There is no doubt that Joel Therien’s launch (or, more correctly rebranding and relaunch – more of that later) was a well executed and well supported piece of internet marketing and has without doubt been hugely satisfying for him and his team.

So what’s it all about, why are the network marketing crowd champing at the bit, MLM’ers drooling over the pay plan and newbies foaming at the mouth and authoring copy that they can’t possibly have the knowledge or experience to back up? It is my hope that people reading this post will appreciate that despite some of the crap and awful advertising that has been foisted upon the internet community by the “get rich quickers” and program hoppers out there, that a little bit of honest perspective is exactly what you are looking for.

One thing I personally find a great turn off is things such as comparisons with GDI which are blatantly nonsense – GDI is nothing more than an MLM program selling domains, originally the Western Samoan dot WS! Many people fell for the hype and some did make a lot of money but most probably did not and will not and to suggest that GVO is in any way similar is a fallacy and very misleading – how many decent websites have you seen from GDI users…not many I’ll hazard because they are not a marketing and hosting service provider and they do not enable their customers other than to sell on the domain MLM and throw in a few pathetic static templates to add a “website” to your shiny new domain. OK, got that one off my chest at least

Let’s step back from all the marketing for a moment and remind ourselves that GVO is a rebranding exercise, albeit one that is accompanied by some very real physical changes and improvements to the company previously known as Kiosk.ws

Kiosk.ws has long been touted as the hosting company run by internet marketers, for internet marketers and although its shared hosting plans did not come cheap, they were endowed with a bundle of extra services that made the overall package very good value for money. Not least of these extras were the unlimited autoresponder accounts and the provision in more recent times of live conference room services for members. Add to that the multi-tier affiliate program, ten levels deep and paying recurring monthly commissions and you had a very good package which was married to a very reliable hosting service with excellent support.

However, after many years of operation, it was obviously felt that things had become stagnant and there began a long process of updating and revitalizing the company from the ground up. Customers in 2009 have far higher expectations than those of a decade ago, particularly in relation to technology and Joel began the long and no doubt costly process of overhauling what had, to be honest, become a very dated looking web presence, even if the services underneath remained pretty sound.

For long time customers like myself, watching the whole process unfold has been fascinating and sometimes frustrating. The first real major change was the relocation of the company’s data center from Canada to Texas. Fortunately, this transition was pretty smooth from the customer’s side although it was obviously not a walk in the park for all the folks at Kiosk. Around this time, the first intimations of GVO started to appear – the first time I saw the now well known logo was on a tee shirt worn by Joel on one of his very early video blogs although no mention was made of the name for some time.

The plan slowly unfolded and it became apparent that the thrust of the marketing was going to be on the network marketing aspect of the relaunch – basically there had been some minor tweaks made to the compensation plan for affiliates, but it was nothing really drastic. It just goes to prove how dressing something up in new clothes and giving it a new image is often a very effective tactic – most of the new GVO hordes had never heard of Kiosk.ws and probably would never have considered becoming customers. The relaunch was of course given great impetus by bringing on board many big name marketers with large opt-in lists od get rich quick hopefuls!

Whilst I can see that this was a great way to generate huge amounts of “buzz” I believe it also has a not inconsiderable downside – that being that outside of these network marketing zealots, the image of the company can also be tarnished in the eyes of regular webmasters and bloggers and even affiliate marketers who just want a competent and reliable place to host their sites or to be part of a reputable affiliate program. Rightly or wrongly, there will be some suspicion of promotion with a focus so heavily weighted towards network marketing and that is a shame because GVO has a long and excellent history in providing value and service in its primary business.

Putting all that aside for a moment though, is GVO better than the old Kiosk.ws? In many ways I would have to say yes, but I will also mention a few reservations. It as taken a very long time for everything promised to new customers to materialize. As an old hand, this does not really surprise me, it is the way the company has always been and is really an indication of their thoroughness and desire to get things right for their customers. Unfortunately I suspect that some new customers have been put off by this.

However, the new GVO services are definitely a step up from Kiosk as it was – the autoresponder service has been completely revamped and the new EresponderPro can really now be considered a rival to the big services like GetResponse and Aweber with far more features and user friendliness than the trusty old Supersponders we had at Kiosk. The whole look of the company is far more in tune with the 21st century and for both visitors and customers the website experience is far more pleasant and less frustrating to use.

I have no doubt that many of the eager beavers who signed up, tempted by the siren song of money for nothing will reduce in numbers as the months go by – there will always be this kind of fallout after a big MLM focused launch. Those that came primarily for a good hosting plan with a great suite of marketing tools will appreciate the value and savings and stick around if the service does not fall short.

So, how has the service been amidst all the marketing hoopla of recent months? Well, unfortunately there have been some problems and some of them quite severe, others just annoying. The blame for some of them can be laid firmly at the door of the company but others cannot. A few examples of recent issues experienced by this webmaster are:

1) A DDOS attack on this domain – by no means the fault of the hosting company. However, the new support staff in India were very disappointing and it took three weeks to even get to a tech support person who would acknowledge the problem and do something about it – that was effectively three weeks of downtime simply because nobody would listen to what I was telling them, preferring to insist it was all being caused by my WordPress installation. This was the first big fail I had ever experienced with the company. It took several more weeks to get things sorted out.

2) A failure of the new cloud technology provided to GVO by Dell led to another spell of downtime for many Kiosk.ws customers but to be fair to GVO, it was totally beyond their control and they worked like madmen to get everything up and running as quickly as they could. Their only real failing during this crisis was a lack of communication with customers – several of us ended up manning the support room ourselves over the weekend!

3) Server security became a burning issue over a period of a few weeks recently with constant hacking of the shared server on which we reside – finally an I-Frame attack exploiting outdated Worpdress blog installations resulted in all sites being moved yet again to a new server. Since then things have been OK.

On this occasion however I was very disappointed once again with the company who moved my domain without any notification beforehand and in doing so lost a fair chunk of data. To make things worse, the cavalier response from support was that it was my responsibility to keep offsite backups (agreed, it is) but worse, their refusal to admit that they had made an error and to apologize for their mistake. I think in all the years I have been with the company, this was a first and I know it would not have been allowed to happen back in the days of the Canadian data center. I was not a happy customer at that point.

However, when all is said and done, and with all my years of experience of hosting companies, you could do a lot lot worse than GVO. Joel is a genuine and honest guy with a team who, for the most part, always have their customers’ interests at heart. They have never refused to enable a server setting for me or to refuse to host a particular script. For the money you pay you get a very comprehensive set of webmaster and marketing tools which would cost you considerably more were you to buy them all separately.

Since writing this post a lot has changed at GVO and we left for pastures new some time ago.

Having said “I shall be sticking with GVO for the foreseeable future and if you are looking for a great package in terms of hosting and building a business online, I think they are definitely worthy of serious consideration” when I originally wrote this review, the service, support and reliability issues became a huge problem. Based on our experiences we have to withdraw our recommendation of GVO following all the changes, many of which were detrimental to the core business in favour of network marketing hype.

If you want decent hosting at affordable prices we recommend two hosting companies over all others – Hostgator and Knownhost

Forget GVO and pay less for superior features, service, support and reliability, it’s that simple. Their marketing tools just aren’t worth the additional cost anymore. If you run WordPress and need an autoresponder you can get a free or premium plugin for all your sites at the Free WordPress Autoresponder Plugin.