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I originally hosted with Best Internet, which Verio swallowed up a number of years ago - maybe 10 years total.

My erly experiences were all positive. In recent years, email has down a lot, and the tech support has gotten continually worse. It's gotten so that in the last year, initial emails to report a problem or submit a question only get an auto-response with no followup. You CAN manage to get support by phone, but waiting on hold has grown beyond 30 minutes. Then you may or may not get someone with any technical expertise. The techs have even instructed me to read the FAQs about something, when the reason I was calling was to find out something the FAQs (obviously outdated) were incorrect about.

I was completely offline for days following the Wilma hurricane that swept through Florida where their data center is located. They didn't have backup. Also, since their primary and secondary DNS servers were in the same location, those trying to email us were getting bounced mail that stated our domain didn't exist.

Yes, this downtime was related to a natural disaster, but that experience illustrates how dim the "technology bulb" is at Verio. Speaking of which, the last straw for me (I'm switching hosts) was their new SPAM filtering of outgoing email. (That's right... they have their SPAM filters checking outgoing mail from their customers... the reason for this I was told was so that the Verio servers would not be blacklisted!) Anyway, I type a few words like "vitamin" (one of my clients manufactures nutritional supplements) in an email and their SMTP server refuses to accept the message for delivery. I asked why mail originating from their clients wasn't "whitelisted" and was told the technological overhead for that was too high.

Bye-bye Verio