[cobalt-users] Review of Rackshack.Net

["Dylan Smith" <dyls@xxxxxxx>]

All,

Seeing there's been a bit of stuff flying around about Rackshack.net, I
thought I'd review it. (I checked out the flamewar in January between
ev1.net's headsurfer and Carrie Bartkowiak, after seeing Rudolfo's message).

I'm a customer of Rackshack.net (and my dialup is with ev1.net, the parent
company. I also had virtual webhosting off ev1.net for about a year prior to
getting my RaQ). I wanted to be able to run my own webserver - since no kind
of broadband whatsoever is available in my part of League City, my only
option was co-lo or dedicated hosting. It's always been far too expensive
though - certainly too much for an individual to justify.

Everyone's Internet has got a reputation around Houston as being a good
deal, and for dialup it really lives up to its promise. So I thought that
Rackshack would be a good bet too. Their reconditioned RaQ2 for $69 a month
looked like a great and affordable deal for an individual. I'm not a
company - I can't justify paying the rates other co-lo or dedicated hosting
companies charge for, nor do I need the extra services they provide (if
indeed they provide any).

I have now had my RaQ for 2 months. I give Rackshack.net 8 out of 10, and
overall I am very satisfied, and feel that Rackshack is offering superb
value for money. Usual disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with ev1.net other
than being a satisfied customer.

I dock 2 points because: their router between the net and my box has gone
down three times. This has not happened in the last month though, so their
problem seems to be fixed. I also dock some score because their technical
support is inadequate. The first time I called tech support to tell them of
the router outage, the youngish-sounding guy (nothing against youngish
people, I'm under 30 myself, it's just his attitude seemed to remind me of
the PFY from the BOFH series) claimed it was a DNS problem and actually got
quite rude with me when I explained it was nothing whatsoever to do with
DNS. Eventually I got him to give me his email address where I sent the
output of traceroute from two different systems to prove it to him. The guy
needed to get a clue. The router was working again within 5 minutes of me
sending the email.
The two occasions following this when their router went down I didn't bother
calling, I just emailed the traceroute and ping output. It was always fixed
within 5 minutes when I did that. The problem hasn't been recurring
recently, so I guess they fixed the hardware.
Their technical support team also strikes me as quite new: when I asked
about the MX-points-back-to-me they didn't have an answer and told me to ask
Cobalt because "they weren't allowed to give me too much support". I'll
leave that to the reader's imagination to decide how to translate that
statement ;-). Fortunately, a BOFH friend of mine told me what the problem
was as soon as I asked him (in the interests of understanding, I emailed the
support guy I had talked to so they now know how to fix it).

As far as I can tell, despite some recent severe thunderstorms, power has
not failed in their server room - the uptime on my RaQ2 continues to climb.