Parastream Past Partnerships

We have partnered with many service providers to help Parastream Technologies to function at its best. These are the ones we used to use. They are listed alphabetically by name here. Click on the company’s logo to visit their web page.

On July 23, 2017, we switched to A2 Hosting after a disappointing two-year run with Host4ASP.NET. After three “cheap” hosts that had various fatal problems, we decided to give the next cost tier a try. So far, so good. At least the server hardware has 12 cores, which is triple that of the “cheap” hosts. Pingdom says they’re only slightly faster for worldwide access. A few things are much faster, but on the whole it’s about the same performance. We’re more interested now in reliability and their technical support’s ability to solve problems. Hopefully we won’t need it, but they actually have a telephone number! Update, September, 2020: It looks like A2 Hosting has decided to focus on Linux hosting and sold the Windows hosting accounts to Mochahost.

Active-domain.com was the domain registrar for parastream.net beginning in 2005. We originally purchased parastream.net in a fit of temporary insanity when we thought we wanted to get into the private web hosting business for some of our clients. We quickly came to our senses and now use the domain as a mirror of parastream.com. It’s mainly there to keep “similar” domains with us. Unfortunately, Active-domain was purchased by EIG, so we moved to Namecheap in 2020.

We used Arvixe for many happy years until one fateful day in 2015 the site went down. Three days passed before I could even get a response from anyone at tech support. During these three days is when I learned about EIG. They had acquired Arvixe and migrated all of the accounts over to one of their data centers, without any notice or warning. When tech support finally got back to me, they were of zero help to fix the mess they made of my site, not to mention the email servers and aliases.

Host4ASP.NET hosted all Parastream’s web sites and SQL databases between 2015 and 2017. Great pricing and reasonable service. They are not an EIG owned hosting company! This was important to us, after our disastrous relationship with Arvixe after the EIG acquisition. The biggest downside is their inability to fix what should be routine problems. For instance, they could not get any of our scheduled tasks to work. Then they could not fix an issue with MSSMS not loading the databases. After breaking Web Deploy, and a forced clumsy migration we moved to A2 Hosting on 23-July-2017.

	HostDime was the domain registrar for parastream.com and two personal domains. When it came time to renew in 2020, their price had nearly doubled! We found Namecheap and moved everything there.

	JRank is the search engine for all Parastream’s web sites from 2011 to 2020. We has started writing our own as part of a product offering (PagePorter), but the entire project was shelved in 2005. Later on, we found JRank. It works so well, why would you want to write your own? Besides, it’s free! Unfortunately, it became unsupported in 2020, and we changed to FreeFind.

We used PayPal as our exclusive payment processor since 2002. Unfortunately we accepted their debit card. When unauthorized transactions were made, They refused to refund some but not all of the transactions. They were all from the same merchant. They forced us to file a police report and a CFPB complaint. As of July, 2026, they have not responded to any further communication attempts. We have decided to switch to Stripe which will result in a much better user experience.

	Since 2014, we have been using Pingdom.com to continuously check the availability of this web site. Unfortunately, they no longer offer free plans as of February 6, 2019. Oh well, it was a fun ride for 4 years.

	From 2003 to 2017, we had been using Thawte for our SSL certificates to keep your personal information safe. Now, Thawte is too expensive and has too little market share.