Okay - I am looking at getting a server(s) here - and switching partially from EV1 - but why woud I be better off?

Looking for feedback - I use a third party company to maintain my server - so would not need that service, and the prices are similar - so need to justify the move with other reasons.

Thanks.

If you need reasons to move, then you obviously don't need to move, simple as that. Why are you thinking of moving? If you're happy with EV1, don't move. If you're not, that's reason enough, surely.

My feedback... The Planet is better

We switched because we were tired of things like incorrectly formatted machines and making changes to hardware that were not authorized were happening at EV1. You should only switch on your own reasons.

Sounds horribly familiar

sorry for butting in your thread but Im considering the same move. Those of you that did move from EV1 is the support here better? worse? same? I am trying to get away from my ensim 3.1 crap box to a cpanel box (ev1 wont support anything that "stopped working" for no reason like inconsistent receiving of emails) and Im curious as to how servermatrix is since ThePlanet seems to run all the gaming servers on the net i take it their connections are solid. and you seem to get more for your buck here.

I've used both. my take is ev1 offers more limited support, but tends to respond a little quicker. ev1 in my opinion makes as many mistakes as sm, so they are even on that count. Both companies can be frustrating to deal with when they make a mistake and think you are at fault. ev1 has more of a reputation for formatting boxes when you didn't ask for it. sm is cheaper when comparing machines head to head. game sm.

You should definitly get a box at servermatrix or theplanet. There support is amazing for cpanel I broke somthing once they fixed it and are always keen to help.

Based on my experience with EV1 couple of years ago, not sure how much has changed since then so I am not sure if this is still valid.

1) Configuration Flexibility
================

At the offset, The Planet offers flexibility on server configuration as there are always several CPU choices and within each of the choice, you can make some minor changes such as RAM, Harddisk and all that to configure to your needs. EV1 does not provide that as they prebuild machine and expects you to conform to what they offer at that point of time. For that, the Planet offers flexibility but the EV1 sacrifices flexibility for the sake of instant set up. I would assume that taking a dedicated server it is a long term commitment and as such there would be some preplanning involved and not something you get only at the time you need it. In any case, most of the Planet set up would take anything between 1 to 24 hours to setup.

I know that EV1 allows you to make option changes after set up but that usually involved set up fees. The Planet allows you to get the configuration right the first time and if it is done at that point of time, you do not need to pay additional set up fees for the add-ons.

You sometimes do fine that what you want at EV1 to be constantly sold out but you don't quite see that happening at The Planet.


2) Service with a Smile
==============

So far my experience with The Planet is that you are dealing with people and they treat you like a valued customer each time. With EV1, you are just treated like a customer ID a number in their books.

3) Managed Service
============

There are times in which you need a quick remote hands service which the tech at The Planet would be willing to provide. EV1 comes as a unmanaged solution so you are pretty much on your own, there are times in which their tech would help but they are not obligated to do so.

4) SLA
====

EV1 does not have any SLA on anything so if their network goes down or anything, they are not responsible for you (at least in the books) to get it back online. You just take what they give you. Of course, so far their network has been quite stable most of the time.

The Planet goes to the extend of offering an SLA (99.9% on SM servers and 100% on The Planet servers). So if their network goes down for some reasons and you are affected, you can get some form of compensation. The money isn't too much of an issue but the underlining implication is that they care about keeping their network up and running as they made themselves responsible if it does not.

5) VLAN setup
=========

One obvious advantage is that with The Planet, you can assign as many IPs address as you want for your server. With EV1, if you need more IPs, you sometimes need to move your machine to a new switch and that means changing all your IP addresses.

6) The Planet listens
=============

Over the years, they have listened to customers requests and concerns and have implemented many of time. That includes one-time setup fees for component add-ons, control panel options, SSL, Flood and Intrusion Protection and so on. Some of which are offered for free or at cost.

There are more but my hands are tired now.

Thats a very good comparison, TP should hire you for a marketing position

Eddy, can you explain what you mean? Do you mean using internal IP address space?

Err, what I mean is external IP address. Sorry I was clear there. Should have proofread.

Okay, here's an example. Say now you have 13 IPs to your machine and you require an additional 16 more. You just submit an IP request ticket and give them the justification for the needs of the IPs and they would assign them to you on that same machine. That is what you get here at The Planet/Servermatrix.

While my experience with EV1 is that whenever I require additional IP addresses, they will tell me that the switch I am on does not support adding additional IP addresses and if I need it, I need to have my machine moved to somewhere else in their datacenter and with that move, I need to change all my external IPs on my machine. This can be rather disruptive to say the least.

It should be noted that you need to document the outage and put in an SLA claim to recieve any refund for the outage period. Be sure to request a copy of the SLA from sales if you are a new customer, and ask questions if you don't understand any sections of the SLA.

Asking that here is like asking the chior if they like the preacher...
TP/SM is better for to many reasons to list.
If you need to look some place else then you have issues with EV1 and nothing more be said.

Well said !...

I moved all of our servers to TP December 2003/January 2004. That was after spending 27 months with EV1 originally Rackshack. After they changed from RS to EV1 things went downhill for us. Previously you could get support that would read the tickets instead of just attempting to close them. Also, they opened new DCs in that time which horribly undermanned their support department. We had one server that they formatted main and backup drives because the ticket was read wrong by a tech and it was someone elses machine being cleaned. We had another HW issue that went on for 2 months where a drive was failing and they swapped cables, memory, and even chasis instead of the HD even though we had complete backups and begged for it. Then one day out of the blue in the middle of it the tech decided it was the drive, pulled the primary in the middle of the day with no warning and put in a new one and began to image. We were never contacted.

Now you know why I am anti-EV1, but in over a year I have never seen SM display any amount of incompetence. They are normally extremely professional on the phone or in ticket. If you need a real person instead of the ticket system they are there instead of forcing you to use that live chat or a non-English phone support person from EV1. I still have credits with EV1 for all of the mistakes that were made last year and I can't bring myself to buy anything from them to use the credits. I am sure some have had some kind of similiar experience here at TP, but I think they will be rare.

Because you want to. Else you wouldn't be here.

Coucou, are you (Gentle Giant) here; after your first post, no more words from you !?!...

Curious !...

Paul scared him off.

I just wonder if it was a ev1 staff !...

I sent him to managed, because they rock

</sarcasm>

LOL - sorry the forum didn't tell me there were new messages

No I am genuine. Problem is I asked the company who looks after the management of my servers, and they advised that I was better with EV1 - they spoke of slower service here in response to tickets.

So it probably looks like I will not be switching any servers

That is not to say I won't take a test server at some point.

Thanks for all your feedback.

No worries. Actually if there is a party which handles your server management, there is really no need for them to approach support here in the first place unless if it is a hardware issue. If the one who does your server management would need to depend on Servermatrix tech then they are not really much of a management company in the first place

EV1 does have faster responses but sometimes their technicans are as dumb as my door knob. The answers they provide seems like just cut and paste responses and they have never been much of a help to me.

I don't blame them, EV1 does provide a totally unmanaged service so they are usually no help for most of the time. Their answers to me when I was with them for everything I asked them was 'Sorry Sir, we do not provide that service' and that's the only time they apologize but when they mess up my server or fail to provide any real information in the front, they would never apologize.

There was a point of time when I had a Cobalt Server with them. I saw that they offered a harddisk add-on for $99 setup / $49 monthly for a 40gb harddisk. I asked for that to be installed and lo and behold they did, they threw in a 20gb harddisk with had someone else's data in there. I told them that I requested for a 40gb harddisk and for $99 setup, I expected them to at least format the harddisk for me. They told me that the Cobalt does not support 40gb harddisk and say that they cannot lower the fees. Ouch, they could have told me that before they installed it. *It is only after my case that they decided to include that disclaimer on their site*. Then as for the data on the new harddisk, they say they do not provide that service and I needed to do it myself. I was given the option to stay with it or remove the harddisk but I still needed to pay for the $99 setup fees. Ouch, that is bad. That was about 3 years ago.

Apologies, whilst they commented upon tickets taking slightly longer - it was the abuse department that they did not like.

Can anyone let me know if their criticism of the abuse department is fair.

I can accept slightly slower support - but what concerns me is if my IP were to get listed due to the abuse department not cracking down on idiots

Thanks.

I could think of only 2 reasons for getting your IPs blacklisted. One would be the unfortunate instance in which you inherit an already blacklisted IP and in which case, you could ask for your IPs to be changed at the offset of getting the machine. There are blacklist systems which would let you scan for blacklisted IPs.

The second is that someone on your server abused the service and got your IP blacklisted. In which case, some good management and monitoring of the activities on your server could help do some stop gap measures or even reduce the likelihood of that happening. For instance if you disable SMTP support and limit the number of recipients per outgoing mail and probably the number of outgoing mails per minute. It would help reduce the likelihood of abuse. Disabling those vulnerable email scripts on the server would help too.

I am sure that the abuse department would investigate and work with the relevant authorities to get your IP unblacklisted if you or your customers did not get the IP black listed in the first place.

Thanks for the response - appreciated.

EV1 cap your servers bandwidth. Even though you get 1300GB or whatever your quota is, it's not true 100mbit bandwidth. They do a lot of QOS, transfers start off at 6-7mb/s and after a few mins they drop to 3-4mb/s and seem to fluxuate between 1-3mb/s.

Well an update. I got a cpanel server here and I have to say, I'm very happy with servermatrix. There support is a little longer to answer but they actually help you unlike EV1 who like to make you feel like everything that happens on the server is because you messed it up. Like fantastico didnt have something setup right on my server, sm fixed it and let me know exactly what was done so I would know for the next time, none of that well its your problem crap I would get from EV1. I reccommend switching for anyone that is considering it. ohh yeah my DL and upload speeds to this server are alot better than my ev1 box.

How does that differ to here?

We don't apply any caps to your bandwidth. The only filtering we provide is blocking certain common vulnerable ports at our border routers (such as the windows file sharing and mssql ports) and our DDOS mitigation system. Other than that you get a full unfiltered 10 or 100 mbit connection to the Internet.

And may I add I've pushed 100mbit before, and, the DDOS mitigation is damn effective too!

I might add to homers statement that I to have fully used 100Mbit for a few days with no problems from TP about my B/W usage.

Ditto, I move files/data from TP/SM to NAC in NJ all the time....full NIC speed (100Mbps) no questions asked. I've done extended HDD backups to NY and NJ from TX and have zero issues with bandwidth. I have a box in NY with Ezzi.net and can't get 4Mbps out of it to save my life and they advertise 100Mbps connectivity. Go figure...Long live Total Control.

EV1 screwed up my server firstly by putting a bad cpanel image on it and then by only re-installing RedHat and forgetting Cpanel itself!!
Their support annoy me or lack of it over everything there not just servers - partner still has an Ensim server there and they aren't exactly helpful when you hit problems.

SM / The Planet

1. i rather stupidly managed to lock myself out of one of our windows servers, it was fixed asap

2. The SLA - and they stick to it too if there are any problems

3. When we have had some problems before a member of staff has actually picked up the phone and called us in the UK to sort it out, rather than being told "contact Cpanel's tech support etc"

4. The support is generally very helpful, right down to the point where if what you want doing is a paid service, they will have a look on the net for a resolution for you and send you the links so you can try and sort it out yourself........maybe not great for their profit making lol but at the end of the day we keep buying more SM servers