Hey Sydcam,

After reading your POST, I spent more than half hour on VIUX.com to compare the packages, Since I have dedicated server with PowerDNN, I only checked the package prices for dedicated servers, honestly, and as you can see they start from $244.95. for their basic package. which is way higher then the PowerDNN.

I don't want to compare Customer service and Technical Support, because your experience speaks itself, when I started my first DNN website I tried another DNN hosting company ( I should not mention their name here) they took more than 4 days to setup my account,  and after I cancelled my account they refunded my money after 30 days, whih is just not acceptable for me. After this experience I tried another hosting company with ZERO support, Finally after runing here and there I stopped on PowerDNN platform, they did not only setup my account within an hour, they also setup my site and helped me in very professional way to get my site up and runing in very short time. (It was weekend).

Different people have different experience, But, people like me who recently started using DotNetNuke, really need a good price, service and support. Within very short period of time I have learnt so much from their Technical Staff. They did not only provide their best hosting service, they also taught me how to work on DNN website.

Please do not feel offended, This is my personal experience and I give them "A+". and recommed others to try PowerDNN, Well First fifteen days are free, i think this is enough time to check their service reliabilty.  

Hello Seansyed,

Thanks for sharing your experience with me. As I mentioned, I was very pleased when I first began working with PowerDNN! The were great! I also believe that it may have just been a string of "unfortunate events" that we faced. I don't believe that PDNN is a "bad" company. How could they be and remain in business. Our reality is what I have described before, and at that time we were literally tripling our client base and could not risk having what may have been the exception becoming the rule for our new clients. We had to make a decision to build our business on the strongest foundation possible.

The people at VIUX have provided us with the support that you described. I have had support to call me to work though some issues while he was driving his family to a weekend vacation! I mean he was literally on the highway talking me through the resolution process with his wife and infant son playing in the background. He was informed of the issue and called me as opposed to having someone else handle it or worse having me to wait until he retuned the following Monday.

I think that its great that you are getting the level of service that you need. Unfortunately for us, we didn't. But we all fall short from time to time. It appears that we were the only ones to have the issues that we experienced with PDNN. I see where the folks at PDNN are contacting people how are experiencing issues and making great efforts to resolve them and repair any strained relations between PDNN and the client. I think that is great move. I would have loved to have experienced that. Again thanks for your testimonial. I sincerly think its great!

Remain blessed,
Nat

I also want to thank this forum and all people provided this topic with very usefull information. I also moved to POWERDNN and am really impressed from the speed and service. POWERDNN is the best I have ever experinced!

Thanks again
and best Regards

Hi, Im searching a provider who can host an instance of DotNetNuke Professional Edition. Im planning to run multiple portal sites under this instance of DotNetNuke. I also wonder if an instance of the Sql Server Express edition will do, or if I need an instance of Sql Server Standard Edition for this goal. thanks in advance, Anthony Belgium

I think that you will want to use SQL Server and not the Express edition.  The requirements for DotNetNuke Professional should be the same as for the Community Edition.

Hi Joe, Thanks for the information.

Hi Anthony, Could you email me a good way to get in contact with you? As you know, we specialize completely in DotNetNuke and once 5.1 is launched, we have some extremely cool products that are coming out for DotNetNuke Professional including our PowerCache webfarm caching provider and our PowerGrid Cloud for DotNetNuke. My email is Tony.Valenti@PowerDNN.com .

Just wanted to add my experience to this thread.

I have been with PowerDNN for going on four years. I have both shared hosting and dedicated servers from them. Prior to PowerDNN I had shared hosting at a non-DNN hosting provider. The things that stand out about PowerDNN would be their service, the speed of their servers, and the access provided (ftp accounts, Plesk control panel, sql access, etc.) PowerDNN is really the ONLY way to go if you are new to DNN or just don't want the hassle of dealing with the backend stuff.

Now that I have more knowledge about DNN I am planning to try one of the other hosting providers for a very small "brochureware" site I'm doing for a client. We'll see how that goes but rest assured all mission critical sites will always be hosted with PowerDNN - the peace of mind of having their team covering my backside is not something I plan on giving up.

Greg Brown

Thanks for your information Greg. I'm familiar with PowerDNN, and their services are indeed very good. I am experienced with installing DNN and getting it up and running, although the upgrade in one click feature that PowerDNN offers seems awfully handy. As a Solutions provider it is my intention to run multiple DNN portals on a server. Every client should have it's own portal. So I'm just wondering, if a virtual server instance won't pose any performance issues. As it seems for now I going for the virtual server solution offered by HostBasket.com. They are offering a virtual 2Ghz server, 2GB Ram, 40 GB Datastorage, 200 GB transfert a month and 1IP address. The software installed is Windows Server 2008 Web Edition and Sql Server 2008 Web Edition. The services included are 24h monitoring, automatic patches and updates of the OS and daily snapshots. I get this for 189 euro's/month.

Hi Acandael,
Do you have an email address that I can contact you at?  On saturday I just presented a session at the Day of DotNetNuke conference in Orlando and the #1 mistake that vertical solution providers make is using portals in DotNetNuke.  I would love to send you my slides.

Also, regarding virtual servers, DotNetNuke will run on a virtual server, but it won't run good.  We used to offer high end vpses ourselves but we had to pull them because of how poor the performance was on them.  We thought we might have set something up wrong so we even paid Hewlett Packard consulting to come in and take a look - their analysis: Our VPSes were some of the best they had ever seen; DotNetNuke is just a very "chatty" application and those kinds of applications do not virtualize well.

avoid powerDNN The support service doesn't answer to specific questions and doesn't even try to fix problems. You always have a different person answering your emails and there is no coordination. You have to explain your problem again and again and you get no results at the end. AVOID AVOID AVOID

avoid powerDNN The support service doesn't answer to specific questions and doesn't even try to fix problems. You always have a different person answering your emails and there is no coordination. You have to explain your problem again and again and you get no results at the end. AVOID AVOID AVOID

Hi Patricks, I'm very sorry about your frustration. We just hired a new wave of recruits and they're still a little green. If you can email me directly at Tony.Valenti@PowerDNN.com with your ticket number I will escalate your issue to a manager and get it resolved.

Dear Tony, You should just fire them, they are totally unprofessional and incompetent. You can forward my email to whoever manager you want, it’s a bit too late after having exchanging more than 10 emails with your support service. I am also very surprised you answered within 2 minutes to a negative review I wrote on dnncreative.com. In short you are more interested in taking care of your reputation than your customers. #MCN-971428 Hi Patrick, I'm very sorry about the frustration that you've been having with our support team. We just hired a new wave of support engineers and they're a bit green. I've reviewed your ticket history and some of the issues have taken just way too long to resolve and I can completely understand your frustration. You will be receiving a phone call from one of our managers tomorrow morning to work with you one-on-one to get your issues resolved. I'm very sorry about your frustration and we will work with you to make this right. Always glad to help, Tony Valenti

I agree with you Patrick regarding the amount of people that deal with a call with PowerDNN - I find this a little annoying too as I would rather a single person was assigned my call and worked it through to completion, however with TimeZones this is not always possible (unless you want a delay).

My experience of the support desk was pleasant though - very helpful and got the problem sorted out in. Yes, Tony takes pride in the reputation of PowerDNN which is a good thing I think as he gets involved personally which is nice to see. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with them as I have been running PokerDIY.com on them for 3-4 years now I think and it's fast and one less headache to worry about...

The question was a very simple FTP access, and rights to upload and download backup files. PowerDNN was not able to handle it after 10 emails with 5 different persons. This question doesn't need an engineer to be answer, a simple technician would have been able to resolve the issue by himself. It reminds me the host service I am using right now where only one person in a team of 25 is able to resolve professioanlly and quicly a problem.

Wow!!!  This sounds so very familiar!  I remember going through the same issues before I changed providers.  I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Good luck!

SydCamVisions.net

I do miss the old days when you called PowerDNN and Tony answered the phone while he was sitting next to the servers (grin) and I have noticed a slight deterioration in service as they have grown (growing pains) but I am surprised at your story Patrick - I have never experienced anything close to this with PowerDNN.

@Greg - I miss those days too. My job is a lot less fun now that I don't get to help customers out one-on-one as often, but when I have a chance, I still love working support and helping customers out. Right now we've got a very good team, but we did just hire a new wave of support engineers. The hardest thing about doing support is that we've learned that it takes a person about 6 months to really learn DNN (and everything it is connected to) inside and out - the hardest part of that is that we have to hire people 6 months before we will actually need them.

@Rodney - That is a good suggestion! I'll take a look at our support system and see if we can give our customers the option to have a dedicated person assigned to their ticket. Although it will slow down ticket responses, what I really like about it is that you have less people in the mix so you have one person who really knows the issue inside and out. And of course, I'll make sure that customers can choose if they want it to be a dedicated ticket or a shared ticket.

@patrickstirn1 - We hang our hat on doing right by our customers - your ticket took too long, had too many replies to it, and had too many employees touching it. It was a perfect storm, but that's our fault, and I will make sure that something like that does not happen again.  I'm very sorry about the frustration that we caused, but I can assure you that won't happen again.

I understand a dedicated technician may take longer in answering emails and I do not have problems with that as long as the problem is fixed. It would have been easier and cost effective, in my case to upload my files from my current server as I suggested it in my first email instead of incurring liabilities issues.I choose DNNpower based on reviews, fast and easy way to migrate from my current host server to powerDNN and was a bit disappointed to see so many persons involved in a simple task. We just have to remember this from Bill Gates: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” Patrick