Corporate Colocation Review (9 Months)

I'm writing a review on Corporate Colocation (Corp Colo, Corporate Colo, etc). We were with them for 9 months and just recently we decided to move our equipment to Zogmo.

Background:
We signed up with Corporate Colocation in September of 2006. At that time, we wanted to find a cheaper colocation offer so we could "get out feet wet" with colocation. For a while, we only had one machine but later on we added a second one. I will go into my reasons for moving at the end.

Sales:
In my opinion, this is the only part of Corporate Colocation that I found good. Jon and Victor have been pretty good customer service wise. They seem to always be willing to do things that need to be done and they are pretty good about working with you. Although they didn't seem to be very technically inclined, they did a pretty good job overall with the sales aspect. There were only a few times we had billing issues and they have been pretty quick to fix them with some follow-up.
I would give them an 8.5/10 for sales.

Technical Support:
Minimal at best. Things seem to take days to get done with technical support and even some of the emails that I sent in with regards to some network issues (not with Corporate Colocation, but farther down) were never even responded to.

For example, I requested them to activate a remote reboot port that I had paid for and a week went by with no word. I ended up calling in and talking with Dima about it and he seemed to know about it the request and he had it setup within a few hours. When it was setup, he didn't even bother to follow my instructions and even proceeded to spell my company name incorrectly. A few weeks later I went to use the remote reboot port and it didn't work. Evidently they fixed it, but I ended up leaving a few weeks later so I didn't bother seeing if it worked.

We had some issues with their network. It's partly my fault for requesting a rate-limit on my port, but it took a few days a few emails to even get a response. He seemed to respond pretty quickly as long as there was no work involved. I can't really hold this one against them because it was my own dumb fault, but it's something that didn't sit well with me.

Overall, I wasn’t very satisfied with their technical support. However, I tend to have a little high standards. If you don’t mind having to follow-up and emails with calls (or more emails) and don’t mind a few days for support to get back to you then Corporate Colocation is for you. I just like being in the loop and communicated to, which is one thing they severely lack.
I rate them a 5/10 for their technical support.

Network:
I will stay that they had a pretty reliable network and speeds were pretty good. All I can recall is two outages (unscheduled) where the network was either down or very slow. One was where their network room lost power, so I assume all their network equipment went down. I did file an SLA claim on that one, which they did promptly pay. The other was just a few minutes (<15 minutes) where the network was spotty. I can say they have been doing some network over that past few months and they are defiantly improving in that area.
I rate them a 9/10 for network.

Datacenter:
I drove to Los Angeles to pick up my equipment from Corporate Colo (see canceling for the experience). I was escorted from the lobby area up to FastServ, where Corporate Colocation is located, and I was given access to the datacenter. The datacenter area was reasonably cooled and they had a few big fans blowing air around. The racks themselves looked a little cluttered. The server a couple U’s above mine evidently fell a U or so on to mine (It was on rails, but somehow got dislodged). The server below mine was not even screwed into the rack and when I attempted to pull my servers out it would pull the ones above and below mine. Good thing I brought a couple people to help me with removing the servers and it four of us to make sure the servers on the top and the bottom didn’t move and to make sure their server’s cords didn’t come out. I just hope that others would exercise the same caution when doing stuff with their server(s).
Overall, I wasn’t really impressed with the datacenter. There was nothing bad per se, but the servers on the racks looked a little cluttered and unorganized. I would rate them a 7.5/10

Canceling:
I wasn’t particularly happy with the way they handled the cancelation. I made sure to have a few people confirm my cancelation (over the phone and email) and I had to do some following up a few times in order to even get some answers (I wanted to have my cancelation confirmed and I wanted to confirm access, etc). After some time, I finally got answers to my questions over the phone.

When I was at the datacenter, I was told by someone from FastServ that I had an outstanding balance and I would need to contact Corporate Colocation to get it resolved.

When I called them, they were trying to charge me for another month of service. But I made sure to keep sufficient proof that I canceled well before the 30 days notice and that both Victor and Jon confirmed it. They did finally give me access to my servers, but after about 20 or so minutes a lady came out with the guy that escorted me to my servers asking my it was taking so long and she eluded to the fact that that I needed to just grab my servers and leave (She did tell me that I need to get my servers and seemed very insistent about why I was there). She then proceeded to wait next to us to finish.

I’m not sure why the lady was so rude to me as I did have a right to be there; my colocation didn’t terminate for another few weeks and I wasn’t wondering around the datacenter touching stuff that I shouldn’t have (In fact, I tried everything I could to make sure the servers around mine were left unharmed. I know it wasn’t just me, because even the security guard that checked us in commented on how rude she was.
I would rate the cancellation a 5/10.

Overall
I can say that sales was pretty good to me. They did lack in some areas, but overall that’s what kept me there for so long. I was planning on using them in the future for some non-critical (off-site, etc) stuff in the future, but the way that I was treated at the datacenter and the trouble I had canceling has made me to think otherwise. This is one of those “you get what you pay for” situations. If you need something cheap that is fairly good, then Corporate Colocation is for you.