Friday, December 9, 2016

We do not tolerate subpar vendors, and neither should you



With the launch of our Critical Express Service, we were reminded of another company that does not take their commitment to customer service seriously. We used to have a small number of clients on HostMonster, whom we have now deemed "HostIdiot." HostIdiot had a major service disruption that is still persisting for over 10 hours as of the time of this writing. In that time, we had accomplished an email migration to GSuite (Google's excellent business class email service), set up a server for a PennTelCo customer, emergency-migrated some domains over to our High Availability datacenter, performed an OsTicket Install, and solved a user's particularly tricky e/mail password issue. Fortunately, all our current hosting customers, as well as our website, are on a dedicated co-located server located in a secure Oklahoma Datacenter that guarantees (via SLA) 99.99% uptime. This means that there is a tolerance of just 1 hour of downtime per year. We had completed the last of our data migrations to this new server location for one of our hold-out customers just days prior! Talk about fortuitous timing. We host our Voice Over IP customers in a similar high-availability Wisconsin or New Jersey Datacenter on dedicated servers that guarantee 99.99% uptime and which has a proven record of 99.995% uptime - less than 30 minutes down - per year. We are proud of this record, and it is part of the reason why we are rolling our our Critical Express Service - more on that later.

HostIdiot also has a slew of other problems that will rear their ugly head in the beginning of January for their customers as well as customers of similar services, such as GoDaddy and HostGator. Due to new Google policies, all websites that are not SSL Secure compliant will be listed as such in Chrome and will eventually face de-listing from Google. Even worse, most websites on the web are not SSL compliant at the moment because of the technical complexity and specialzed server requirements necessary (at the very minimum an SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address). We encourage you to take a look at the informational webpage we set up that will tell you a little more about the issue. We encourage you to engage our services to ensure a smooth transition, as well.

Our express service has a fleet of two aircraft and is priced the same as our ground express services. 
And now for perhaps our biggest announcement. A recent critical emergency service call highlighted to us the need for a new class of service, one that we have called Critical Express. With our Critical Express service, customers experiencing mission-critical downtime with a potential impact to business loss of $1,500 or more can engage with our Critical Express Service team. When you invoke this special service, all our current engagements are placed on hold and your service request is given our top priority by all technicians on call. We direct our tech resources at getting you back up and running as soon as possible.

There is, however, one facet of our service that makes us the only managed IT services firm in the nation to provide it, and that is our air service.  Our Senior Linux and Windows Technical administrator is also an FAA Certified Pilot. From our satellite base in Washington, DC, we can dispatch this technician for extra-critical issues where remote support or driving to the location just won't cut it. We have an available fleet of two aircraft (a Piper Warrior and Socata Tobago), ready to go at an instant's notice! Moreover, our air service is available at the same price as our ground service! This is an incredible value and resource that allows us to service most of the eastern seaboard within mere hours for especially critical remote incidents when remote access just will not do the job. We are proud of this new service, and especially encourage our customers to spread the word to those who might benefit from this sort of service in case it is needed.