INetU Managed Hosting

As an IT Consultant I have worked with my fair share of managed hosting companies for customers over the years. I have to say INetU by and far blows away the competition. One way they differentiate themselves is the high quality staff. I know when I need to phone in for support, the person on the other end is well trained and knows how to solve my problem. Having gone through the boarding process with several customers, I am confident they designed a solution that best fits their needs. INetU comes highly recommended.

We have been hosting on InetU since June 2002. Prior to finding InetU, we had been hosting with a local ISP that could not keep pace with our growth. When I spoke first to Dev — before signing the contract — I told him my only criteria for success was that I was able to sleep nights. It has been my only standard since signing. He promised his company would not ever let me down.
In 9 ½ years, InetU has never forgotten that single promise that has kept me loyal for this long in an industry that pushes ever forward to cheap and free. There are probably hosting services out there that are far cheaper than InetU, but I’m certain that none of them would ever make — and keep — such a promise. At every step of our growth, InetU has been ahead of us, monitoring and recommending solutions that would keep our services up and running for our clients and brands, especially during new server migrations (there have been several, including two moves to separate dedicated MySQL servers.)
My account rep keeps in contact with me regularly and the tech support staff is top notch with each having a width range of skills. There is no «escalation» process; issues are just handled with the first phone call. And the few times we have called in a panic due to some human error on our part, restores have been quick and complete.
I’m still sleeping nights and expect to as long as we are hosting with InetU. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon!

INetU was our hoster for 21 months. In some ways, they do a good job (sales, set up of new servers, capacity).
We’ve had a number of problems with INetU, not least of which is one of our managed databases went out for 30 days. While we had a second database, it was unable to keep up with the load as it was the only one serving data. INetU’s tech daystaff repeatedly referred the whole problem to the midnight people. The night shift folks were unable to solve it, or get approval to replace the server. After being down for a month, this seriously compromised our ability to serve customers. They finally, after several stern calls, lots of begging, showing lots of evidence that the server was bad, etc replaced the server. At that point, out traffic was so hurt, and business relationships were compromised as well, the $ 965 credit for a month on the server was worthless. They cost us, in direct costs, over $ 75k in engineering to keep the site limping, & in indirect costs: hundreds of thousands. Ironically, the old server died within minutes of completeing transfer of data to the replacement.
For them to cripple a small fledgling online business was unconscionable.
Also, after we’d been paying for backups for a year, we discovered they were doing no backups. We asked them why, and they said something about how «someone at some point asked them to turn them off.» We figured out that the engineer on our end asked them to suspend them, while we tested, for 24 hours. INetU left backups off indefinitely, & never asking why, though we paid for backups.
In other words, INETU doesn’t relate what you pay in billing, to the services you get, or think through what is going on with your account overall.
Additionally, we found that after 18 months, they weren’t doing any spam control on our email at all. When we switched to a managed email provider, that provider was hit with cue of 300k messages (from about a one week period during the set up process). No hoster lets all email through without cleaning spam at the most outside, top server level, and yet that’s the way they’d set up our email process. Bizarre.
During Christmas and New Years 2007 – 8, we moved email services because of light holiday business needs. INetU was also changing their trouble ticket system, so during that period, both their phone system and online trouble ticket system were down, keeping us from contacting them for two days, during the 300k email screw up. INetU then announced via front page of their website/​email to customers the new trouble ticket system (sans link or phone number) as coming Jan 1, but since it was Dec 29, we were sort of amazed that they would be so clueless about keeping emergency systems functioning & available & giving advanced notice of such an important communication tool.
Overall, I would say that you have to stay on top of their technical staff, and make sure you get what you pay for. Otherwise, you’ll just be throwing money away. And they won’t catch it.
Additionally, if the equipment goes bad, their first thought is that you should upgrade, instead of their replacing bad equipment, that might only be months old, and then re-​up for a 1 – 2 year contract. I felt this was disingenuous, in bad form and not at all helpful when their equipment failed.
Once, their techs accidentally flipped some switch & all our servers went offline. It took a few hours for them to fix, & the upshot was that one of their techs had accidentally killed power to everything in a section of their hosting site. It took us two days to get everything back online on our servers which had hard-​crashed, and part of that resulted in discovering we had no backups (paid for, but not done by INetU).
Overall, it’s not been a technically pleasant experience. INetU has cost us a lot of unnecessary engineering time and $$. While Netcraft may rate them as having uptime at #1, it doesn’t really matter if your managed hosted equipment fails and they don’t take responsibility for it, or can’t fix problems, and don’t really «manage» the account and services in a responsible manner.
Lastly, a word about their billing department and Copyright/​DMCA. Our site hosts discussion about content at other places. We don’t host the content itself. We have a copyright policy in keeping with the requirements under the DMCA to then be treated as an «ISP.» We often get C&D notices to remove the actual content, which we DON’T have.
For some reason, an owner of a piece of content (hosted elsewhere) contacted INetU. The junior billing clerk informed us that if we didn’t remove the discussion page, she would have our whole site taken down. I escalated it to lawyers, but it was clear this obtuse interpretation of the DMCA made by the billing clerk and her harassing email threatening takedown of a 50m page site, without thought or consideration, was ridiculous.
Think twice before using INetU. They aren’t too bright about a lot of things.