Level 20, 2 Market Street
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
1300 045 614
Launched in early 2011, Ninefold is an Australian cloud computing company with the full backing of Macquarie Telecom, a major ASX listed company. Ninefold offers virtual Windows and Linux-based servers, cloud storage and an affiliate program.
Review
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Sales
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Ninefold sales questions are taken by telephone (free in Australia only), live chat, Twitter, and email. I tossed a few questions to Ninefold by email and was surprised to see fully detailed responses back in my inbox in less than fifteen minutes. I exchanged several emails with Ninefold staff and found them to be not only confident and courteous, but very helpful in choosing the plan that would work best for my needs. Perfect!
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Setup
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Account sign up with Ninefold takes just a few moments are requires applying first for a free account. I had some difficulty from the get-go as Ninefold’s initial sign up page (where you input your telephone number, desired username, password and credit card details) was not fully encrypted. Not feeling comfortable throwing my credit card information to the wind, I emailed Ninefold, who politely offered to telephone me at their expense to complete the sale while they fixed the issue at hand. Once payment had been arranged and finalized, I was emailed some helpful setup information and was up and running in moments.
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Billing
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Ninefold accepts all major credit cards. I had no issues with the billing department whatsoever, nor was I charged for features or services I had not ordered.
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Reliability
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I found Ninefold’s hardware and network to be 100% reliable.
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Help & Support
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When it comes to support, Ninefold shines! Questions are answered quickly and thoroughly and Ninefold makes themselves available not only by email, live chat and phone, but also on several social networking sites. My only complaint here is that live chat services were not available 24/7.
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Uptime
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My uptime monitor showed that Ninefold maintained a 99.98% uptime rating over a one year period.
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Pricing
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Ninefold's virtual private servers start at AUD $30 per month (plus bandwidth) and cloud hosting services run around AUD $.04 per hour. Outbound internet bandwidth from Australia is significantly more expensive ($.90/GB), especially when compared with US-based services that can run as little as $.19/GB outbound and $.08 inbound. For businesses located in Australia, Ninefold's pricing is comparable to anything else on the market. For those hosting from other countries, however, Ninefold is not the cheapest alternative. On the plus side, Ninefold offers a $50 credit to all new customers signing on.
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Guarantee
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Ninefold can be read on their website. Highlights include:
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Strict policy against spam.
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Trouble tickets guaranteed to be responded to within one business day.
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Reproduction, distribution or displaying copyrighted material not allowed.
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Rates subject to change without notice.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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$50 credit for signing up for new account.
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Easy to scale up and down.
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Tech support is exceptional.
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Highly competitive affiliate program.
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Reliable network.
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Disadvantages
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Bandwidth rates can be spendy for those outside Australia.
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No toll-free phone support outside Australia.
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Relatively new company.
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Live chat not available 24/7.
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