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Please note that this form is only for web host company's representatives. Responses from others will not
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You are responding to the following review:
| Great so far... - Review by
submitted on September 22, 2002 |
| Customer's web site: www.appleandoakpress.com |
| Length of time hosted by this company: 1 month - 3 months |
| Date when last hosted by this company (as of September 22, 2002): Current customer |
| Plan used: E-commerce SE-3 |
| Customer service rating: 8 out of 10 |
| Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10 |
| Cost rating: 9 out of 10 |
| Overall rating: 9 out of 10 |
We signed up for their Commerce SE-3 service. It's $49.95 per month, plus a $25 set up fee and offers good storage and bandwidth, plus lots of mailboxes. We were quickly notified of need for some information for our domain name transfer. Our prompt reply got the name reply got name transferred within 24 hours so the interruption in our site's service was minimal. Their web pages are generally well-designed, clear and easy to understand. The introductory panel is clear and gives good information. The system administrator control panel design is good--it puts most common items at the sysad's fingertips.
Here's a shocker: THEY HAVE AN ACTUAL USER'S GUIDE! With a drop-down table of contents, and an index, and a search feature, and a glossary, an', an', an' an' EVERYTHING! Our webmaster thought he was having a flashback to 1995 when people still did such things, but determined that, yes, it IS a user's guide, and a pretty good one.
Instructions on how to get started and set up your site are available in the user's guide and on the FAQ sheet. The FAQ sheet could be a bit more forthcoming for a few things, but most of the questions have links to separate instructions, many of which are highly detailed and well illustrated. The instructions for setting up outgoing mail are typical of these: a nine-step process, highly detailed, illustrated with screen shots, straight-forward, and clear, and just generally great! They have the good sense to open them in a separate window so that you can view instructions while you do the operations in the other window.
The FAQ sheet gives wrong location for FTP upload directory, but our webmaster found correct directory with a little poking around; the directory and addressing for files is somewhat confusing since the host software assumes the default directory and is somewhat reluctant to accept other addresses.
As is common today, you need to create a support account, something we hate. We found ourselves unable to log in once we had created the account and so found ourselves in the position of needing support to find out how to get support. They thoughtfully provided a toll-free number in our welcome e-mail. Our call was answered immediately. It took several calls to determine problem (which was at our end); tech support personnel were always friendly and helpful and we were put on hold for only the briefest period (perhaps one minute) on one of the calls.
The file manager is ungodly slow; copying, moving and deleting are done by checking boxes one at a time rather than more convenient selection or drag-and-drop. For our site with roughly 85 files, this can be quite cumbersome. In addition, the default directory for files is several levels deep, which adds to the time required for initial access. On-screen instructions are sparse, but the layout is uncluttered and the use of common icons makes understanding fairly easy. File management includes file upload capability which saves trouble of using ftp access through other software; however, it seems to run somewhat slower than ftp software (WS_FTP).
Mail login is easy and fast; they thoughtfully standardized mailbox name types and the site name is already filled in login box. The web-based squirrel mail layout is attractive, clear, easy-to-read, and well organized. It also responds fast, faster than our Yahoo mailboxes or our former host ValueWeb, no doubt because of their decision to keep graphics to a bare minimum and rely on text for selection operations and options.
We've had some intermittent trouble accessing various services such as e-mail (get page not found errors); we're unclear if this is result of server downtime or browser problems. However,it hasn't been so bad as to interfere significantly with our operations.
So far we're pretty happy with OLM and we feel comfortable recommending their service for your small business.
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