I'm working with guys at ThePlanet since 2001, when company was called EV1 and so far I really had no complain about that. Quick in support, professional, innovative and sporting enterprise systems. Most of all, they have great network and they use to introduce new systems / solutions every few months. That's a company you can depend on.
Unfortunately, since a few months, major italian provider is having increasing difficulties in routing to ThePlanet network. From time to time, servers look unreachable for long times (1 hour or more... a few times it was much more than that). Now, I understand this is not ThePlanet's fault but rather provider's fault but unfortunately customers won't understand such "details": to your customers, your servers are down. Bad, as you could imagine...
However, while that is something ThePlanet cannot solve for sure, I have to say that I was very disappointed about their dedicated servers. You know, they offered dedicated servers using CentOS to run R1Soft CDP appliance for continuous backup services. This is a must in my business so I was very happy to get one of those servers, with 1TB space and pay more than 300$/month for it. By using compression, that huge space could be used to backup many servers so costs would have been parted between all of them which looked reasonable. Moreover, CDP is able to produce images of disks and supported Windows servers. I thought this was perfect because, in the end, I could use CDP to restore servers, even from bare-metal if needed. Right?
Wrong! First of all, CDP started to experience out of memory errors very often when more than 4 servers were involved in backup operations (and they weren't performed concurrently of course...). Server has 1GB RAM and that could be easily solved by increasing memory for server but I'm a bit disappointed CDP requires so much memory while not allowing you to perform more than 2 concurrent backup operations. Whatever...
What shocked me most happened when I tried to test bare-metal restore operations in order to check if I could use it to restore a pysical disk which had problems on a customer's server. I checked CDP website to understand which was best way to perform that and CDP allows you to do that in a couple of ways (3, if I remember it well). However, I was astonished to know that ThePlanet doesn't support ANY of them!
Couldn't believe my eyes when they replied to my tickets: nothing. That operation is simply unsupported, expecially for Windows servers. Now, let's not consider that I sent them multiple tickets before getting that server, asking them if bare-metal restores of Windows servers was supported and if their technicians would have helped for that. Their sales dept always replied positively.
What shocks me most is they sell such a solution without caring that they won't support a critical funcionality of it ! They technicians tried to led me to ask for an OS reload but that wasn't what I needed and I told them. This basically means they tricked me into getting that server and paying them more than 300$ per month and if something bad happened (which didn't happen, thank God), I would have been confident to be able to restore my server only to find that I couldn't. Geez! That's very bad from them...
So the lesson here is: always try any functionality your provider tells you they provide before becoming dependent on that, even if that costs money. Exactly knowing what you can expect from your provider will be the key to be able to plan a good emergency stategy in case anything goes wrong.
A side-lesson is: be always prepared for the worst because the worst you can imagine will happen at least one time. If you won't have a good exit strategy for the worst, that will possibly led you to real big problems. And I mean BIG.