Goodbye!

[#1]

After thirteen years with a PN business account, I am leaving.

I am grateful to the PN staff over the years who have dug me out of some complex holes, many of which were side-effects of PN’s move from CCGI to PAYH and then to Hostopia while my applications used an admittedly unusual combination of Home pages, PHP pages and MySQL (ah … the days of Rumpus and Humbug…).

Latterly I would particularly like to thank Bob Pullen; PN just needs to find a way to replicate him many times over.    

I am moving to Zen. I looked seriously at the excellent Andrews and Arnold, but for the applications I use, I could have been caught by their download volume limits.

Last year, I moved my mail services and mail domains to Microsoft’s O365 (at £4.56 pm per user) because PN’s IMAP was getting very slow and the webmail client was mostly unusable. O365 is expensive, but given my reliance on email and my use of Outlook and many of Exchange’s ‘business’ features, it has proved rock-solid and worthwhile.

I already had some experience of GSuite - Google’s business equivalent at the same price, but for business use it is no competition to a combination of Outlook and O365 (online Exchange).     

A few weeks ago, I moved my webspaces to Vidahost (£2.80 pm) and PN-hosted domain zone files to (for the time being…) 123-reg

My phone line is – and will remain with – BT for extraneous reasons.

PRICES

PN are currently charging me £51 pm.

Zen will be charging me £35 pm for essentially the same link.

A&A would have charged £35 pm  (for up to 150GB pm)

Given the attractions of more responsive customer service for significantly less money, can anyone suggest why I should have stayed?

[#2]

i assume the £51pm from plusnet was the connection AND hosting services?
whereas the £35pm from Zen is just for connection and NO services?

so you're total new cost is £35 + £2.80 + £4.56 (multiplied by how many users you have) per month ?

[#3]

Thanks for the kind comments and sorry to see you go

Out of curiosity, did you speak to our helpdesk to see if there's anything more financially palatable they could have offered?

Or would that not have helped?

[#4]

@decomplexity Thanks for making the post. Hope all goes well with your new provider.

[#5]

For me this isn’t primarily a cost issue but what I get for what I pay.

 I could have used Vidahost’s 25 mailboxes and SSL/TLS support that come free with my hosting account. But I would have to add shared calendar and contacts by some other means. And O365 is functionally much richer. So I pay for O365.

And continuing to use PN IMAP was not, anyway, an option I could countenance given its lack of TLS security as well as sluggish performance.

Moving email elsewhere and keeping free webspace and DNS hosting with PN was impossible: implementing O365 needs DNS changes (e.g. customer access to TXT records) that PN do not support. So since website and email domains are the same...

The split between home pages and active pages servers (with the latter now with Hostopia) was historical: the original CCGI servers that ran PHP (etc) were separate from home pages for security reasons – at least that was PN’s stated reason many many years ago. This is OK when the back-end and front-end split is a simple call / response (GET, POST, AJAX,…) but an impediment when the home pages side wants to do SSI includes from the backend or have files transferred from the backend. I want to get away from all that.

And to Bob's point in the reply above, no - I didn't contact the Help Desk to try to negotiate a better price for pure broadband. Again, this isn't primarily a money issue: I know from experience elsewhere that if a customer calls Zen or A&A, the call is picked up quickly by someone reasonably experienced and  knowledgeable (A&A especially - I think the employ 100 Bobs!). With PN it is pot luck.