Many changes are going on around here, as you may have noticed our servers are receiving upgrades, software is being updated, new features are being announced and launched. It has been a busy last few months here and would like to continue with our service improvements! We would like to ask that you take just a few seconds out of your day to answer the poll below and give us your feedback and even comment further if you wish on your thoughts and ideas about what you would like to see changed with ASPnix!
Your votes are not tied to your hosting account in anyway, only your IP address is logged to aid in preventing double voting. Please keep any comments related to the question being asked, we will be posting further polls asking for other types of feedback.
Thank you very much for taking time to answer our questions – your feedback is appreciated!
[poll id="2"]
I would like to see a switch to one of the commercial control panels. I find the current one a bit confusing in its organization.
Thank you Bill,
While I highly doubt we will be switching to a new control panel (we have spent a ton of money and invested a lot of time in this one). However note that the Windows control panel we currently use *was* a commercial CP. It was DotNetPanel, then Microsoft bought them and turned it into WebsitePanel, an open source project.
We have taken it and heavily modified it, adding our own custom theme, and many many custom features and additions that he default panel does not have. We feel that running this control panel and being able to do our own feature adjustments / additions sets us apart from using a system that every other provider uses.
However, what do you find confusing about it? One of the reasons we went with it was that it was very very easy follow and navigate.
I’ve worked with no more than 15 hosting companies before, so I don’t know about the rest of hosting providers; however, in my opinion, ASPnix is one of the best. I like the speed of shared servers, features, unlimited disk/bandwidth, and 10GB SQL space. I also like ‘ASP’ in the name of the company. I’m not sure if I’ve had any problems yet. I may complain about no complaints though.
Ticket service and support is great.
Sometimes better server uptime and stability, but above all I would like to have a control panel including all… control, billing and support.
This last server migration was relatively painless as opposed to some in the past. I feel aspnix has come a long way in that regard. I still find periods (not frequently) where I get no response from my websites (where other internet sites seem to be working). It’s difficult to trace this down to where the problem lies.
In the past, when there has been (acknowledged) down time with either web or mail servers, I feel that the communication could have been better. I realize that the focus must be on getting the server back up and running, but I have customers also who are asking for answers.
On the bright side, the support is excellent – the response time is far superior to any hosting service I’ve ever dealt with. There seems to be a conscious focus on maintaining quality hardware while timely offering the very latest in hosting add-ons or server-side software.
Regarding the control panel, I must say that I use it infrequently, but it seems to do whatever I need it to do. I would much prefer to leave it as it as opposed to facing another migration!
Overall, I am very satisfied and I would definitely recommend aspnix to anyone looking for a quality hosting solution.
Provide a DAILY BACKUP with versions of the web sites and more importantly the databases and email. Most web sites are fairly static so it will not take much space, the dynamic part is the databases. CrashPlan offerers unlimited backup for a few dollars a month. Other web hosting companies offer free daily backups.
I like the updates you have been doing. I have left my previous hosting companies because their technology became obsolete.
I have my company in Colombia (South America) and we own a Windows Web Hosting with ASPnix with servers located at the USA. I must say that for our company the service and the support has been great, but sometimes, due to distance issues, the database response is slow and I get lots of high ping times. I don’t know if I’m asking a lot but it would be possible to have a data center with ASPnix servers in South America near Colombia (or in Colombia)? hehehehe
A bit more notice and better explanation of what to do when you make changes. I feel very frustrated that your decision to add a data center or create a new control panel causes me to do several tasks that I am not familiar with.
I’ve been an ASPnix customer for over 6 years. In addition to my own hosting account, I’ve brought others to ASPnix for their hosting needs as well. About the time of the control panel switch early last year, I was pretty upset and was seriously considering switching to another host due to down time issues and not getting straight answers from support.
I have to say though, in the past year you guys have completely turned me around. I’m now very happy with the hosting provided, and have no need to go elsewhere for my hosting. Thanks for doing such a great job guys!!
This is the most pain-free hosting I have ever done. ASPnix is a great hosting company with terrific support. In several years of hosting here I have never had a problem they didn’t help me solve quickly and with useful detail info. Thanks
In the future, it might be nice to have a MongoDB database. OTOH, these are available as SaaS.
Thank you everyone for the comments – all of them have been read.
@John – We are actively planning a new backup system under R1Soft. This will provide continuous backup protection of your site and its files. While we are not providing a public backup service and are certainly not joining the “cloud” backup service offerings, we understand the need for a backup solution.
@Eddie – I am very sorry for the frustration caused by the migration of Helm 4. We are doing our best to make sure support is top-notch. We’ve always been known to have awesome support, and we would like to keep it that way!
@Earl – Understood and noted. I will make sure we are more proactive in the future.
@Martin – We opened the Europe (Germany) data-center location only because of the very high demand for a data-center in that area. I will certainly make note of your request and see if there is a high enough demand for a location in the Columbia / South America region.
@ChrisA – We would need to make sure there is a big enough demand for the product. As we would have to develop control systems for our control panel, as well as hire someone(s) to manage it and make sure it is setup correctly. Development costs money, as does paying a database admin. I have noted your request though, and if we receive enough input and requests for MongoDB we will certainly make sure it is added.
Thank you again everyone for your comments thus far. We really do appreciate it!
ASPNIX is truly a leading edge provider that offers great service with the kind of control a professional developer can appreciate. The only change I would ask for is a simpler way to set up a mailbox on my domain and have it forward incoming mail to multiple addresses. Right now it can only forward to one so a separate fowarding account has to be created to copy multiple people.
@Rick – Thank you for your comments! Are you not able to use email groups? The email groups feature will allow you to forward from one to many addresses. A group is not an account though, it is simply a more advanced forwarder.
Great news about the backup plans. Hopefully it will be ready soon. I was not trying to imply for you to provide a general purpose cloud backup service.
My experience has been quite stellar, especially since I have left another hosting company to come here.
To add what Bill said on August 28th, 2012 at 11:31 PM, I am not a big fan on the control panel. It is a little quirky getting around. It isn’t a deal breaker for me, just a little annoying. I admit that I am not sure what suggestion to make to make the navigation better.
At any rate, the service is top-notch, keep up the good work.
@Jason – I am not really understanding what is hard about navigating the CP. All the options are categorized or under fairly self-explanatory icons. Would you (or Bill) be able to give more information as to what is wrong or what you find difficult about the control panel?
I would love to see what we can do to help the control panel, but without feedback, there is not much I can do.
Thank you Jason for your feedback!
So far I’ve been very happy with aspnix. I really like how you keep up to date with the latest .NET frameworks. However, it always seems that after a few years with every hosting company that I’ve been with they try and save money and then the quality drops and problems start to occur. Then I have to find yet another hosting company. So please do not drop your prices and keep up the great service instead.
@Eric – Thank you for the complements. I can assure you that quality will never diminish. Roma and myself run this company with a very strong passion, not just as a job and a company, but as a passion for running servers. If prices do drop, it will not be a drop in quality, I can promise you that. We will continue our drive to be the very leader in offering the latest in technologies and software.
Thanks!
I’m extremely happy to see so many feedback posts here. Thank you all for taking your time and leaving some feedback. The more the better!
Thanks!
Despite some support issues of the past, I am a quite happy customer. I generally receive fast reply to my tickets even with a standard support.
ASPnix offers amazing features and I also do not want that to go away in order to lower the price. The price is already low!
I believe the complains about the control panel interface exists because HELM was easier to navigate, but eventually I got use to the new control panel.
My only complain is about the server uptime and stability. I check my domain uptime through Monitis.com (every 5 seconds 6 servers around the world check if the domain is working) and I constantly get notifications that 2 or more locations were unable to ping my domain. They usually last a few seconds, so when I opened a ticket about it, the response was “domain is working fine” – this is frustrating.
Sometimes I receive errors notifications all day long. I also have a Amazon EC2 server being monitored with same locations and I NEVER receive those alerts – so there’s obviously some stability issues with my ASPnix server.
Thank you all for opening this space for us to comment. I know that’s only possible when everything is working fine and I am glad that’s ASPnix current state.
@Tiago – I cannot speak for 3rd party monitoring services. However we do have protection in place to keep servers from being flooded with ping requests, port scanners and other items.
https://status.aspnix.com/ – you can view our server status to get an instant view of all servers and their current state. You can also view live graphs from our PRTG networking monitoring system.
We have our server PING, HTTP, FTP and other service types graphs publicly available for all to see. If our servers were going down every 5 or so seconds we would have a huge issue on our hands, however this simply is not the case.
The support ticket comments about your domain being “down” are because for whatever reason (most likely do to network filtering above) your service flags your domain “down” all because PING requests (which are not HTTP requests) fail. When the support technician checks our monitoring system and sees that everything is green and running well and your domain is loading, there is not much he / she can do at that point.
Thank you for your comments!
Hi Christopher.
The monitoring I do are with HTTP requests, not PING (as I previously mentioned). When I receive the alert, I check my domain and it is in fact down, but a few seconds later is back on (when I receive a new alert stating the domain is back).
My domain does not goes down every 5 seconds, but for 5 seconds every hour (depending of the day). I know this too little to complain, but I would like to give the feedback on the only issue I have.
Cheers.
@Tiago – Thank you for feedback! Our monitoring system does check our IIS services ever 60 seconds and we do not see any failures within IIS.
While I certainly do not want to get into details about your account publicly – https://status.aspnix.com/server/web01 you can review your sites web servers stats and graphs here.
We are however expanding our network by adding another provider into our already massive Level 3 backbone and installing a new router with an extremely high network throughput capacity.
We are continuously making our services better and stronger.
Thank you Tiago for your feedback!
Provide support for Smarter Mail control panel to add/delete email accounts. So I do not have to give my clients access to the main control panel where they could do some real damage.
@John – This is something that we have no plans to support. The entire purpose of the “control panel” is to do just this and to provide a centralized point of management. There are so many different situations that can happen here that having the email created through the control panel and in the control panel is beneficial.
In this case the cons outweigh the pros.
You could also download the control panel module for resellers from the client area @ https://billing.aspnix.com/clientarea.php and remove all the service icons except for email.
Chris,
Apparently have not been in the control panel in a really long time. Thank goodness things all run by themselves 🙂
With that in mind, I retract my statement about the control panel being goofy to navigate.
Fantastic feedback so far!