4SmartPhone.net
Editorial

Click here to read the entire review

While your post promotes 4Smartphone.net, it should be pointed out that with the Exchange-2007 rollout, they have increased pricing substantially while at the same time slashing storage space limits from 2 gigs (for the Pro plan) to 1 gig. At $14 per month there's a $4 increase (40%) over previous pricing with 50% of the storage. They asked me to pay the balance of the increase, pro-rated, for the remaining 6 months of my contract. When I complained they offered to not charge me more, but shorten the time I had left on my pre-paid service; a creative way of 'charging me more'... They charged me a hefty cancellation fee when I opted not to participate in their new pricing plan. This was their explanation:

4SmartPhone has decided to move to the Exchange 2007 architecture and equipment for many reasons, and one of the most important was because we could go to a passive-active cluster server configuration in order to provide seamless failover when a cluster node is unavailable or is taken offline for maintenance. This architecture while very reliable does comes at a price. Our Microsoft Exchange 2003 architecture did not have that robustness. As for the $9.95 My Hosted Solution price we cannot match it, you get what you pay for...

Fortunately, I found another company that has worked out flawlessly for the past few months. IT-Solutions-Now ( http://www.myhostedsolution.com/ ) . Their Hosted Exchange 2007 service is $9.95 per month, with >>>unlimited<<< storage space, and contractually it's month-to-month with no fee to cancel as with 4Smartphone.

Not sure what they were referring to by 'you get what you pay for'. So far, after 3 months, I'm getting exactly the same service, at $60 less per year, with unlimited storage.

4Smartphone was a great service when they were the only-kid-on-the-block. They aren't any longer, and have lost their competetive edge...

Chaznet,

Thanks for the sensible response and rejoinder - a worthwhile statement of the situation as experienced by yourself.

I'm sure many readers will take what you've said and investigate further.

Definitely food for thought!

We have had some discussions about this in another thread (can't find it at present!) and I think a lot of users will leave 4SP due to the big increase in costs.

It will be interesting to see how HTCMail pans out, and what the monthly charge will be.

Yep 4SP were one of the best originally but as you say these days the price has gone up dramatically for what folks see as a more restrictive service.