Anyone use Verio as a ShopSite host?

[NuQ]

http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[Gary]

Contact Lexiconn. They have been great for us.

Gary


"NuQ" <nuq@34543544.com> wrote in message
news:de5lip$crv$1@eval.shopsite.com...

http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[Liver Kid]

I've used Verio for several years now and have multiple clients using
various Shop Site packages with them. I've always found them to be great.

"Gary" <glb2@poboxes.com> wrote in message
news:de5tk8$gn3$1@eval.shopsite.com...

Contact Lexiconn. They have been great for us.

Gary


"NuQ" <nuq@34543544.com> wrote in message
news:de5lip$crv$1@eval.shopsite.com...
http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[Larry Bohen]

We have used Lexiconn for several years and highly recommend them.

--
Larry Bohen
www.audiobooksonline.com

"Gary" <glb2@poboxes.com> wrote in message
news:de5tk8$gn3$1@eval.shopsite.com...

Contact Lexiconn. They have been great for us.

Gary


"NuQ" <nuq@34543544.com> wrote in message
news:de5lip$crv$1@eval.shopsite.com...
http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[NuQ]

Thanks for the reply and suggestion. Thanks to Liver Kid and Larry also for
the suggestions!

"Gary" <glb2@poboxes.com> wrote in message
news:de5tk8$gn3$1@eval.shopsite.com...

Contact Lexiconn. They have been great for us.

Gary


"NuQ" <nuq@34543544.com> wrote in message
news:de5lip$crv$1@eval.shopsite.com...
http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[Randall]

I administer a number of sites on shared-server plans at Verio, all on what they called the Bronze Plan (no longer offered except to legacy customers). Two have been Mercantec SoftCart stores there for 5-6 years. Last month I converted one of them to ShopSite, on a 2000 plan. It's the closest thing to the Bronze Plan, but I can't say I'm happy with the differences.

One particular point of frustration is the logs. I'll do a separate post about that, because I'm at a loss as to how to housekeep them locally and run meaningful reports on them. They offer an online report feature called Urchin. But it's slow as h***, and doesn't exclude your own visits, maintenance visits and spiders. (When most of your visitors start at robots.txt, you know there's a problem!)

You're on a 4000 plan, so maybe those hits will be relatively insignificant. Not so on our little stores.

Verio's logs on the Bronze plan have resolve IPs. Among other things, that makes it easier to read them manually, for example if you need to do a quick when a user reports a problem or something.

Verio Support is hot and cold. Phone support is very quick and professional. Promised follow-up is average -- sometimes you can depend on it, sometimes you have to remind them. Email support is often VERY slow and the first response is sometimes incomplete or off-base. Follow-up requests eventually do get earnest efforts, however. And in the few cases where the problem has been sticky, they will stick with it (even in one case where it was my error and I insisted it must be theirs).

I'm not always too thrilled with the speed that pages are served, but overall it appears adequate.

A couple years ago, they finally installed spam filtering. A month-long fiasco with all kinds of legitimate mail getting rejected. I turned it off and just resumed it a few months ago on some accounts. Seems adequate, although it, too, has some frustrating aspects to its design. Whitelisted addresses have to be entered one at a time, and there's no way to retrieve false positives. So I have them simply mark the postives as [SPAM] and filter them locally. But every so often it seems something gets bounced, and we can't explain why (why bounce spam, anyway?).

Our plan is Version 7.1.4 of ShopSite. Don't know if an upgrade is planned anytime soon.

I find the control panel for the new plan a little confusing, but that's a short-term issue, and it seems to be some sort of open source interface (I've seen it at another host), so you may already be used to it.

Last year, they were out for several days due to Hurricane Wilma (apparently the servers were fine, but the backup generators failed.) Since then, they have been moving sites to other server locations and I hear (unofficially) that that location will be closed.

They have an uptime guarantee, but check your site daily, because if its down, you have to tell them, they won't tell you.

I've stayed with Verio because I figure vendors just have their own set of pluses and minuses. But I'll read the other posts here with interests. The log thing has me concerned. How do we build the store up to meaningful numbers if we can't generate meaningful reports?

[Melinda]

--"Verio Support is Hot and Cold."

Ha! You dont say?!? Personally, I have had very, very bad experiences with Verio. Their support was terrible. When I tried to get very simple errors corrected that I could not correct as an end user, it was miserable, time consuming and I lost a fair amount of money.

I am currently hosting with LexiConn. I have nothing but great things to say about them. Their entire staff has been helpful, knowledgable, prompt and just all out swell.

I will never ever leave them.

-Melinda

[Jeff]

Lexiconn knows Shopsite cold. Their service is top notch, day or night, by email or free phone. I don't think our site has been down one minute in the past few months.

Moreover Lexiconn has developed several SS enhancements. Their free Search Statistics Module is reason enough to host with them:
http://support.shopsite.com/forums/view ... 4606d50c57

[BigBooksandGifts.com]

...

[tricianeill]

I am in the process of looking for a new Vendor for ShopSite as well, because I have had extremely bad experiences with Verio's Tech Support.

When I call - it is extremely frustrating (over 10 mins to hold to talk to a person), and then, the support tech is unable to correct my issues (even simple ones) so they put you on hold for a level 2 tech. This continues up the ladder...if you are lucky enough to get to a higher up manager, then they will solve your issue - but who wants to wait 24 hours for an issue to be solved? (and spend hours on the phone restating your problem?)

Email support is almost nonexistant - most of the time their replies are irrelevant to your issue or you receive no reply at all.

It's too bad, because I like the way their plans are set up - but, after reading this post, I am going to look into Lexiconn. I thought I would let you know about my experience with Verio first, so that you are warned of potential tech support issues you may have with your site...

[Randall]

I've also liked the way Verio's plans have been set up, with some exceptions (Urchin data is useless, but their old plans provide downloadable monthly logs.) Unfortunately, the Bronze plans my clients and I have been on are phased out, in favor of "Hosting 2000" (T.S. calls them Signature -- apparently nobody's told them the company changed the name?). The 2000-type plans are set up very differently. Some features are an improvement, but others which I've grown accustomed to are very differently implemented, or gone.

(The raw log structure strikes me as particularly horrendous, but maybe it's just me that doesn't like a different .gz log file for each day, with all of them renamed daily and all the unzipped logs having the same name. Try downloading that!)

On the other hand, I've found Verio's phone tech support to be very quick to answer (maybe we call different times of day?), and their phone reps are either fairly quick to catch on, or willing to pass you to a supervisor if you ask them to. The higher level is willing to whatever time necessary to understand the issue, and they appear to understand causes of the customer's frustration.

Unfortunately, there's only so much even they can do to resolve issues I've recently brought to them, because the limitations are built into Verio's system or management.

In another post, I've mentioned another problem still under review -- redirection from a SoftCart URL to a ShopSite URL (aka an ordinary URL). After ignoring various Support alibis and suggestions that haven't worked, and having searched the Internet and tried several fixes that should work, I'm now talking to an outside vendor they suggested for a fix that they should have thought about when they introduced the new product in the first place!

And now another Verio SoftCart site is increasingly crippled by impossibly slow order response. They say it's due to (if I understand them correctly) their phasing out our plan and therefore not having updated the server software for years (the server is apparently too old to update). How do I learn about the phase-out? As usual, only by hitting the wall. They say the only solution is to switch to a ShopSite plan, rebuilding the store at our expense. Which now would be on an emergency basis. I've asked, "then why keep it at Verio," and mostly get a verbal shrug of the shoulders.

Verio's always seemed more interested in customer acquisition than in 100% service to their existing base. I've been a Verio customer for almost a decade (they bought the service I was with then). As noted, Tech Support has had good periods and slumps, no provider is perfect, and oversights happen. I used to recommend them, because overall their plans and features were robust and TS eventually generally came through.

But several years ago, the trade press mentioned that Verio wanted to get rid of small accounts. True or not, from here it seems they are finally implementing that game plan.

(If I find that I've erred or if Verio finally comes through with a system fix, I'll amend this post accordingly.)

[tcguide]

Hi,

I've used pair Networks (pair.com) for many years going back to ShopSite v4. I use them for all my hosting and have found great service, rates and most importantly - worry free relibility. Recently converted a custom over from Verio since they were not going to support the customers Mercantec anymore. This is an 8,000 item store and it runs smooth and fast on pair.

I've heard many negatives about verio but never used them personally.

Many hear swear by Lexiconn, and from what I can tell, if I had to switch from pair they would be my next choice.

http://www.verio.com

We are looking to change hosts and Verio looks great. We would get the
eShop 4000 package.

Anyone have any experience with Verio or recommend a good host?

[Randall]

Now we're in the territory of my other post (http://support.shopsite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2399&highlight=), but I must ask...

Are you able to redirect a request for the old Mercanted URL (http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart. ... ename.html) to the corresponding ShopSite URL (http://www.domain.com/store/filename.html)? (Our site doesn't have the /store/ level, but that's probably irrelevant.)

If so, how???

[tcguide]

Hi Randall,

This is a great question. Unfortunately I didn't have the need to - the old site used a JavaScript generated frame navigation (not MY doing!!!) so the search engine indexing was poor at best. We simply used a 404 redirect to a website map to handle old links and quickly update was indexed by the SEs.

Assuming you still have Merchantec installed - couldn't you edit the main store page or set up an htaccess permenant 302 redirect?

Also, a bit sneakier but does work, if you have SSI enabled, change the old store file by editing ALL the html out and just putting in #inclulde /store.html directive (or whatever you main SS page is) - and it will serve up the SS page.

[Randall]

Thanks. You've lucked into the Henny Youngman Solution (Hurts when you do that? Don't do that.)

I'll try the redirect. Don't think I've set up specifically a 302. No other redirect commands worked for this, though. Hypothetically, if the server is set up to look at cgi-_____ before .htaccess, nothing in there will work. Verio won't confirm it, but that seems to be the case.

Unfortuntely, it's a shared server account, and since SoftCart is no longer available to us, and there's no way to run any kind of redirection from inside the old files.