A prospective client called in this week looking for info on dedicated servers, colo, and hosted firewall/vpn service. He said that he was paying too much for cloud servers from a large national provider and was very unhappy with their performance and ‘lack’ of support. In addition to these issues, he was told:
- Colo service for a 1u server for development would be $450 per month. We charge $99.95 per month + offer a 100% uptime SLA, 30 day satisfaction guarantee, etc.
- They wanted to sell him a Cisco PIX firewall for $150 per month. Cisco hasn’t sold PIX firewalls since early 2008. We offer the Cisco ASA line starting at $50 per month for managed / dedicated service OR $10 for the box colo.
- Here is a quote re their support “Another issue we have at SERVICE PROVIDER NAME is our server is somehow screwed up and service pack 1 keeps failing to install. MS had 2 suggestions, repair install or download this 300MB app to fix the issue and neither worked they both failed. SERVICE PROVIDER NAME cannot or will not support a fix.” We offer management services on contract or as needed by experienced and knowledgeable engineers (something most places are not even capable of, let alone offer to their customers).
He is overpaying for ‘cloud’ servers that are most likely underpowered and over subscribed (they must have worked for AOL back in the day). We offered a free trial of our cloud servers – two of them with a private network between them for his secure database transactions to interface with his application / web server in addition to secure public access, colo for his development server, options for dedicated servers, and the Cisco ASA 5505 entry level firewall / vpn service, plus offered service and support to help him with migrating his servers to our infrastructure — all for less than what he is paying for his current inadequate service.
Unfortunately this is not uncommon. There are MANY companies offering what they call ‘high performance cloud servers with fanatical / inspired / full service support’ that are doing a great disservice to their customers and the entire community. Their incompetence is cloaked with a good sales pitch, their low prices overshadow cheap & oversold resources. If you are looking for economically priced cloud servers, colo service, dedicated servers, etc — please email us at sales@cera.net and give us the opportunity to show you how we help out customers do more with less & sleep better at night knowing that their services are backed by professionals that care of their success.