email settings/network setup

[trafford]

so the guy may have well been called william the lier then . . . why does that not suprise me . . . . . so your company, do you offer telephone support? i don't mean for this lol, i meant if we decided to change hosts.

[pinbrook]

we offer support via email/online ticket desk - you can access this via a browser to see your questions and our replies (this keeps a history too). During the day support can be realtime

by restricting support to email means we can extend support hours

[cbarling]

so why is there such a big gap in prices between someone like easyspace and actinic? what do you get for your money? (dont say working email!)

What you get with any Actinic specialist is:
- knowledge of how to configure Actinic with the hosting
- enough customers using Actinic so that if someone changes something so that the configuration stops working, it will be fixed very quickly
- some go-faster stripes that makes the hosting quicker and uploading faster than it would be with a general host

With Actinic themselves, you get your hosting from the same datacentre as the X-factor web site. Servers are monitored both inside and outside the firewall. There are hardware engineers on site 24x7 (the same guys that look after ITVs web sites) and Actinic senior software engineers on call 24x7 on the end of a mobile. They are both automatically called if the monitoring shows a problem.

Why the price difference? There's a roughly fixed cost per month per server to provide the service. As a provider you can get the price as low as you want. You simply load up more sites on the server. It just has higher risks of problems and lower performance.

The issue is essentially about quality, which means availability and performance, which in turn has a major impact on your traffic (as stated by Google, anyway). I could go on for ages about all of the reasons why this is true, but that's the bottom line.

Chris

[trafford]

chris many thanks for the detailed answer, i appreciate the points you make and i will bear this in mind when looking to replace easyspace.

jo, i'll be completely honest, not having telephone support of some kind puts me off a little, and i have been looking at your packages, i think as i'm new to all this and learning it feesl like you have a safety net when you have a number you can call. i'm sure once we have a reliable host that knows how actinic works it will be trouble free and we wouldn't need use it, but i don't think i'd be alone in thinking along those lines. i won't let it put me off completely though but i think need to take a bit longer looking as i don't really know what our needs are regarding disc space, bandwidth etc, christ i don't even know how you work it out lol . . . .

[trafford]

one thing i would like to add about actinic's phone support is that i have learnt it is important to take names, from today. there seems to be a couple of people in support i have talked to that have been really helpfull and a couple that have assumed i know what i'm talking about, which i don't and i'll admit it! my terminology of situations and the way i phrase things is probably not in the way that they understand but until i learn more i don't know how i am expected to put it across.

after 'sending' three or four snapshots and not hearing anything back i finally got someone today that explained that i could upload the snapshot via ftp to them, which i did, and they are now looking into my email dilemma. the only thing i've thought so far that afterwards i felt was a bit poor, was that somebody could have just phoned me and told me the snapshot hadn't arrived, that would be customer support in my eyes. i had emails days after sending to say the case was closed but i didn't realise they were talking about the file not being received, maybe the email could have been better in its explanation for those of us that are not yet up to speed

[leehack]

With Actinic themselves, you get your hosting from the same datacentre as the X-factor web site.

Double goat point to the big boss for the name drop .

[trafford]

will we get more hits if i put x factor in as a meta description? lol

[guccij]

i'll be completely honest, not having telephone support of some kind puts me off a little

Don't be put off - we recently launched a new site with Jo @ Pinbrook and the support was second to none. It was truly a real time email conversation and even though all the problems were of our own making, not once did we get the impression that we were asking too many questions or being too needy.

[trafford]

i need to stop googling web hosting, it's driving me dafter than the email scenario . . . . my threads going off topic i know but how can this lot, 34sp.com who are apparently just around the corner, offer 25gb of disc space and 100gb of data transfer for a tenner a month? i take it that's shared space not just for us? and how would i know how many we share with? do the hosts tell you?

i've gathered people say it's better to pay more to have less users on the same server, makes sense, but how can you tell and if i were to ring up and ask questions what do i ask?

my brain hurts . . . .

[leehack]

Go with one of the proven name mentioned numerous times on the forum, that's a safe bet then. Chances are if you don't know what you'll need regarding capacities, it will be very very little at this stage. Choose your host, then worry about what you need, they should be independent choices, ie the correct host is the most important, the price is irrelevant if the site does just a tiny bit well.

[cbarling]

Hosting is sold a bit like snake oil. Take a big allowance on bandwidth for a low price.

For Actinic customers, around 80% of new sites use less than 1GB per month in the first year. So if you were to sell an allowance of 100GB, probably nobody at all would use that much.

If someone did use 100GB per month, they would be a phenomenally suceesful site, and you can only use that much if the server is fast enough. We have a fair amount of knowledge about this, because Actinic do actually host several sites at this level.

So would a new site, signed up for cheap hosting use 100GB? There are two points to make about that. Firstly, they probably wouldn't have become that successful on poor quality hosting. There is research showing that faster hosting increases orders, so the converse must be true. Secondly, anyone with that much traffic is likely to be doing £1m + of sales. They won't have a problem with paying more for quality hosting and will have long since moved from cheap and nasty hosting.

So in practise, a company selling oodles of bandwidth for a low price never actually has to deliver on it. You could try asking any of these hosts if they can name a customer actually using 100GB per month, or anything near it.

If you buy hosting from Actinic, you will actually be able to use what is promised.

Chris