Last night, December 28th, 2012, Eskimo North moved from an Integra co-location facility to an Isomedia facility.

First off, I want to thank the crew at Isomedia that worked with us to make this happen successfully.  In all we managed to accomplish this with less than two hours downtime.

The primary reason for our move was cost, Integra’s old rate was 1.5x what Isomedia charges, and they had in November sent me a notice that the rates were going up another $50, but when the invoice came they were $673, and I’ve yet to get an explanation from any of my contacts there, making the new Integra rate 2.5x higher than their competitor.

Secondary reasons for that were service, the last time there was a commercial AC power outage, their generator failed to start and the UPS quickly drained and we were down for lack of power a number of hours.

Then there was the incident where they lost air conditioning in the facility, our web server went down and when I got there it was 108F in the building and when I called the NOC, they were totally unaware that anything was wrong.

Or while I was gone, and they failed to reach my son regarding payment and their solution was to shut our Internet connectivity off for a weekend, a fiasco that cost me a significant number of web hosting customers.

So those were some of my reasons for leaving.  That said, I’m impressed with Isomedia so far.  The facility is better lit, and instead of blowing hurricane force winds through the entire building they have air come up through the floor of the cabinet and exit out the top.  The lighting is much better.  And they have a nice thing they refer to as crash carts, role around carts with a keyboard and monitor that will allow most people not to have to bring one.  Unfortunately, we found the monitors couldn’t handle Sun video so we still had to bring a monitor for our Sun equipment, but it’s a nice plus.

The greatest thing though is the people, Robb and Martin and Eric, all of you guys are great and I really appreciate your attitude of partnering with your customers and commitment to find a way to get it done.