What is the deal with Aretta?

[Dan Lawrence]

So, I eagerly signed up for the new hosting solution from Aretta as soon as I saw the news on the home page.

They took my money just fine, but I have yet to recieve the email from them with the passwords to access my PIAF server. The user control panel shows that it is set up and I have the IP addresses listed, but without the passwords I can't do anything.

I've talked to their chat support and submitted a trouble ticket. I've tried two different email address (one gmail in case there is a spam problem with my office account).

Is anyone else having trouble with Aretta?

 

[Dan Lawrence]

update

We were able to communicate with my gmail account so I'm back in business.

I am still interested in hearing other people experiences - good or bad.

-Dan

 

[cosmicwombat]

What link? What hosting deal?

I looked at Aretta and didn't see PBX in a Flash?

I did see http://lylix.net/pbx-in-a-flash

Which is different.

 

[merlyn]

I looked at Aretta and didn't see PBX in a Flash?

I did see http://lylix.net/pbx-in-a-flash

Which is different.

I wondered the same thing.. The link to Aretta from Ward's main page just links you to Aretta's normal netpbx hosted asterisk with no mention of pbxinaflash

same price as off the street?? seems kinda of odd.. Not sure if the "package" they are offering for us is different or what?

link from todays posting ... http://www.aretta.com/products/hosted-asterisk.php?splash&type=PBX in a Flash

Has the info just not been updated yet?

merlyn

 

[emtty]

Difference

LYLIX differences...

Real 24/7 in-house, responsive support; provided via trouble ticket or immediate telephone emergency assistance with an actual administrator at any hour. Customer confidence goes hand in hand with solid and reliable communication and support. In fact, a recent situation spawning from lack of response to support requests from Aretta resulted in a non-customer "emergency" call in the middle of the night just to "test" whether we actual would answer or not, now a satisfied client.

High availability infrastructure, ie. network RAID, to ensure if any hardware issues arise, downtime for customers is minimal (minutes for failover) if hardware replacement, et. al., is necessary.

Three regional NOCs to minimize latency to key geographic locations as required; NYC NOC hits many ITSPs within 2-10ms (VoicePulse, RapidVox, Les, VOIPJet, etc.).

Provisioning typically within an hour or less (ready to use, not just a reserved IP). No extension/trunk limitations, just storage/RAM/traffic allocations upgradeable at any time on-the-fly. We've been hosting and promoting PIAF since December '07 just days after the 1.1 release, the first to do so to our knowledge; one of few regarded Asterisk friendly VPS providers for nearly 2 years.

 

[Dan Lawrence]

Well, so far it has been a very bumpy road. I finally got my passwords and I am able to log into the box via ssh, I the passwords for the web GUI are not working.

I figured I would simply log into the shell and run passwd-master to fix up the passwords, but that script isn't present. In fact, I don't see any of the PIAF scripts at all. No help-pbx, etc.

In fact, asterisk and amportal aren't even in my path.

I'm starting to think that I am shareing the same PIAF system with other users. If that is the case I will cancel with Aretta and try out Lylix.

 

[emtty]

PIAF scripts

Dan

The aforementioned scripts are all present in the PIAF hosted over here; you basically get what you'd expect from an ISO install on a dedicated box. Sounds like the competition is still playing catchup

Hope things fare better for you... just keep us in mind.

 

[frontline]

Sounds like the competition is still playing catchup

Hope things fare better for you... just keep us in mind.

A couple question while you are here....

Do the non-distribution VPS provide burst levels for memory, cpu, etc. Is a swapfile allocation provided to allow 256mb to actually run a asterisk/centos5/freepbx configuration.

Are you provisioning in NYC datacenter at this time.

Do you accept Paypal?

I am asking here because your presentation (and competitor face-off) is here and others may wish to know.

 

[emtty]

misc...

256 MB suits a CentOS5/LAMP/Asterisk/FreePBX layout fine; in most cases about 60-70% utilization. Memory allocation is burstable at 2x the purchased guarantee. Swap is not provided as there are not only performance issues, but it's essentially unnecessary on a properly configured system. CPU bursts as well.

There is never a shortage of space in any NOC. Paypal - certainly.

 

[frontline]

Guess I better say emtty sent me....

If you have access can you post the ping time from your east coast NOC's to inbound4.vitelity.net

 

[emtty]

inbound4.vitelity.net

East ~ 42ms x11 hops (Savvis), but South NOC is better @ ~18 ms x14 hops (Level 3).

 

[frontline]

Where is south? Atlanta I pray... Would that also be good to voipjet? east.voipjet.com

 

[emtty]

http://lylix.net/network

On VOIPjet... all depends on what proxy you want to use, they have both east and west coast, but concentrated primarily in NY (east, nac, dialer, dialer2, test), all of which you can hit in < 5 ms from LYLIX East.

 

[frontline]

The network page doesn't mention a south noc.

I was hoping it is in Atlanta. I was looking for the ping to east.voipjet.com. This is my last request for now at least

It is worth noting (to me) that this thread which includes the Aretta name in the thread title has yet to have their response unless I missed it. Methinks I will go the other way.

 

[emtty]

Channel Limits

Ping to east.voipjet.com ~= 1.90 ms from East NOC

South-west -> TX

On another note, not sure what the so-called "Maximum Simultaneous Calls" channel limit at Ar---- is supposed to mean; a hard, controlled limit or "bad things will happen if you exceed this" limit? Not much different than charging per extension really. Our concurrency is based more on slice allocation, so a base plan here ($30) equals $109.95+ over yonder (typically 20-25 concurrency).

Basically, if you need phones and the whole bundle, they could be a viable solution for a one-stop shop. We tend to concentrate more on infrastructure and try not to be all things, appealing to a more technical audience who prefers unmanaged hosting; but at the same time always happy to provide initial configuration for a small fee to anyone who is new to the IP-PBX playing field.

 

[Dan Lawrence]

I wanted to update that I have been having discussions with Aretta through their support ticket system. They restored my WebGUI password and I now finally have complete access to the system.

I express my unhappiness in the problems that I was having as well as the apparent lack of PIAF support from the shell. Since I had paid up front for the service, I requested that they terminate my account and refund my money.

They replied saying "This is a brand spankin new template for PiaF, can you give us a little time to address the issues? We'll do our best to get it straight for you, as you want it, that's what the trial period is for!"

Well, that is the first I had heard of a trial period.

To make a long story slightly shorter, I now have what appears to be working system and my up front payment has been refunded. I am now on a 30 day free trial.

I've decided to continue to give them a shot, but I will also be trying out lylix at the same time. It feels to me that the higher price and lower concurent connection limits will nudge me in the lylix direction.

For my next trick, I am doing a backup of my test PIAF box and then restoring that backup to the Aretta host. Wish me luck

I will keep this thread posted with updates.

 

[Dan Lawrence]

ping times from Aretta

And just for completeness, here are some ping times taken from the PIAF shell of my Aretta account. Please note these are loaded packets which I feel are a more realistic representation of actual voip traffic...

$ date
Fri Feb 15 14:55:32 EST 2008

$ ping -q -c 5 -s 1000 inbound4.vitelity.net
PING inbound4.vitelity.net (64.2.142.30) 1000(1028) bytes of data.
--- inbound4.vitelity.net ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 50.770/51.138/51.557/0.309 ms

$ ping -q -c 5 -s 1000 east.voipjet.com
PING east.voipjet.com (208.72.186.66) 1000(1028) bytes of data.
--- east.voipjet.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 24.503/24.749/25.034/0.270 ms


-Dan

 

[frontline]

This is some good stuff. If I recall Aretta servers are in Chicago. I would have expected better pings to vitelity. At $40 or whatever for a hard 2 channel limit they will need to tune more than their templates to get competitive in my view.

Lylix:
I would like to see...
.. A little lower price increments on the open servers. More like 2.50 to $3 for 4gb of space or cpu upgrades.
.. An Atlanta server
Nervertheless, Lylix seems to understand the market.

Keep the reviews coming. It is priceless.

 

[emtty]

This is a brand spankin new template for PiaF, can you give us a little time to address the issues?

sounds like things were a little premature to the market... we haven't heard of any such issues even on deployment #1 from December, except for that well documented Web-Meetme bug, which we patched internally back then.

Anyways... it's good for the consumer that there is choice, it comes down to choosing the shoe that fits the situation.

 

[mfribush]

The 'deal' with Aretta

I normally don't stoop to this level, but if you're going to rake us through the coals in a public forum, I cannot and will not sit idle and let it go on without a response. This is my final letter to Mr. Lawrence.

Dan,
I want to clearly express my dissatisfaction regarding your negative public postings surrounding your experience with my company that all of us here at Aretta have worked so hard to build. Our employees spend tireless hours supporting our customers regarding every little issue they may have with Asterisk, be it configuration, trunking, VICIDIAL, A2Billing, custom scripts and every endpoint device known to man. When they come to me with support tickets like this, it hits hard.

I want you to know that we have supported the PiaF project since its inception by hosting thousands upon thousands of ISO downloads from our datacenter, on our dime. We have provided free virtual machines for the entire PiaF team to build and test the distributions. We have gone out of our way to support this project and quite frankly, I am appalled that you would launch a negative attack on us in a public forum. It's unprofessional, and damages the goodwill we worked so hard to provide to the entire PiaF community.

Had you of worked constructively with us, as the entire PiaF development team has, as opposed to turning this into a Lylix vs. Aretta bakeoff, we would have been more than accommodating to spend plenty time to resolve your issues that were caused primarily as a result of you not logging into SSH properly. The welcome email, which was sent 22 minutes after you ordered at 4:40AM Eastern time, clearly explains how to log in properly via SSH. I'm sorry that your domain doesn't receive email from us, that was unfortunate. Had you of picked up the phone and given us a polite call instead of launching a condescending support ticket out of the gate, we would have been more than happy to walk you through the entire login process and get you going, as we do with all of our customers, even those with just our SIP Trunking offering. We're in Atlanta, GA, home of good old Southern Hospitality which unfortunately you never got to experience.

Had you of worked constructively with us, you would have also learned that you were running THE LATEST AND GREATEST VERSION of PiaF, VERSION 1.1.1, UNRELEASED TO THE PUBLIC. You were the very first user of this "brand spankin new template" outside of the developers of the entire project. Most would chomp at the bit to be able to work with things like that, as anyone running PiaF is in it for the thrill of the latest and greatest code.

There are so many good people we have met and worked with in this entire community that are all in this together, for the good of the project. It is clear that this is not your objective and you have other motives. For that, we feel it is in our best interest to stop supporting you.

We have honored your request to terminate service and as I stated previously, all money received has been refunded.

Sincerely yours,
Marc J. Fribush
President
Aretta Communications, Inc.