Have you tried telling them that? Maybe you aren’t looking at the right companies. I mean people trying to sell you viagra contact you first too, but you wouldn’t go buy your heart pills from them.

Josh, it might be cheaper, less time consuming and possibly even fun to just hire one or two people to build you a storage farm on top of some network clustering technology.

I mean, who wouldn’t want a job working for DreamHost setting up a million dollars worth of disk under MogileFS or something like that?

(Especially if the job paid well.)

In reply to #3 Creature:

Thanks for that link. My opinion of Larson has only gone down after that. I’ll be sure never to use Gary Larson’s mediocre strips online, per his request.

Heh, sounds kinda familiar, except in our case the “sales” people are DreamHost (not so much sales as support in this case). We’ve been trying to get the memory upgraded in our dedicated server for almost 3 weeks now, and still have no estimated time of upgrade. Apparently the memory is backordered (though I keep seeing shared servers being upgraded on the status blog). I’m sure there’s a good reason for it, but to us on the outside, this seems pretty surprising, given that there are hundreds of companies that sell RAM. Surely you guys could go to a different supplier with stock on hand and still get a good deal? I don’t know what kind of volume discounts you guys get, so maybe it’s not worth placing a small order with some place like NewEgg.

But at some point, maybe a little extra money is worth keeping a satisfied customer. Our server bogs down more and more each day as our audience grows, causing the machine to start swapping during peak loads. We’re optimizing everything we possibly can, but ultimately that upgrade is going to make a much bigger difference than anything we can do in the meantime. So we keep waiting…

Maybe you guys don’t want the extra money we’ll be paying once the machine is upgraded. I’m hoping I don’t have to start looking at alternative hosts. :)

[...] http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/10/13/sales-are-slow/ [...]

I think you should name and shame the comapanies and their salespeople. Also put their calls on the blog like you did with Mr Angry who complained about spam!

I was a “sales guy” of big-iron telecomm equipment for a long time. The other sales guys didn’t like me because I was my own tech-consultant. I wanted to answer your questions, give you a price, and leave you alone to decide – they wanted to take you to Delmonico’s (NYC) for a steak lunch.

I would call the HQ for the companies who offer products that might be appropriate and ask for the “head of sales”. Tell that person what your experience was with the morons who were supposed to smile and take your money. You will probably get immediate oral sex, followed by competent help spending your money with that vendor.

Best/jad

Just a tought .. but what about calling like seagate direct and cutting the middleman ? it’s not like there are so many companies in this business .. seagate, wd, hitachi, maxtor, samsung and toshiba and that’s pretty much it

unless you need fancy packaging (like some nas box) for a million bucks these guys will talk to you …

at that price , even at street price you’ll get 360 terabytes !!

Josh,
Seems to me you can afford to help, assuming you can get a good price on those drives, I just need to be able to pay rent and eat. Perhaps you could hire me to mount those drives in your new rackspace at S&D. Then we can talk about Operating Systems and File System Structure.

You know, The questions that came up during the interview were interesting to say the least. I believe an easy set-up of Moodle is possible, we would just have to change the install script to be a little more “one-click’ish”

What do you say? Perhaps you can make me an offer, and I can help you with your QUEUE. A $1000.00 advance would get things rolling. So, as Ralph hasn’t contacted me back, this could be a good thing.

Oh, I should have asked; Do you know what a google is?
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one google

Fun Fun, and Data,
“Lee”

Thanks Ryan,
For your spelling correction, Googol as you spell it was one of the quesions on Jeopardy the other night. I love Alex Trebec like 10 to the 100th power.

TEE HEE
Lee

Douglas –

I could be wrong as I’m not expect on network filesystems (learning!), but based on Josh’s original post, one of their requirements is RAID6 compatibility, which Apple isn’t advertising as part of the XSan / XServe RAID solution. Still, the price does look quite nice.

Sean

For my company’s much smaller storage needs we evaluated about ten different storage companies. In the end we went with Pillar Data. Somewhat annoying website, but a great product. The ability to prioritize storage out of a single pool is what really impressed us. We have our oracle dbs on the high performance tier and most everything else on standard. They are also pretty good on price, definitely better than NetApp and EMC.

Dream Host done it again to make me Laugh (when I saw the photo English of India, I think Dream Host not Aware of Out Souring, now most of the company in us prefer to outsource the marketing, sales, tech job (few company’s yahoo, google, msn, oracle, ibm, Microsoft lot’s more) to India since there have quality English speak people compare with other country

Everyone seems to be calling upon the really big IT hardware companies out there for direct access to their products and services. I used to work for one of the giants, and a $1m deal is really small potatos for them (their sales resources are dedicated to the $20m or more deals in the public sector).

On the other hand, there are plenty of small, lean, and hungry IT companies out here that will bend over backwards to close a $1m deal. I think you would have better results finding a smaller company who is a licensed reseller for the big guys, and giving them an opportunity to earn your business.

I am not a salesman, but I deal with them a lot. I spend about $250,000 with EMC every year in hardware, support, etc. Their support is absolutely first rate and their storage products have been bulletproof for us. Every now and then I get some yahoo from NetApp, Equallogic, or Xiotech (and a handful of Taiwanese OEM peddlers) contact me telling me how they want to replace all my EMC gear with stuff that’s “cheaper”, and “better” — so they claim. But really, I have 60TB of storage tied up in EMC products. 90% of that is fiber channel. I’m replacing 50% of it with 4GB fiber next year. There is no way in hell I am going to move to a completely alien SAN environment for these clowns. They can throw all the hookers and fancy bottles of scotch at me they want. But that’s a whole other thing…

Call up EMC directly. DON’T go to a so-called VAR. Tell the EMC sales techs what you need. They will tell you honestly. Then find a VAR and make them sell you want EMC told you to buy and nothing more and nothing less. EMC supports their gear, so the VAR really does nothing.

Or… Dell has some good deals on the new EMC Clariion equipment, BTW, if you can stand dealing with Dell.

Just go to sun’s at
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=151017
and get an x4500 server with 24 terabytes
Fill in the form,
try it for 60 days
if you like it, buy it, if you dont they’ll take it back (and pay for the shipping).

Have fun

PS: I’m not an employee of Sun or any of it’s subsidiary

@Jim Talbot

Jim, you are not the first nor probably the last to point out the obvious solution for DreamHost. They have yet to ever respond to the comments about x4500, it throughput, how quickly they could have one in their data center or the money back guarantee.

I also am not a SUN employee, FWIW.

@Dallas

Seems like your high performance competitor Joyent has been having much success using SUN.

http://www.joyeur.com/

Just my 2 cents.

But… Who is the slow vendor?! We need names!

“Yesterday we sent an email in hopes of getting a phone call from someone to answer our questions about corporate hosting. Here is the response we received:”

That’s Dreamhost’s policy–you accept it when you sign up or you go somewhere else. Which part of that was too difficult for you to figure out on your own? Was your entire company stumped on that one?

Now, genius, point to where ANY of the companies DH is trying to deal with sent them an email and said they don’t offer phone support.

I don’t remember DH typing, “They don’t offer phone support, but we want it anyway, boo hoo, waaaaa” Which is pretty much what you are writing.

AND… it’s not just the phone call DH wants. They want the actual equipment and they’re trying to give out $1,000,000. I’m sure DH would be happy if they received an email that said, “We got what you need and we’re on our way. Have the check ready.” Big difference between that and you being too lazy to read through the DH site where all of your questions have probably already been answered.

Putting “corporate” in front of the word hosting doesn’t make you more important than the rest of us, so why did you think YOU were going to get phone support?

And do you really not see the difference between signing up for something cheap like a web hosting plan… and dumping $1,000,000 into equipment that will benefit Dreamhost customers?

Translation: Your company should fire you and hire someone competent that can follow directions and do something besides whine about nothing.

How dare he request that you not use his copyrighted material on blog! Wow I’ve lost sooo much respect for him too!

Idiot.

“I reviewed my post and could not find where I stated that my needs were more important than yours…”

How about here: “How you can help is simply picking up the phone and calling.”

You said you’ve been here since 2003, yet you still don’t get that they don’t do phone support. If you can ask it on the phone, you can ask it in writing. Who cares about your employer? Just because they tell you to look into something isn’t a reason for DH to drop what they’re doing and yap on the phone with you.

“While I understand DH’s support policies, I did not find the information I was seeking on the site. The information I am seeking is not about standard features or pricing. Hence, my request for a phone call.”

Then you send them an email and ask your questions. What’s so hard about that?

Your post was totally irrelevant to DH spending $1,000,000 with companies that do not state that they don’t offer phone support. These are clearly companies that do offer phone sales and even meet in person.

You thought you were going to be clever and that your post implied that DH does exactly what it’s complaining about. You simply chose not to follow their email support policy which is your fault–not theirs.

Would you like to try again and explain how you not following directions when signing up with a web hosting company has anything to do with DH going through the appropriate channels when making hardware purchases?

Like I said, maybe your company should fire you and hire someone a little more intelligent. You made an irrelevant post, posted mail from DH that was meant for you, and took a few cheap shots. If you’re the best your company can afford, maybe they should be looking into free hosting hosting services.

“Dream Host done it again to make me Laugh (when I saw the photo English of India, I think Dream Host not Aware of Out Souring, now most of the company in us prefer to outsource the marketing, sales, tech job (few company’s yahoo, google, msn, oracle, ibm, Microsoft lot’s more) to India since there have quality English speak people compare with other country ”

Ouch! Was this written in English? My eyes hurt. Go back to school!

“Why don’t you sign yourself up for some anger management”

I’ll do that on the same day 90% of the posters stop taking stupid-pills. ;)

haha you had me scared there for a minute. Yea you would think if you wanted to spend that much money they would be as quick to help you out as possible to make sure they made a sale to you guys.

good luck! and great post once again.

What hilarious entries here — the usage of humorous imagery pushes it even more over the top. This has got to be one of the bestest “corporate” blogs I’ve ever read, bar none.

Free, very valuable advice:

You: “I just don’t get it.”

noone special: That is patently obvious.

You: ‘What do you mean?’ (theoretical quotation;)

noone special: If you are open to it, I suggest you consider owning your own thoughts, do Your job and cause yourself to be served.

You: ‘Did you read the post?’ These salesman “infuriate” me a little bit. I do not “feel loved”. I am not being doted upon anywhere near the degree I desire. I am not getting the end result I desire and ‘slow’ salespeople are the reason.

noone special: As before, it is clear that is what You Think is the reason for your apparent frustration.

You: What’s your point?

noone special: I am suggesting that You create the world around you. I am offering that, if you are open to it, you can always get everything you want.

You: (silence)

Maybe you should go fishing…

Post your requirements in several public places, then wait for a bite.

i.e. If I knew exactly what it is you needed, maybe I could sell it to you?

Montie

Try Sun…
http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/data_center/9980/

I hear they are quite good, dont know if it is what you are looking for.

Hope you get your storage sorted,
Best Regards
Sam.

Hello!

This happens to me all the time… but now less often…
Sometimes I wanted to buy something but had to wait months to get it. All delays and excuses. Heck, how can a business prosper if the clients have to ask with pretty sugar on top, to someone to bring the product?

It doesn’t make sense…

For a 5% commition I’ll come down there and get these idiots to give you what you need ;) okay all joking aside, as a retail sales clerk (been one for many years, actually love the work) sounds like your dealing with the dumbest of the dumb. They’re trying to sell you on something your already trying to buy (I know the logic there sounds funny doesn’t it) and they don’t sound all that good at what their doing. Get a few retail guys (people who work for Mom and Pop stores are the best) on your team, as Mom and Pop stores live off 2 things, Customer Service, and Word of Mouth their sales people are always the best and they can likely talk these idiots into deals they shouldn’t be making. A good sales staff on your end will make it run smoother and easier when dealing with large corperations trying to sell you something you already told them about 25 times you want. Good luck with that and hey if you really do need help send me an e-mail ;)