ThePlanet And LayeredTech - 4 Yrs Review
May 28, 2008
I have a Win2003 dedicated server w/theplanet since 2004 and a Win2003 Web and FreeBSD server with LT shortly after purchasing theplanet server. I'm leaving the dedicated world and into the colo world. The reason is i like the total control of my server and when something happened to my server. I know i'll work nonstop to fix it and not reinstall OS as the only option. (My win2k3 server got system corruption at LT and th tech told me, OS reload to fix the problem. I know a lot of you thinking having dedicated server gave you a piece of mind or whatever but if OS reload is the only option then i might as well take the risk and run my own server and buy some spare parts in case of server melt down. However, i think it got to do more with LT using whitebox parts because my theplanet's server take a lot of abuse as well from me and it chuck a long just fine since it's Dell's entry level tower server despite having Cellery as CPU while my LT's windows server have P4 w/HT option. Both have 1GB of RAM. I think 1GB is rather limited nowaday. I also like the option of using whatever hardware that i want with my colo server and not paying extra $20 per month for RAM or whatever.) /end rant.
anyway, here are some pro and con that i hope you guys will find it helpful.
theplanet:
Pro -
1. very stable hardware because they use name brand like Dell
2. good network/tech support
3. Orbit - one place for everything. love it.
4. professional service
5. No price hike since 2004!
6. they have system in place to alter(email) you if your sever went down. LT have no such thing that i know of.
Con - not many. Didn't come across anything that piss me off.
LT (LayeredTech)
Pro -
1. good network/tech support
Con -
1. Not so stable hardware. They have to replace my FreeBSD server with AMD64. Originally the server have AMD XP. I think they use whitebox parts. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with whitebox parts but they could be using cheaper parts.
2. too many different login. Encompass, knowledge base for tech support...etc. It will be nice if they have something like Orbit. plus, you have to call them to change your CC and their reason is it is more secure that way but how so? their employee can write down my CC. why do you need human interaction for CC change?
3. price hike
This is all i can think of right now. I'm leaving the dedicated world and leaving the comfrot of dedicated provider and going into manage my own server plus the hardware. Hopefully, my server hardware can hold up like theplanet's Dell server.
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Apr 30, 2008
Thought I may as well post up a review of Layeredtech having left them recently after 15 months of service.
Network: 10/10 - Don't recall a single downtime with them, certainly nothing that showed up on my cacti graphs & downtime would certainly show up.
Support: ?/10 - Unfortunately I can't comment on their support as it's something I never used. Ultimately though, given they are an unmanaged provider, support really should be limited to tracking down hardware issues etc.
Hardware: 10/10 - Never had a single problem with the box I was on.
Sales: 9/10 - I'll give em a 9 for the hassle of scanning ID etc, although in fairness these days, you expect that with pretty much all providers so not a major issue.
Other:-
I'd read bad things about their cancellation process, e.g. people continuing to get billed for cancelled servers etc, this hasn't happened to me, I gave my two days noticed (as required in their terms) and they did everything properly.
The only downside really was they increased the price by $9 or something, although in fairness, that was a pretty small increase and they made up for it by providing remote reboot ports, although I never did make use of them since my box never crashed.
Overall, a pretty positive experience, only left because I needed much more powerful hardware and LT's deals aren't as good as they once were.
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Sep 26, 2008
several years ago I came here to find a webhosting reseller account, you helped me find hostgator, who I have been mostly happy with.
The only issue I had was that they suspended me for a CPU TOS violation and it took me over 24 hours to get my site back online.
Once this was resolved, I was also resolved to move my site to a new dedicated server, (My CPU, My TOS) - so I went with the planet. I was a little put off by their verification methods, they wanted a copy of my DL and credit card - once I contacted them, and voiced my concerns, they told me that the image could be redacted (only last 4 of CC and no DL#) - then they went to work.
My server went online, with CPANEL installed - well I happen to have a friend that is a Linux guru - so upon his recomendation, we did an OS reload to straight CentOS 5.2. The reload was amazing - the datacenter did exactly what we asked, and within 4 hours, we had a brand new Linux box, clean and shiny and ready to go. ThePlanet kept me informed of the progress the entire time, and set the root password to exactly what we wanted - it could not have gone smoother....
Then...I moved the primary site to the new server and our load average skyrocketed (36,37,42) etc.. Hostgator was definately justified as my site must have been just SLAMMING thier box. Once the primary site was up, we did a memory upgrade (once again theplanet did this within an hour or so) at our request, the box was rebooted and we found that it STILL wasn't enough - so today I ordered an upgrade...
Today before 12 noon eastern time I ordered the new server, same OS and as I type this, I can see the new box is up, running and ready to put the penguin to work.
The moral of the story - if your website is becoming large (mine is 40,000 articles +) and Google is always a crawling - it's time to move to a dedicated server. Granted, you will need to know Linux, and you need to have a REALLY good grasp of it - but the question that convinced me to change is this - if you are doing web hosting, web design - isn't it time to learn linux - I have moved to kubuntu, and can not stand windows any longer -
Get Linux, Get Hostgator then Get ThePlanet - and your company can Get Going!
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Sep 22, 2008
I've been with ThePlanet with a dedicated server for a little over a month now [url]
and figured it was about time to post a little review of their services.
My Ratings:
Network: 10/10
Support: 10/10
To sum it up briefly, I'm amazed by their service - not one problem since I've been there. Since I've been with them there's not been 1 stitch of downtime - they even sent a maintenance notice 3 weeks in advance just to let us know the support portal would be down (you can't even get some providers to give you 3 days notice).
Support tickets are answered in a timely fashion 24/7 - even billing tickets. I don't believe I've ever had ANY ticket (support or billing) go more than 1-2 hours at most.
Of course if you really have an issue, you have a phone number that you can call too - which is nice
Can't sleep at night or go out because you worry about your server being online? I opted to get their 'monitoring' service for an extra $25/month and it was amazing.
Within a few minutes of my server going down, they were already in the process of rebooting it - and as soon as it was back online they even called me on my cell to let me know what happened. That's damn good service in my book.
All in all - ThePlanet is stable, reliable, and has a great customer service team to back it up. Sure their pricing is a little higher than most places, but as they say - you get what you pay for. And with ThePlanet they give you what you pay for and so much more.
Will be back for a 3 month review.
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Jun 20, 2009
I've got two servers with LayeredTech in Texas. One is seemingly totally down. Their support page is unreachable and their billing page is loading as slow as AOL on dialup. Anyone else having issues this morning?
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Oct 5, 2009
We are the clients of LayeredTech for 4.5 years. Basically, we're fed up with poor service and below are the details. Love the stories about stupid circumstances leading to major catastrophes? You'll love the story below.
Another incident took place in June. We have ordered another hard drive for our server. During the maintenance, their technician obviously dropped an existing hard drive (never admitted by them), causing the bad sectors to appear immediately after upgrade. They were trying to replace it, but replaced a wrong hard drive (!). Their second attempt to fix things up resulted in a broken SCSI controller (!). Their verdict: the server is dead and can't be restored. It resulted in a huge downtime of three days. During these three days, we experienced the lack of professionalism from their staff (besides group leaders), poor coordination between the shifts (another shift comes and they have no idea of what the previous shift has started) and poor response times.
Now, they are moving their data center forcing clients to order a new server (you guys probably heard about it) and we have the same experience: poor coordination of departments. Friday: technicians offered a configuration and suggested to submit a ticket to sales (I've no idea why clients have to transfer information between their departments). Sales came on Monday refusing to fulfill this order suggesting to order a new server from the web site. We gave another attempt and placed an order, asking to upgrade memory and disk - the features we already purchased. Their response? It's not upgradable. Nothing was suggested.
I'm not to tell about the other issues, about red eyes of our technicians that can't get to bed waiting for their support to reply and restoring the server from backups. I'm not telling about our IPs whitelisted in major mailing services; years of work discarded by moving our server without asking us if we like to. Finally, I'm not telling about minor issues; they happened for these years.
Guys, we're fed up with LayeredTech and moving our server out (we have one more and refer it as "hostage"). Yes, we loose money for the purchased memory, for purchased a hard drive and for a setup fee from another provider. But we can't deal with them anymore. Anyone thinking about LT - keep away. Dear fellows who already own a server there - let's keep our fingers crossed; LT is great when nothing happens, but horrible dealing with incidents. Good luck, guys.
For LT management: if you want to proof the facts, my client ID is 4553.
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Mar 31, 2009
My server is down [At layeredtech.com]
I told them I selected 2009/3/28 to migrate my server on 13 march, 2009.
Then, I have not received any information from them, such as the new IP.
Now, my server is down and I don't know how to login my server.
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Jun 25, 2008
While I only had a server with LT for testing and running our helpdesk off network... I'm happy to say that I'm finally fully moved from LT. (My new off network home is at GNAX, btw.)
I went from a reseller of 3+ years, with a peak of ~20 servers ... to nothing.
Way to go Layeredtech!
I started this thread out writing all about my history with LT, and my thoughts on what they've done... but I decided that it wasn't worth it. Layeredtech will probably continue doing what they are doing - swindling customers - and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I'm just happy to no longer be a victim.
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Apr 21, 2008
Because they offer AppLogic we chose a company called LayeredTech.com a.k.a layeredtechnologies.com;
I have not had much issues with the access related issues and support was fairly quick;
But, i have decided not to use them as a DataCenter because
- One they they stopped our server by not giving any advance notification by telling us that there were a spammer and they do not allow any account with Spammer
- Earlier their warning were only for 8 hours . So if you happen to sleep when they send notifications you wake up a disabled server; They refused to improve this and they rejected to accept he fact that Web Hosting accounts can have many reasons that can be abused for spam.
- We have woken up to $1800 charge one day and we wanted to dispute it. They have given us RTG charts which does not explain anything about the detailed usage.
We have asked them to listen to our reports from WHM that shows only 200 GB usage rather than 15000 GB they charged us for. They were pretty quick to comment that WHM calculations are not reliable.
- On another note we paid for a year for Cpanel licenses. We had to cancel 2 Cpanel licenses and asked for a refund. They said, they could not refund the payment for Cpanel license; well they charged for a year. At least a credit? No. They offered to enable it if we need;
- Applogic? Another utopia. It does not work for cpanel purposes.
Whenever you have problems, High Availability feature never works. The other server never picks up the functionality.
When you ask why, they say you put so many accounts on one server.
Well, you want us to put 250 account on a server prices for $700 USD per month? That does not make any sense;
I have used in the past so many Data Centers
- Bustnet
- Iweb
- NAC
- Netelligent
- Dedicatednow
Layered is the least flexible one. They do not give any value to your thoughts and rights;
I have started using netelligent.ca and they are great guys. I will be canceling all my accounts with Layered as soon as my account term paid will expire.
Just wanted to share my experience
Bulent Turkoglu
[url]
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Jun 29, 2008
I remember long time ago when I used to host on Layered Tech fast network good stuff, affordable price my first server costed me 90 dollars on Layered Tech with about 20 dollar setup one time fee.
I visited today after about 2 years and I'm pretty much surprised to see their prices they are by no means affordable as they were previously and the setup fee is now 50 dollars on every server.
With such large number of servers in their data centers shouldn't they be able to make them affordable? yet I have seen same server on WHT ads section for fraction of the price LT expects and not to mention the excessive setup fee.
I'm not complaining, its their business, but is it really helping them? I cant be the only person feeling this anti-love for Layered Tech being a former LT customer, I had no problems with them or their services I just left after I sold my site and moved into VPS. But seeing the new prices its a bit shocking.
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Oct 26, 2008
I've been reading that layeredtech's helpdesk or whatever they call there backend has been hacked again just a few days ago and the hackers got the customers root passwords.
This happened about a year ago also with them. How does this keep happening?
I thought about not giving my datacenter my password but then if it goes down they can't do anything.
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May 31, 2008
I had two server from LT for few years. I was happy with the server until 6 month ago. I got an email from LT and was told the price will be increased. I have not choice but paid what they asked. I got another email few days later, again LT increased price. I think it's fine if they increase the price. The problem I got is: LT increases the price but at same time LT still offer same package I had back to few years to their new customers. I called LT, they told me they can do nothing. Today I looked the offer carefully. Here's detail.
-------------------------------------
Dual-Processor Opteron 248$59/Month
RAM:2GB
Hard Drive(s):2 x 160GB SATA
Free upgrade to 2 x 250GB
Bandwidth:3300GB
IP Addresses:8 (5 Usable)
Notes:No Reseller Discount
Setup Fee:$999 setup
---------------------------------------
Ha, $59 not bad deal at all. But watch out, $999 setup fee. Think this, LT will increase your price two years later. Then monthly cost will be $59+$999/24=$100 OR if LT increase you price one year later, your cost will be $59+$999/12=$142. Just think twice before you order from LT.
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Jul 10, 2008
I've worked with LT and a few others for some years but, never worked with SoftLayer. I'm looking for people's comments and advice that have had at least a years experience with both companies. We have some serious sites. One site reads from MySQL, uses about 30% of its traffic pulling in external data from around the world to create png maps from the data, and serves 10,000 pages in just under a minute and 6 seconds during busy times. We've been moved around inside SAVVIS once for traffic reasons, and the network is fine.
It's time to upgrade. Softlayer seems to have a lot of compelling features not the least of which is KVM. Because of our traffic, a wrong DC choice would be very expensive for us. That's why I'm doing my due diligence here. That’s why I need to hear from people with experience with both.
If you actually use the KVM to load servers, and the power switch to do hard-reboots, I'd like to hear about how well that all works. Maybe iSCSI experience as well if there is any of that out there.
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Mar 9, 2009
I received an e-mail that goes like:
"Data Center Migration Efforts Underway, from SAVVIS to Databank"
"The LayeredTech data center have informed us that in an effort to optimize the network architecture, they are planning to move all servers from SAVVIS location to a more centralized facility, the DataBank data center which is also located in Dallas."
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Sep 29, 2008
I've been a layeredtech customer since early 2005, and until this last insane price-hike fiasco, I've never had a major complaint.
But now it keeps getting worse.
I wound up keeping this particular server around after the price hike (for several reasons, one of which was misinformation from a LT sales person regarding the prepay option) and several days ago received an email stating that my server would have to be moved, and that due to the chassis type of my old server, they could not move my server, I would need to migrate to a new server.
The email was less than forthcoming with details, so I tried to phone the person who sent me the email. The call went straight to his voicemail, where I left a couple messages asking him to return my calls, which he never did.
Finally I called their Sales department to figure out what was going on, and finally spoke with a nice & friendly guy (in a different department), who he stated that he felt like he was in the middle, and he just wanted to help us (the affected customers) out.
Okay, I figure I can handle moving all my custom software to a new server figuring that they would find some comparable piece of hardware to move me to at the same cost.
No.
I was told I would have to pay around 10% more per month for a server with only a slightly faster CPU, only 1GB of ram and only 1 hard-drive (current server has 1.5GB of ram & 2 hard-drives mirrored)
Oh, and I have to have everything moved by the 18th of October.
And I'll have to pay for 2 servers while I move.
Or, I might be able to have the server moved to a different space at Savvis, but that would likely only be a short-term solution, and this situation would come up again.
I find this really appalling--they really must hate their customers who helped them through the early years!
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Dec 8, 2008
ThePlanet vs.......... ?
I just ordered a Dual Xeon 3.2, 4GB RAM, 2X 250GB SATA server from ThePlanet and it ...sucks. This damn thing doesn't even want to run a single UrbanTerror server ( which mind you is an 8 year old game that should be running like BUTTER on this system )every 5 minutes this thing lags out like you wouldn't believe, so it seems I'm wasting nearly 200 month on nothing but a web host now, which isn't something I need to do. ThePlanet of course doesn't support any of this, not that I asked them to, I just told them this box sucks and something is wrong, but they don't really care it seems, so I'm looking for another place, does anyone have any good recommendations ?
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Sep 8, 2008
I have dedicated server P4 3.2 Ghz with ThePlanet for 4 years now. Since I want to upgrade a server I started to think if it will be good idea to change to the Rackspace.
They offer AMD Opteron 246 for pretty much same price I am getting my P4 3.2 Ghz at ThePlanet. Is it faster processor?
I do not need faster CPU, I want to upgrade Hard drive but if I am getting faster CPU it's good.
Several points here.
1. I can not complain about ThePlanet. Never had a problem. And whenever I had opened ticket they were answered in time I expected.
2. I need a good/fast network.
Should I switch?
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Jul 15, 2008
I am going to begin a social network and for the beginning I just need 100 gb hard disk, 2 ram, 200 TB monthly. I need a web hosting with potential for big traffic and scalability in the near future.
I have read what people from big social networks have said about both companies and they can handle big traffic, though mediatemple has better ranked costumers than the plannet according to Alexa (I checked one by one of their big clients in Alexa.)
My website is going to be about video streaming, webcam streaming and other common things in social networks.
What do you recommend? Do you have a better company in mind that can handle big traffic and scalability?
My budget is between 500 up to 800 monthly?
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May 19, 2008
I definitely like ThePlanet. They have good support and goot network.
But seems I need to know more from the world.
So could anyone please tell me another DCs that can be compared with TP *in full* (i.e. not "good support but bad network" - "good" should be both).
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May 8, 2009
ThePlanet did a mailout the other day about their servers in UK. Does anyone have servers there? Good pings?
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Nov 5, 2008
ThePlanet / Softlayer
Does anyone know of any hosters that are reselling servers from The Planet or Softlayer (or anyone else is Texas that I've missed)
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Jun 25, 2008
A few days ago my server started to receive a bunch of Input/Output errors. I scrambled all over Google to find out what the problem could be and most pointed to a failing hard drive.
I contacted ThePlanet roughly 4 hours after I first saw the problem and they recommended that run a few diagnostic programs on the hard drive to find out if there were any problems. I agreed and we picked a good 4 hour time frame to do the work.
Luckily for me this was the 2nd hdd on the server, but the downside was its a 200GB that I am using 165GB. So I tried to do backups and at about 35% done, the 2nd hdd became virtually unaccessible.
ThePlanet started the diagnostic at roughly 12:00pm PST and updated me nearly every 10 minutes on the progress. At 12:50 they indicated that the hdd diagnostic wasn't able to find any problems, then rebooted the server. I'm not sure what they did, but after the server came back up after roughly 5 minutes the 2nd hdd is working perfectly fine.
So i'd like to send out some praise as i'm very happy that the hdd is working again, and I'm happy with the updates and professionalism with ThePlanet.
I've had some rough times with ThePlanet, but the majority of my situations have been resolved in a timely and professional manner. Thanks again TP for saving my butt!
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Oct 25, 2009
If I have to choose between ThePlanet and SoftLayer for a dedicated server which will be used for Shared Hosting, which one should I choose?
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Jul 2, 2006
I have partners down in Dallas, Tx. that are deciding on whether or not they want to go with "ThePlanet" datacenter. But, we just want to know before purchasing any or keeping any servers there that the datacenter is fully equipped with 24/7 monitoring, fire safety, flood safety, backup generators, etc. We're thinking of leasing 2 servers there, and we just need to know some details before going on. Now, I know there's all that information on the website and I've done alot of research on them, but I want to know from WHT's first-hand experience of ThePlanet is any good.
So, if you've used ThePlanet datacenters, can you please help me out. I'm highly suggesting ThePlanet as one of the datacenters I might use. Because it's located in Dallas, TX. it would be alot easier to co-locate the server, or check up on it once and a while or sort out any problems, etc.
Please leave a message of your first-hand experience with this datacenter.
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Apr 5, 2009
We push out a lot of data from our customers a month. So i was wondering which one is better? ThePlanet or Softlayer?
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Jun 8, 2009
First off thank you WHT for providing these forums and please forgive me for my first post being a huge rant!
We have contacted ThePlanet multiple times with DMCA requests to have a website remove illegal copies of our software from their website. The website is (*****.com *removed link*), and ThePlanet hosts them.
This issue has been ongoing for over 10 days, our original DMCA from them was ignored.
We resent another on Tue June 2, 2009, that one was responded to. Either no one from ThePlanet bothered to visit the warez website or they encourage warez on their networks because the website is still up; they initially removed links to our software but added new ones hours later.
We contacted ThePlanet again hours later with our email again to be disregarded. We sent another reply last Friday, ThePlanet responded back that our email was not in proper DMCA format; but do not bother to see the entire website is nothing but warez. Do these guys just not care that warez is on their network? I didn't realize the economy has gotten so bad they now cater to warez websites.
Visit the website and see that is has full ISO copies of Windows and other software, has full dvdrip movies and copies of games, as well as crack patches and keygenerators.
Why is it that ThePlanet allows these websites to operate and that their AUP is a total joke? Obviously if you want to distribute warez ThePlanet seems like the best place to do it.
We also hosted our websites on ThePlanet but intend to cancel service with them due to this issue. I encourage anyone that is a software developer and uses ThePlanet to also dump their service.
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Aug 12, 2008
I have two dedicated linux servers with the planet and about an hour ago as I was testing a site on one I noticed it got terribly slow. I'm lazy sometimes and just assumed that I could fix the problem with a reboot so I went typed in the control panel address that ThePlanet.com uses for clients.
Behold, nothing. The site won't load and I noticed that theplanet.com won't load either. I am able to access my site still but its very slow, is anyone else noticing this? Is it a problem with my ISP?
My site - [url]
ThePlanet - [url]
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Oct 5, 2008
I currently have a VPS and it's running out of breath. I saw a dedicated server package at The Planet for $69 a month (+$25 for cPanel):
- Celeron 2.0
- 512 MB RAM
- 80 GB
- 750 GB Bandwidth
- cPanel
[url]
I know these specs are enough for me right now but before I order, do you know some other web host that offers a similar package in this price range?
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Jun 2, 2008
how many hosts have been effected by the fire at the planet over the weekend?
Luckily i have just cancelled all my servers with the planet (moved to owned hardware in local UK Datacentre). My mail server would of been on the floor that was effected!
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May 16, 2008
I don't remember the planet being this awful. Then again, I haven't dealt with them in years before the EV1servers.net buyout.
They triple charged me for a SSL certificate. So I thought I would call them to deal with it.
15 minute wait time, and was then told SSL department not available at this time. Better if I email them instead.
Use their online chat. Explained my situation. Gave them my name, credit card number, and date of the 3 charges and the amount for each charge. They said they can't find my information unless I provided them with the exact time of the purchase as well. WTF?
You need to know not only the date, but the exact time of the purchase in order to look up my information? Name, credit card number, and date of purchase is not enough anymore?
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Sep 10, 2008
I'm switching provider soon and was considering these two. DedicatedNOW have given me an amazingly good quote, the question is are they any good? As good as ThePlanet for network/reliability and such would you say?
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