I'm also uneasy with people that put up a page like this which basically makes it seem (unless you read the first sentence carefully) that you are in the secure hands of a much larger organization.
http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network
http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc
Thoughts? (Note all blog posts are by "Gordon") I have less issues of course if the idea is redundancy.
Info in that post seems to indicate more employees:
Real office location in Austin, TX
Experienced owners; over 8 years experience in the web industry, over 50 years combined business experience
I haven't even gotten my incero server yet (just ordered it Friday evening); but I am impressed by their offering - such as IPMI/KVM, which is often not offered by fly-by-night hosters (and not offered by EC2 in the form of out of band access).
I also happen to be in a unique situation of not needing 100% uptime for my startup - a few minutes of downtime to switch to a hot failover is a non-issue; so if Incero proves competent to me, I'll still give them serious consideration for production hosting (again, with proper hot-failover backup elsewhere); despite potentially being a one-man-show.
Difficult to say which is the lesser of two evils:
* Being the customer of a small business, having to potentially wait for response
* Being one insignificant customer among millions when there's a datacenter meltdown at AWS, with no phone number to call, and no neck to strangle until you get back up -- at the end of a long list of small customers.
I only casually mentioned Incero here, vs. Voxel in many other replies, as I believe voxel is the more appropriate choice for most startups.
I'm reminded of this every time I log in to my now 12-year-old PayPal account. I see "1 open case" in my "Dispute Resolution Center" -- it's the case disputing my prepayment for the servers to this host, which PayPal said they would leave open forever, and if the principals of that company ever opened a new PayPal account they would have to resolve those disputes with all their former customers first.
Ultimately better to have a person or two that will pick up their cell phone when they are in the mall on a Saturday or out for dinner but are quite willing to tackle the problem when they arrive home. Not because they have to but because they care about what they do and have a conscience.
