy (Client-Arena.net) that runs a server based in Texas.
We're paying something like US$128 for 27 months of 120G hard drive space, 2,000G of bandwidth, CPanel/WHM, overselling and no limits on the number of domains hosted. The down side is that backups to a second drive on the server is not supported.
Our logic is that under $5 per month is a trivial expense. If these guys overload the server or otherwise screw up, the loss is less than a good meal at a big city restaurant.
Client-Arena’s support is willing and good natured but English isn't their first language.
Now before a whole bunch of my sage fellow WHTers quite properly gang tackle me with the economics of this. Take a look at your cell phone. Do you use all its features? Mine will do Fourier calculations but I haven’t taken advantage of it. The big question is how many folks like me will buy excess capacity just for the security of knowing it’s there if I need it?
In a funny sort of way Client-Arena’s odd refusal to offer backups really excludes the wanna be hosting reseller who will push the capacity of their account. You need to be savvy enough to be able to FTP up clean sites if something goes wrong and take care of your own backing up. Perhaps their marketing strategy will attract a different crowd (hopefully not a collection of spammers and other unsavory sorts).
Anyway, it’s a noble experiment. Stay tuned for my cries of anguish or gloating <g>
Cheers,
Aza D. Oberman
Client Arena mail server is still down
It's a new year and still ClientArena can't get it's email working again.
The entire server died without notice (It appears they moved the server) for a couple of days and once we got the new IP from Client Arena they refused to reinstall an alternate SMTP port.
The nasty thing is that this occurred less than 120 days after we prepayed for two years of a reseller account. Naturally, they refuse to refund the unused balance.
More as it happens.
Aza D. Oberman
Speed Web Solutions LLC "acquires" ClientArena
On February 6, 2012, we got an email from SpeedWebSolutions.Org saying in part:
"We are pleased to present some interesting news. Client-Arena.Net was bought by SpeedWebSolutions.Org and all its activities and SpeedWebSolutions.Org 02.06.2012 will continue to operate as a separate brand under parent SpeedWebSolutions.Org. For you, the customer, this means a lot of great things, including service improvements, guaranteed response times, and much more. Please take a moment of precious time to read what this change will mean for you."
We responded by asking if the new owners would restore the alternate SMTP port turned off by Client Arena. We assumed that as the new owners Speed Web Solutions would finish out any reseller agreements entered by Client Arena.
The prompt reply from a Mohamed Abdul was confusing to say the least:
"As I said. We take only the company and servicing, only those who want
to continue with us, not take over their Servers. We are not responsible
for what he did absolutely nothing Client-Arena or what you promised.
If you want to try our servicing give a reply."
The syntax of the SpeedWebSolutions correspondance is disturbingly similar to Client-Arena's. However, before anyone leaps to the conclusion that this is just a ploy to continue Client Arena under another name, one should take a moment to appreciate that one company buying another is a complicated process and glitches will occur as assets and liabilities are discovered.
More as it happens -- and I'll be interested in experiences other WHTers may be having with SpeedWeb Solution's purchase and takeover of Client Arena.
Aza D. Oberman
It's also a matter of business ethics
Quote:
Originally Posted by
cutabovehost
Sounds like just another company that got where they didn't care about customers.
<Snip>
I still often wonder how people like that manage to attract customers.
Well, there is a niche for a kind of bare bones hosting. Not offering backups halves your disk requirement for example. A bit of throttling can trim your bandwidth load. Can the fancy Shell access, FrontPage extensions, or resold account billing schemes. And you can always play the percentages that your customers have largely "set and forget" websites.
The attraction is price. The market is in-house users.
In my case we run a bunch of in-house dedicated servers, but we also want a small capability to support employee sites and collect daily status reports from the dedicates. We need reliable email, access to SendMail, and perhaps a Cpan module or two, but otherwise all we need is decent up-time physically located nowhere near our dedicateds. Little did we know that that ClientArena would go down for days on end and curtail services within less than 120 days after we paid for two years.
According to Speed Web Solutions, the outfit that claims to have "bought" Client-Arena.Net, they got 3,200 clients -- apparently with no obligation to service any existing contracts; a rather novel and suspiciously self-serving business model to say the least.
To mitigate damages from Client Arena/SpeedWebSolutions mischief we opened an account with OnProMedia -- It's like a date with a cute local after the Navy's been in town on shore leave... It's nice to deal with a straight up and responsibly priced vendor. BUT, they do charge significantly more and offer competence waaaaay beyond our needs.
One point that needs making is that it is absurd to agree to any TOS that doesn't make sense. Not the least of which is an outfit that charges you should you object to a draw on your credit card, or someone who wants you to enter into an annual contract but only guarantees that the first 30 days will be acceptable!
I still think there is a market for a clearly bare bones reseller account. But I've not found anyone who has picked up on this market. In the meantime I'm tickled to death with what we're getting from OnPro Media Ltd. -- albeit they are not the cheapest game in town.
Regards,
Aza
SpeedWebSolutions bails out Client-Arena fiasco
I guess this is good news. I'd been bitching and moaning in this thread about the bizarre behavior of Client-Arena who cut back service shortly after we paid in advance for two years.
SpeedWebSolutions acquired Client-Arena and just made good on our Client Arena account. They gave us their equivalent reseller account and deserve kudos for behaving like a serious enterprise interested in keeping customers.
We'll see how it works out.
Although English is clearly not SpeedWebSolutions' native language and communication is difficult, good intentions go a long way and their prices are more than competitive.
More in perhaps six months once we can report what the service is like.
Regards,
Aza D. Oberman