Posted By Simon Thompson on 24 Nov 2020 07:08 AM

John,

I have taken a Managed VPS with DNN4less but am finding the service not as good as Managed.

I am struggling to get past first base and install my first site. I relied on the Control Panel in Managed for that task and see very few references to DNN in the Plesk panel and most fo those are old. 

I am feeling I have been led up a path here.

What am I missing?

I guess Managed is the only Hoster that has true DNN integration in their Control Panel.
I think you will have to install DNN manually in this case.

 

 

Simon - I made a couple of calls to support and did a couple of chat's from the link on their site to see how responsive they were to support requests before I set up the account. They were always prompt. Here is what I learned.

Dnn4Less uses Plesk just like Managed.
Dnn4Less does not have the 'control panel' that Managed does.
You have to turn in a support ticket to get a new install or upgrade.
At Managed, I used control panel all the time so I almost stopped there.
But I turned in a support ticket and my first two installs were done in a couple of hours. (New Installs)
I'm going to do a few migrations this week.
I can RDP in just like at Managed. This would have been a deal breaker for me if it wasn't available.
I decided the cost (about half of Managed) was worth the control panel trade off for me.

A couple of notes:
You have to register on their SUPPORT site - the Account Creation didn't give me a support account.
Their KB articles are dated.

Bottom line for me, if I can get a quick response when I have a support issue and they can take care of it, than it's worth it.
For the time being, I am keeping a Managed server and this new Dnn4Less server (splitting my clients 50/50) so after a couple of months I'll be able to provide a much better comparison. If anyone else has long term experience with Dnn4Less, I'd love to hear it.

John,

I very much appreciate the reply and will take your approach for now.

Based in the UK as I am the level of support during my working day seems not a patch on Managed. I am actually considering going back to them but adding in the offsite backups in future.

Simon Thompson UK 

My Managed.com server was turned off again - Support says they are not able to give an ETA of when it will be back up. Anybody know what's going on?

Yes, most likely gross mismanagement. My site is still down since the inception of the attack. Security folks are theorizing that a so-called deprecated attack of some sort hit their system. That is, running outdated security protocols and procedures and not having any sort of ransomware disaster recovery plan. Yes, those kind of specific plans actually exist.  

If you are going to condemn Managed.com for gross mismanagement, are you going to let the real criminals off of the hook? C'mon man!

I'm not saying the Managed.com has done everything correctly, but let's at least be even handed.  Their "gross mismanagement" pales in comparison to that of the criminals who performed this heinous act!

Just wanted to add a quick word here. I have been with managed.com / powerdnn for about 8 years and have, on balance, been very satisfied with their services over that time. This ransom attack put the fear of god in me as my sites on their servers were down for longer than most due to the attack and my working assumption had been they were lost (I did not have recent offline backups, most recent offline backups of mine were a few years old!). However I sat tight and waited. I was rewarded when I woke up this morning to discover all was recovered and back online. Profund relief.

I will continue to keep my custom with managed.com. I am not going to flee because of this criminal act that they were on the receiveing end of and their clear struggle to deal with it. They have delivered for me at the cost - in my case - of a few days' downtime. I can live with that. I will now sort my own practices out of storing off site backups on a frequent basis. Quite an experience all 'round.

But Managed continue to have my vote of confidence.

Just wanted to add another message of hope. My sites came up briefly this morning but went down again. Then, a few minutes later, they're back up and everything seems to be working perfectly. Been about 1/2 hour. Waiting an hour or so to notify customers.

On a slightly different note, I was fortunate to have 6 day old backups that I download every week. I use them to test module installs and upgrades on my development server prior to releasing them to production. Also run DNN upgrades on dev first. But it didn't really do me much good. I contacted several hosting companies and none seemed anywhere close to Managed.com services. 

It did help me with my customers because I could assure them that I had all their data safely stored and ready to deploy somewhere else. Especially the one customer who was writing a book using her 300+ blog entries as a reference. 

Also. for the last 6 months I have been working (procrastinating) on getting our hosting running on Azure. But I've been postponing the work until now. I will be continuing testing and configuration to see how successful that will be. Depending on various factors I may move, I may not.

If anyone wants some advice on procedures, backups, restoring a DB to your local server or even Azure (little knowledge that I have so far), please ask away. We all need to be in this together.

One last note, I've been with DNN since 2.0 and have no plans to leave it as a platform.

Hey Joe, I did comment on the hackers (see above), but the real problem lies with the ISP, since they are the only ones that can solve the problem. Cursing the hackers does no good because it's simply futile. It's like cursing the sun for burning your skin. :-)

We are going to disagree with that one, Will. Strongly.