All my blood, sweat and tears utterly destroyed by Legend. Some good people had their lives ruined, and in the end I took voluntary redundancy as I was fed up, and my blood pressure was scary for a then mid 20′s salesman!

Rest assured, from someone who was there from the original Business Serve acquisition through to the Legend re-brand (but got about pre-Thus) we did everything in our power to maintain the standards!

Folks like myself, Chris Clarke, the indomitable Jon Topper and many others had to sit there and watch our work and the work of those before us be utterly abused.

I had a couple of opportunities to get involved in new hosting start-ups, but ultimately became disenfranchised and moved on.

I can honestly say that my time at DSVR was the best of my 10+ year career, and if I could steal a TARDIS for a day, I’d certainly have a long think about going back and wrecking that acquisition!

If anyone wants to chat DSVR, rocketdave at gmail dot com. :)

I suspect one stupid manager is to blame for all this, it’s always the way with these medium sized businesses. One idiot in a key role brings down the whole company.

It’s a shame that the director will only find out what’s going wrong once his desk is being loaded onto a back of a lorry by the liquidators!

However, for us the grass was greener on the other side. I’ve no experience of UK Fast (unless that’s just a guise of Fasthosts, in which case I’m not surprised…), but their site seems to be having problems right now ;)

Anyway, thanks for your comment. The original post about DSVR was meant purely as a moan, so I’m happy to read any positive comments too.

I think we can all agree that finding decent quality UK hostng shouldn’t be this traumatic, should it?! Or perhaps we – or at least our clients – just demand too much for too little?

One of our main clients has an extremely successful database driven ecommerce web site and we hosted this on our dedicated dsvr server however the traffic to the site increased to such a level that the site needed to be moved to a dedicated box of its own. As we too had suffered lots of issues with the move to docklands and the power failure described above a decision was made that as the site was being moved anyway that we would try a new provider. We chose UK Fast as they make such a big play on the awards that they have won etc etc – all I can say is what a bloody nightmare!

Their server was down more than it was up cost our client a vast amount in lost sale and their reputation. Bearing in mind that the site had run happily on our dedicated box with dsvr for some years and our server hosted more of our other clients sites as well email. The fact that the UK Fast server was only hosting 1 site and no email etc this was very very bad and to add insult to injury UK Fast blamed guess what us, saying the there must be something wrong in the code/database etc. Anyway we moved the site temporarily back to our box and all worked fine as it had before the move to UK Fast whilst we provisioned another dedicated server with DSVR to which the site was finally moved more than a year ago and since everything has been great.

So the moral of the story is whilst the grass may look greener on the other side sometimes you are better off with the devil you know!

I’ve no idea what became of what was left of DSVR, but I hope the people behind it (when it was still a great company) have managed to find somewhere where their services and skills are appreciated.

18 months on, and Clook are providing an excellent service.

@Austin Delaney – it must have been pretty galling for you to see how DSVR ended up, having co-founded them. I’m sure I speak for a lot of ex-customers when I say thanks for your hard work.

@Jint – I’ve not had any experience with Businessserve, so perhaps you could let us know why you think they’re terrible?

We paid for the highest and best service DSVR had to offer but the support was useless and second rate, They accepted no responsibility for loss of service and always refer to these mythical creatures “systems guys” in London who are looking into it……remind me of the back to the future saying “cosine pressure angle of the flux capacitor etc etc” as if that helps!

Anyway enough ranting, let all put to and start a new DSVR, one in which we and our customers matter!

regards to all

It’s such a shame, as DSVR really rocked when I first joined up.

I haven’t done too much research on the hosting front myself and have just plumped for a standard cpanel account with no shell login. Not for long though.

One of the main sales techies who helped greatly with DSVR is now working for fubra – their new service that’s coming out soon is pretty hot.

http://www.fubra.com/blog

Austin.