I've finally gotten a dedicated server set up with serverpronto.com. That server is now hosting this blog. It's really nice to finally have a well-connected web server that I can control by RDP'ing in.
I will say I'm not too impressed with serverpronto. They are cheap -- way less money per month than anyone else. You get what you pay for, right? They say they'll have it set up in 24 hours of signing on. I signed on Sunday night and didn't get my welcome email until early Thursday AM. I called on Tuesday and they said they were having trouble getting the Windows Server 2008 image to work with their hardware, so it would take a couple days, or I could just go with Windows Server 2003 instead and have it up "in an hour; well, certainly less than two hours." I told them to do the 2003 model.
Another 24 hours later, still not up. I click on Live Chat on the website, which actually isn't live chat, it just sends them an email which they will reply to within 24 hours. Let me quote their response:
Message Received Via AliveChat @ 12/17/2008 11:15:59 PM
Your welcome email has been sent when the server was completed a few days ago. I just resent the email. If you are not receiving it you may want to check your spam filter or junk mail settings.
Here are some facts surrounding this:
- I use gmail to read my mail. As is the default, I keep all spam for 30 days.
- Two welcome emails were sent right after this was sent. Both had dates in their content of 12/18.
- Searching my mail for serverpronto, both searching in all mail, in:spam, and in:trash returns no welcome messages (besides the two dated 12/18).
- "A few days ago" actually would have been before Tuesday, before my account was even set up.
My response: pretty ticked off because this evidence suggests to me that serverpronto's response was an outright lie. This motivated me to make this blog post.
The Moral of the Story: to all tech support people, and I believe this is true in general, not just for tech support people, you'll get a lot farther with your customers if you come clean with your mistakes than you will by lying. I don't trust the people at serverpronto. I just hope they put decent hardware on and can keep the power and pipeline connected to it until I can afford to upgrade to someone else (or hopefully Amazon or Microsoft's cloud computing will come down a bit in price. Right now $50 per month is about my limit).