The snapgear 550 and 630 are some of the poorest solutions made. The company has been bought out several times over the past 2 years and there are SERIOUS quality control issues with the firmware that is put out. With the cost of the 550 being very near what a Watchguard SOHO or Sonicwall SOHO unit would cost, why would the planet choose something inferior over a proven brand?

Just a guess, but I'd say that the fact it's a PCI card is attractive to them. The real estate to house a piddly desktop router'ish box is likely not there either.

What problems have you had with the SnapGears?

They do offer better solutions - they're called servers from ThePlanet

ServerMatrix = budget
ThePlanet = High-End

So, if what ServerMatrix is offering isn't good enough, then you'll need to go with ThePlanet. If those are too much then you'll need to compromise. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

However, I'm sure they'll take this under consideration as SM doesn't want to be viewed as a past-tense division with reguards to hardware. Then again they cannot offer the high-end solutions because that's not what ServerMatrix is about.

They have a tendency to go down and they have severe quality control issues with their firmware updates. Plus the models that they are selling aren;t even sold anymore. Another thing is why would I want to pay them $99 per month for a firewall when the newer versions of these units cost $249/399 respectively? I know that if you go to a Total Control they have Cisco firewalls, why can't the same be offered here as a managed solution?

Well, I may be wrong but Servermatrix is their budget entry level line so they probably offer solutions which are within that category. If they provide everything that the higher level Total Control servers have then it would blur the line and probably they will stab themselves if they did that.

It is like the airline industry, as a passenger you can opt for say economy class or business class. For both, you still get to point A to point B, you are on the same plane. You will however get a number of perks with business class which you don't get with the economy class, it's makes sense because you pay a lot more for a business class seat. If the airline than allows the economy class options to upgrade certain features like bigger seat, better food or better services then what's stopping someone to abandon the business class seat and going to economy class and just take the options they want ? Wouldn't they kill themselves for doing that ?

I would think it is the same thing here.