My problem and some of the reasons I’m switching to Sonar are: PCI compliance of Platypus, it was somehow always out of compliance the day after I paid techs to put it back in compliance.
Running and hosting myself requires constant upkeep of the OS itself which introduced problems now and then over the years. I’ve hosted on my own hardware and it’s a PITA sometimes to deal with dual disk failure and constant backups and testing of those backups. I’ve had to rebuild my own hardware from scratch after a raid failure of multiple disks, then finding out my backups were corrupt and outdated too. We had to manually enter and catch up accounts by hand after that POS. This time around I used the same platform but on a VM so I didn’t have to worry about the hardware, it was redundant geographically. But then on the 15th of this month THAT company went bust and closed down all of its VM’s. I am now back to hosting Platypus in a VM that I converted to run on my own desktop right now, lol! I’m moving to Sonar so it’s back with a hosted platform, but they are responsible for everything to be current compliant and running. That is a lot cheaper per customer per month than hiring a person to do that, and even not much more than a good VM hosted platform that doesn’t crawl like molasses when you RDP to it. I moved my Quickbooks instance/server to Cloud9 when my VM host provider went bye bye, and that is cheap, but man is it SLLLOOOOOWWW. Plus they have a growing feature set that I like that integrates more and more of my OSS features and ticketing and integration with paid tech/sales support etc. I like the idea of automation, and if they can come through the painful conversion part and help me automate my systems then it’s a total win. If they go belly up, I’m sure there is a way to get my data and make conversion back to something else. I’m not too worried about that as long as I set up backups that I can visibly verify as having the information I need to rebuild somewhere else. From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Matt Hoppes Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:59 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar We are going on 10 :) On Oct 17, 2017, at 16:55, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com<mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com>> wrote: Right, keep that running for 30 years with no support. On Oct 17, 2017 1:36 PM, "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> wrote: Local install. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:32, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com<mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com>> wrote: Good luck with that. Any company could close up shop today, and if they are bankrupt, they are bankrupt. On Oct 17, 2017 12:27 PM, "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> wrote: It also means at any point they can just close up shop leaving my data and my customer information high and dry with no recourse. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:24, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com<mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com>> wrote: They provide enough value to avoid locking you in a contract that would otherwise retain your business when they don't continuously earn it. Others are NOT the same. On Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM, "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> wrote: No contract? That's frankly beyond scary. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:06, Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com<mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>> wrote: Sonar is strictly per user with no contract, so if you haven't migrated any users in yet then you pay the minimum.....which I think is $100/month. ------ Original Message ------ From: "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: 10/17/2017 9:16:46 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar Fail. On Oct 17, 2017, at 08:54, Lewis Bergman <lewis.berg...@gmail.com<mailto:lewis.berg...@gmail.com>> wrote: Many of them start charging you regardless if you are on their system yet. Once you sign the contract, you start paying. On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 6:00 PM Nathan Anderson <nath...@fsr.com<mailto:nath...@fsr.com>> wrote: I can understand this if the product in question is purchased/licensed for a one-time upfront fee. However, if you have a SaaS model with recurring revenues, it seems like it would be in your best interest to help the customer move existing data over to your product cost-free, and thus get them to be a paying customer ASAP. -- Nathan ________________________________ From: Af <af-boun...@afmug.com<mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com>> on behalf of Lewis Bergman <lewis.berg...@gmail.com<mailto:lewis.berg...@gmail.com>> Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 3:36 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar Yea, this seems to be a common practice in the software industry. What they all should really say is that they help you convert. I am going through this with ECi at the moment. We paid several thousand for them to convert our database. What it really was was a half hearted gesture at putting the DB into an excel spreadsheet that they spent zero time checking for sanity. They expect us to do all that. It seems that most software companies expect their customers to have a whole team of people doing what seems to be the software companies job. Not saying Sonar fits the description, just that that seems to be the rule not the exception. On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 5:24 PM Sterling Jacobson <sterl...@avative.net<mailto:sterl...@avative.net>> wrote: Taking forever to migrate from Platypus to Sonar. I was told conversion was free, but they didn't tell me I had to do all my own conversion from Plat to Sonar, so in my mind that's not free. I paid Spender Lambert to move some initial data to their format, but I've been on a hold with Sonar since last month. Super excited to get going with a 'modern' billing system, but so far the process has been a total snoozer.
