Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Reseller Hosting : Bare Bones Reseller experiment

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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

[cutabovehost]

Sounds like just another company that got where they didn't care about customers.

Usually it is because business is so good they are not going to be worried about you little people. In this case looks like they knew they were going down and just didn't care.

I will say that it is very odd for a business that has a domain name only registered since Creation Date: 2012-01-26 18:58:36 would be buying out any company.
Then again whois data is not a true sign of how old a company is and I get that.

Sure hope things work out sorry to hear someone having troubles.
It is kind of scary seeing incidents like this. These kind of stories have become common and might endanger the image of web hosting companies as a whole.

I still often wonder how people like that manage to attract customers.

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Originally Posted by cutabovehost

Sounds like just another company that got where they didn't care about customers.

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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

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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

[firstreview]

looks like client arena past owner and speed current present owner still the same italian only different name of host and persons name (ivan bordowski ? Lol) ?

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Yeah, I'd be willing to bet SpeedWebSolutions is is run by at least some of the same folks who ran that ClientArena travesty.

BUT, and here's the thing, they seem to have dumped the chump(s) with the bad attitude and cleaned up their act. They certainly are *much* easier to work with and seem to have a better command of English.

We're not using the SpeedWebSolutions reseller account very much because we already had gotten another one elsewhere (OnProMedia which I *highly* recommend; although they cost considerably more, OnProMedia delivers value for money with prompt good humored support, excellent up times, and a rational TOS).

We expect, however, to let some high school students use the SpeedWebSolutions account for their computer science project (building W3C certified HTML web sites). The teacher is quite keen on the idea and we'll at least get a tax write-off and a chance to see if SpeedWebSolutions can deliver over the long haul.

So the bottom line is that while it may be all or part of the same ClientArema crowd that's running SpeedWebSolutions, they've mellowed considerably and may be ready to play the big leagues and provide solid service at a bargain price.

Stay tuned -- I'll post a one year report when we have more of a performance history.

Regards,

Aza

[DWS2006]

"The big question is how many folks like me will buy excess capacity just for the security of knowing it’s there"

Hopefully not too many. I would assume if more than a very small percentage of users tried to fill accounts 90% or more that one might find that the storage really isn't there after all.

edit: must read entire thread before making a reply LOL. But I can't say I'm surprised by the outcome.