How To Balance between price and support

[wipr]

Hi

We have been hosting a relatively high bandwidth dedicated server with Aplus for the past 8 months and have received consistently poor service. They do not offer 24/7 live support as they claim, as their live chat support for dedicated server clients rarely has a person at the other end and it usually goes to a messaging system. There is generally only one person sitting at telephone support at night (the day for me in my time zone) who is usually cheeky and impolite. When an issue goes beyond his or her competence, you have to wait 5-8 hours until a second level technician comes to work. Over the past few months our uptime has been around 90% (not 99% as they claim) [according to my ping service] and they recently experienced a major electricity disruption to their dedicated servers where the servers were down for 4 hours (they claim to have 100% electricity uptime). In short, they were the cheapest option for us ($99 for a fairly good dedicated server) and the saying cheap and nasty proved true yet again.

We are now seeking to move to a better hosting company. While we do not wish to overpay, we would like to find a company that offers a good balance between price and levels of support. Uptime should obviously be 99.9%, and the levels of support should be excellent and responsive. We will also probably want a managed server solution. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks,

[tosh]

It's really difficult to determine the the ratio between price and quality, I would probably recommend that you make a list of your priorities in terms of price, type of server management, server specifications, data center location. It will help people here to come up with some valuable recommendations.

[saganaka]

I personally stick with a dedicated server provider that doesn't offer admin services & then outsource for managed services. This way I can find the best admin for my needs & I'm not stuck with the admins the provider hires.

In the past year I have had to find a new admin 4 times due to the old admins' incompetency. So far so good with the new one! Be very careful if you choose this route. Some admin services claim to be the experts but are just kids with little or no experience that are looking for work to grow their new business.

Also, absolutely require that they are located in the US and are fluent in the English language.. well unless you're in a different country and speak their native tongue.

[simonsays]

This balance is hard to find but not impossible. There are few good server provider with good support service.

I will suggest you one service provider Reseller Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Shared Hosting plans - CPWebHosting

[japworld]

I'm not sure you will be able to find a decent managed dedicated server with quality support for less than $200 per month. I've changed several managed Linux server dedicated providers, and every time I switched I went for more expensive server (same server config pretty much) until I'm relatively happy with my current solution for $250/mo.

Make sure that the company you choose has been in business for a while and it has 24/7 phone or pager support.

Good luck!

[saganaka]

I feel that email/ticketing support is more proficient then telephone because when you send in an email or create a ticket, the tech has the chance to research and investigate the problem more in-depth, as to a phone call...