Not sure if anyone is having similar issues, I have 2 shared dnn instances at PowerDNN and are unable to back them up and restore them to my localhost (laptop) with Vista and IIS7.  I can restore them, but I get a redirect to the live site when I try to use http://localhost/mywebsitecom the browser will only resolve to http://mywebsite.com. 

In this case, http://mywebsite.com is the actual portal name and 'localhost\mywebsitecom' is an alias. 

I have also backed up a godaddy site with the same results on the vista machine.  I don't have this issue with XP or Windows Server 2k3. 

Does anyone have a suggestion with regards to vista or IIS7?  I have tried to remove all the records from the 'PortalAlias' table except for the 'localhost\...' record and that doesn't seem to help.

Willing to try anything..

Dan

Hey Dan,
On your local machine try making your portal alias table have:
localhost/mywebsitecom  (instead of  localhost\mywebsitecom)

and then try removing the other portal aliases and I believe that will make it work for you.

Once again - great work!

Thanks so much for your expert advice as this has resolved the issue.

No problem!  Glad I could help.

I hope you have a great holiday season from everybody here at PowerDNN!

I attempted to use their Web Form to ask a question yesterday morning, but have not heard back from anyone. Looking at their web site, their Live Chat option indicates "Away" so I guess I'll have to call them and ask my questions the old-fashioned way :-)

One question the group may be able to help with - I see they have three datacenters, in the US, UK and Australia. Does anyone know if they offer a "deploy on all three" datacenters type option where we could redirect trafic from each region to the local datacenter?

Thanks,
Graham

Hey Graham, Give me a call and we can talk about what we can do for you in regards to geographic load balancing. We do have customers who are doing that, but with all implementations of that size, they are extremely customized implementations. My number is 402-650-6072. -Tony V.

Several times that I have had site issues/problems at PowerDNN they request that I send an email to support@powerdnn.com. Several months ago this gave me an idea. I setup Host-Tracker to SMS me and send mail to PowerDNN when it couldn't reach my site. This morning at 5AM my cell phone when off with such a SMS message. I got up and checked the site. It was down. I phoned PowerDNN's emergency number and got voicemail. I left a message and a return phone number.

I assumed that they were busy fixing some much more global problem than mine and that mine would be fixed as a result. I went back to bed.

When I got up I checked the site. It was still down. I called and the tech I got had not checked the email or the voice mail. Nothing had been done for several hours!

He restarted the IIS pool and the site came back online. I mentioned that they had had to do this several times since "their upgrades" a couple months ago. He said that he would have someone look into this. Nine hours later and still no call or email from PowerDNN. Recently they put in a new help system to "help" with such issues. While I haven't talked with Tony today, I have talked with him they last three times my site have been down. When I started with them 18 months ago they were much more responsive. I hope the get over their growing pains soon.

/Dave Snow

When we first signed with PowerDNN, we believed that they provided superior service.  Maybe that was because we were coming from iHostASP.net.  When we were new clients the service was very good.  However for the past 4 to 5 months the service (both customer and technical) has gotten progressivly worse.  We are paying a higher price for poor service.  I have been told that the problem was with Paralells and the Plesk GUI.  But the problems don't seem to be resolved.  The technical issues are bad enough, but the sub-professional attitudes that we experience are completly unexceptable.  It is very clear to us that we are the ones with the problem, PowerDNN abviously have so many happy customers that they don't have to worry about us!  So, its us to us to resolve our problems...and we will!  Once we implement the solution we will share it here for anyone else that may have a simular problem that they need to resolve.

Be Blessed!

I met the guys from PowerDNN at Open Force08 a few months ago and purchased a dedicated server soon thereafter.  I come from more of a design background than server admin so I'm in well over my head much of the time.  The guys at PowerDnn have been very helpful and my uptime has been infinitely better than my old host, whom I will mention as soon as I've moved all my sites over to my new server.

I've got a technical question that I thought I'd post here because I'm guessing other people might come across it as well...

If I set up a domain in Plesk which has not had the DNS redirected yet, the Plesk instructions say you should be able to see that site from anywhere y typing the URL:

"[IP ADDRESS] /$sitepreview/yourdomain.com"

Doing that will show me the home page, but if I've loaded DNN (using PowerDNN's phenominal Install/Upgrade/Clone tool) I can't login or navigate the site because the site wants to access the proper URL's without the "$sitepreview" prefix.

What's the best way to gain full access to my newly created, no-DNS, DNN sites on my dedicated server from machines other than my server?

Thanks,
Brett Monk
www.openpageweb.com

Hey Nat/Sydcam, As a manager at PowerDNN, I take a keen interest in all customer service related issues. We've discussed your particular issues in a number of management meetings and the response times of our guys have always been more than acceptable with many tickets being responded to in less than 5 minutes and with only a few taking more than an hour. I'm sorry if responses might have taken longer than you would have liked. We always do our absolute best to get tickets knocked out as fast as possible. At the end of the day, we build our success on our customer's success.

Hey Brett,

Depending on how your server's nameservers are set up, (If you're using custom name servers instead of bouncing off of our name servers) what you can do lots of times is add a "Temporary URL" (Domain Alias) to the domain. For example, let's say that OpenWebPage.com is your master domain and all of your sites use "NSA.OpenWebPage.com" and "NSB.OpenWebPage.com", then wehn you create a new domain, you can add a domain alias of MySite.com.OpenWebPage.com and that will propagate to the live internet. Make sure you also add the domain as a portal alias inside of DotNetNuke as well! If you need any help with the above or don't understand it, just open a ticket and we'll get to you as soon as possible. Please go easy with us tonight though. [Smile] We've got the company christmas party going on and we'll have people coming and going since we still have to be staffed all the time. I'm glad to hear we're doing a great job for you!

Hi Guys,

You will notice I have removed a few comments from this discussion as it was starting to turn into an argument, so I have stripped it back to the first couple of comments that you made.

Thanks,

Lee

I'm looking to move my DNN installation from my premises here to a hosting provider. I've read with interest the full thread. Based on the thread, I'm still a little unsure whether or not to keep PowerDNN on my list of possible providers. I notice that there hasn't been any further discussion here since the end of the year. Does that mean that everyone's completely satisfied with the services provided by PowerDNN?

Steve

True enough - everything seemed to die down after years end. I have been planning to comment and haven't had the time until now.

I have used a low-cost hosting provider that offers zero support, prior to making the transition to powerdnn. I started in June last year with a shared hosting plan and changed to a dedicated server plan in the last couple months. There are many words I could use to describe my experience and if I had to choose one, I would say - fantastic.

What few have described one of the most useful 'value-added' tools they offer. With dedicated plans, PowerDNN offers their own PowerDNN tool (control suite). This makes life amazingly simple. It saves tons of time and practically automates everything from upgrades, backup, restore, cloning sites, migrating, splitting child sites in to parent portals, optimization, and more.. This set of tools updates the web.config files, utilizes templates, creates the database files - it covers every aspect of administration.

Need more - what can I say. I am relatively new to Plesk and find it to be interesting to say the least. It is a great toolset and seems really robust once you get familiar with where everything is and how it works. In comparison to hosting providers (using that term loosely) such as GoDaddy.com - it is hands down a better control suite. GoDaddy keeps changing things around every time the design monkey's brain gets overheated in the desert, making it even more challenging to locate simplest item. Not to mention the irritation of being bombarded with advertisements and the like.

While I haven't used other services specializing in DNN hosting, I can't see that I'll being venturing to find out as long as the service continues to exceed my expectations.

That's quite an endorsement! I'm pleased to hear of your positive experience.

Steve

Hi Steve,

The inconsistencies and service related issues that we were experiencing continued after my last posting and we changed provides very soon thereafter.  The plan that I have now gives us more benefits/features for about the same (if not less) price.  I say that because we added a VPS and we have up to 100 installations of DNN available to us.  The tech support is not perfect but on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being the best service we have experienced, they are a solid 8.5. 

I'm sure that PowerDNN is great for the majority of their clients, but it didn't work well for us.  In the initial thread someone responded saying that they thought they PowerDNN may have to make a special effort to keep us from leaving.  They didn't.  The pricing and service that DNN offered us is nowhere close to what we have with our new provider.  If you want to compare check out www.Viux.com.  Anyone that you work with will be great, we work mostly with J.T..  Ask for him.  Tell him SydCam sent you.

Remain blessed!

Hi aggiedan97, Shoot me an email at Tony.Valenti@PowerDNN.com . I'd love to include you as a showcase/testimonial client on our new website push (currently scheduled for 5/1/2009). As you know, we definitely have some really sweet tools at our disposal, and the dedicated server version of the control suite only has about 1/2 the features that we offer. By the way, keep your eyes and ears peeled for some really sweet products we have scheduled for DotNetNuke Professional. I can't tell you too much, but we're about to take big-boy DotNetNuke clustering to a whole new level including full system replication, synchronization and distribution. I hope I didn't say too much.

I have two websites hosted with PowerDNN and 3rd one is almost ready to go. I am not going any where for my website hosting. There is nothing better than PowerDNN.

Other hosting companies may have better price, but I can bet my 20 years experiece that, none of them has better customer service, Support, and Technical Engineers.

Both thumbs up for PowerDNN.

I'm happy for you! To each his reach. I'm sure that the stars just didn't align themselves correctly for us. But we now not only have MUCH better prices, we have better products and support. Sure, we still experience problems from time to time, but it's how the problems get resolved that makes the difference. I would be willing to pay more money for better service, but we are blessed in that we get the the best of both worlds, BETTER PRODUCTS & SUPPORT FOR LESS MONEY!!! I may be crazy but after experiencing both, I'll stick with (and wholeheartedly endorse) VIUX.com

Hi Sean, Thank you very much for the kind reviews. We definitely work hard to deliver on our promise of being THE hosting provider for DotNetNuke. @Sydcam - I'm very glad that ViUX is working out for you, however, I think that you would have had a much better experience with us had you gone with a plan comparable to what you now have with ViUX.

Hi Tony,

You I'm sure that you are correct as it relates to the technical side of things. I'm sure that VIUX doesn't have Seacret Squrrel Technology. It's probably the same as you provide. The tipping point came on the issue of customer service, not price. I would mind paying a little more for great customer service. The issues that we were experiencing with PDNN were (to us) very basic, follow-up/communication type issues. I won't go into details, I'm sure you guys have a record of it somewhere. Maybe that was the time when things were kind of crazy for you. The bottom line is the we fell through the cracks... but everything worked out for everyone. You guys are doing a stellar job for all of your current clients and we found what we needed at a major savings to our company that allow us to pass along the savings to our clients which in turn referred more business our way. So, all's well that ends well!

Remain blessed,
Nat Carter
SydCam Visions