Review: 01.com Zimbra Hosting
Update (12.26.08): I wanted to post an update to my original review below. After I had my initial problems with their service, 01.com was incredibly responsive and proactive in not only helping me get an understanding of the origins of the problems, but improving overall communication with all of their customers. I did a great deal of competitive analysis, and even tried several competitors, but no one matched 01.com in service, support, and reliability. They clearly have the scale to not only always make sure that they are constantly upgrading and tweaking the latest version of Zimbra hosting, but the size of their service and operation helps make sure that they are getting help directly from the software vendor. While it may seem weird, after reading my scathing review below, to understand why I stuck with 01.com, it really came down to me gaining a greater understanding of the variables that could cause service disruption, and that I felt I had transparency into their operation and practices. Their new newsletters, e-mail updates, and admin tools have been great in helping me manage my hosting service. While the initial failure below was certainly a troubling event, they have done a great deal to improve the quality of the service, and I have been very happy with 01.com since then. I don’t plan on leaving any time soon.
Original Post: I’m going to keep this rant brief. I own my own domain (clearly) and so I need to use a mail host in order to manage my messaging. I’ve used Horde, Exchange Hosting, and most recently, Zimbra though 01.com. First off, I want to say that I absolutely love Zimbra. It is an amazing, standards-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange, and works incredibly well with the Mac. It supports CalDAV, iSync integration, and fully works with the iPhone over-the-air. I loved the functionality, and it just worked perfectly.
No, the problem isn’t with Zimbra, it is with my (ex) host, 01.com. This Monday afternoon my e-mail went down. This has actually happened before, so I wasn’t terribly concerned. However, after checking their blog, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t a minor outage, it was a major crash. All of my mail, contacts, and calendars, were gone. About 12 hours later my e-mail started coming in, but none of my old info was restored, nor did any of the messages that should have arrived during the outage get delivered.
So, here I am, days later, and I am still without my data. This is unbelievably unacceptable, and has been a tremendous, stupendous example of an epic fail. I am so frustrated I am switching to Google hosting, which doesn’t offer the same functionality, but at least I know Google won’t go down.
Well, there you have it. 01.com blew it. They had a great product, but lousy reliability and support. I really wish 01.com could deliver a reliable product, because Zimbra is certainly the best messaging platform for my needs, and so I would love to see 01.com prove me wrong in the future. However, for now, they won’t be getting any more of my money, and I’d strongly caution you against giving them your business.
[UPDATE]: I just got a call from a manager at 01.com who went into great detail on the cause of the problem, what is being done to fix it, and more. While I have still had an incredibly frustrating experience over the past week, it was comforting to finally to have the chance to talk to someone about it. Please see the comments for an official 01.com response.
[UPDATE 2]: So the string of letdowns continues… See the comments for more details. We’ll see if they keep their promises.
[UPDATE 3]: My mail started coming back late Friday night. We’ll see what got recovered tomorrow.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Google’s reliability:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9117322
I am also an 01.com customer and have been without my data all week. Totally ridiculous. Just goes to show that backups are useless unless you have a comprehensive recovery plan.
wow, thanks. hopefully google will just be a temporary step. as i have been spending the night getting it set up, i realize how much less feature rich than zimbra it is.
i actually came across this host: http://www.simplymailsolutions.com/
although they are in the UK, i’m hoping the latency won’t be a problem. i’m currently getting some more info (ZCS version, mobile support, etc) and am hoping that once 01.com is back, i can do a full migration.
Dear Max,
Thanks for speaking with me on the phone. I am deeply saddened by the frustration that our service has caused you and other clients impacted by our service issue. We have been trying to be as transparent and helpful as possible through this, and I regret that you and other of our clients have escaped our attention. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain better what’s been happening here to assist you as we finish recovering. Your data is on the way back into your account, as it is to all remaining clients impacted by our recent service issue. While we have added 50% to our staff in the last month, and the issue affects less than 15% of mailboxes in our shared hosting service, clearly our current systems aren’t up to the task of communicating effectively to such a large number of impacted clients. Once all clients are restored, we’re installing a new feedback system through which on Monday we can communicate an analysis, what we’ve learned and changed, how it will not happen again. Expect more from us. And if you should finalize your move, as with any of our clients, as is written into our agreement, you can count on our assistance still. In any event I’m happy that your trouble with us has not diminished your enthusiasm for Zimbra, and there are a number of other good Zimbra providers out there, including http://www.perceiva.com and http://www.hostprogressive.com
for those following along at home: after having the conversation with the above commentor, who explained the failure, i was told that the restore would start on my mailbox. that was 6 hours ago, and yet here i am, patiently waiting to get back some critical information, and they have not honored their claim and begun restoring my information.
after thinking that perhaps i would consider going back, this is another disappointment. further, my latest help ticket hasn’t been responded to in over 24 hours. very disappointing. 1 failure is 1 failure too many, and they are wearing my patience thin. these false promises are tiresome…
We’ve settled on Google Apps ,for all of its warts, as it has the basic features we need at a very good price point in a ‘real’ cloud environment.
(Zimbra is fantastic, but the price point was not good for the basic features we needed…)
Unfortunately ANY hosting provider you go with is going to have problems of some sort, so it is vital that you check the organization ‘under the hood’ and find out what you are really buying in terms of both the hosted environment and the engineers who will be helping you at 2am when everything goes to H*ll.
And this incident with 01.com sounds like business as usual for Intermedia who are our current (Exchange) providers, so they are not alone in this department…
Good luck.
So what was the final outcome? Did you get your email and a final resolution with these guys?
after looking at many alternatives, i am staying with 01.com, at least for the moment. the closest hosting provider with parity in features is progressive hosting. however, at this point, as twisted as it sounds, i now at least know what can go wrong with this host. all of this is such an adventure into uncertainty, and so for the time being, i am going to see how their new measures go. consider all of this strike two…
We are in the same boat with 01.com
We were going to switch to another (unnamed) provider this weekend, but they botched every single part of the transition they could. Considering they are pursuing me as a customer and I have not paid a dime, I worry how things will be once they have me tied to a one year contract. For now, I guess I will stick with 01.com.
What’s the saying? Fool me once, shame on you, Fool me a second time…
I found this posting while doing a search on 01.com issues. I’m in a similar situation as you and needed an email host for a couple domains. I found Zimbra a year and a half ago, and think it’s absolutely great. I’ve tried running my own Exchange server, a hosted Exchange account, a Zimbra hosted account with HostProgressive, and now a 01.com Zimbra account. When dealing with multiple email accounts, Zimbra has no competition.
I actually just switched to a business account from a shared account with 01 about a month ago. The price was about the same, but now I can add more mailboxes and have shared resources between them. I just backed up my shared account to Outlook, created a new account and sync’d up from my Outlook backup. If you have a shared account now you may think about doing something similar….perhaps the business accounts are treated a little differently.
But what I’m searching for now is anything to do with email delays. For the past several weeks, I’ve been experiencing a 5 – 15 minute delay both on the sending and receiving end of emails. I’m hoping this is something that 01.com is working through, as it’s getting annoying. Are you experiencing the same types of delays?
Are you using the web interface or a thick client when you see the delay?
Have their engineers (aka real tech people, not reassuring managerial types…) been helpful?
Are you still having problems with 01? I was thinking of switching as MobileMe is super fail and I wanted something to sync with my iPhone and my girlfriends calendar.
so i am not currently having any issues with 01.com any more. i use them through the web interface, the Zimbra desktop client, my iPhone via exchange, and IMAP.
after having my initial problems, they have done a great deal to dramatically improve their communication and overall transparency. while this doesn’t make the initial failure any less painful, it has greatly assuaged any of my concerns over their ability to execute.
with regards to Zimbra as an alternative to MobileMe, i have found Zimbra to meet all of my needs. it works perfectly for me, since i have my own domain, and allows me to effortlessly manage my information across multiple machines, while leveraging CalDAV, push e-mail, and address book sync.
We work quite closely with 01.com, they do much of our mail server work. Some of our internal accounts were affected by this outage and I was as angry as hell. We looked at moving hosting providers within the first few days.
I have talked to a number of people at 01.com including the person who owns the company and I am happy with how they have handled everything given the scale of the failure. We are going to use them to setup our new dedicated Zimbra servers and they have been more than helpful in designing a solution that is multi continent redundant for our customers, without any extra charge.
While the failure was crap and unacceptable, their knowledge of Zimbra and how to connect it with 3rd party applications is awesome, truly their biggest selling point.
Similar review about 01.com:
http://01hostingreview.synthasite.com/
Recommendation: AVOID!
Wow, that is a rather scathing review…
If it is correct in terms of some customers going a month without recovering their mail, that would poke quite a few holes in the idea that they have any sort of redundancy or fail-over capabilities.
Do they have pictures of their ‘redundant data center’?
(Of course some hosting providers seem to think RAID 5 = redundancy :) )
for anyone following along, i’ve updated the post. while i certainly had a trying time during the outage, things have improved substantially since then.
Well it’s good to hear you’ve sorted things out. I work with another hosting provider called SpecialAI and although they don’t sell personal accounts, SpecialAI does have one of the best up-time guarantees, 100%, which we consistently satisfy year over year. Yes, technology poops out occasionally but it’s the way that the provider handles the problem which makes the biggest difference.