Ahsay Discussion Forum

[divinet]

After months of having trouble with all the not-so-very-good updates, today Ahsay has announced their new pricing.
I was totally shocked by this.

a 25-user OBM all-in-one package was $ 1250.
Their new pricing is: $ 2250.

a 100-user ACB package was $ 1000.
Their new price is: $ 3500.

I called them to make sure I did understand this well and their reaction was: I should buy my new/extra licenses now at the old pricing.

Now I know for sure I don't trust Ahsay anymore. If anyone has a good alternative for Ahsay please PM me.

[alfito]

I completelly agree with you. This is outrageous !!!

I am serously thinking on changing to someone else !!!!

[backithere]

What about annual licensing fee? That go up too?

[divinet]

Monthly rates:
OBM 1-300: was $4.50, new price is $6.0
ACB 1-300: was $1.20 - $0.90 ,new price is $3.0

[backithere]

Is there a link to it? From their main site I saw just the sign up form. I pay annually, not monthly.

I have yet to go live, looking to do it by the end of the month. I have 400 ACM and 100 OBM. From when I was researching a year ago, Ahsay had the best reselling capabilities. Also open to exploring other alternatives if anyone knows of any. Just looking for the best product and the best price.

Thanks for the post!

Mike

[kspare]

If someone has information on a product that works similar to ahsay, please pm me. I'd like to consider something else.

I can understand something like this if everything works, but hell i'm still running old software because I can't risk a bad update. I feel like i'm being backed into a corner here.

[thdrought]

I am currently evaluating this software bring my clients online backups in-house.

This is my second company I'm evaluating, and so far have no issues with this product. I'd like to get other Ahsay users comments on this product, and for the unhappy ones, maybe some reasons why you don't like it.

As for other providers, I just warn to steer clear of V-e-m-b-u. I ran a trial of thier product for 1 week. Installation seemed easy enough, though all clients run a version of Apache web server. I thought this was very strange. Why are the backup clients needing to run Apache?

Not a single backup ever completed! Ever. Though the portal would say that they did. Weird... but I would get a failure email, followed by a sucess email and the portal always said "100% complete" on all those backups.

Then, the portal stopped working. Never could log back into it. A sales person from V-e-m-b-u called me, transferred me to technical support, which they "logged a ticket", but never called me back. That was a week ago.

I promptly uninstalled their portal, clients and made sure that the V-e-m-b-u directories were deleted from all.

If anyone else is looking at something else, please share, but even with the price increase, so far this product is looking better and better for a backup solution in this price range.

[kspare]

Ahsay works good on 5.5.1.2 however, i'd say going to 5.5.3 or 5.5.5 75% of the people have nothing but problems and not the reliability you'd expect from a provider who wants to increase their prices.

5.5.1.2 works. and works very well, i've many success stories, however exchange 2007 is coming along and i've had to work on alternative methods to get good backups.

Price Increase = Bad
Lack of stability in recent releases = bad

Hopefully they will get their act together and this will be a good product again.

[thdrought]

[nexusdata]

The huge fee increases are outrageous and unjustified! I hope that the developers read this forum and understand that their customers are very unhappy.

They obviously think that people are locked into their software and therefore they can put up the price whenever they want, by as much as they want. I'm certainly not locked in and will actively consider alternatives.

Ahsay need to review this.

[backupirl]

[nucotech]

Hi,

We really liked (like) the software (noted that updates have to be approached with caution) however I have to agree that recent decisions do not really impress us and we are evaluating alternatives at the moment.

Firstly the retail price drops much lower than the OEM price to a point that for even moderate numbers it is more cost effective to install their own instance than use our hosted service and now a price increase of over 30% with very little notice.

We would continue to use the software for existing customers (for now) but move new sign ups to the new platform and later increase the price for existing users unless they upgrade to the new platform which normally does the trick. Although up front costs may be more in the longer term we will save over the current solution.

I think they should have either given much more notice of the increases or selected a more realistic price increase (with another next year).

Lets hope they listen to what is being said and take a longer term view on this.
_________________
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www.nucotechnologies.com
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[vtphilk]

Luckily I'm not stuck because I have just been testing and trialing Ahsay. I'm disappointed because I have taken several months at testing and finally have the hardware in house to purchase and now this.

This just priced them out of the market! To almost double there price overnight is ridiculous.

The only hope is that they are coming out with there own bare-metal in 6.0 which would require you to NOT purchase a $500+ copy of shadowcopy for each server. If I could get that with my OBM licenses then it would make more sense.

But now, to protect 10 servers with OBM and shadowcopy licenses it is going to cost almost $8,000 in software alone. Forget that.... that totally kills my ROI on this even at charging my customers $100/month.

[Niels Klomp]

I would gladly pay the new prices when the development process and the QA of the product was in a good shape.

Ahsay has a long history of bad release management and unstable software. The reason why we wait several minor release before even considering upgrading. The bad QA process is also the reason why we have put any marketing efforts on hold in the past.

Having said that i have to come to the conclusion that the new price is not justified and we will definitely consider alternatives.
_________________
www.centis-backup.eu

[Scherring]

First of all, I need to apologize to all people affected by v5.5.3.x releases. I admit that v5.5.3.x releases were bad for partners with large amount of backup data and backup accounts because of scalability problems. We ended up rewritting many of the core logic from scratch again to fix this problem. v5.5.5.0-3 were much better releases but it still failed to address problems caused by unexpected corrupted backup file system data structure. But the good news is v5.5.5.4 is now out and we are pretty confident that it should resolve at least 90%, if not all, of all recent problems. I strongly urge all people to apply this hotfix immediately.

I believe that there are misunderstandings to the new pricing structure. Yes, there will be price increases, but mainly for new customers only, existing customers are pretty not much affected. Both software support fee and meter rate stays the same ($4.5 for OBM) for existing customers. Probably, this hasn't been pointed out clearly in the new pricing document and thus causing lots of frustration here. Although the new price for purchase software licenses has been increased, there are quite a few methods to lock the old price for future use. The first and obvious method, though many of you might not like this, is to buy extra licenses for future use when the discounted price is available in our year end promotion. Another less obvious method is to migrate your existing purchased license to meter deposit through our license conversion program (please contact our sales for details). This way, you will not be affected by the new price and will still be able to enjoy the same old meter rate when buying more licesnse in the future.

I am sure that nobody likes to see price increases in any product. Ahsay doesn't want to see this either but Ahsay is being forced to do so. Looking back, our price had stayed the same since version 4.0 was released in 2003. There had been no changes to our license price for the past 6 years. While our price stayed the same, prices of many other products, e.g. gold, oil, grew at least 3 to 4 times during this period. Many essential business expenses, e.g. rent, power and transportation, are now much higher than 6 years ago. With foreseeable, even worsening, inflation period ahead, Ahsay has no choice but to increase our price the first time to keep up with the increased expenses. We are not increasing our price to fill our fat belly, but to stay competitive in the market so that we can serve our customers better through better services and products (including better QA as suggested). I am not sure whether Ahsay is the first among our competitors to increase our price, but I can assure you that Ahsay won't be the last. If you think dropping Ahsay and using another product is a "smart move", I am sure that you will soon be forced to make another "smart move" from another product because none of us can escape the increase cost of running businesses worldwide, not even Ahsay's competitors.

Although many of you might think that thdrought is actually someone from Ahsay, I can tell you that he is NOT from us. (In fact, I strongly urge thdrought to let others know that you are not from Ahsay). However, I can tell you that what he is saying is true. We compare out prices with our competitors' periodically. Ahsay is one of the cheapest online backup software available in the market but among all these software, Ahsay has the richest features. We are also proud that our support service is always responsive, though not immediate as requested by anxious customers in trouble. We care what our customers care about and we spend many of our time troubleshooting software and configuration problems through remote desktop sharing sessions with our customers.

It is not necessary for Ahsay to "lock in" our customers through our software as mentioned in previous posts, nor have we ever evaluated how difficult it is to switch from Ahsay to another product. We believe that when we are committed to deliver the best software and service to our customers, our customers can feel our heart and will choose to stay with us. I can see no reason to lock in our customers. I am happy to escort our customers personally to the exit when they are not happy, provided that they tell me the reason for us to review and do things better in the future. This is how Ahsay keeps on doing better.

In short, I hope this post makes everyone understand the increase of price in 2010 is something Ahsay never wants to, but has to, roll out. We have devised methods (see above) for existing customers to lock the old prices for future use to minimize the impact of this to our existing customers. I strongly urge our existing customers to look into these methods and act accordingly.
_________________
Scherring Chong
Software Development Director
Ahsay Online Backup - Let's make profits from online backup together