In a previous post, I outlined how we were looking at managed hosting for SuperMotors, to replace the current colocation contract we’ve had for nearly 2 years. After much negotiation with Rackspace, PEER 1, and INetU, none of them were able to come up with a proposal that was attractive enough as ipHouse’s offer. Here’s how things went down:

4th Place: INetU

I really liked their website, the fact that they promoted their customer satisfaction rating (which is really high, at 96%), and they offered FreeBSD (my OS of choice, and where my comfort level is). Unfortunately, their pricing structure is not setup for high-bandwidth environments, as their bid came in much, much higher than the other 3 ISPs who were bidding on our business. Kudos to them for not straying from their core competency, but probably not a viable consideration for us in the future unless they make significant changes to their billing model.

3rd Place: Rackspace

I have real-world experience with Rackspace and their managed hosting, so I knew what to expect in terms of service and support. They did an excellent job in coming down on the costs of their hardware to match PEER 1’s quote, but just were not able to match the bandwidth (they could not go higher than 1000 GB/mo — as this is their standard bandwidth package). They could have gone higher, but at $1/GB, which would have gotten very expensive for us. Had bandwidth not been the primary driver behind our decision, Rackspace might have been our final decision, just based on my past experience with them as a managed hosting provider.

2nd Place: PEER 1

Excellent sales follow-up, paid attention to my blog, and had the best overall price between INetU, Rackspace, and PEER 1. However, in the end, they did not offer FreeBSD for an operating system and required a 12/31/06 commitment date, which would have meant 2 months of overlapped billing with our current ipHouse colocation contract and the new PEER 1 managed contract. Also, switching ISPs would have meant dealing with DNS switches for our customer’s domains, dealing with e-mail account downtime for customers, transferring data over the Internet to the new servers…the list of “cons” went on and on. Granted, this would have been the situation for INetU, Rackspace, or PEER 1…which is why we went with ipHouse:

1st Place: ipHouse

Our current ISP where we’ve colocated for many years now. We’re comfortable with their support, their sales staff, and their network reliability. This, combined with the fact that they will run a managed FreeBSD server for us, matched the PEER 1 bandwidth quote, beat the PEER 1 hardware quote (PEER 1 uses commodity hardware to keep costs down where as ipHouse is getting us new Dell servers). Plus, not having to deal with the IP change, DNS changes, e-mail downtime, etc…everything just made sense for us to stay with the current provider, and for less than we’re paying today. We also bumped up our colocation contract expiration date by 30 days to get started with managed hosting even sooner. Bottom line: no overlap in hosting contracts, faster time-to-production with managed hosting, more bandwidth, better/faster/more reliable servers, less cost.

Moral of the story

• If you’re near the end of your hosting contract, always shop around to see what else is out there. The grass may be greener on the other side.
• Put a competitor’s bid in the hands of your current ISP and see what they can do about meeting or beating the bid.
• Prices are usually negotiable. Never take the first offer and always talk to the rep via phone or e-mail about the quote so they can understand your level of commitment for hosting.
• By renegotiating, you may be able to enter into a new/better contract a month or two sooner than expected — and thus not have to wait for your existing contract to expire, as long as it means your current ISP keeps you as a customer for a longer period of time.
• It’s more expensive for an ISP to obtain a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer for slightly less money.

Related posts

• Managed hosting – Rackspace vs. Peer1 vs. INetU (Part 1) (4)
• What is so difficult about this sales process thing? (1)
• Our horrible experience with CCSI (Computer and Control Solutions) (0)
• apache mod_deflate reduces bandwidth usage by 27% on SuperMotors.net (1)
• 5 Reasons to avoid multi-year colocation contracts (1)

We recently became new owners of a 50″ Panasonic Plasma TV. With this TV comes HD capabilities. We are die-hard DIRECTV subscribers, so naturally we wanted the best of all worlds: HD + Satellite + DVR.

Unfortunately, being the holiday season, DIRECTV had these wonderful units on back order. So, this meant we would have to settle for standard HD satellite with no DVR capabilities. This is being installed on 12/30. But, good news! Last week (after only about an 8-day waiting period), DIRECTV’s automated service called to inform us that the DVR was available. I promptly called, kindly accepted the $299 one-time charge (spread across 3 billing cycles, of course), and scheduled the DVR for installation on 1/15.

I’m interested to see what the interface is like on this new DVR. It doesn’t appear to be a Tivo unit, so we may be giving up the use of Tivo capabilities, which would really be a bummer. But, with only one HD TV in the house, it’s not like a networked Tivo does us much good, anyway. Plus, downloading HD content via a wireless connection to a PC for offline viewing isn’t exactly, speedy either. Hopefully DIRECTV has ways to schedule programming online with this new DVR. It sure does look nice — can’t wait to get my hands on it.

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• Disappointing DIRECTV HD DVR (1)
• When will TV have its version of the RSS feed? (0)
• Viewing 200+ TV channels by number & a 4-character station ID is not usable (0)

I’ve been a Google Apps for your Domain user/administrator since they first launched the service with just e-mail hosting. It wasn’t until recently that I noticed they offered more services than just e-mail hosting:

• Calendars
• Chat
• Customized Start Page
• Domain Web Pages

I realized that calendars and chat were basically available, what I didn’t realize was that you could toggle them on/off. I also realized that there wasn’t a waiting list for signing up new domain names any more (though the service is still in “beta”), too. I proceeded to setup google apps for 7 other domain names, making a total of 8 domains that I use Google apps for. After trying to add a 9th domain, I got this message:

The Google Team

Bummer! But, I can’t complain. I’ll take free e-mail hosting for 8 domains. This also means I can clear off all of the e-mail accounts on our mail server which makes one less thing to setup when we switch ISPs. What I also like is the ability to host web pages on a domain name with Google, meaning I can eliminate all of the one-page domains that we host, as well. Can’t wait to see what’s next with the service — hopefully full integration with Picasa, Gmail mobile, and other Google applications/utilities.

Related posts

• What is so difficult about this sales process thing? (1)
• We’ve landed on a managed hosting contract (0)
• reCAPTCHA Mailhide secures your e-mail link online (0)
• Our horrible experience with CCSI (Computer and Control Solutions) (0)
• Managed hosting – Rackspace vs. Peer1 vs. INetU (Part 1) (4)

It was a busy weekend and I didn’t keep up on my RSS feed reading. Monday’s are typically very busy as well, so here I am, Monday night, catching up on all that’s happened in the online world via my RSS feeds. Now, I realize that bloggers are trying to generate/keep readers and revenue by posting often, but it’s amazing how many blogs cover the same exact stories. Thankfully, Google Reader makes it easy to “skim,” but still.

I hope Google has the following in store for its Google Reader service:

• Search past/present RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. I can’t believe how many times I start reading, get distracted, close my browser, and wish I could find the feed again. I honestly don’t pay any attention to which blogs I’m reading from — once I’ve subscribed, as far as I’m concerned it’s something I’m interested in and pay little attention to it. With the RSS feed list topping 100 blogs, it’s almost impossible to remember all of them anyway. So, a searchable feed list of my subscribed-to feeds would be great, thanks.
• Mark individual posts as unread. I like to refer to feeds later and don’t want to mark everything as “read.” RSS feeds are great for skimming, but reading with more comprehension or wanting to post comments later on is something I like to do — but I don’t want to keep a list of unread posts in my del.icio.us account. I really don’t have another way to keep track of them…once they’re “read,” they’re gone forever (hence the searchable options; see above bullet point).
• Consolidate posts that are similar in context. Kind of like Gmail organizes threads/conversations by subject, but group blog posts in a similar fashion. This is probably largely beyond the scope of the reader, but hey, it’s Google. They should be able to figure out how to make this a reality. It sure would save me a lot of time.   This might also encourage more unique content than simply regurgitating articles/news found on other sites.

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Making the switch to Gmail — on a full-time basis
For quite some time, I had been using Google Apps’ hosted e-mail service for negate.net. It’s all nice and everything in that I rarely ever have to worry about e-mail servers going down anymore, but as Google rolls out new features like Gmail mobile (for Blackberry) and other services that are integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar, they seem to forget about the Google Apps hosted domains (like negate.net). In their defense, Google Apps is still in beta, so supporting it in everything they launch may not be a top priority, but I was genuinely bummed when my negate.net e-mail did not work on Gmail’s mobile client.

Gmail supports multiple e-mail accounts with ease
So, today I setup all of my e-mail accounts (those that are hosted by Google and those that are still hosted by me) to be forwarded to my Gmail account which I had never really used before until today. Gmail supports sending from multiple e-mail addresses and as long as you can forward your e-mail to your single gmail.com address, this is really a dream come true for me.

Goodbye Entourage
I am now going to try completely eliminating the use of Entourage (OS X version of Outlook) for e-mail and for calendar purposes. I still use my Exchange server calendar and BlackBerry for most of my scheduling needs, but with Google Notifier, keeping up-to-date with personal calendar events and all of my personal e-mail addresses is quite easy whether I’m on my home computer or my office computer. Not to mention that I have a centralized address book and everything is now fully web-based. Plus, iCal can “subscribe” to my Google Calendar.

RSS + Calendar + Gmail =
Combine all of this with the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader widgets that I can place on my customized Google Homepage, and I really have all of my favorite daily tools one click away via my web browser. Very, very handy. And best of all, it’s all accessible via my BlackBerry. Previously, any e-mails that were downloaded to Entourage on my home computer were essentially in a black hole where I could never get back to them unless I remote-accessed the machine or kept a copy on the server. I’ve never enjoyed either of these two methods — now I have a central source for all of my contacts, mail, and scheduling that lives outside of the office.

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