We have three different plans to choose from: SUPPORT lite, SUPPORT standard, and SUPPORT premium.

The main difference between the 3 is how long the tickets are valid and how fast a ticket is first responded to by a human (response time) and how long to a final resolution (resolution time).

These can now be added at the time of plan purchase or as an additional service.

For more info, please see: http://powermonster.net/usersupport/

the powerMonster team

Even if you are not in the United States, take the time to reflect upon all that you are thankful for. Sometimes life gets so busy that we never stop to think about how fortunate we all are.

For those celebrating Thanksgiving, I wish you all a great and safe holiday with friends and family.

***FREE 6-MONTH OFFER***

For anyone who is currently a cPanel customer with us, we’re offering free 6 months for switching to one of our DirectAdmin servers. If this interests you, please submit a migration ticket with “FREE 6 MONTHS” in the subject and we’ll coordinate the best time to migrate you over.

After months of searching for the right deal, I think we have found it with Gigenet who has servers based in their own DC outside of Chicago. Our current provider in the Chicago area is WiredTree, but they were not able to accommodate our needs at a price that we were looking for. Their prices are great for what they offer, but the service they provide for us is overkill for our needs and we don’t need to pay for a service that we aren’t actively utilizing.

The server that we have procured from Gigenet should be provisioned overnight and be ready for migration tomorrow sometime (official time TBA).

There should be no downtime associated with the migration, though, those of you with private name servers and dedicated IP addresses will have to make changes to your DNS for everything to work out well.

By increasing the capacity both in processing power and memory, we will have less slow-downs (especially at night) and overall a speedier performance.

We will be planning on making the migration sometime tomorrow afternoon so we can give enough notice to those with private name servers and dedicated IP addresses to make the dns changes in advance of the official migration.

We are doing something extremely unique with our pricing plans. We think you won’t find this with any other host out there!

Instead of focusing on the monthly rates of our plans and giving modest discounts to our yearly rates, we are giving deep discounts (deeper than any other host) to our yearly rates! We’re doing this because we want you as long-term clients, not fly-by-night customers.

We’re confident that once you become a client of powerMonster, that you will want to stay for as long as possible. And we want that, too!

We are also providing an easy upgrade path to more disk space and/or bandwidth for small add-on fees. This way you are able to customize our plans to your needs.

Along with these new plans and pricing, we are giving a standard 25% discount to all new additional accounts to current clients. So now getting a second or even a third account, is even easier on the wallet!

And I know all of you are wondering, how can we afford to offer these very low prices and still stay in business. You’re probably assuming that we are massively overselling to be able to etch out a profit. I assure you we are not and I assure you even with these lower prices, we are and will continue to be profitable. We have crunched all of the numbers and are basing our profit/expense ratio on our lowest yearly plan and we still have a strict limit to the number of accounts we will place on any one server.

So take the time to check out our new plans. Read what our clients have to say about us. Check out our servers and our uptime statistics. Send us your pre-sales questions. And in the end, we are confident, that you will make the same decision that all of our current clients have made, and you experience that at powerMonster, it’s different here.

powerMonster.net and this forum are currently running on the new server.

You can ping/traceroute the new server at the following IP address:
67.220.212.50

The new server is an Intel q9550 Quad with 4×2.83ghz processor with 8gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

This is a beta test of the LiteSpeed web server for powerMonster and we’re truly excited to test it out.

We are looking for volunteers who wish to help us beta test the new server powered by LiteSpeed ahead of the official launch this Friday.

If you are interested, please submit a site-migration ticket and we will migrate your site(s) as soon as possible. We will be working the migration queue 9a-5p PT (GMT-8) daily until the official launch.

We hope that this move is the beginning of many more exciting things to come to powerMonster in the future!

the powerMonster team

It’s a great way to ask a quick question, to get status updates on server maintenance or other issues, or to just shoot the breeze. 

To encourage you to follow us on twitter, we’re offering a $5 credit for each new customer who follows us on twitter and tweets @powermonster at least 3 meaningful tweets.

To claim your credit, be sure you are on our followers list and have tweeted 3 meaningful tweets, and then open up a feedback ticket at http://my.powermonster.net/ with your twitter address and we’ll add the $5 credit.

Also, just a subtle hint: there are times when we may offer a twitter only special and you don’t want to miss out, so be a follower today!  

You can find us at http://twitter.com/powermonster/ .

Also, what kinds of things would you like us to twit about? We’re looking for great ideas that will help market powerMonster to the masses. If you have a great idea, please share it with us. The top three GREAT twit ideas will receive a free month of service!   Give us your ideas below.

Our forums have gone under a major makeover and are now online.

Please feel free to discuss away and don’t hold back!

If you notice any glitches, please let us know as we’ve hacked up the code a bit to get it where we want it. We’ll be adding features as we go along.

Remember, a forum is only as good as its members so JOIN and be ACTIVE.

From time to time, we may offer forum only specials to the first person to see something or comment to something, so be on the lookout!

And as always, we’d love to hear from you! Now, with the forums, you have one more venue to tell us what you think!

Check out our forums!

All the best,

the powerMonster team

Positive Changes @ powerMonster

If you haven’t been by the site lately, you may not have noticed a lot of changes that have been happening here at powerMonster.

We have a new site design as well as new powerMonster hosting plans. We have replaced the dark powerMonster theme with a lighter, blue and off-white colored theme. We’ve also simplified our navigation to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Our hosting plans have also changed. We have readjusted the offerings and matched with some new price points for our entire line. We have had feedback that some of our line was confusing, so we have consolidated our blog and shared hosting into one simple package line called webMonster. With any of these plans, you may request that we install WordPress and our theme packages so that you may start a blog of any size.

Also, we are in the process of offering flash tutorials on our DirectAdmin control panel and WordPress. These will soon be available through the client panel (my.powermonster.net) via the KnowledgeBase.

Behind the scenes we are constantly looking at ways to improve upon our service to you! We’ve have upgraded our servers both in LA and in Dallas to more powerful machines. We are also looking at consolidating our control-panel offerings under one panel called DirectAdmin. We currently only have one cPanel server, but are looking to migrate it to a DirectAdmin server. Why? Basically, cPanel is a resource-hungry application and DirectAdmin can do the same thing as cPanel for less resources and with more security. This will allow us to dedicate more resources to our clients, assure a more secure server, and maintain the most up-to-date software on the server. We are quite happy with the DirectAdmin servers we already have, especially performance-wise, and are sure that those of you using cPanel, will also appreciate the speed boost as well as the zippiness with which DirectAdmin runs as compared to cPanel.

We’re Growing!

As we approach our one-year anniversary, powerMonster continues to grow and are happy to report that we are currently running in the black despite the economic situation here in the United States and many other parts of the world. Because we have upgraded to some more powerful servers, we have been able to consolidate some of our customers to a fewer number of servers, but continue to provide the high-level of service and uptime that you’ve come to expect from powerMonster and we continue to guarantee that ALL of our servers will remain undersold so that your sites can continue to grow without feeling the squeeze because of overloaded servers. If we continue to grow at the rate that we are, we will be adding another server and were looking at the GNAX data center in Atlanta, GA. If you have any opinions on this, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

powerMonster forums

We have reopened our forums (forums.powermonster.net). As this is a relatively new forum, it has not been populated with great posts and threads yet. But that’s where you, our customers, come in. Go ahead and register and post your questions, your ideas, your comments and concerns on the forum. It’s for you guys, so make it GREAT!

Affiliate Program and Free Months for Referrals!

You may not be aware that powerMonster has an affiliate program. We offer various kickbacks in the form of service credits for any referrals that purchase a powerMonster plan via one of your affiliate links. If you’re interested, you can sign up via the client panel. In addition to our affiliate program, we are also offering one free month for each new customer that gives us your name as the reason they became a powerMonster client.

Spread the Word!

We know that the best advertising is word-of-mouth from current customers. And who best to spread that word-of-mouth advertising than you, our current customers? If you have a blog, facebook, myspace, or twitter, we ask that you take the time to add an honest opinion of powerMonster and the service and value that we provide on your blog, facebook/myspace page, or twit about us. Or, if you’re so inclined, there are many forums, review sites, and other venus to post unbiased reviews of hosting companies and any honest review you give would be greatly appreciated. A few of the more popular places to post unbiased hosting reviews are webhostingstuff.com, hostjury.com, and webhostingtalk.com.

Thanks for your continued support of powerMonster!

Scott and the powerMonster team

Why? cPanel uses more resources than DirectAdmin, therefore reducing the available resources for our clients’ sites.

cPanel is a very resource intensive control panel that requires many other programs to run. Although, by doing this, it makes a server for the less-experienced easier to manage, it plays havoc on the server’s resources using up a minimum of 256MB of ram with its basic install.

By switching to DirectAdmin, we are able to customize the installations of our servers with more up-to-date software (without waiting for cPanel to catch up) or other software that is not compatible with cPanel. DirectAdmin is also a more secure panel in that it is updated more frequently, has fewer bugs, and isn’t tied directly to the operating system in the same way cPanel is. It also uses much fewer resources than cPanel which makes those resources available to our clients and their sites.

DirectAdmin has all the same features that cPanel has including a more robust script installer called Installatron. Installatron is Fantastico on steroids! It can not only import, update, and install popular scripts, it can also revert back to an older version. Installatron keeps its scripts more up-to-date than Fantastico, usually being only a day or two behind the official release from the software developers. DirectAdmin’s interface is more streamlined and efficient, causing a faster user experience. On top of all that, there are more webmail options by default with DirectAdmin than with cPanel. So if you’re used to using a particular webmail client, it’s there, but if you want to try something new, you can!

Although we are excited to migrate the last of our cPanel servers to DirectAdmin, we know that we nothing if it weren’t for you, our customers! 

So before move forward, we welcome your viewpoints on the matter. Please take the time to take the poll below and to add any comments expressing your opinions. Please feel free to openly express your views on the subject!

If we do decide to migrate the servers to DirectAdmin, rest assured, that we will take great care in migrating your sites over to the new control panel and get everything set up just the way it was.

Thanks for all your continued support!

Scott and the powerMonster team

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