Hello folks,
Weinbar, the hosting company, has been acquired by us - Deru Internet. The purchase has not gone as smoothly as we had hoped but we are looking to a postive future.
Any domains we register (Deru) will always have the admin contact and billing contact set to the buyer. We will never hold back a domain that someone registers with us - if you wish to move to another host, we'll support that.
The email address
support@weinbar.com was/is answered by a group of people from bobcares.com out of India. They are diligent but they are limited in what they can do - ie accounting/server reloads/etc are a bit too much to ask. They are good at getting a broken link fixed, a database reloaded, a permission adjusted, minor to medium severity issues and escalating the rest of the problems if they occur. It's good to have a dozen people available at all times of the day. It works pretty well compared to one or a couple of people answering support requests.
Bobcares has had issues in the past month with their connectivity to their business (they are in a third world country!), so could not be on top of things as much as possible - we were relying on them and didn't realize there were problems.
Any time someone acquires an ISP you have to worry about several things - one - don't screw up the billing - that will tick people off more than anything else. Two - don't create change to just create change (ie - don't change the name of the company so you can satisfy your ego - change it only if it's going to be a net positive for the customer base) - and give more service going forward than what the customer base received in the past.
So far we've done pretty good on the billing front. There have been some burps, but we caught those before they become real major issues. There are some oustanding billing issues that existed prior to the acquistions that we are having to deal with today but we are making progress there - no one enjoys getting their credit card whacked for charges they didn't incur. What happened in the past with Weinbar we can't control, but going forward our billing is 100% dead on.
We didn't want to change the name - people (witness everyone here) loved the name/company - and people still sign up for service - must be word of mouth - but given all the problems we acquired and what has transpired in the last 60 days, we have decied to change the name of the company and rebrand it from Weinbar.
And in giving more, we already do that - Some people just loved the prior service, and detested it. No one can make everyone happy - and that includes us. But we know we can give more. In general, we do have better bandwidth - there is no way that 4 FULL oc12's and a few oc3's isn't as good *overall* or *better* than the fractional ds3 Weinbar was on - sure some customers may like the old connecitivity better, but in general people are saying it's like night and day compared to a few months ago. Some people that read these boards (hi esnipe) have issues and we are actively working on those - we can't satisfy 100% of the people, but we sure can satisfy 99% of the people - we'll accept that ratio.
We are not a one man shop, so we have more people answering phones, emails, and concerns. We have 24x7 *onsite* customer support. No more waiting for the tech girl to arrive at the colo. Sure, someone has to tell the techs what to do, but at least they are there and not 20+ minutes away.
If you want service/bandwidth and want to pay for quality, we are definately a place for you to come.
Darin
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