Welcome to Apollo and AT&T Callvantage customers – August 28, 2009

Lime Daley often acquires new customers when they leave a previous provider who either doesn't provide support, or the support that is provided consists of mostly trying to figure out what language they are speaking.   The person doesn't want to have to know technical details of why their site is getting the infamous 503 Internal Server Error, nor why their emails sometimes take 15 or 30 minutes to be delivered, and they are attracted to Lime Daley because they know they will get an engineer on the phone immediately, and problems are taken care of without hassle.

However, this month has been an interesting one where we have customers frustrated by their current provider for a different reason.  In one example, AT&T is closing their voice over IP (VOIP) service in October, and so their customers are left to scramble to find new phone service before they disappear.  After a year of providing VOIP on a limited basis, Lime Daley is now offering phone service to the general public.  The cheapest plans are $15/month, and we have the capacity to handle any needs your house or business has.  A VOIP phone or adapter is needed for our service.  We are currently recommending an ATS X10001P device sold at Walmart for $50, though supplies are getting scarce.  This phone works both as a "regular" VOIP phone, while also providing a POTS lines to make your existing phones work.  Unfortunately, your existing CallVantage router takes some time to make it work properly, and isn't supported by the vendor as a general purpose SIP device, so you'll probably be better off replacing it than trying to hack it to make it work. We run an Asterisk-based system, so any SIP device will work.

Another potential customer just instant messaged (what, you mean your provider's technical staff isn't available via IM?) to say that apollohosting.com recently moved all of their customers to new servers, and lost various pieces of essential functionality overnight, causing various errors and downtime for their customers.  If you are one of those customers that cares about PDO, SSH, or a nice mysql frontend like navicat, give us a call, and we'll get you setup quickly.  (As always, DNS propagation delays will limit your transfer time, but in Apollo's case, they have much smaller numbers than lots of hosts - only an hour for the switch to take place.  Not as fast as Lime Daley's TTL (minimum of 5 seconds), but not as bad as some of the hosts who make you wait 3 days of downtime before your site transfers properly).