I know yesterday was the day for product summaries, and that I’ve mentioned these guys before, but it’s worth repeating: Johncompanies is a phenomenal colo provider. On my personal 2-8 rating scale they’re a legitimate 8.
After getting myself lost in the woods late this afternoon (long story – the short version is that I’m an idiot), I returned to find emails from our two uptime monitoring services (1stmonitor and Montastic) indicating that redmonk.com was down. They were right. Pages weren’t serving and my first two attempts at SSHing into the server timed out.
This is unusual, because typically even if Apache is down SSH is responsive, so I immediately fired off an email to our host Johncompanies asking if they knew of any network difficulties. The net time for their response? 4 minutes. On a Sunday afternoon. And not an automated response, but an actual email from a sysadmin.
As it turned out, SSH had come back in the meantime, but it was an excellent reminder of why I’m so happy to host with them.
Would that a temporarily unresponsive box had been the end of my troubles, but the subsequent MySQL corruption issus were far less dire than I had anticipated. At least so far – knock on wood. Do let me know if you see anything wonky across the RedMonk blogs, though.
If you’re in the market for a colo provider, Johncompanies gets my highest recommendation.
Update: Matt’s absolutely right – the lack of linkage was a grievous omission. Corrected here.
Disclosure: None. We get no discounts or special treatment from Johncompanies – I’m just a happy customer.
