How to gain a customer in one easy step

Wednesday July 19, 2006 @ 02:34 PM (PDT)

My first choice for Jetpants' new colocation provider fell through yesterday when I discovered that they wanted to charge me double just to provide an additional network drop for the server's remote access card (which I'll probably use once every six months or so). I'd have understood charging a small additional monthly fee for the extra connection, but charging me for an additional unit of rack space and a terabyte of bandwidth was unacceptable. I tried to negotiate, but they wouldn't budge an inch. So screw 'em. If that's the kind of service they provide, I'm not interested.

I've been emailing other companies all day asking for quotes, but none had responded until this afternoon, when I sent an email to Simpli Hosting and got a response within minutes saying that they'd be happy to provide an extra network drop free of charge. Guess who's getting my business?

Comments

Surely, you aren't going to fall for fair pricing and good service?

That's how they get you. First the fair pricing and good service. But then later they might just throw in extra support for something! Those dirty bastards....

You can't trust people who spell things without y's. I mean, extra y's, q's and k's? TOTALLY normal. But FEWER y's? That's just flying in the face of coolness.

Going to charge you for another rack for the extra network connection?

And on a totally unrelated note, I assume you are using a Dell server with a IPMI/DRAC card. How does that work out? I've heard that ocassionaly they totally lockup and need a hard reboot.

Superb Servers was the company that wanted to charge us double. I've heard lots of good things about their data centers and support people, but their sales process could use some work.

I've never heard of a DRAC causing any problems. I've managed servers with DRACs before, and they're the best thing since sliced pie.

Our racks contain tens of DRAC-enabled Dell servers, all of which have been running fine since we bought them (in the longest case, about a year ago.) I will note that while the console is Java based, I couldn't get it to run under any JVM/browser combination in Linux. This makes me sad.

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