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Stuart DH	Wednesday 05 January 2005 4:25:28 am Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the info about recent problems and changes at Firebright. You're right, our site is still on your servers, but as I pointed out in my post, we're planning on moving. To be honest, it's not easy finding a good host that can do a good job of running eZ publish and also manage to set the right balance between quality hardware, good customer service and price. In our experience, Firebright has scored high in most of these areas but recent problems with the service almost entirely negates the bonus of having fast equipment, virtual hosting and competitive pricing. Most of our site - forum, gallery, newspaper, directory etc - (all non-eZpublish) is currently being run on 1and1 servers that are lower spec but we're getting 100% uptime. Unfortunately, eZ publish doesn't play well with their servers so we're running a less than desirable setup of having to split our site between your servers and theirs. Obviously, we'd love to have all our site with one host and we'd planned to make that host Firebright, but the recent problems have really knocked our confidence. As you know, our site was recently down for several hours whilst you carried out maintenance, but we hadn't been informed that this was happening. We tried our site, your site, your phone support, your email etc but almost everything was a total blackout and we couldn't get in touch for hours. A few days later the site was down for half a day when your night staff didn't arrive for work. We had DNS issues and the above problems with a bug in a brand new server, email support has been fairly slow quite recently and the controlpanel link gave us a few problems as well. In short, we'd really like to have all our site on Firebright and there is a fair amount of reasons to tempt us to do so, but recent events have planted a big seed of doubt and left our confidence seriously knocked. Personally, we're not too bothered about Mae West, branded hardware or 8 substations etc, all we want is good end results that provide reliable hosting. We're not looking for freebies or any special service, we just want a hosting facility that we know can really rely on. The great thing about this type of forum is that we can publicly give our support, or otherwise, to our hosting experiences. After giving a testimonial about Firebright providing a great service, it's only fair to the eZpublish community that we also highlight any major problems when they happen. Rest assured, if we decide to host with Firebright in the future and all works well then we'll certainly post a positive recommendation. When we started out with Firebright your service was outstanding and your tech support couldn't have been more helpful, our confidence in your company and our hosting experience was 100%. No-one would be more happy than us if we could eventually get back to that level of confidence. Let's hope that 2005 will be a good year for all of us. http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Thursday 06 January 2005 1:51:16 am Hey - I'm sorry you had such a rough experience. I can assure you that whatever problems we've had in the past are in the past. If you want to move over to 1&1 or another provider, please by my guest. We don't want unhappy customers. I know who you are, and I know you through the community here, and I would emplore you to reconsider such a move. I think you'll find that our service is back to kicking ass, and you won't get a repeat performance. FireBright had growing pains: we've fixed the problems. You know what the problem was, and I frankly think we fixed the problems in a professional manner in a really quick timeframe. We hand rebuilt the entire customer database (thousands of customers) in less than 4 hours after we found out about the problem, and had everything completely resolved in less than 12 hours. That's a pretty good response time. Any by fixed I mean fixed, addressed, permanatly changed, no longer an issue, and otherwise completely resolved. To put it in perspective, in the last 90 days we've implemented: - an internal gigabit network for backups to our NAS systems - an external gigabit switch for public consumption - three new products, including used-centric NAS backup space for customers - network and server system monitoring, including service level monitoring on each of our servers - IP KVM, so we can do remote hands on management without having to send someone to the datacenter - A move to Mae West, one of the best datacenters on the planet - Power cycling switches, so we can actually reboot downed machines - DAS for each of our customer machines, so backups are actually knocked out to an external disk before being transferred to the NAS - DNS montioring from three outside locations - Triplicate DRP backup of the billing / customer database to prevent the possibility that anything like you experienced could ever happen again And the list goes on an on... FireBright is doing this of course as an independent development shop, full of guys and gals who are really enthusiastic about eZ Publish, and not some high-powered rich hosting company. At the end of the day, we've fixed the problems we experienced as a result of a pretty serious situation professionally, quickly, and with minimal downtime. That's about all I can say about that. Let me just say, we're about to launch a line of dedicated servers (have the first 15 of them here right now) at Mae. We're investing dozens of hours in building a really amazing system for deploying server on demand for customers (details coming). We have a full time developer working to build out our next generation eZ Publish offerings. How many other eZ Publish partners are out there investing in products like that? Not many. I know you're unhappy about the problems we had, but there isn't much I can do about it. It happened, it's now fixed. There won't be a repeat performance. In terms of notification of our 3 hour outage, it went out three days before, and the day of the move to everyone on our list. If you want to be on the FireBright list let me know. All customers are added when they sign up, but some choose to unsubscribe themselves. But notification was sent, and information about the work that we were doing was posted on our helpdesk the day of. We don't do work on the systems without notification, except on an emergency basis. I do hope you'll consider staying with the service, but please do explore your options. FireBright's service is a steal at 20-35 bucks for a root access VDS including eZ Publish, and we're one of the few companies out there that really have a commitment to the platform. Have a fantastic day, and if I didn't say it before (better late than never), happy New Year!!!! Jonathan --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Tony Wood	Thursday 06 January 2005 2:30:58 am Hi all, I believe this thread has become a bit of an advert. So without moderating the advertising I think I should mention that all the hosting partners have a duty to ensure their environments meet with high standards required by eZ systems. So I am sure that FireBright's services will come up to scratch. Please take a look at the partner list to find a list of approved suppliers. http://ez.no/partner/partner_list/(partner)/hosting/(sort) Stuart, I hope you get your problems resolved and your site is able to continue to run smoothly. Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood Vision with Technology Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development Power to the Editor! Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future
Peter Quennell	Thursday 06 January 2005 7:39:33 am Hi Tony: Respectfully, Stuart has used more column inches attacking than Jonathan defending - and this whole exchange hardly reads to me like an advert! I posted my own Firebright problem above (the credit card issue) and Jonathan gave a very credible explanation. So it's only fair I think that I state for the record that I always found these things below with Firebright to be excellent, and yes I will head back there when we have time to do a new site: >The control panel: really a nice look piece of art >Free loads of EZP and the various freebies >The excellent php acceleration >The support-questions route - a kind of mini-forum, not email >The pricing for the virtual machine Comparison puts them on a par with our Windows 2003 hoster Crystaltech which is now a huge and very crack outfit. Think twice Stuart!
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Thursday 06 January 2005 1:02:35 pm My apologies. It was not my intention to hijack the thread for self-promotion. It's the vocal minority thing -- I should know better by now, eh? Thanks Peter. Let me know when you do and I'll get you taken care of. Jonathan --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Takuya Misawa	Wednesday 12 January 2005 2:16:22 am I've currently using iPowerweb and Globat, both US companies best rated (on several review sites which can be found on Google) for shared hostings for commercial uses. I've tried to install 3.5.0 on Globat server, but I faced some troubles with .htaccess configuration. I haven't installed EZP on iPowerweb's server yet. They both don't have SSH/Telnet access on their shared plans, but I wonder, if ROOT access is important or useful when it comes to the installation and customization of EZP. -- Takuya Misawa CEO at OPENUP dot JP
Tony Wood	Wednesday 12 January 2005 5:58:38 am Hi Takuya, In our experience you do not need ROOT access as long as you have a good control panel that enables you to run the sort of commands you need to run with eZ publish. If however the provider does not give your this sort of control then you do need ROOT access. I think it comes down to experience if you are happy working on a command line then choose a provider that offers it, otherwise, choose one that guarantees support for eZ publish. you can generally get eZ publish working in any environment it just comes down to how much time you want to invest in setting it up. Here is the link to eZ publish hosting partners who understand eZ publish http://ez.no/partner/partner_list/(partner)/hosting/(sort) I hope this helps. Tony Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood Vision with Technology Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development Power to the Editor! Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future
Zane Cole	Wednesday 12 January 2005 12:49:19 pm bMerge (http://www.bmerge.com) offers hosting that works well with EZPublish (even EZPublish 3.5.0). We have setup several sites for customers with no problems. Many of them are listed on the EZPublish website (http://www.ez.no/ez_publish/references/miscellaneous). Our prices for an EZPublish installation starts out at $14.99/month for 1 year of hosting. You get 2Gb of storage and 50GB monthly transfer, along with many more options. I don't mean to post an 'advertisement' for bMerge, but our servers work for me and my customers. We have a 30-day money back guarentee as well.
Stuart DH	Saturday 19 February 2005 3:23:08 am Well Peter, like you suggested, I thought twice and I also listened to all of the great reassurances that Jonathan gave in the above postings. In the end I stuck with Firebright, so here's a short summary of how things have gone since then. We've had quite a few problems with domain names not working properly and trying to run multiple websites has given us more than a few headaches. It seems as though average response time for a reply to technical support from an email/helpdesk ticket has been about 7/8+ hours - and that doesn't include one ticket that took more than 4 days to get a reply on. Last night, the site went down with a major blackout and it has now been down for about 12 hours. They've initiated their Disaster Recovery Program and despatched a replacement server to their San Jose data center, but no idea where it's being despatched from, or how long it is going to take. http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk