Blacknight Solutions contacted me this afternoon and asked me to move all my sites off their servers. They no longer want my business. Why? Because I criticised their customer service after they lost all my podcasts, didn’t tell me about it until I discovered it a couple of weeks later, and when I did report it to them, they blamed me for asking for a temporary home for my podcasts (untrue).
In the comments of that post, Blacknight MD Michele Neylon admitted:
our handling of the “podcast situation� could have been better
I decided to do a quick search through all my posts relating to Blacknight on this blog. I found fifteen posts referencing Blacknight. Of those fifteen posts (below) ten were positive or at worst neutral about Blacknight (mentioning them as my hoster in passing). In many cases I linked to them using the word “host” or “hoster” which can only have been good for their SEO.
Recently I have noted a decline in the standards of their customer service and my most recent five posts were negative about them.
I will always highlight good service when I receive it and poor service too.
It appears that Blacknight are incapable of taking criticism. If you criticise them, they ask you to take your business elsewhere.
Way to build a customer base guys.
For anyone thinking of hosting with Blacknight, beware what you say about them or you may find yourself out on your ear too.
Here are all the posts I found on this blog referencing Blacknight:
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/authimage-error-call-to-undefined-function-imagettftext/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/comments-fixed-wordpress-122-breaks-authimage-addressing/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/site-offline-briefly-sorry/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/offline-there-briefly/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/kudos-to-michele/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/podleaders-in-syndication-deal/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/site-offline-temporarily-apologies/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/hosting-problems-solved-hopefully-site-moved/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/hosting365-loses-internet-connectivity/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/awstats-vs-webalizer-lies-damn-lies-and-statistics/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blacknight-suspends-site-against-explicit-instructions/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/commenting-problems-on-this-site/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/email-sending-problems/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blacknight-customer-service-gets-worse/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/all-this-sites-comments-lost/
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I only wish I did business with them so I could fire those schmucks.
Name and shame I say. Hosting 365 probably have the worst customer services I’ve come across. Not only are they ignorant, they’re technically crap. The winning prize however, must go to Irish Broadband – ARGH!
We’re moving all our hosting to Rackspace who couldn’t be more helpful.
We’re only staying with Irish Broadband because they ripped us off for the first year and are now on a heavily discounted (albeit crap connection) rate.
Blacknight, you really need to get a grip. We now live in a world of permanent beta - i.e. constantly improving our products and services based on customer feedback.
Sounds pretty bad Tom. I’ve used BlueHost for several years and their customer service has been fantastic. You deserve nothing but the best!
We have a technical term for this Tom: assholes
Personally, I believe you are giving too much by even blogging about them. They don’t deserve your spreading their name…even in a negative fashion.
First of all I’m a long time reader of your blog. Having never met you I made the assumption from reading and listening to your comments that you’re not a moron. Yet you seem to be trying really hard to prove otherwise in your last few blog posts on Blacknight.
This is the way I see the situation so far and please correct me if any of the details are wrong.
You pay for a reseller account with Blacknight; you’re happy with the service provided by BKS regarding the reseller account and have no issues.
Your blog is hosted on the reseller account or you pay for a separate hosting package for the blog.
With the account I assume there are bandwidth thresholds? And because of the popularity of the podcasts you were bursting these?
Instead of charging you extremely high bandwidth charges BKS offers to let you upload the podcasts to a new server in Amsterdam and offer you unlimited space and traffic at no cost to you.
Was there an SLA on this offer?
Was there a backup solution for the podcasts offered? If not did you ask for one? Did you pay for one?
If the answer to all of the above is no; I really don’t see what your issue is and you’re starting to look pretty petty here.
I find it very strange that you didn’t insure an SLA or some form of backup/redundancy solution for something that seems to be so important to you. If someone offers me some free space on a server for critical /data/applications no contract no SLA then I should be fired for accepting the offer when something goes wrong and not my hosting provider.
I have no problem with naming and shaming bad customer service, but in this case I don’t think it’s warranted. I think you should probably apologies to BKS and clear this mess up before any more fan boys comment on BKS.
Regards
Brian O’Regan
I believe the easiest solution is to “vote with your feet”, is it not?
With all the problems you have had with Blacknight, I am just surprised you have not done so earlier?
With so much choice these days hosting companies and the difference in pricing is not huge - customer service is king. I live in Germany and they are slowly waking up to this fact that the customer is actually important and should be treated as such.
Only the big boys, the ones shifting more than 1000 podcast downloads a day, appear to have SLAs in place with hosts. This saga sounds like it started with generosity, peaked with bandwidth spikes and ended with load balancing that did not meet expectations.
I’ve had issues with every webhost I’ve ever used. That’s why I’ve stuff in four separate countries and manage my own load balancing. But the podcast deliveries need special handling. What comes cheap for me fails to download for others.
Hi Tom, I have already said my bit on this so I’m not going to go into this again in detail.
Good on them too.. If you’re not happy with a service, do agree that you should walk away. It’s all about making sure that blacknight could meet your expectations. It looks like those expectations where a bit too high in this case.
Hey that was my idea! LOL
Well if it was you company and you went out of your way to help someone, would you be pissed off if they started publicly criticising you? It’s more like a self defense in some cases. They could keep you on board and have this happen again in 6 months when your expectations haven’t been met (yet again). The smart idea was to let you go do your own thing.
I doubt that this would be the case for a customer who was paying a premium for this service.
You would think that they would be happy about both the feedback and the links to them.
Short termism is one of the biggest causes of business failure which is something Blacknight Solutions might experience unless they change their attitude to customers and constructive criticism.
I’m a Blacknight customer too and I’ve come to their defense on your blog before strictly because I’ve had nothing but great service from them and I like to promote companies I think are doing things right too.
I agree with Brian O’Regan and can only say that it seems Blacknight were trying to do you a favour. If I remember correctly they host your blog for free and I think your podcasts too. While this may have seemed like a great deal for both sides (free ad for them, free host for you) in my experience its arrangements like this that get everyone in trouble.
You were prob on a non standard setup with non standard policies etc..outside the comfort zone of Blacknight staff. (Its just a guess) but I’ve found when I’ve used one of their standard packages they’ve been great.
Now you can say its still Blacknights fault for offering this free service - true, and I hope they learnt their lesson…unless they want to offer me free hosting too
To sum up you get what u pay for and when I’ve paid for Blacknight services they’ve been great.
cheers
des
PS I’m glad you’ve got all (most?) of the podcasts back
Tom - obviously you feel very stongly about your experience and I am not negating this with my following post. But I did want to chip in and support the Blacknight team and customer service on what is a very public and widely read (and syndicated) blog.
I’ve been a customer for over 2 years (I think!) and have had nothing but good experiences with Blacknight, their team, customer service and products. As a web designer, they are one of only two companies I host with in Ireland and out of the two hosting companies, feedback from my clients is that the BK experience has been better. Specifically, they don’t fudge the issue of downtime.
When I have had cause to contact their support team, Paul has been responsive, patient and technically brilliant and Michele on a number of occasions has personally helped my clients and I after hours and at weekends too.
I simply couldn’t ask for better service and it’s no wonder to me that they are growing rapidly.
Correct me if I’m wrong here Tom. But are you complaining about a service you were getting for free?
If that is the case, I don’t think any more needs to be said.
A few points. The whole “free lunch” thing and the whole “get what you pay for” makes my blood boil.
A customer should be entitled to the best possible care no matter what they pay. There’s value in free and if a business can’t see that then I feel quite sorry for them. If your treatment of customers is based on the “no such thing as a free lunch” mantra or “get what you pay for” line then I honestly would not want to be your customer because taken to an extreme level you could happily screw me over down the road if a better paying customer comes along.
Should the health service say “get what you pay for” to public patients and always give better treatment to those who pay their taxes AND pay for private health care? “Sorry your father died on a trolley but sure you should have had private health care.”, would you accept that?
Here’s my take. Blacknight offered space and in return got advertising/goodwill for it. It doesn’t matter who got the better deal and how much one side payed in bandwidth costs. I’d be very very embarassed as a webhosting company if a customer, paying or not had all their data wiped on one of my servers. The temporary space excuse does not wash. A business should not offer anything that ends with “we make no guarantees” and in fact whatever non-guarantees are given you still have a duty of care obligation, legally enforceable or not. I think Michele’s generosity in this case severely bit him in the ass.
Now on the other side of things, I see no reason with Blacknight telling Tom to get on his bike. I do think that just as a customer can choose a business, a business can choose a customer. It is within their right. Whether it makes good business sense is an entirely different matter.
I disagree with Tom’s suggestion he is being dumped because of his criticisms. Surely the relationship was coming to and end anyway. If Blacknight cannot meet his expectations they are entitled to end the relationship with him as much as he is.
Disclosure: Blacknight host the Blog Awards website for me for free and have given me an unlimited hosting package for my other site.
Hey Tom,
Firstly, I’m sure it’s great for your traffic and page rank, but you really should take up any issues with providers through official support channels first, then contact people higher up personally if necessary. If that’s not getting things done, then feel free to name and shame. Repeatedly posting a rant to your blog instead of firing off a support mail and waiting for an official response makes you look like a petulant child.
On to Blacknight…
At this stage I have dealt with a reasonable proportion of the irish hosting companies out there in both professional and personal capacities on projects ranging from simple shared hosting specialised managed hosting of many machines in specialised complex setups.
Blacknight are far from perfect, in fact they can be all too human sometimes, just look at the last NOC announce mail they sent out yesterday!.
Despite that, they are the only Irish host I have used who have provided a continuous power supply for over a year and who have only had planned network outages which they scheduled well in advance and they have always stuck to the advertised maintenance window. Not rocket science I know, but it’s amazing how few Irish companies can pull that off.
If hosting in Ireland was a requirement they are the first people I would call.
(I would probably call DigiWeb as well now that Dan King is in charge over there :))
I don’t know where people are getting the idea that this was free. It wasn’t. I pay (paid) Blacknight €689.70 per annum for my hosting.
Even if I didn’t Damien is spot on with his comments about free lunchs.
Damien, sure a company is equally entitled to end a relationship with a client but there are ways to do it where you don’t come across looking like you are terrified of the slightest bit of criticism.
Michael, with all due respect, I suggest you go back and read over the posts and threads. I started out by contacting Blacknight Support. I was in contact with Michele.
It was only after dealing with Michele and his appalling attitude to my troubles that I decided to blog this. As I said before, he could have responded with something along the lines of “Oh my gosh Tom, I’m so sorry that happened. Our supplier left us down. I’m really embarrassed. What can we do to help?” In which case, I’d have been singing his praises from the blog as I have done numerous times in the past (see above).
Apologies, I should have been clearer. I have been reading your blog on and off for a while and I meant my first paragraph as a comment on your general tendency to blog first, contact the service provider in question later. You have a loud voice in the Irish “Blogosphere” and with that voice comes responsibilities. Lots of people will read the first angry post, very few will read the edit added a few days later.
I have read the previous posts and threads about this fiasco.
Without a doubt there was a major screw up here. You have been let down badly at a difficult time. At the very least you should have been notified when the server went down, free on the side hosting or not. And again, free on the side hosting or not, you should have been dealt with in a professional manner by Blacknight once you did contact their official support channels.
Despite this particular difficult situation, I think that it really is worth mentioning that Blacknight actually manage to provide a very reliable service, 24/7/365.
Most Irish hosts (in my experience,) seem to think Monday to Friday and 9 to 5, is all that’s required.
Quote “Despite that, they are the only Irish host I have used who have provided a continuous power supply for over a year and who have only had planned network outages which they scheduled well in advance and they have always stuck to the advertised maintenance window. Not rocket science I know, but it’s amazing how few Irish companies can pull that off.”
Hi Michael,
I am surprised by your blanket statement about Irish hosting companies. The last notable outage we had was almost 2 years ago and it only lasted a couple of minutes, we run regular customer satisfaction surveys which are prodominantly positive. I’m certainly not saying we are perfect but we are continuosly improving our services to customers.
Not meaning to rain on anyone’s parade but what’s happening at 365 ( Extract from http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com 02-12-2006 “I have my own dedicated server with Hosting365 and, while I’ve found the service is great when it’s up-and-running, their support is seriously making me consider switching to someone else. Regularly fobbing me off the phone with the promise of callbacks that never arrive, mis-information from support staff, semi-resolved support queries… and, even on a dedicated package, support queries generally take 24-72 hours. That doesn’t include any follow-up correspondence that might be required. Not good. It’s difficult to leave as I’ll need to set-up everything on another server and I’ll need away out of the contract… but as everything’s going okay now, I’m happy to sit it out. I just hope the support improves. #The Menace”)
and from reading the above what appears to be happening now at Blacknight are one of the side effects of rapid growth, something has to give and it is usually one of the more expensive elements of the equation, customer service.
Eoin
Novara.ie
You have an opportunity to rank your host now… I happened across this site yesterday:
http://www.awardwinninghosts.com/
Tom,
Seriously. Allegedly you’re a high profile tech blogger but a lot of your posts do tend towards “Argh, my email went down for 5 mins!”, “My plugins stopped working”. As much as we would all like to complain about our daily tech issues, there’s little need to publicly call-out the parties involved and possibly tarnish their good reputation. especially when such high regard for Blacknight is observed by the tech community.
This whole situation reminds me of all the web 2.0 drama from last year (rocketboom,digg/netscape,techcrunch, etc). And let me tell you, web 2.0 drama is the worst kinda of drama.
I wish you best of luck in acquiring a hosting package from a different provider but do try to be rationale if problems occur and exhaust the usual customer service procedures before going public. You were very lucky to have Michel as a direct contact in BK & I hope this saga won’t tarnish the small subset of Irish hosts from taking on your business.
Commentating on a brand is something I’ve been meaning to write about for sometime so this has prompted me to write something now. After speaking to Tom, I’ve decided to write my own post about this. I didn’t want to fill up the entire comment screen with my post so please feel free to read it on my blog.
In essence it supports Tom’s approach. I believe you should look for a response from the supplier first and when unhappy with it, blog it! That’s what blogs are for; personal opinions. I personally believe Tom took this approach as I don’t think he’s the type of person to blog and then seek a response – that would be unprofessional and I wouldn’t question Tom in this area.
I disagree with commentators who believe Tom should have accepted what was given to him for free. As Tom suggests, he wasn’t given anything for free. Why would a hosting provider give space for free anyway? It doesn’t make sense unless they’re getting something in return, however small. This turns it into a contra deal, i.e. it’s not free and therefore subject to a normal professional agreement (albeit it more personal).
There have been a few replies here in favour of Blacknight, and I feel I have to row in behind them.
I have been with BKS for the last four years or so. I host a number of major accounts with them. I might add that I pay full whack and get nothing free, nor would I ask for it. And apart brom being a client of theirs, I have no particular axe to grind.
Over the years, I have had some major hosting problems. BKS have always been thoroughly professional in their response and have solved the issues courteously and [more importantly] promptly.
Recently I had some problems - one on which BKS fixed on Christmas Day. Show me another company that would do that.
Another problem was where a major client, for reasons best known to themselves transferred their .IE doamin away from BKS to Eircom. In the process, the DNS settings ended up pointing nowhere. Needless to say, the client lost their web site, on-line sales [in the runup to Christmas] and their e-mail facilities. BKS had no reason at all to get involved. It was nothing to do with them. Yet they bent over backwards to help out, and eventually we got the system up and running again.
In short, I have been with several hosting companies in the past and have found BKS to be head and shoulders above the others.
Like Paul above, I decided to write my own post about my opinions on this instead of commenting at length here…
When a service provider gives free access to their service, it is generally done as a promotional venture. No intelligent business does anything out of the goodness of their hearts; this was intended to be a mutually beneficial, promotional relationship. It behooves them to provide the best service and support possible.
This whole “you get what you pay for” stuff is nonsense. Two commercial entities engaged in what should have been a mutually beneficial, reciprocating relationship. One entity failed to meet their end of the bargin, and now we all know about it. This holds true whether the annual cost is €689.70 or 0.
Ed Byrne, Marketing Director for Hosting 365 emailed me as soon as he read my post above. I’ve posted this on my own blog as a way of saying thanks and thought it was only fair to post it here given that my comment is still on the post. I thought it was even more relevant when I read Eoin’s post.
This is how to react in today’s market. Full marks go to Hosting 365 for taking the time to write to me and acknowledge the complaint.
It’s about getting in touch to demonstrate that you care. Whether Tom is right or wrong, he’s a blogger (doesn’t matter if he’s a consultant) and bloggers blog their personal opinions. If you don’t like or agree with them you know where the unsubscribe option is. Some people will like Tom’s approach and some people won’t. Diversity is what makes the blogsphere so interesting.
Best intentions intended
Eoin,
Sorry!
I didn’t mean to tar all Irish hosters with one blanket statement, instead I had wanted to deliberately avoided naming names so was trying to be vague.
I have had no professional dealings with Novara.
A band I was previously a member of has a domain registered with Novara, which in fact we won for free! A colleague has a site for a personal art project with Novara.
Both of those have been handled flawlessly to the best of my knowledge.
fuck those Blacknight Solutions losers.
Spod. I’m reminded of: ” All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
You’re quickly running out of Irish webhosts!
LOL - I don’t normally spam without saying something meaningful (to me at least). But Damien, that was brilliant.
contrast that to my recent experience with Delta Airlines
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/01/yes_the_cfo_did.html
When I read Tom’s piece I remembered a couple of days later a similar experience I had witnessed a while back. Just so that you don’t think you are completely mad on this Tom I thought I would share it with you.
A while back I was reading a post on Michele Neylon’s blog where he was congratulating Hosting 365 for having the best marketing in Ireland. Chuffed with this babyface wrote thanking “Nice guy” neylon for his praise (on checking his blog this morning the thread has now been removed).
What that interaction brought to mind for me was how “Nice guy” Neylon could be two faced and extremely devious, please see below:
Subject: Copyright Infringement of your site
X-Persona:
Return-Path:
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 10020 invoked from network); 31 Jan 2004 21:44:29 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO percival.blacknightsolutions.com) (217.114.173.6)
by 0 with SMTP; 31 Jan 2004 21:44:29 -0000
Received: from BLACKNIGDESK (office.blacknight.ie [213.79.35.249])
by percival.blacknightsolutions.com (8.12.8/8.11.6) with SMTP id i0VLhH0t018434;
Sat, 31 Jan 2004 21:43:18 GMT
From: “Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions”
To: ,
Subject: Copyright Infringement of your site
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 21:43:50 -0000
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
Importance: Normal
Disposition-Notification-To: “Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions”
X-percival.blacknightsolutions.ie-MailScanner-Information: Please contact the ISP for more information
X-percival.blacknightsolutions.ie-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-percival.blacknightsolutions.ie-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam,
SpamAssassin (score=-2.601, required 8.5, BAYES_00 -4.90,
DEAR_SOMETHING 2.30)
Dear Sir/Madam
I thought you might be interested to know that an Irish company has taken
liberties with your website’s content and has copied, practically verbatim,
sections of your website:
http://www.theplanet.com/managed/continuance.php
compare with:
http://www.servers365.ie/managed_continuance.php
and
http://www.theplanet.com/managed/remotebackup.php
with
http://www.servers365.ie/managed_remote_backup.php
http://www.theplanet.com/managed/emailadministration.php
with
http://www.servers365.ie/managed_web-email_admin.php
The list goes on and on:
http://www.theplanet.com/managed/databaseadministration.php
http://www.servers365.ie/managed_database_admin.php
I noticed with interest that you have dedicated an entire section of your
own website to copyright infringement, so I thought it would be opportune to
point this gross infringement out to you.
Sincerely
Michele
Mr. Michele Neylon
Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd
http://www.blacknightsolutions.ie/
http://www.search.ie/
Tel. + 353 (0)59 9137101
Lowest price domains in Ireland
Eoin
It’s nice to see how you respect clients and colleagues’ privacy.
As you know there were grievances between Blacknight and Hosting 365 at that time. However, unlike you, we have managed to move on and focus on growing our respective businesses.
Maybe your time would be better served doing likewise.
Regards
Michele
You are/were neither a client (you were a reseller of Hosting 365 but never of us) nor a colleague so your first comment is bull@@@@.
Anyway it’s probably only fair that you have the last word on this thread seeing as it is all about you and your inimitable style of dealing with people that are no longer in your personal favour
(says me getting back to growing my business)
Eoin
If your podcasts where so important to you, how come you didnt keep the source files or back them up on disk???
Fortunately David, I had backups of all the podcasts but Blacknight didn’t know that when they were so blasé to me.
This isn’t about the podcasts. It is about Blacknight’s appalling customer service to a good customer of long standing (witness all the positive posts I wrote about them) after their negligence potentially lost me all my podcasts.
Hopefully you have learned a lesson from this. When you pay for dedicated hosting, you get dedicated support (and there is no problems over what happened files, because it is up to you to maintain backups). Same when you pay for shared hosting you get a shared service. To me this post could be seen as nothing more then crying about it. Trying to bring a hosting companys name through the dirt because then didnt have the answers or service level you wanted or paid for. And if it was me hosting you, I would have closed your account. But I do feel for you, I would hate to wake up tomorrow and find that files of mine had been deleted.
Hopefully you have learned a lesson from this. When you pay for dedicated hosting, you get dedicated support (and there is no problems over what happened files, because it is up to you to maintain backups). Same when you pay for shared hosting you get a shared service. To me this post could be seen as nothing more then crying about it. Trying to bring a hosting companys name through the dirt because then didnt have the answers or service level you wanted or paid for. And if it was me hosting you, I would have closed your account as well. But I do feel for you, I would hate to wake up tomorrow and find that files of mine had been deleted.
David,
you are coming to this quite late so allow me to put it in a little bit of context for you.
This happened the same week my mother died. It happened the same week my aunt died. It happened the same week my 7 month old baby was rushed to hospital with suspected pneumonia.
Michele (Blacknight MD) knew all of these things when he reacted the way he did to the loss of over a year’s worth of podcasts.
He then gave me less than 5 working days to get my all sites and my client’s sites off his servers. I asked for an extension based on the fact that I didn’t think Dell would be able to deliver a server in time. I was refused.
Fortunately Dell delivered in the nick of time and downtime was kept to a minimum.
Hi Tom
You seem like a competent (well managed blog), honest (positive and negative viewpoints pertaing to you published) and literate individual. I host with blacknight and also with internet planners (usa)
Neither of them are perfect for me because I have a small reseller account and my own individual requirements. That is why I have more than one provider. I identified two competent suppliers and over time became familliar with their strengts and weaknewsses relative to my needs.
I genuinely don’t think you are being fair. Either blacknight are responsible or are not responsible for your podcasts. If they are you should back this up and we will all comiserate with you and feel very sorry for and wary of blacknoght. If they are not then your posting (even though this is your site) is wrong and your treatment of them is unfair.
I can understand your frustration but how you could consider your host to be responsible for your data without an sla to back it up (I am assuming you dont have one and appologies if you have) is beyond acceptable.
I have no vested interest in this and would like to be allowed to publish in future as I have found your site (first time today!) interesting and useful.
Kind regards
John
I’ve used Blacknight for at least 4 years and not had any faults. I’ve found there customer service pretty good also, you can always call them which is a lot better than most shared hosting packages.
I also have my own server at RackSpace which I use for my public sector clients, this costs more than £380.00 pcm. They have 24/7 support and the service is very good. For this I get access to a suport team who make backups install software at my request.
It’s my opinion that unless you’re paying a company to make backups etc then it your responsibility. Much the same way as I deal with my clients, If they pay for an SLA then it goes on rackspace (as I’m paying for support backups etc) if not then I’ll host them on blacknight and they get there own ftp account and control panel to do it themselves.
Blacknight offer a reliable personal service which you’ll find hard to match anywhere in Europe. In many ways they have been better than Rackspace at a fraction of the cost.
I have a blog on Blacknight.ie shared Linux server for 2 months now. And it runs and runs and runs….
There is just one point that I have not seen an Irish hosing company able to match. It is the speed. One day I decided to purchase a same or similar package with all Irish hosting companies I could think of. I only managed to purchase the service from the three of them: Digiweb, Hosting365 and Blacknight. The others have either been two times more expensive than the ones listed or just did not reply at all to the email/phone call with a quote request.
Where BlackNight excelled was the speed. It took 22 hours and my blog was online. 2.5 days with Digiweb. And about 5 days with Hosting365 (in all fairness DomainRegistry contributed with the additional query and took a day for themselves).
And the support gave me the feeling that there is someone on the other line…
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
(Hosted by Blacknight.ie)
Wow, this is an old post and you are quite late Ivan. I hope all the previous contributors are still alive. Thankfully blacknight is and providing the high quality we have both become familiar with.
John
http://www.backupanytime.com
I’ve been with BKS for 6 years now, I was probally their first reseller - now co-lo hosted.
The truth about the company is that as they have grown, the ‘personal service’ has become a bit more ‘automated’, but I wouldn’t expect any different.
BKS have always stood miles ahead of the rest in terms of customer support - this is largly down to paul kelly the technical director I believe. The customer support is still second to none.
The sales dept. is fairly poor tbh & can be frustrating to buy something from BKS other then via their website. I just get the impression they are too busy with ‘multi server’ big clients to bother too much about the smaller outfits. That’s the impression created anyway.
Michele Neylon the MD is a man of the highest integrity without a doubt. His name was mentioned in the first post here.
Some of their shared boxes have, what I would consider, very poor availability - sometimes unavailable for minutes at a time multiple times a day.
They charge too litle. The company has always been obsessed with delivering low cost hosting. There is a difference between ‘low cost’ & ‘good value for money’. At the end of the day if you only pay peanuts for hosting what can the company realy deliver?
I think they should place emphasis on delivering quality and not price. This is where they previously stood out. Otherwise they will continue their slide into the ’same as all the rest’ teritory.
At time of writting BKS still best hosting provider in Ireland.
regards.
I am looking into setting up my own website, so I asked my editor. He suggested Blacknight. I have been trying to load their website but it keeps crashing my Internet Explorer. That doesn’t instill much confidence in the outfit, so I will go with another.