How are we doing, suggestions, requested changes ?

[JPC-Greg]

This is a three part poll. First the poll, how are we doing ?



If you vote please take a moment to also offer a suggestion for anything you would like to see here. If there is something we are doing or have in place that you would like to see changed please mention it as well.

Based on this thread I will create a new poll soon with options to vote for, we will implement your suggestions in the order of the most wanted to least.

[GivenRandy]

I think things are great. Was there supposed to be a poll here?

[stevenha]

I don't see a poll either, so I'm assuming that you're asking for suggested topics, from which you will later build some poll questions.

My issues aren't horribly bothersome, but they are areas I think that improvements would be welcomed: 1) more frequent, daily updates of awstats. 2) having a dependable access-log saved automatically at the end of the month, for download at leisure, sometime in the first few days of the new month.

[Vin DSL]

Originally posted by Jag
This is a three part poll. First the poll, how are we doing ?

I can safely say, this is the best mass webhoster I've been at since 1996. Do you have worts? Sure! But, your tech support rocks, and that makes all the difference in the world to me.

All I want is a server that doesn't crash and someone that takes care of it when it does. All the rest is secondary...

[Connie]

I agree with "stevenha" and "Vin DSL".

[lookout]

No poll on view here yet either. Jag did say in his initial post he'd be posting it soon. Odd to have started this thread without one in place, particularly when another thread of his points us all here looking for the poll. Jumped the gun I guess, or got stuck on the details.

Or maybe he's seeing things as a forum administrator that regular forum users don't? Still can't upload and view images in this forum; apparently that function was disabled a while ago. Might be a similar thing with the polls.

Wendy's old "Where's the beef?" slogan seems kind of appropriate here, as in "Where's the beefing poll?"

I've seen steady improvement in the quality of service myself. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good, IMHO, though I've had days here when I was ready to jump ship (as I have had with some of my other hosting services). Still, the bumpy days of the Aletia transition and nightmare billing practices seem a distant memory now. Communication could still improve, but many businesses struggle with that, and the web hosting business is no different. I think I'll be sticking it out another year. A speedier server would be nice though! But maybe it's best not to rock that particular boat.

[gakenny]

Hello,

I agree that my experience of the service here has been very good. Technical support has always been good and timely.

I'd love to see JSP and Servlet support and HostGUI, but it seems that neither will arrive.

Apart from that - all I can say is keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Gary

[jason]

What I got out of Jag's news post was that he was looking for general comments now and that, based on what he saw from them he'd fourmulate poll questions in the future.

Well, I've been here, what is it?, three and a half years so far. If I wasn't happy, I wouldn't still be here. Since the Houston NOC was built, I've noticed much less downtime and much faster response to server issues than I was used to when their servers were co-loed at VDI and DI, and aside from being double billed at the begining of my second year here, I've had no problems in that department, either. Tickets are always answered the same day, even though sometimes they take a couple days to be completed. (I can handle many small problems myself, so the few tickets I submit tend to be "challenges.") I have definitely noticed that communication has improved recently.

What would I like to see? HostGUI is definitley at the top of the list. Other than that, I can't really think of much. My site is up and running (just about) every day, and aside from occasional upates, I don't see myself making any major changes to it any time soon. While things like JSP would be nice to have, I doubt I would retool my entire site just because it was available. One other thing that would be nice to see, however is the ability to create POP boxes on parked and multihosted domains instead of having to use the forwarder trick that I've posted on here many times.

--Jason

[lookout]

"Poll" has such a specific meaning in the forum that I guess many of were expecting to see one posted with voting options, rather than a general query.

On the billing, there had been a lot of grief with this a while back. I went thru some myself with one of my sites, due to an inability to update my account info or get any response from sales or billing (who seemed to have vanished for a time). As you know, Jaguar inherited a huge mess from the Aletia acquisition, where things had really gotten out of hand. Kind of ancient history, even though in real time it really wasn't that long ago. Things seem much more on track now. I just renewed one account a little while ago, and all went smoothly.

I think one of the best things here are the forums, although I imagine they are a frequent source of both amusement and pain for our hosts.

[iohannis]

I have had problems with billing on several occasions this year. Double billing one month, being charged for resold accounts that are not mine as a reseller, charged for the wrong account plan (v400 instead of v200), and other things. JaguarPC has discovered none of these, I have had to report them myself. It makes me think that there are Jag customers that have paid too much and maybe have not discovered it.

I think billing is the single most important issue that has to work well.

Tech support is usually very good. However, when it's night time in the US (morning in Europe, where I am), the quality of support is not as good. US daytime support take one or two responses to get a ticket resolved (I'm very happy with you guys), nighttime it's more like 4-5 responses. I won't mention anyone in particular, but when I have a technical problem, I just hope my client can wait until the afternoon over here.

Another thing is the pop email account setup in cpanel. I don't know how much control Jag has over cpanel, but the autoconfig sets up email in outlook express with + instead of @ in the account, which causes a lot of outages for users. I have 5-10 users per month (who do not read the instructions I provide) that simply click the autoconfig in the cpanel. A small thing, but it would save a lot of support time.

[JPC-Greg]

doh, forgot to make it a poll.

bah, vb doent handle merging a poll and thread very well. I'll save the poll for items most demanded.

[Still Shady]

Everything suck!

OF COURSE NOT! JAG OWNZ ALL! CHEERS!

Now were's the poll?

[iohannis]

Virus protection for email is a feature I get asked about a lot. Would be great to have.

[Joshua Clinard]

I have to agree with Jason, and the others. Service has been very good, and I'm happy with it. Speed has always been perfectly acceptable as well. I have come up with a pretty sizable lists of requests, most of which I have requested before. At the time though, Jag was undoubtedly busy working on more important things.

I would definately like to see HostGUI, or at least cPanel 8 with the new skin, so we can take advantage of new features.

I also would like to be able to setup pop accounts for multi-hosted domains. cPanel actually has that capability built-in, and I have never understood why Jag hasn't offered it, when several other hosts do. It would definately be a selling point.

I would like to see some of the errors that have been pointed out in regards to the web site fixed. I really hate web sites with errors, even if they are just a few small ones. Most of them could be fixed in a short amount of time, so why not fix them? Refer to my posts in the thread regarding the new web sites for examples.

Updated AWStats!! Version 5.9 has some nice new features! Speaking of AWstats, PLEASE configure the servers so that these features work: Visitors domains/countries, Screen Size, Misc.

vBulletin updated. It would take a little while to port the style to the vB 3 system, but the current beta is perfectly acceptable.

A system information page setup for each server is a must. Aletia had these for every server at sysinfo.server.com. A link to it in the control panel would also be very nice. PHP Sysinfo

That's it for now.

[stevenha]

I remembered another potential poll question. You could ask which of the 3 stats programs are being used the most, and maybe determine if one or more of them could be dropped.

You could ask poll questions about FTP issues. Maybe you could explore whether people are sticking to FTP, tolerating its limitations in general, putting up with timeouts and connection difficulties on certain servers, perhaps because they don't want to learn unix shell commands or new Apps like WinSCP. ( That's me, by the way... but the zinc server that my site is hosted on, is using PureFTPd, which seems fast and reliable, and I can usually find FTP on computers anywhere I travel, not just at home and office.)

You know, I'd be curious to see poll results that indicate something about the makeup of the population of subscribers and websites, in terms of their traffic levels, # domains per client, fulltime webmaster or hobbyist status, in-profit or labor-of-love status, etc.