The Quantact Experience: Day 0
I’ve signed up for a new hosting account at Quantact. I looked around and chose them because they don’t [yet] have any bad reviews, as far as I could see. What Quantact offer is Xen-based hosting at a good price, with no setup fee.
Xen is a next-generation virtual server based on the Linux kernel, although you can now get the various BSDs to run on top of it too. What that means is that I’ve got what looks like my own server, with its own disk and RAM, and mostly its own CPU. Clearly the processor is shared, but unlike other resources I don’t have a fixed amount of it. I’ve got a certain minimum share, but when others aren’t using theirs, I can use even the whole of the machine’s computing power for short periods, known as bursts.
Quantact have a handy fraud-busting system in place, but not in the way you might think. I had to supply them with the phone number that my credit card company has, and they called me on it to ensure that I had placed the order. Now, I don’t know whether they were able to verify my phone number as it’s a foreign card, but they did call before creating the account and billing my card.
The other thing that calling did is make them human. Company web sites often spend a lot of money developing a personality and a rapport with the customer. Once Quantact’s web site persuaded me to place an order, I got a call from the CEO to thank me and confirm the details. Admittedly, knowing that Tim Doyle is the CEO as well as the admin reinforces the small-company effect—not necessarily a good thing—it does give the company a human face, and this before I’ve started using it in earnest.
I’m at work tomorrow, but I’ve booked Friday off to configure my new server. So the first thing I did was power it down using Quantact’s management console. Now I don’t have to worry about it being hacked before I can check out the security. The next thing I’ll do, first thing on Friday, is to edit my hosts.deny and hosts.allow files to give me some peace of mind while I’m setting things up. Join me then and I’ll tell you why and how.
p.s. I submitted my order after lunch (GMT), while California slept, and got my phone call during dinner. That’s good turnaround.