| Q. |
 |
Considering the myriad of self-acclaimed hosting providers
in the industry today, what were the determining factors in
your decision to migrate all of your businesses to 2advanced.net? |
|
| A. |
|
Plain and simple, "Tech Support." As a rather large
resource site, we get a fair amount of traffic at Ultrashock
and require solid hosting with 24-hour technical support. Usually
when you have a challenge, it requires a reasonable response
time. Most of the time, our definition of "reasonable"
and the actual response time is way off. We also knew that in
the coming years, our site would grow three fold or more, and
there was no way we would compromise our stability with poor
tech support. Besides that, we have quite a few forum addicts
that may not make it thru the day without their daily dose of
perusing thru the forums. Ever since we migrated to 2ANet, if
there is ever a problem someone is already on it by the time
we contact tech support and they keep us up to date on the progress.
That's all we ever expected. |
|
| Q. |
|
What level of traffic does Ultrashock currently sustain
on a monthly basis and how is performance during peak utilization?
|
|
| A. |
|
Lately our overall site traffic seems to be growing steadily
and the traffic to our forums was over 250,000 unique visitors
for the month of October. It seems very solid to me during peak
times and I rarely notice any slowness aside from my ISP. I
just “pinged” our server and the average response time was 12
milliseconds and there are almost 100 users online. |
|
| Q. |
|
What does the future hold for Ultrashock in terms
of hosting growth and needs? |
|
| A. |
|
Bandwidth, and lots of it! Our future plans for Ultrashock
is that we will probably double or triple the size of the site
in the next year or so. We will be offering more services to
the community including ecommerce and this requires more and
more technical support. We know without a doubt, the 2ANet crew
will be there to help us answer all of our questions and handle
any issues that may arise and most importantly provide us with
a stable hosting environment we can count on. |
|
| Q. |
|
In your opinion, what factors have contributed most
to the declining state of Web Hosts and Managed Hosting Services
in general? |
|
| A. |
|
It seems that once they get you "sold" on their
service that's all that matters to them and they look for the
next big customer to go after. Whatever happened to customer
service? We feel it is an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship
and one we take very seriously. Most designers and developers
I know host from a few, to a hundred sites or so and not all
of them want to become telnet geeks. They simply want a nice,
stable, and easy to manage setup to host their customer's sites
so they can focus on building them. |
|
| Q. |
|
Briefly, can you provide us with an overview of how
you have embraced the 2advanced.net hosting offering? In particular,
how many servers and what other equipment or services do you
currently use 2advanced.net for? |
|
| A. |
|
We recently purchased our own server, which is an IBM 345
with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, redundant power supplies,
6 hot-swappable SCSI RAID drive bays and dual Xeon processors.
We host a few other customer sites (some of which get pretty
decent traffic), as well as Ultrashock. I am sure we will add
more servers to our cluster in the near future as our needs
grow. |
|
| Q. |
|
Where do you fall in the spectrum of quality of service
vs. the economies of price? How have these factors influenced
your decision to choose 2advanced.net as your Managed Service
Provider? |
|
| A. |
|
We expect both and don't mind paying for quality service.
At our level, quality service is first and foremost on our mind,
as is reasonable prices. We experienced both of these to be
the case at 2ANET. |
|
| Q. |
|
In general, how has your overall hosting experience
with 2advanced.net been? More specifically, was your initial
transition to the 2advanced.net service painless and have service
levels remained constant with your expectations? |
|
| A. |
|
Our transition was "flawless." In fact, come to
think of it... We spend less time messing around on the server
lately, and more time on development. That's what everyone wants
to accomplish. |
|
| Q. |
|
How would you compare your transition effort and continuing
service levels against your experiences with your previous hosting
providers? |
|
| A. |
|
It's like the feeling you have when you are just leaving work
and taking off to Hawaii for vacation. When you get there you
start to relax and do the things you enjoy doing. There really
is no comparison. The 2ANet team has every level figured out
hands down. |
|
| Q. |
|
Lastly, in the spirit of shameless self-promotion,
is there anything else you would like to say? |
|
| A. |
|
On a serious note, I would like to add that I am a very particular
person when it comes to the details. I am extremely impressed
with the 2ANet team from the business side to the technical
support side of things. These guys operate on a very courteous
and professional level and they have the skills necessary to
give customers the high level of service they require. If you
are serious about your hosting needs, do what we did. Switch.
You'll be glad you did! |
|
|
|
Special thanks from the 2advanced.net team
to Patrick Miko, co-founding partner of Ultrashock, for taking
the time to candidly answer our questions regarding our service
offering. |
