I've used Cedant Hosting Solutions for several years, both for my current web site, www.jazzobsession.com, and for another web site that I sold.

I thought that they had an acceptable "value proposition" - in other words how much bandwidth and storage they provided for the price. I also recall that they promised 99.9% uptime.

Generally, the outages had been few and far between and short. I was able to maintain the site using Microsoft Front Page. Customer Service had been adequate.

I had heard that they were a reseller of services. That is, they do not own their own servers. However, this had not led to a functionality issue.

However, a few months ago, I decided to hire a webmaster and open a separate site for my CD, The Power Of Two by John Temmerman's Jazz Obsession Quartet, while maintaining the present site for promotional activity for the band and my music teaching business.

Once I looked at my needs, it became clear that I was going to need more storage than Cedant was offering. I had already identified several alternative vendors that were offering much more storage for similar pricing compared to Cedant. I hadn't done too much on getting ready for the new site.

That is, until last week.

Last Saturday evening, my site was down for several hours. Cedant's technical support is email-only after 5pm on Saturday. I first noticed the outage around 7pm, when I was unable to access my FTP site. I sent hourly emails and left a couple of phone messages for technical support. I called the sales number and the sales person said that there was nothing she could do. I had to send email and otherwise wait until Monday morning.

Then, I did something else. I called Ipowerweb, one of the competing vendors I was considering, to see if I could talk to a technical support person there. I did. It took about 7 minutes.

My site was still down when I went to bed at around 11:30 CST.

My site was up when I got up at 7CST on Sunday Morning. Cedant never responded to my calls.

I've decided that I need more capacity for the money, with a provider that has their own servers and true 24/7 technical support. Cedant isn't it - and they no longer have any reliability promises on their web site.

Ipowerweb provides 8 times the storage, much higher traffic, and LIVE TECHNICAL SUPPORT for a lower price. They also make reliability promises.

Here is a description from the Cedant site of the hosting package I use:

Starting at only $10.36 per month, our Standard account combines outstanding value with the features usually associated with more expensive accounts. We provide 100 MB of disk space (enough for thousands of web pages!), 10000 MB of data transfer per month, and 25 email accounts.

•I 100 MB Disk Space
•I 10 GB Data Transfer
•I 25 POP Email Account
•I Secure Server (SSL)
•I Telnet (SSH)
•I mySQL Database
•I PHP 4
•I Anonymous FTP
•I Web Based Email
•I 24/7 Email Support
•I Phone Support
•I Account Control Panel
•I File Manager
•I Unlimited FTP Updates
•I Autoresponders
•I Email Aliasing
•I FrontPage 2002
•I Server Side Includes (SSI)
•I Password Protected Pages
•I Detailed Web Statistics
•I Your own CGI-BIN
•I Free CGI Scripts
•I Mailing Lists
•I Static IP Address
•I Real Audio/Video
•I 30 Day Money Back Guarantee






Recommended: No

Monthly fees (US$): 10.36
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: Other ODBC database
Main focus of Web site: Customer service and retention