Head Guru

Printed on a glossy page, from a very expensive xerox printer. (thanks to kinkos). Placed in a very nice looking wooden frame with a nice border thing. (thanks to the frame shoppe). Hanging on wall in my den. I am the proud dad of a great family of clients and staff members. Bill

Hey gang! Hope everyone had a nice weekend. I am working on a new server monitoring page and would like to ask a couple questions. What would users prefer. A page that give a lot of information. Response times, packet loss, round trip information and so on. Pretty detailed information. However, the page would take a bit of time to load and you would have to scroll down a ways to get to your server. OR A page that simply tells if the server and services are up or down. Any input would be helpful. Thanks

I think what Mike wanted to say was this. Our support will be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. However, during holidays our Management Team will be available on a limited, emergency basis, only. Our billing department will re-open on Monday, however emergency billing issues will be handled by our on call manager. Our on site techs in our data centers will be available 24/7 as well. Level 1 thru Level 3 tech support will be online and available for your support needs. Thanks and Happy Holidays.

Bruce - I would highy suggest you take a look at this site before buying your next lappy. h**p://notebookforums.com/

Could be bruce. Do yourself a favor and check out the Sager Laptops. They are EXCELLENT laptops. I am on my second one. Check this out. A list of laptop's I have owned and why they were replaced. eMachine - 1.5 years of use. Was a good machine, but could not take the abuse I threw at it. LCD Mounts broke and the LCD would not stand up anymore. Everyday machine. Tons of hours on it. Good value but not very fast. Sony - Dropped it once from the center armrest of my truck and it never booted again. Dell - Two bad mother boards. Never again. Gateway - Good unit, currently being used by Mike Herman. Sager - Excellent Machine. Used by my entire family. at least used 10 hours per day. Never has had a issue. I am currently on my second sager. I love these laptops! HP - Screen went bad after 13 months of heavy use. Sold on ebay for parts.

Motherboard! RMA the entire laptop. I had a dell, did the same thing. The mobo ended up dead at 6 months. Bill

Well, that's more than 20,000 and the image is still correct, right? Bwahahahaha Bruce you kill me. Bill

TCH is currently looking for a part time web designer. Needs to be up to speed on: Flash HTML Able to maintain current TCH web site. Would be directly responsible for daily maint. work on current TCH web site. Would maintain presence in our TCH family forums. Add new sites and maintain current listing of Family Sites. Also, maintain & design new sites for clients. 25-30 hours per week. Interested parties please drop me a email with your salary requirements. I do not require any previous "paid" design experience from the applicants. If you can design then please apply. Bill

DWD - I did something today I normally don't do. I spent over an hour reading your blog. Good stuff my friend. Your site does indeed load fast. Wonder why Bill

What software are you wanting to get installed? Bill

I am a Blackberry user and am very happy with it's performance. Just wanted to give you a point of advice. Make sure you set the web client to automaticly delete emails after so many days. You would be so surprised how fast that 5mb of space can be used and if your out on the road and that 5mb of space is used you will no longer get forwarded emails to your blackberry. Bill

DWD - Thanks for the kind comments. Part of the reason for the success of this company goes back 30+ years to my father. When I was a young kid, he took me to his office. He was self employed. He walked me up to the lunch room and sat me down. He pointed at a poster on the wall and said "Billy, read that sign to me". I looked at the poster and saw a very large Lion under a large tree staring into the camera. The poster said. "We are family, but the customer is KING!" That is the motto behind TotalChoice. He then took me into the meeting room and there were 25 or so people seated around the table. My dad then introduced me to each and every one of them. It went something like this: This is Mr. Jones. He is the Operations Manager. His son James, is going to MSU next year and his daughter Jamie is your age. This went on from each and every employee. I will never forget my Father. He knew how to treat people and knew how to run a business. He taught me several things, but two things I will never forget. 1. Your word is your bond. If you tell someone you will do something do it. 2. Family is the most important thing in your life, but remember family has nothing to do with blood lines. My Dad passed away in 2001. Lung Cancer! Anyways, I am rambling on and on. I just thought you would like to know some of the behind philosophy behind TCH. Bill

Phil, Thanks for the input. TCH is currently very blog friendly. In fact, we were recently voted the #2 most popular blog friendly host by a popular MT site. Maybe one of the mods could dig up the link for the review. As far as growth look at these numbers. In 2004 we have added well over 12,000 domains to our family. That combined with a attrition rate of We will look at your suggestion's and put them to good use. Bill

Adam, I would like to first Thank You for your business. Secondly, I would like to welcome you to your new on-line family and thirdly thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to post a review on our services. Let me take a moment to personally respond to your review. Your first point is confusing to me. You state: Please remember we do not have control over their server. cPanel has a built in copy feature that tar's the contents of your home directory and then our server copies it. We do not have root access to your account on the other companies server. Perhaps my tech should have mentioned this to you, as we should have known the leftover tar file could have placed you over quota. I will go over this with the support crew and tighten up on this. Your second point. You state: That is really disappointing the accounts did not copy over correctly. I am not sure how many domains are in your reseller account, and the number would be no excuse at all, however once again cPanel account move feature leaves alot to be desired. You should never have to be persistant to get the support you are paying for, and lost email is not good by any means. I will go over this with the tech support crew and fill in any cracks that may be open. As with any server move, there are bound to be issues. Sometimes they are small issues and sometimes things can go very wrong. I am just glad that we were there to fix the problems for you. In responding to your other "good" points, I am happy to see everything else is going well. Please do check back with us whenever you need help or just to say hello. Also, I am personally available to all my clients 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Please only use the contact information once you have tried all other means. However, my personal blackberry pager email address is. billkish{@}nextel.blackberry.net, simply remove the {} and send me a email. I have placed the {} in my email address here to prevent spam bots from grabbing the address. Thanks again. Bill

DWD and others. The current monitoring server can not handle any more monitoring tasks. Loads are nearly 95% capacity. I am simply not placing new servers on until we can build up a new monitoring server. Speaking of new monitoring server. Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon (2) 120GB SCSI Drives 2GB DDR Ram I am just finishing up on the server, should be done tonight and have all the monitoring and status site moved over. Will update this when its done Bill

http://pasqualesrestaurant.com/

One thing I wanted to mention. Currently we host well in excess of 30,000 web sites. It would be impossible to meet and greet all our clients. We can seat around 35 extra people in the room we have booked. First come, first server (hehe). Bill

Would you like to meet other TCH users? Would you like to meet some of the TCH staff? Good Food and Drinks all around? We are going to be having dinner at a local resturant here in Michigan, and would like to invite our clients, friends and vendors to stop by and join us for some fun. Seating is limited so we will require people to register here in advance. Once we have sold out, we will not be able to take any more people. If you sign up and are not going to make it please post back, as someone else may want to come. Dinner will be provided at no charge to our guests, however we will not be providing any adult drinks. Your on your own there! TCH will provide a few T-Shirts and other prizes to the people attending. We willb e meeting for Dinner at the following location and time. Decemeber 12th, 2004 @ 12noon Pasquale's Restaurant 31555 Woodward Avenue Royal Oak Michigan 48073 Pasquale's History Since 1954, Pasquale's Restaurant has offered fine Italian-American cuisine, with recipes dating back four generations. The menu includes egg plant parmigiana, poppers, potato flora , breaded mushrooms, marinated artichoke hearts, fried ravioli, Italian sausage and sundried tomatoes, and a variety of salads and pastas, as well as a kids menu. There is a large banquet room for parties and special events. Open 7 days a week. Also, we can come up with some hotel names in the area if anyone is interested. Look forward to meeting those who can attend in person! Bill

Server5 - First off, I am sorry if you were given the run-around by my tech support staff. This is not how I run the business. Please accept my appologies. I have eartlink as a backup provider in my home. They have so many email problems that we stopped using them for send mail. Of course, you can always use your TCH account's send mail feature. Like Mike stated, if you need help please feel free to open a ticket and we will help you out. If you feel the ticket is not being dealt with, ask that it be sent up to a manager. Bill

When in doubt, try try again. Just submit another ticket. Bill

We are looking to fill a volunteer posistion on the forums. The only compensation will be a free hosting account of your choice and the pleasure of joining one of the best mod teams on the planet. Here is what we are looking for. "Official Server Uptime Guru" Your job is to post server uptime reports once per week for all our virtual and reseller servers. This would be done by simply checking a given email account and then posting the emails in their prespective server threads. Also once per month a additional email would need to be posted into the server thread for the monthly uptime reports. Please respond right here if this would interest you. We need to fill this spot fairly quick, or we will have to assign this function to a current staff member. Thanks Bill

I know I own this place. But WOW, these forums just amaze me! Bill

Welcome to the family! Good to have you on board. Bill

Yes it will be added to our main pages. Bill

As promised TCH has a new toll free number that clients can call for Network and Server Status reports. The new number is: 877-559-6716 Thanks for your continued support. Bill