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  1. #1

    Zone.net- One Month Review

    Here is my first 1 month review for Zone.net. This was my first VPS account, before this I have used mostly shared and reseller hosting. Some of my favorite previous hosts are: clook.net and nearlyfreespeech.net. Unlike some reviews I have read here, I had a BAD experience with Host Gator a couple of year ago, but I can't really be bothered going into that.

    Okay after looking at various options I decided that Zone.net met my requirements the best. I signed up around the 16th of November. I signed up to a Production VPS account for $55 @ monthly price (the price has since reduced $5). These VPS accounts have an usual situation as to how bandwidth is allocated, and I thought this might be useful in my case. It took a day or so to get around to voice verifying my credit card details (I don't know if they tried to call but I can be very hard to catch on the phone). I had initially signed up for a Windows VPS account but was convinced by staff that my needs would be better met by a Linux VPS. In the end I am glad I changed to this option.

    After validating my credit card by phone it wasn't long before I got a very polite phone call telling me my account was set up etc. I was quite impressed by the friendlyness and sincerity of the voice on the phone, and was struck by the impression that these people have pride in their business. I must admit, I am not totally sure which person it was who I spoke to on the phone (I forget names easily) but they had the most cool voice, I'd classify it as an "American Dot Com" voice Then again I don't often speak to American businesses (being located in Australia) so it may have been a novelty for me

    Anyway I mucked around with my new VPS a bit but it was a few days before I started heavily mucking around with it due to the fact I always have various computer projects all going on at once. I also get easily side tracked.

    I was new to Plesk having just used Cpanel before but I was glad to try something different because I associate Cpanel with sleazy web hosting. This might be irrational, but its just how I have been conditioned

    I find Plesk fairly good, its a close call comparing it to Cpanel. Cpanel might win out but only because it has better support from third party applications and scripts. However I believe it is more resource intensive which is definitely a negative for me.

    The performance of the VPS was very good. I was extremely impressed when I used wget to download a file and it was so quick that I thought an error had occurred. In fact an error had not occurred but it had downloaded at around 8mb per seconds, that's megabytes, not megabits. I wouldn't always expect such performance but I must admit that did impress me. Since a critical factor in my use of the VPS would be bandwidth, I felt reassured.

    Now a few days later there were some *significant* server problems. For a couple of days the VPS was up and down like a yo-yo. From what I understand, the issue causing the problem was very technical (potential kernal hardware conflict?) and it does appear as if their data center was let us say not doing their job very well. I definitely got the distinct, strong impression zone.net was VERY unhappy to be having their customers suffer such difficulty.

    When I noticed the VPS was down, I went into support. Now in support I don't *always* get through on livechat (80% of time I do) but I have found that when a server problem occurs, they tend to be much more responsive. They were very apologetic about the problems, always provided me with lots of info, and in fact on a couple of occasions I ended up chatting over a couple of hours. I have found support to generally be quite sociable, and to always be professional and polite in conversation. While everyone at Zone.net seems okay, my favorite people are Jeffrey and Sean.

    After a couple of days the problems did resolve- mostly but a couple of short down times did occur (some of these we were forewarned about) as they upgraded things such as the kernal etc. In the end they have moved various accounts to another data center and indeed I believe moving most (or all?) accounts over to the other data center.

    The migration for me has gone fairly smoothly. They copied my httpdocs across and I copied the databases across. I had one small hiccup but it was fixed by CHMODING a directory. Everything for me is now working on the new server. I have only been on the new server a few days but so far the performance has been perfect, without a single hiccup that I have noticed. I have my URL monitored and no downtime has yet occurred. They have upgraded the version of Fedora I am using, as well as Plesk to v8.1. I will point out that over the migration period it seemed that support had been overloaded, but things seem to have calmed down back to normal now.

    Despite the fact that some significant problems have occurred, I am still much inclined towards zone.net. I do believe they have been reasonable in handling the problems and were sincerely upset that they did occur. The response time for support while not always lightening fast via email, is adequate and the quality of the support is outstanding. They always seem happy to tell you when they have done something for you, such as a system admin request.

    I am a mirror for Autopatcher for Wiindows so i have been getting reasonable traffic, and they have helped make sure that all the traffic is being handled well and basically did me some favors beyond the specifications of my account to help me This was I guess given partially in compensation for the server problems, plus I think they are just naturally helpful. I host the *update* for Autopatcher but one day when I get a higher account I might give them a mega test and host the full version (then they will be getting a bit more than 12 gigs of traffic per day, quite possibly up to 100-200 gigs per day at peak)

    Also I requested them to install a GUI like gnome and realvnc so that I could log on remotely to my new VPS and explore the desktop, and I did this and well it was fun. I enjoyed downloading a file or two on Mozilla on my VPS at super fast speeds I did some browsing and I guess you could say it was proxy web browsing!

    I have bombarded support a lot with various issues I have had which are due to my being new to a VPS environment and I have been impressed with them. I am not good at getting to a point, but they have been very patient. They have fixed various issues, some issues I perhaps should have been able to fix etc

    I like zone.net and will be staying on another month to test my new VPS on the new server, so far, all is excellent. I will update this review in one month, to let everyone know how this goes.

    My personal inclination is that despite a few hiccups (which they have taken seriously and addressed), that this hosting company will go far. Within a few months, I hope to find the excuses (and funds) to upgrade to one of their dedicated server packages.

    I commit to definitely updating this thread.

    Michael
    filevortex.net

    My site. Mostly just a mirror for Autopatcher at the moment, but I will add a LOT more content over the next few weeks.

  2. #2
    Not to reply to myself but has nobody found my review of any interest? Perhaps I should post more technical details about the VPS service?

    Its just that the views vs replies ratio seems to be higher for most other posts! (well a division by zero error would occur if you currently tried to apply that formula to this post!)

    If anybody has constructive feedback let me know so I can hopefully be more useful with future posts.

    I am just trying to contribute.

    Thanks
    filevortex.net

    My site. Mostly just a mirror for Autopatcher at the moment, but I will add a LOT more content over the next few weeks.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    Jupiter, FL
    Posts
    348
    Great review! It seems zone.net is on top of things over there and it's always nice to see a happy customer. Sorry to hear about your issues but every service will have their fair share of issues but the most important thing is how they are delt with and it seems zone.net was on top of it 100%

    Goodluck with your VPS!
    Ben Gabler
    Chairman & CEO, Rocket.net
    Web Hosting Industry Veteran (HostNine, Hostgator, GoDaddy, StackPath)

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, Az USA
    Posts
    13
    it is a good review. I'm with them and experienced some of the same problems. Support has been pretty good and they've helped trying to relieve a lot of the issues and make up for the downtime.

  5. #5

    * ZONE.net

    I have been trying to get my refund for over a month now, due to lack of service and my server being hacked by a thirdparty before we had even accesed it. I cancelled within a week of signing up, taking these as signs of the future to come.

    I was refunded everything ($328) but $50 which they claim is the steup fee. In my invoice it clearly states the setup was free. I am very unhappy with their service and according to their own Terms and Conditions I am entitled to a full refund.

    It doesnt seem right to me that they can charge me $50 for something we never even had a chance to use before it was comprimised by a third party.

    Their ticketing system has never given me a response and it took about 10 diffrent phone calls and as many tickets to see any kind of refund. Use caution when moving forward with ZONE.net

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    London UK
    Posts
    695
    If you don't mind me asking how did it get hacked before you had access ?
    Ultra High Performance UK VPS without compromise.
    HPe servers, Intel NVMe DC P3700/P4600 SSD
    https://clustered.net

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    New York, NY
    Posts
    1,041
    Quote Originally Posted by Knewjac
    I have been trying to get my refund for over a month now, due to lack of service and my server being hacked by a thirdparty before we had even accesed it. I cancelled within a week of signing up, taking these as signs of the future to come.

    I was refunded everything ($328) but $50 which they claim is the steup fee. In my invoice it clearly states the setup was free. I am very unhappy with their service and according to their own Terms and Conditions I am entitled to a full refund.

    It doesnt seem right to me that they can charge me $50 for something we never even had a chance to use before it was comprimised by a third party.

    Their ticketing system has never given me a response and it took about 10 diffrent phone calls and as many tickets to see any kind of refund. Use caution when moving forward with ZONE.net
    Hello,

    Ok, if you want the same response given to you by us via all of those emails and phone conversations in a public forum, here goes...

    The $50 that was deducted from your account was because your Windows server was running various scanning software across our network and of others, and caused an issue within the entire network, leading to downtime and alot of cleanup by our SA's to fix your machine and remove all the infected files/scanning software running on YOUR server.

    The logs clearly showed that you logged into the server several times, from different locations and remained logged in for some time (IP's match the same address that was used to make the order). This usually means that someone is "using" their service, namely, you.

    We gave you the benefit of the doubt and kept you on as our customer even after discussing this incident with you and the ramifications for our network that it caused, yet a week later you changed your story and claimed you never used the machine and want a full refund. That raises quite a bit of red flags.

    Our final response was to you, the same thing as before, if you have an issue with the reduced $50 network clean up fee due to the issues your server caused our network, than you should contact your credit/debit card issuing bank, and file a dispute. Because we have plenty of documentation, as we told you before, to state our case.

    It's unfortunate but as any legitimate hosting business we get attempts to do chargebacks on our accounts all the time, and we have an adequate defense with plenty of account information, access logs, system logs, etc prepared in every case.

    Good luck with your future hosting needs!

    Regards,

    -Sean
    Last edited by seankoons; 12-21-2006 at 05:58 PM.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    599
    How long does it take for the Zone.Net staff to validate and give you your account details to the server....?

  9. #9
    usually less than 24 hours. However as of lately, zone.net has been useless. Livechat and phone is unreachable... emails don't get responded to. i am thinking of canceling if things don't resolve in the next 24 hours.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    599
    Yes i agree.I purchased a VPS and their support emails are VERY VERY Slow.

  11. #11
    I hope Sean K. posts on here soon, at least let us know what is going on. I really don't want to switch but I will if I have to...

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    New York, NY
    Posts
    1,041
    Quote Originally Posted by xan16
    I hope Sean K. posts on here soon, at least let us know what is going on. I really don't want to switch but I will if I have to...
    Hello!

    Well things have been very busy at zone.net since the holiday and new year season (and a happy 2007 to all on WHT, by the way!). We're in the middle of renovating our new HQ in downtown manhattan (349 broadway), and also still migrating all of our existing servers/clients from ThePlanet to SoftLayer, a move that has been fantastic thanks to SoftLayer I might add. I'll update all of our customers in our end of month newsletter later on this month on all the happenings, and update our internal zone.net forum as well for the public.

    I belive our staff has addressed both of your above concerns already, so I just wanted to drop a line on WHT (I haven't posted in quite a bit) saying we're all still here and kicking, getting ready to turn our advertising back on within the next 30 days.

    As always, if you feel any of my staff is not giving you a prompt response, you can always just PM me here on WHT or send me an email directly admin at zone.net.

    -Sean

  13. #13
    Nope, zone.net is back on top of things again. I got on livechat last night and got 90% of my issues resolved right then and there. Thanks for the post Sean and I look forward to the newsletter : )

  14. #14
    we are a small company in NJ US. one of our websites has been hosting on the zone.net for more than 3 months now. the plan we use is enterprise hosting. we signed up the plan in Oct. 2006, The server downed once in Nov. 2006 because of DOS attack, except that the server runs smoothly for more than 3 months. we are happy with their services and quick response for our questions and comments. recently we just locked our price and plan to stay with them for a long term.

  15. #15
    Hello,
    just want to mention that I get trough Live support 10-15% of the time, this has been since Christmas or so. Before that I got trough Live support 80% of the time too... I hope things will be back to normal soon

  16. #16
    Im curious if you are still having a good experience with zone.net. There is another post on a different thread that says otherwise. I was going to sign up with them yesterday when I saw this message board and now Im getting a little leary.

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    599
    Try another webhost instead of zone.net
    Like knownhost.com
    Or Downtownhost.com

  18. #18
    don't know what is going on with zone.net today, no support, nobody answered phone. it happened a lot recently? anybody?

  19. #19
    just want to keep you posted, our server downed around 3pm, opened ticket immediately. called them more than 10 times, nobody answered phone, at this time 10:30pm still no fix, no email reply. just nobody. we have been happy with them for more than 3 months, but today it is really unacceptable, i just wonder where the employees are?

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    1,922
    Have you PM'ed Sean? He is active on WHT I believe. I see he isn't on now but you should try that.

    -Jay

  21. #21

    My VPS is performing very well.

    Well my second month with them has been much better than the first.

    I have noticed one down time of around 20 minutes.. I managed to get a response from Sean within a few minutes who reassured me and it was all back up. Initially I did panic a little because i was working on a php script and testing it on the server (I even considered the irrational thought that my script may have somehow crashed the server!) but yeah everything was quickly resolved. They do seem to take server downtime very seriously.

    I did notice that the live help was offline a lot around newyears (okay I did have this slight picture in my head of them staggering around a bit yelling "HAPPY NEWYEARS!" but my imagination was just making that up!). Anyway it seems to be online a lot now. I did try it once and didn't get a response but that wasn't for anything important and I haven't really tried communicating with them at all.. Haven't had the need. So I guess I haven't "visited" them much recently. The forum seems a little quite. I would like to hear them buzzing around a bit more.

    I am happy though, I am getting around 160 gigs per month traffic (mostly from large file downloads) and I am having no performance problems. I did have some performance problems around the start of my second month but this was because i needed to configure apache etc to handle download managers and things like that.

    Sorry this is poorly edited i wasn't going to say anything but decided to look on here just before bed. I am off too sleep.
    filevortex.net

    My site. Mostly just a mirror for Autopatcher at the moment, but I will add a LOT more content over the next few weeks.

  22. #22

    Hmmm

    Quote Originally Posted by becooler
    just want to keep you posted, our server downed around 3pm, opened ticket immediately. called them more than 10 times, nobody answered phone, at this time 10:30pm still no fix, no email reply. just nobody. we have been happy with them for more than 3 months, but today it is really unacceptable, i just wonder where the employees are?
    What server are you on?

    I am on Homer and I haven't noticed any downtime (I have independent monitoring setup).

    Let us all know how this resolves please. If you leave a comment like this surely its fair you let us know how it turns out
    filevortex.net

    My site. Mostly just a mirror for Autopatcher at the moment, but I will add a LOT more content over the next few weeks.

  23. #23
    ok, some update. at 3:30am, Jeffrey forwarded us an email from DMCA. it turns out that some users uploaded copyrighted mp3 and make it public. (we have a free tool that allow you to edit mp3 online.)
    DMCA sent an email to zone.net, and zone.net called us two days ago. but one of our employees who answered the phone thought it is spam and told him it is a "wrong number" since we got lots of ads spam calls. yesterday they turned off our server. right now it is still down. they just forwarded the email to us and did nothing else. we tried to reach them on phone this morning, nobody answered phone. live help shows online, but tried N times, just nobody there.
    two thoughts:
    1. yes, it is our employee fault to tell them it is "wrong number", but before they turned off vps, shouldn't they send an email to us?
    2. how come nobody work at the normal business hours? is there any bug in their online chat tool and they don't answer the phone intentionally? or they work as a part-time job?

    your comments are welcome!

  24. #24

    Okay then

    So it wasn't a technical fault which caused your VPS to go down, but zone.net acting on an email from the DMCA. So zone.net may feel you have violated the terms of service but you are saying you have been unable to establish adequete communication with them over this matter and wish to protest that their decision is not fair?

    You acknowledge some fault on behalf of your employee in that zone.net did try and contact you but feel the communication on their side is still inadequete...

    They have contacted you twice over the matter (the email and phone call) but certainly I agree that taking down a VPS is a big deal without solid justification, and I guess from the view of an outside party the correctness of that decision is not yet apparent.

    I did try to contact them via live support just then to point them towards this thread but they did not respond in this instance, which is suggestive of what you are saying about a communications problem

    Obviously from the point of view of an outsider people would be curious to find more information about the DMCA issue to see if the action seems justified. I can imagine certainly a site getting unfairly jumped on over a DMCA issue but on the other hand of course zone.net must be careful in such a situation. They cannot allow content which is breaching the law.

    One thing i find curious is that you offer a tool to edit mp3's online, I am not sure how this would allow a user to make an mp3 public on your site and get you into trouble? And is this something you can prevent reoccuring?

    It does seem zone.net may need to make a statement or two regarding the communications issue regarding their service because it does seem this is an issue, and hopefully they can assure us the situation will improve soon.

    I can't yet see that they have acted unreasonable further than the issue with communication, of course the consequence of this is serious in your case. We need to hear from zone.net I am thinking

    Oh just thought i would clarify, you have a server with them, not vps?
    Last edited by MichaelN2006; 01-19-2007 at 10:30 AM.
    filevortex.net

    My site. Mostly just a mirror for Autopatcher at the moment, but I will add a LOT more content over the next few weeks.

  25. #25
    hi, MichaelN2006. thanks for the reply.
    they just contacted us ONCE before turned off server. after we opened tickets, they forwarded the email. If we got the DMCA's email, we will remove the mp3 immediately.
    about our tool, it allows you edit mp3 into ringtone, then you can share it with others, or make it private.
    our main concern is their communication problem. we can understand they shut down our server because of content violation. (but of course, we think DMCA should contact us first instead of zone.net, but that is DMCA problem). we chose them at the beginning is because of their online support, 24 hour phone supports. but now looks like everything is changed. all you can do now is to pray your server never screw up and you won't need to contact them at all.
    Last edited by becooler; 01-19-2007 at 10:44 AM.

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