Tuesday, February 13, 2007

ICDSoft Appraisal

If you're looking for a hosting server, my advice goes to ICDSoft. I host my sister's in law website there and it has all the features I need (PHP, MySql, Ruby, email accounts galore, ...) and I never had a problem with it.

Of course not having problems isn't good enough reason to recommend a hosting service. That's the minimum they can do for you! The reason why I recommend ICDSoft is for their support. Let me tell you about my two experiences with them:

Ticket 1: I tried to place a Rails application on the website. For some reason I wasn't able to make it work, so I decided to contact support. In 5 minutes I had a reply with all the required instructions to make my application work.

Being new to Rails I didn't really understand the response... So I told them something like "I couldn't make it work. Please poke my code and see what is wrong. And fixe it while your at it". And can you believe it? They did look into my code, corrected my scripts, changed the permissions to make it all work and sent me a reply with all they had done... In less than 45 minutes! Now that is great support...

Ticket 2: Still working on my sister's in law Rails version of the website I decided to use RMagick to resize the images and create the thumbnails. I uploaded the website to my account to test it and it didn't work. ICDSoft doesn't have RMagick installed.

So I contacted support. I don't know how long they took to reply, but I think it was about 5 minutes like the first time. The reply said something like "We're talking to the sysadmins and we will contact you soon". And they did!

Less than 30 minutes later I had a reply stating that the sysadmins had installed RMagick. I tested my website again and RMagick was really working!

As a client, my feeling was that they were there working just for me! They edited my code, they installed a package on the server because I asked them to. Never a support service made me feel this pampered!

1 comment:

Scott said...

I just wanted to drop a line to agree with you- I've hosted, over the last four years, at least five sites with ICDSoft, and my emails have never gone unanswered for longer than half an hour. Their rates are reasonable, their service and uptime has been fantastic. Hearing that they support rails is just one more reason to keep spreading their good name.