[Asterisk-biz] ITSP Rant

[Robert Goodyear]

On Mar 30, 2005, at 9:21 AM, Kristian Kielhofner wrote:

> Robert Goodyear wrote:
>> On Mar 30, 2005, at 7:59 AM, Brian West wrote:
>>> Price, Reliability, Quality....
>>>
>>> Pick 2.
>>>
>>> NEXT!!!
>>>
>>> /b
>> Yeah, we've already been over that. Waiting for someone to step up to 
>> the plate and give me items 2 and 3 at the expense of item 1.
>> Hey wait a minute... isn't VoicePulse one of the most expensive? 
>> Doesn't that mean I can have Reliability and Quality now according to 
>> the formula above?
>
> 	I have been complaining about this time and time again.  I'll pay 
> double, triple the going rate for quality.  No problem.  Right now I 
> have

OK, so I'm not alone here. Between your response, Mike Benoit's, and 
several others, it seems like a few of us are looking for 
enterprise-class service, such as what we'd experience if we carefully 
selected an HSP for a server farm. Pay a premium and get taken care of. 
It's like something I experienced a few years ago when I made the 
mistake of putting a freelance client on a Win2K shared server at 
HostPro. When our .ASP script was getting hammered with 70K hits a day, 
it was leaning on the app pool too hard. Even though HostPro sold us a 
Windows Server product, their tech support scoffed at us when we asked 
why it couldn't support the load. They laughed and said "well, you 
shouldn't even try to do that on Windows, use Linux instead. We'll 
reset the IIS service and you can wait and see. Oh, and, no, even 
though your contract says we monitor the server, that's only for static 
.HTML, if the ASP interpreter dies, we wouldn't know about it." Come 
on. Why sell a product, claim it works, and then blame the technology. 
We switched to a company who espouses service over everything else 
(MaximumASP) and shoved three times as much traffic on there, and it 
hasn't missed a beat in four years. Seriously.

I then sent at least 20 customers their way (at $499.00 a month or 
more) in the years since. Doing the math, that's about $120K/year in 
revenue from people who otherwise would not have even *heard* of them.

Fifteen years ago in business school I'd call this not just a gap 
analysis, but a GAPE analysis ;-)