As has been discussed here frequently, I’m a fairly serious consumer – in both personal and professional capacities – of SaaS/network services. As has also been discussed here on a regular basis, many if not most of the providers have let me down in the area of customer service. In a very real Pavlovian sense, I’m now mentally conditioned to mentally wince every time I receive correspondence from a service provider, prepared as I am in advance for their utter incompetence service-wise. Our horrific experiences with 1and1, in that context, can be seen as exercises in learned helplessness.
Thus it was a minor relief to receive the following email from the good folks over at rysnc.net (a spinoff of our current host, Johncompanies), who house the /redmonk and /.evolution directories I so fortunately backed up a week before I destroyed my root partition (the very same directories that are being pulled down to bishop as we speak – over a FUSE mounted directory, no less, but more on that exciting news in a bit). In the past, I’ve had both email and web hosting accounts suspended and even cut off because of overages in size. The geniuses at AIT once took our web site offline because we exceeded our alotted quota, which when you’re in your first two months of operation is less than ideal. How did Rsync.net handle it? See for yourself:
Hello,
This is an automated alert, sent by rsync.net. Your rsync.net filesystem is currently over quota.
This is not a major problem, nor do we insist that you remedy the problem immediately. However, your account is only allowed a 10% overage before it will be impossible for you to write additional data to the account. You will never lose the ability to read files from the account.
You may check your quota at any time by running the quota command over ssh:
ssh [email protected] quota
You can remedy this problem by removing files from your account, by purchasing a larger amount of space, or by simply letting it be.
If you have any trouble checking your quota, or would like to disable these notifications for this account, please contact [email protected]
Thank You,
rsync.net Support
I have to admit to some bias on the matter given the above, but it seems to me that if you’re looking for a remote backup services that’s friendly and very human in their customer service, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Rsync.net. On my Enemies List, they are not. And I think it may be time to upgrade my account over there so that I can avoid future disasters such as this one.
