29 Responses to “Greetings From Ben And Joel”

1. 

   Rebecca  on October 29th, 2008

   Congratulations! I look forward to improvements with your experience. :)

2. 

   Web Hosting Reviews  on October 29th, 2008

   Welcome! I look forward to future changes and post by the new owners… Good luck!

3. 

   idEric  on October 29th, 2008

   Great stuff, we will always continue to host with you guys! Asheville Web Design

4. 

   Site5 Fan  on October 29th, 2008

   Congrats Ben & Joel!

   Looking forward to see where you will bring Site5. I have high expectations to you guys ;-)

5. 

   bwb  on October 29th, 2008

   Thanks guys! I think you are going to be even happier with Site5 over the coming months and years!

6. 

   Jamiers  on October 29th, 2008

   I can only hope that Site5’s entire customer service will improve and some of the policies will change to. I have felt that the management team was unreachable, especially when I get unhelpful canned answers from the support team. I have remained with Site5, but truly hope that things will change… status quo is not OK.

7. 

   codecraig  on October 29th, 2008

   Congratulations, I look forward to the continued success of Site5.

   One thing I’d like to see is improved support/documentation on setting up things like Trac, home-made rails apps, etc.

   Even an option to have a Java web server instead of RoR.

   Thanks!

8. 

   Erik  on October 29th, 2008

   Congratulations!
   Best of luck with your Site5 endeavors!

9. 

   kross  on October 29th, 2008

   While I agree with Jamiers that customer service can be improved (as well as other things too I’m sure) I have been with site5 for a lot of years because they do a lot of things right. I sure hope none of the good things disappear. I have more freedom for a very reasonable price with site5. Please keep it that way.

10. 

    Joey  on October 29th, 2008

    Congrats! Any plans to take over the world?

11. 

    csg2  on October 29th, 2008

    Welcome Guys and I hope you mean every word you said ,LOL.
    I had hair raising experiences with my old host and have been happy with site5.Problems have been taken care of fast ,for the most part.I cant complain.Not everything is always 100%, but then, what is.I love Site5 and I have seen the other site of Hosting and it is scary.This is by far the best that is out there.

12. 

    Amnon Levav  on October 30th, 2008

    I hope performance will improve – this is my main complaint for my reseller account.

    Also, I hope you will move to green-powered hosting to save electricity & the environment – and then I could wholeheartedly recommend you as an affiliate.

13. 

    bwb  on October 30th, 2008

    Thanks for the great welcome everyone! Specific comments below and feel free to email me any questions too!

    @Jamiers – Yep our main goal right now is to improve the quality and response times of customer service. It is not as easy as flipping a switch and will take some time but that is what we are working on and will improve. Please feel free to email me if you have a ticket you think is not reaching management when it needs too. This is one of the things we are going to be fixing.

    @codecraig – Yep, I really want to start helping people code and have more options, that is a little bit farther down the line as improving support and server stability is going to be my priority. We will get to that and just watch our “State of Stie5″ blog posts coming every three months to get updates on our projects, what we have done, and what we are doing. The first one will be out November 1st!

    @kross – Yep we have no plans to take away anything good :), our goal is to make things better starting with the foundation of support and server reliability. After that you are going to see even more good things coming out of Site5!

    @joey – I am luckily just focusing on improving customer service and server stability, but my partner Joel is looking into plans for world domination in addition to new software development for Site5 and his President duties :)

14. 

    Alex  on October 30th, 2008

    Hello, I hope you DO improve on customer support. I have horror stories that would curl your cereal milk regarding our server (priapus) and Site5’s response to our problems. We have been having stability issues for a year or more now and upon my request to be moved to another server, the response was “Site5’s policy is we do not move customers to different server’s”, yet there was no alternative solution for us. The only reason we remained with Site5 through this was because, frankly, we didn’t have the time to relocate.

    We joined Site5 because another company (bruji.com) spoke very highly of it, and apparently haven’t had too many problems. Not so for us. That is why we were very surprised with all our problems and Site5’s lack of resolution for them. I got the distinct feeling that Site5 really didn’t care if we just up and left.

    Here’s with my fingers crossed and cheers.

15. 

    Dave  on October 30th, 2008

    Good luck guys, brave time to be buying a company, hope it all works out. Been happy with site5 for a long time now, keep up the good work :)

16. 

    RMcGirr83  on October 30th, 2008

    I sincerely hope that the server stability will increase one thousand fold. Time outs and slow page parse times are killing site5. I know of several web designers who have moved their sites to a different provider…me being one of them.

    Good luck with your endeavors!! :)

17. 

    greg  on October 30th, 2008

    I’ve been a long time customer on both shared and reseller plans. When I first started with Site5 many many years ago, they were a great, reliable hosting service with great prices and were backed helpful and quick customer support. Over the years I’ve watched all of these things slowly slip. I still think that Site5 is good but there is definitely room for improvement and I sincerely hope that you are able to turn this around and bring it back to what it once was, and quickly.

    Best of luck to both of you!

18. 

    Rafael  on October 30th, 2008

    Site5 customer service (and technical reliability of server Antinous) is awful. At least once a year, server Antinous goes down for several DAYS. After it’s “fixed”, I then have to battle to get my immediate problem address. Unless Site5 customer service improves, I will definitely take my business elsewhere.

    Last year, the only way I could get Site5 customer service was by browsing the Internet, contacting a partner company’s PR department, which connected me to their CTO, who connected me to Site5 management. Before that, Site5 had ignored my tech support ticket.

19. 

    bwb  on October 30th, 2008

    Thanks :)

    @Alex- Please email me at bwb@site5.com as I would like to hear about the problems on priapus and how they could have lasted a year.

    @RMcGirr83 – Sorry to hear that, that is what we never want to happen and what we will be focusing our attention on!

    @greg – I totally agree, I think you are about to see Site5 improve and offer some totally new products over the next year!

20. 

    Brian  on October 30th, 2008

    So, any chance we will see improved customer service in the change…..Meaning, can we expect some phone tech support?

21. 

    bwb  on October 30th, 2008

    Hi Brian,

    Just having phone tech support doesn’t mean an improvement, it might be something we add down the road but right now we are focusing on improving the quality and speed of our ticket and chat responses. Once we get that to where we want it we can start looking at the possibility of adding phone,

    thanks, Ben

22. 

    Terry  on November 1st, 2008

    The entrepreneur in me wants to say” best of luck to you.” The customer in me wants to scream “Fix my f*****g Site5 server!”

    All day I’ve been trying to access my sites with great difficulty. Same thing last weekend. Google dropped my PR for my main website. Nothing’s changed but server downtime.

    I’m ready to move. I would have rather seen things improve. Just can’t afford this.

    Hope you make a lot of money but it won’t likely be from me.

23. 

    Keith Elder  on November 3rd, 2008

    Ben, please seriously look into supporting Mono on your servers. It’d be a huge win for you guys as no one is doing it on scale. From what I know about cpanel, it supports it, just needs to be turned on.

    -Thanks,

    -Keith

24. 

    Ben Welch-Bolen  on November 3rd, 2008

    @Terry – Thanks Terry, just keep in mind that Google PR drops have nothing to do with that us. That is just due to sites that are linking to you.

    @Keith – I’ll take a look at it, feel free to drop me an email to at bwb@site5.com to tell me more about it.

25. 

    RMcGirr83  on November 6th, 2008

    Ben you seem sincere, though I believe you do have your work cut out for you.

    http://rmcgirr83.org/mods/alexa_site5.jpg

    Snippet

    Speed: Very Slow, (83% of sites are faster)

    That right there states volumes of what I have had to endure prior to moving. Athenia used to be my server, if you’re interested.

26. 

    Ben Welch-Bolen  on November 7th, 2008

    Hi RMcGirr83,

    Actually Alexa is talking about the load time for the web page, not the server :)

    Mostly that is because we like graphics on our website and lots of them ;

    Thanks, Ben

27. 

    Tinus  on November 20th, 2008

    Nice guys, keep it going! :)

28. 

    Brian  on January 6th, 2009

    Since you guys have taken over, it’s been nothing but problems. First, you moved my entire account to a different server which resulted in on-and-off outages. Then you just turned of my account because a credit card expired. Somehow I was supposed to know and check this. Next the new server died and I was without anything for a day or so. And now the old server keeps crashing for 30-40 minutes at a time, at least twice today.

    Hopefully this is just a string of bad luck, but it has never been this bad over the last several years. If it keeps up, I will definitely be looking for a new home before long.

29. 

    Ben Welch-Bolen  on January 22nd, 2009

    Hi Brian,

    I’m sorry to hear that, we had to do the migration in order to provide a better backup system and to provide better uptime. Only a small percentage of clients migrated even noticed, around 1.5% and I’m very sorry to hear your site had a problem.

    Please email me at bwb@site5.com as we haven’t had any old servers active and I would be happy to look into it for you as I’m not sure exactly what you are describing.

    Thanks, Ben