As far as I can piece together from the archives, the first mention of Johncompanies I encountered was back in May of 2005, when DeWitt picked them as his new provider. Two days short of a year later, after 1and1 decided it was acceptable for our production MySQL databases to be offline for over four days, and we found ourselves in the market for a new hosting provider, the very first suggestion offered by Paul Brown was…wait for it…Johncompanies. A couple of further comments in that vein, and I was sold. Johncompanies it was.
Of the IT decisions I’ve made since starting RedMonk with James back in ’02, the Johncompanies selection is up there with the best of them. True, my expectations were fairly minimal after I went from one host that lost our DNS records for two days (Purehost) to the aforementioned 1and1 who was unable to provide even average connectivity to their MySQL databases, but even then Johncompanies has been a stellar choice.
Our recent Google migration was yet another validation of this assertion. Friday morning, we decided to go with Google Apps. Friday around lunchtime, I requested – via email – MX record changes for two domains, and CNAME changes for two subdomains. Of course, I forgot one of the CNAME requests, so that actually arrived in two separate requests. Time to change? Sub two hours, and done right the first time.
That’s not bad, and I suppose it’s positive that I have enough confidence in their support to use email knowing it won’t vanish into the ether, but it’s also not earth shattering. But guess how long it took them to apply the third CNAME change, the one I’d forgotten to ask for? Seven minutes. Seriously. Done, again, correctly. At no point did I have to pick up a phone, at no point was I in doubt as to whether my request would be handled, and at no point was there any question that it would be handled correctly. How many people can say that about their hosts?
While the support is good, however, the uptime is even better. The only outages experienced in the year plus we’ve been with Johncompanies were caused by either by my own stupidity (still a problem) or by out of control spammers (our migration to WordPress has done wonders there).
All too often these days I and many of the folks I read are writing about services or products that have let us and our businesses down, so it’s nice to be able to point to one that consistently exceeds expectations. If you’re looking for a host – for colo or otherwise – Johncompanies has my highest recommendation.
Now I just have to hope that they don’t take the same route 1and1 did after I thanked them 😉
