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I have been a customer of GVO for around four years, long before the recent face lift, when my hosting provider was a Canadian based company called Kiosk.ws headed up by an amiable and hands on guy called Joel Therien.

A lot has happened in those four years and you can read my recent post about the resulting changes since the re-branding of the company to GVO, or Global Virtual Opportunities, for a little more on the background.

In this post I wanted to comment on a few more things that I either forgot or didn’t have time or space to mention in my last post. The gradual process of morphing from Kiosk into GVO has been a fairly lengthy one and, to be honest, the way it dragged on got on my nerves a little. There is only so much you can take when it comes to all the rah rah rah of such a relaunch, prelaunch and never ending cheerleading.

I think it is safe to say that most of that is now behind us and I for one am glad. GVO definitely brought in a fair number of some so called “heavy hitters” who have probably cleaned up by getting involved and whilst I do not doubt the experience and marketing power of some of these folks it does not mean you have to like them or their methods even if their involvement has ensured a substantial influx of new customers for GVO. One unfortunate side effect of the sudden growth is the plethora of ads, articles, blog posts and landing pages all selling GVO that are plainly written by people who know very little about web hosting, which is after all the core business of the company. I’m sure if you have studied most of the search results in google you have found very little hard information about the pros and cons of their hosting plans aside from a few brief “it’s great value” or “I’m pretty happy” type sales efforts.

So let’s move on to the GVO services and look at what has changed from the perspective of a Kiosk customer.

GVO still offer three shared hosting plans, although you almost certainly wouldn’t realize that from any recent advertising. The old Silver and Platinum plans still exist, priced at $18.95 and $24.95 respectively. But, and this is a big but, there really are no good reasons to buy either one of them any longer as all incentives to do so have been removed, basically making the Titanium plan at $44.95 the only real shared hosting option on offer. Neither the Platinum or Silver plans include any of the additional services, so they are effectively dead in the water.

GVO’s Titanium bundled marketing and hosting package is really good value, just as many of the “reviewers” are saying but unfortunately at such a price point, many experienced webmasters are going to see a managed VPS as a much more attractive option if they have no need for the autoresponder service, video hosting and conference rooms. This is one of the major stumbling blocks because ultimately, shared hosting is shared hosting and it’s simply not good enough for those with a lot of domains and a lot of traffic. Conversely, for newbies who see only monthly $ signs and who are starting from scratch, a sub $10 shared hosting package with someone like Hostgator or Bluehost for example, is rightly or wrongly, a lot more tempting.

Don’t get me wrong, GVO offer a very competitively priced package, but convincing people of the fact is not always an easy task in view of the aforementioned considerations. I would guess that there might be a fairly substantial attrition rate in the early stages after the relaunch amongst those who joined in the belief that there were easy fortunes to be made through the affiliate program and the promises of spillover. Some will have done well already by signing up under the top recruiters, but many will not see the “money for nothing” they no doubt believed they would get and they will soon tire of paying each month unless they are willing and able to put the excellent tools to good use.

Existing customers, even those on the old Silver and Platinum plans of Kiosk.ws still get to enjoy the marketing tools due to grandfather rights, but for new customers, if you want the whole shebang it’s Titanium or nothing.

Many of the big marketing names associated with GVO and who recently marketed it so aggressively to their lists are obviously not using shared hosting but are on dedicated servers. This distinction is important because whilst Kiosk offered webmasters a pretty flexible set of dedicated server options, including one off custom builds for example, most of those now seem to be gone at GVO. Looking at the site, the only dedicated options at the time of writing are a fully managed Dell box at $299 per month with a one time $99 set up fee or a slightly cheaper box at $199 per month. Not bad, but only for those with deep pockets already.

One more thing worth mentioning on this topic is that if you outgrow a shared reseller hosting account, even one as good as GVO’s, the way things stand at the moment, you would have to either cough up for a costly dedicated server, or change hosting companies as there is currently no VPS plan available. This could be a real headache if you have built your lists and all your web real estate with GVO. Some people would no doubt argue that keeping all your services under one roof is never a good idea but again that will depend entirely on your outlook and your own forecasts of business expectations. As things stand, GVO can definitely save many webmasters a good deal of money with their packaged services.

Moving on to other changes, one of the major ones as been the outsourcing of many areas of support to India. For me, this as been one of the more disappointing aspects of the GVO re-branding. Whilst I appreciate that for the growth of the company to be sustainable there had to be investment in staff, premises and hardware, the end user experience is definitely not what it once was. When the old Kiosk.ws team in Canada were at the helm of tech support you were pretty much guaranteed fast responses, great service and experienced systems administrators. In recent times, whilst support as been available, the quality of that support as deteriorated. That is not to say it is really bad, just that the very high standards of old have slipped. Maybe it will not be permanent and things will settle down but like so many other industries rapid growth invariably results in  the customer experience suffering to a certain degree. This is something GVO must work on if they want to retain webmasters.

There have been several hiccups along the way but in view of the rapid expansion some of those have to be expected and I still feel very comfortable in recommending GVO if what you want is good solid shared hosting and some invaluable business and marketing tools. The new eResponderPro autoresponders are very good although they still lack one or two features offered by the established big names. The service is a massive step up from the previous Kiosk autoresponders and there are no graduated price points dependent upon the size of your list either – you get as many autoresponders as you want or need as a Titanium customer. With other third party services, the more subscribers, the higher the monthly fee.

Promoting GVO itself can be lucrative, but it is going to take work if you want to earn money as an affiliate. The compensation plan is very good but that does not mean you will get rich just by joining. I just think that should be made clear to anyone who is considering signing up with this as their primary motivation. You can learn a great deal about the compensation plan through the GVO Academy presentations and I would recommend these to anyone looking for a great overview of GVO as a whole.

Ultimately, when it comes to your webhosting and online business needs, GVO is either a good fit or it isn’t, just as with most web hosting, it’s not about which company or offer is best, it’s about what is best for you.

I hope that this honest summation will help my visitors in making that decision. What I will say is that Joel Therien has always been, and remains, an honest and trustworthy guy and consequently you can certainly feel comfortable dealing with his company. You will never need to worry about sharp practices as you sometimes do in the world of web hosting.

Overall, I would still recommend them to anyone except maybe those who are reaching the point where a VPS is close on the horizon because your hosting needs might not be best served by GVO at this moment in time. As an affiliate marketer, I would say that the affiliate program for GVO remains one of the best in the industry and will reward those who actively promote it. Resellers will also find GVO a good company to partner up with and a Titanium account with GVO still represents a solid investment for a lot of webmasters and online businesses.

(If you don’t want or need a reseller hosting account and can live without a conference room and video hosting a solid alternative at half the price is MK Hosting USA – we moved to them from GVO and have been very impressed to date, and would say that the email marketing tools are superior and support faster and more knowledgable).

You can try the GVO services for 14 days risk free with your $1 trial membership – no contracts, no catches.  I think you will be impressed with what you find on the inside.

As always I would love to hear what you have to say so please leave your comments below.

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In recent months most marketing and advertising sites have been inundated with the name GVO, the headlines being written becoming more and more fantastic by the day as flocks of hopefuls flooded into the GVO fold hoping to strike it lucky or rich or both.

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.

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.

To find out more about the GVO Hosting & Marketing Packages available visit GVO Hosting & Marketing and if you want to learn more about the affiliate compensation plan we recommend attending one of the excellent GVO Academy presentations online.

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GVO is about to launch its new brand of hosting and marketing services to the world at large. This is an exciting time for the company who are set for huge expansion having invested millions of dollars in their business in order to stay at the forefront of web hosting and online marketing technology.

Although the new site is still a few days away from its public launch we are able to give you a brief outline of what you will be able to expect along with a sneak preview of the new site’s look below.

OK, so that isn’t giving much away, but here is a brief summary of some of the major features that will be included with your hosting package. The company offer both shared and dedicated server hosting and have already established themselves as providers of industry leading customer and technical support.

GVO will be offering a great deal more than a simple hosting account. Included in your monthly hosting costs will be things like:-

1) Unlimited professional autoresponder service.

2) video Lead Capture Service (Create, upload, share video with a few mouse clicks)

3) Industry leading flash live conference rooms for all customers

4) Separate lead capture system including everything you need to put up professional pages fast

5) Probably the top reseller and affiliate programs available from any host today. Recurring monthly income potential for all customers.

6) Guaranteed 99.9% Uptime from their own hi tech data cente in Texas.

7) cpanel hosting with over 50 of the most popular scripts available today, making it easy to install almost any kind of site you wish to build…..

…..and really a whole lot more. If you are running a business website GVO really are the host of choice, saving you a huge amount of money considering the additional software and tools included with their hosting packages.

Even better, as part of the launch you can get a full 14 days free trial of their services entirely free of charge and with absolutely no strings attached.

If you would like to be added to our early notification list just drop your details in the form below and we’ll tell you when you can go and grab your free trial.

The World Of Hosting Is About To Change…..

Will You Be Ready?

We Will NEVER Rent Sell or Share Your Information

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