Does anybody have any feedback on PowerDNN?

Tony seems very helpful but I would like to see some example websites/speed.

my site www.retirementlifestyle.com.au is hosted by PowerDNN.

Wow, very impressive speed (first time was a bit slow but once loaded) - impressed!
Is that the Professional plan (if you don't mind me asking?).

very interesting results Rodney, thanks for the info

My kinda hosting provider!! Exremeley knowledgable and most important friendly. Hosting packages with ideal monthly payments, maybe a bit pricey. However, their service, staff, and description of facilities are outstanding. Not to mention, they are recognised as "DNN Platinium Benefactor" for their services and knowledge of DNN. Thanks to Rodney's post on Smart-thinker, i was convinced to accept due to their impressive results

Just signed up with them .. they are going through a major overhaul of their control panel, etc .. but they are working hard and bend over backwards to take care of things.

I like them so far and I intend to stay with them.

I register domain names on 1and1 and then forward to powerDNN name servers to start the process.

HI,

I have my site www.virtualgolfsociety.co.uk with PowerDNN, and its true Tony is beyond helpful and really work hard to get your site working.

Sadly I do have one problem which I think Tony has given up on as he cannot find a solution. My "remember login details" no longer works. It used to when I hosted at home but since moving to PowerDNN it no longer works. I am sadly still running DNN1 but the site works well except for this problem.

I am also having trouble uploading data in to my DB's. I have static tables that I use as lookup (I have created a lot of new modules).

I would be even happier with Tony and PowerDNN if someone could help out with these two issues.

The login is the biggest problem as my members are complaining but the upload is also important as I need to upload some new data.

Can anyone help??

Thanks

Simeon.

Hi Simeon

I've got the same problem with my sites on PowerDNN. I have raised it with Tony and at first I thought it was a 3.2.x error (or 4.3.x) but I using the old 3.x version still and getting the same logout problem.

Maybe it's the virus scanner or something that is deleting the cookie?

I have been using PowerDNN for a while now and have no complaints. Tony has helped me out in the middle of the morning when I have had problems due to my errors. Nothing but exceptional support and Knowledge about DNN. And performance has never been an issue. I am a satisfied customer and highly recommend PowerDNN for anyone looking for a good professional host.

From GoDaddy thru Reseller Choice and now to PowerDNN

The migration to PoawerDNn was easy - Just provide an "zip" of the files and a "bak" of the database. 

Unfortunatly I set it up using a "spare" domain name www.AgingSafelyHosting.com while my production site was still at GoDaddy as www.AgingSafely.com The database had portal aliases for both so this made testing easy.

PowerDNN's control panel took some getting used to as one would expect, but works fine.

While I was finishing my testing the menu disappeared from my GoDaddy site without any help from me, so I quickly decided the NOW was the time to finih the migration. What was remaining was for PowerDNN to rename several items from AgingSafelyHosting.com to AgingSafely.com. Somehow in the process write permissions disapeard from several important directories. The site worked but I couldn't upload files, install modules etc. I could only change items that were located in the sql database.

It took 3 tickets before PowerDNN got the permissions right, but they did and the problem was not visable to my customers. All is working well and I am happy with them.

I never had a complaint about speed at Godaddy and my site is about as fast at PowerDNN. I am much happier with the support, tools, people and capabilities at PowerDNN. 

/DaveS

Rodney,

Are you still satisfied ???
I have lots of downtime problem with WebHost4Life (WH4L), and I am sending my 7th remedy ticket to them. I sincerely hope to find a solution, but without solution, I will be obliged to move... 96% of uptime is not good enough for me (~1 hour downtime each day, regularly one continuous hour !!).

DV

I too am still happy. They seems to have 30-90 minutes downtime every couple of weeks in the middle of the night (~11PM PST). I know this because i have Host Tracker setup to email my cell phone when the site is down for more than about 30-40 minutes.  Tony claims this is do to MS critical patches being applied.  I would have though that they would apply the autpmatic patches on a test system PRIOR to inflicting them on us for the first time. However, no customer has noticed.

The support is great.

I'm not sure if you are talking about remembering the login to the Plesk control panel or DNN. If it is DNN you are talking about a web.config entry will make DNN remember you for ever unless you logout.


      <form>s name=".DOTNETNUKE" protection="All" timeout="10080" slidingExpiration="true" cookieless="UseCookies" />
      <!-- DWS was 60  and slidingExpiration not mentioned -->
   

Regards,
/DaveS

Hello David,

My main problem currently is DOWNTIME (1 hour every 2 days). For me, this is not possible anymore. Do you imagine this website unavailable 1 hour every 2 days ?
Their support is great, they already moved me 2 times (Web server and database and application pool). It works 7 days, and then come a new customer (I imagine), and I have downtime.....
Very very sad, I have tried 3 hosting for the moment.... I do not really want to change, but if I am obliged...

DV

When I moved from GoDaddy, PoweDNN made it easy. I had cloned from Godaddy to localhost and upgraded to a later DNN version. All I did was gice them the zip of the files and the bak of the database. 

They had a problem a while ago where you could backup your site automaticall and on demand, but the Pleask tools didn't do the restore correctly when done by the user. I had to restore once and whenh it failed they imediatly offered do the restore by hand and email when it was done.  It is well worth the $20/mo.

They keep asking me to upgrade to the $50/mo package but aren't real clear what I get besides twice the resources and a static IP.  If I could get 2 IP's on different class-C subdomains and place my "parent portals" on one IP and my primary domain on the other, so that Google would treat them as different sites I might consider it worth it.

The one downside of PowerDNN is that I can't use them for email. They lump the web and email into the same 1GB of space, so I don't dare host my email there. I am using Google Apps and have it there where I get 100 accounts with 2GB each for free.  The spam handling seems good, but I have occasional pop-timeouts.

If you want to see how the performance is hit my site www.AgingSafely.com and check the speed. I am running PageBlaster on it.

Good luck moving where ever you go,
/DaveS

I am talking of the DOWNTIME... My speed is very good (I find so...)
DV

if you follow lees tutorials about transfering from your local host to your live server,  powerdnn does not give you access to restore your sql .bak file.   My experience doing this was to give up at about 2pm which started at about 8 am. and I decided to just wipe out the site and start a new installation and just copy the html and recreate the site, which seemed to be faster since it only took me 3 hours to recreate the site and it took about 6 hours of the site being down.  I followed all of the steps and have transfered sites from local to live at other hosts sucessfully. lees tutorials worked fine at webhost4life.  powerdnn suggested that i needed windows xp server desktop or something like that.   I will do all my work on the live site except for module developement from now on.

Hey Webmonkey,
Are you trying to restore the database BAK to your hosting account at PowerDNN or to your local desktop? I know that I've seen lots of times when people try to restore the BAKs to their local computer, they don't change the internal paths in the BAKs (it isn't completely obvious) and then SQL Server won't let you restore it because of that.

-Tony V.

Hey DavidWSnow, I know this is a bit off topic but I noticed the search form and application that you use to search for and display the adult family homes. I think that application is great. I was wondering did you use a paticular module to create that or was that custom development? Thanks.

The application was built by me but uses ListX from Bi4ce for about $70 as I recall. It handles all of the "Ajax magic" that makes the the results module update as you tick the boxes in the search module. It has a steep learning curve but is a great module. The manual is very complete and accurate at describing what each function does (much like a dictionary describes each word). However, there is little guidance on stringing these function together to get a good application. Hence the steep learning curve.

If you need to print content and don't like DNN's crazy print function look at the "print page icon and what it does. This comes from another idea from Kevin S. of Bi4ce (the guy who did the procedure for fixing the image paths when moving sites between localhost and productions site) This uses a simple bit of JavaScript and allows you to specify the divs that you want printed.

If you are considering using ListX and want some ideas or pointers contact me offline.
/DaveS

PowerDNN has always been very good to my company. We started out with a VPS account in Feb. 2006. This is an incredibly good setup (and no, I don't have stock in the company, nor am I affiliated). By now this offer has been discontinued, so now you can choose between dedicated or shared.

Because of several different reasons we went to the shared option (for now), and I found that the downgrade went without a hitch. The operator found that we had a somewhat different set up (with production and staging setups, without going through the control panel) and he did what needed to be done to get the whole thing set up on the shared account.

Tony (the owner) and all the staff are always very friendly, patient and extremely tolerant. I am a developer and support pro myself in my day job, and I am not half as patient as these very professional people.

I have only kudos for this company. Very knowledgeable with regards to hosting and DNN. No questions asked when I needed to downgrade. Very professional jon to get the original server setup and now the shared account. They will be my only choice when we go back to dedicated.

As you will probably ask: why go shared. Current economics. Plain and simple. Their shared account will support our current client base.

Yes, one more vote for PowerDNN here. I have a couple of sites on thier shared service and they are both rock solid and fast.

The support is 1st rate too.

PowerDNN is the daddy. My site is almost as fast as when it was on a local host installation. Even the first load time (when the site hasnt been pinged in ages) is below 10 seconds.

Expensive though!

Has anyone else had any problems with these lately?

I have been using them for a few months but just recently we have had lots of problems. It seems to be since they changed their support and want to start charging for it. If you dont pay for it, I am finding that you dont even get a reply.

I wont go into all the details as I would like to give them a chance to correct it first.
To cut the story short they deleted my account and wiped out my whole site. It took 4 days from my initial support request to put this right. i was told it was a bug in their software. This was just one problem I have had with them. They have left me feeling like they dont know what they are doing!

Is this just me? Or have they gone down hill? I went with them because of everything said about them in this forum.

I have also just found out that even though I paid $1000 for aspdnsf from powerdnn, they can not support it and neither will aspdnsf themselves as I bought it through a reseller.

They have been a very expensive mistake for us!

Hi JazzLilly,
Is there a phone number I can reach you at?  I'd like to talk with you about your issues.

You can email me at Tony.Valenti@PowerDNN.com or call me at 402-650-6072.

-Tony Valenti
PowerDNN Manager

JazzLilly,

Please let us know if your issues get resolved.  I'm getting ready to start a contract for a new website and was thinking about using PowerDNN to Host.  Most of the comments I've seen have been very good.

Thanks,

Mark

I have been with PowerDNN for about a year now. No performance degradation issues.

They do seem to go down frequently in the dark of the night for upgrades, and my pager goes off or I wouldn't know about it.   Daytime uptime has been great.  My customers are all in the US. This wouldbe be great of they were in China.

Parellels Software has screwed my sight once recently by changing the protections. A bug know by PowerDNN staff.  They fixed it quickly when I told them of the problem.

I haven't had any issues with the "new support" plans, but I haven't had any major issues either.

My biggest complaint is that when they close a call, they don't usually tell you what the problem was or how they fixed. This means that i have to reopen the call and ask.

I hope that your problems are a one of the kind.

/Dave Snow - www.AgingSafely.com

I have spoken with Tony Valenti today.  He seems like a nice man and has assured me that he will look into my issues.  I will wait to hear the outcome and post back here when I do.

I agree with DavidWSnow that it is not really acceptable to close a call and not give you an answer.  I have had a couple of problems where they have not been fixed and it has been closed without an explanation.  I have been told that this is possibly because I raised the support call by email rather than their website so hopefully this wont happen again. 

Hopefully, I am just a one off and they will sort out my issues.  I will continue to use powerDNN for our current project if I see some improvement as I do think that the performance of their servers is far better than some other hosts we are using for smaller projects.

I do agree that they are expensive compared to some others but with good support when things go wrong, especially when the problems are caused by powerdnn, then I would be happy to pay for it.
 

Hi All

I have been using PowerDNN for over two years now. Started with virtual server. Tony was always working in support at that time and they were growing. I think I recieved plenty of support in those days and was given some great pricing because they had not really nailed down there Pricing/Package.

While on the virtual sever I had a few minor issues and they were resolved quickly and had no down time
 
Today I'm on a dedicated server and not really sure why I have had so many down times and for very long periods up to six hours.
 
I have gone over with support on several issues usually around a module problem.

They have been responsive but unfortunatly I have suffered 5 major down times and twice it effected all of my sites on the dedicated server.

The one site that seems to suffer is www.conservatoryseniorliving.com which would be my largest account. The issues seem to surround a module thats used for contacting the company for more info.
The thing is I use this module on other sites and never have had a proplem.

Next I was not happy about there pay for support system after not being told they would move to doing this. I have paid $85.00 per/hr for several hrs and have been told the issue was resolved and that it would never come back.

Well it did. Now I have been told by the client that they are shopping around for another developer and will leave my services.

The last time I was told by PowerDNN that it was some errors that they cleared from the BUS ????? I had no clue what that meant.

And after saying I would pay again to resolve whatever the module was doing (just to be sure this module was recently updated) The support person said you can just go check your logs.

Now I want to be very clear here.
 
I know that Tony has responded to others on this forum and I want everyone to know that by and all PowerDNN has provided me with some outstanding service JUST seems lately that I have been cursed with some unknown Murphys Law.

I wanted to participate in this forum not to shred as bad as it may seem PowerDNN as I still believe they are the best.

It would be a shame to start out with one of the best support teams and then because of good business and rapid growth lose that edge.

In a world that seems to have everything everywhere the problem still remains GREAT Support.

It bothers me to talk to someone offshore not because of their accent but because I dont believe they care about MY BUSINESS.

I need people like PowerDNN to care about MY Business and  thats the business of websites that use DNN.

I know several of the people who have made post in this forum. We kinda grew up together using DNN.

I couldnt have made it without all your help. It still stings to lose a client and not feel good about it.

Kemper Burt

 

To all

I just recently added a post to this forum. What I didnt say is that I have several sites housed on WH4L. Best Practice for me is to build out on a test site then move my sites to another more stable Hosting Platform.

That Hosting platform is PowerDNN and if you read my post you would think I was not happy with PowerDNN thats NOT the case.

I think because we have an open forum and this is the only one I would consider (Thank you Lee) it's important to stay open and honest.

In consideration of this that may very true foranyone at just that moment.

So it's important for me to say what it it is at any given time. Where Im at with it all.
 
I have been working with DNN for 5 years. It is more time than I've given any open source program no matter who's it is.

And we have all had our issues here Im sure!!!!!.

Again if it wasnt for the input talent and creative minds of the people who have come together to make DNN work I wouldnt be where Im at today with some exciting prospects.

Rodney you helped me the very first time I wanted to put up video with a menu system over two years ago.

Lee if wasnt for your pursuit of passing on information on this site and teaching me I may have given up.

To Tony Valenti if you hadnt worked with me from the start I wouldnt have even been able to build an enterprise site to begin with.

I have had more than my share of different hosting platforms and today in my humble opinon you will not find a better Hosting service than PowerDNN.

To make it clear I am moving everything off of WH4L. I have found this service to be more than lacking. Poor speed poor support and the new ticketing service they put up frustrates me.

They have implemented a Security Guard feature that does not allow me to work on a site that has a temp URL.

I use a temp URL because I dont want it live yet.

My appreciation of the DNN community is filled with respect thats why Im here.

And to Tony and his team at PowerDnn I will be signing up for your shared hosted programs to help facilitate my move off of WH4L

Thank you all for what you have done for me.

Best Regards
Kemper Burt

 

I have been with PowerDNN for about a year now, and was very happy with them when I first signed up. However, recently (in the last 2 months or so) things have gone downhill with them in terms of reliability. I don't know why. I am paying $105 a month for the service so it's not like I'm on the cheapie plan.

Let me give some examples. But let me preface by saying this: their support is top-notch; they always respond quickly and politely and usually fix the problem right away. HOWEVER, the frequency of problems is unacceptable.

Just in the last two weeks, two of my own sites (including email) have gone down because of DNS problems on their servers. I never did get an explanation from them on why it happened. I tried browsing to my site to make some changes and got the "address not found" error.

Just in the last 2 days, my email has been stopped (no errors sending and receiving, but no mail is transferred so it took me a day to figure out I wasn't receiving any mail) because of server problems on their end. Nor could I log into my PowerDNN control panel (kept saying the control panel was down for system maintenance). I haven't received an explanation for that either. The problem first happened yesterday, to which I sent an urgent tech support request to them and they rebooted the server and all the sudden I got all my mail. Guess what happened today? Exact same problem, and exact same explanation - nothing.

These issues are affecting my own sites as well as my customer's sites. I am starting to look very bad in the eyes of my customers, after having promised them that PowerDNN is fast and reliable. Every time something goes wrong I have to explain to my customers what happened and apologize. I can only do that for so long before the customer moves elsewhere.

Tech support has offered me free month's worth of service for my trouble, to which I stated I'm not looking for any freebies, I just want the service to be reliable. *Some* downtime is to be expected, but every week? And with little or no explanation, or gameplan to not let it happen again? Unacceptable.

I hate to say this, but if you are looking to move to PowerDNN I would consider what I have said above, and do not make the switch. Look elsewhere.

-Rob-

I too have been having PowerDNN reliability and support issues over the same period. At first they acknowledged that the changing or file/directory permissions and the hogging of the CPU was a problem caused by an upgraded of their "control panel" software. Now when it happens their solution is to limit your CPU usage to 20% and suggest that the cause of the problem is your and likely log files. I use Lee's suggestions for self managing of log files and they never have been a problem in the past with similar usage. If this doesn't get better very soon I will be considering switching.

/DaveS

Hi Rob and Dave,
I am very sorry about the troubles that we've been having lately. The past two months haven't been fun for us either. Two of our vendors released buggy software "upgrades", DotNetNuke 4.9 has been having scheduler issues, and Microsoft's recent security patches along with .NET 3.5 SP1 have been keeping us extremely busy and not in the way that we want.

On the bright side though, we have just recently expanded our staff by 30%, and, although the new guys are still green at DotNetNuke, I have never had more confidence in the technical abilities of our team. We're also setting up all new servers with SmarterMail Pro which is greatly improving our systems performance and reliability. We've also implemented a much more stringent patch Q/A process to help us ensure that when our vendors release patches, it doesn't break things for our customers. We've also just finished development on our Control Suite 2.0 DotNetNuke Management application. We are also currently running a private beta on PowerMenu, a highly customizable menu navigation system for DotNetNuke. We also just finished our "Network 2.0" design which is going to be bringing 10gig ethernet to our infrastructure.

Again, I am extremely sorry for the recent problems we've had. It hasn't been fun, but we're working hard to improve our processes and always deliver the best service to our customers.

If you have any ongoing issues, I would really like to work with you to investigate the issue more fully and find a permanent resolution. My direct cell phone number is 402-650-6072 and my email address is Tony.Valenti@PowerDNN.com . Please feel free to give me a call at any time.

I hope to see you at OpenForce this year!
-Tony V

Ok Tony I know I have'nt called you back. Sometimes I need to take a while to talk to people after I have had a major set back due to anothers problems. As I reported in my last few posts the problems with PowerDnn was causing my largest client 5 site (locations) with a social media sites for each location all under Conservatoryseniorliving.com with child sites running DNN.
 
In the last post I said they may leave. WELL THEY DID !!!. I pay $ 450 dollars a month from my own pocket to have a dedicated server with your service and Im very dissapointed.

Unfortunatly I cannot find somewhere else to move my accounts right now because Im being buried by econmics. As Im sure everyone is.

I think it's great your hiring new people I had to let one go that managed my biggest account that I no longer have.

I was just billed again from PowerDNN and I have to say I cringed.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have two other sites there right now I would move my business. It's not easy looking for good hosting, from the posts that I read here seems it's difficult for everyone.

I have 4 sites on WH4L as well and yes it's slow sometimes and I bought into the Schedular service they have (like a keepalive) and it's helped.

These sites dont have the scope that the ones on PowerDnn have nor are my clients able to support you Great growth as I have.

And while Im blowing off steam I can't remember how many hundreds of dollars I have spent with your company to get services for problems that did not get fixed or go away.

If your having trouble believing anything Im writing here please feel free to contact your accounting dept. and look at my account.

Or the many payments for using your tech services for non issues, such as migrating and upgrades to DNN sites.

This is an open forum and Im hoping Lee dosent prevent this post from being seen. Everyone has a right to express.

Thank you
Kemper Burt

Hi Kemper, I'll give you a call this afternoon. I really want to get a handle on your situation. As a customer on a dedicated server, you have been unaffected by the issues that I mentioned above. I did take a look at your account and I do see that way back in july/june you purchased a couple of different consulting services from us, but other than that, the only other thing that stands out is that, at least since august when we upgraded our support system, your account has no support tickets on it. Please also remember that PowerDNN is a hosting company but that DotNetNuke is a web development "platform". When a DotNetNuke website is crashing due to an old or faulty module, as a hosting provider, there's only so much we can do - recommend upgrading the core, recommend upgrading the module, and as a list resort, uninstall the module.

Hello,

Just to add my 2pence in. I also have a dedicated server with PowerDNN and have not had the problems you have been experiencing. - Of course this post will stay on here as I try to keep the forum on here as open as possible.

Hopefully you will manage to solve your problems, good luck,

Oh cool you have a dedicated server? Fancy selling me some space? Sykehosts! xD

Lol! - mmm could be a possibility, but I wouldn't offer ANY support!

A quick update for everyone...Previously I commented how unhappy I was with PowerDNN and recent outages and other problems they have been having.

Shortly after I left my comment, I received an email from Tony, the owner, saying he would personally be looking into the problems I had and will let me know the outcome. He did look into the problem and offered some solutions and explanations and was genuinely concerned with my problems, and admitted PowerDNN has been having an unfortunate string of events of late.

So far all of the problems have been solved, and I know PowerDNN has taken steps to ensure the problems don't happen again.

Kudos to Tony and PowerDNN for acting swiftly and for taking a sincere interest. I told Tony on a voice phone call that it is for this reason (his personal involvement) that I stuck with PowerDNN. If it were another provider I highly doubt the response would have been as positive and I would have moved my business elsewhere.

I can't speak for what will happen in the future at PowerDNN as far as reliability, but for now I'm more than satisfied and wanted to update everyone as such.

-Rob-

Hi everyone. I have been contacted by Tony at PowerDnn and feel that I in some areas was not fair or correct in all of my complaints.

Only one area that stuck was over a critical update issued by Microsoft that was a serious culpert on my dedicated server. One that I could not resolve and PowerDNN did (albiet not fast enough for my client).

Bad timing and SH!T Happens

Once Tony and I disscussed things he was very easy going and really listened to what I had to say. Listening is a quality I admire and which
I have the inability to express myself without sounding like an A&& for the most part.

So he listened and offered solutions. Better to be in the solution than part of the problem.

I need to point out that if it were not for PowerDNN I would not have been able to build the sites I have.

I am not someone who is intimatley familar with SQL,IIS and other various aspects of maintaing todays servers. I say todays because I no longer work as an IT manager or build call centers.

My days would have us all still working on Mainframes and little green screens. Ok so what if Im an Amazon developer anyone can be you just have to signup

I do push the limits of DNN in every way I can(sometimes not even knowing)

Thank you PowerDnn and thank you Tony for taking the time to put the "personal" back into customer service.

Thank you Lee for letting us work out our frustrations here.

I will be moving TWO new sites to PowerDnn This weekend no pain no gain.
You will not in my opinon find a better DNN hosting service than PowerDNN.

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

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

Yep. I agree. The process broke down and things weren't handled nearly as good as they normally are. I know it has been frustrating, but thank you very much for understanding and continuing to work with us.

Just had the "opportunity" to speak with PowerDNN support again. WOW! Michael K helped me out - not only did he fix my issue but he took the initiative to look through my old support tickets and saw that I had a past issue with performance. He proactively looked into some things and scheduled the server for an upgrade. That's 1950's style customer service and I enjoyed it.

PowerDNN has been great with their quick support. The only problem I have with them is at times when they tell you that your issue is out of scope of their standard, free support and the other division normally charges $85/hr. I don't believe its fair when the problem has nothing to do with you. We recently had a situation where our users were being kicked out after logging in and the site worked perfectly on our development server. The issue hasn't been resolved yet and I'm not paying them $85/hr for something which is probably an issue on their server.

Just an update to my earlier post. They fixed the permissions and repaired IIS and it resolved everything. And that was within the scope of free support. Thanks, PowerDNN.

PowerDNN is excellent! I strongly recommend them !