My OVH/Kimsufi Review: After Ordering The I7 920 8XL Plan

Note before reading: Apologies everyone, but I can not link to URL's or use BB code as I have a post count of less than 5, when I posted this review.

Hello everyone,

A while back, I posted on here to see if anyone could offer a good deal for an i7 920, or know of a place who could. After finding no success due to the i7 being too new, I chose kimsufi, a section of OVH.

Following this you will find my lengthy review of OVH/Kimsufi, I hope members or guests of this forum find this useful in their search for the best provider or worst provider out there.

Specifications from kimsufi.co.uk (a section of ovh.co.uk):

- Intel Core i7 920 x2 (Quad Core) 2.66GHz+

- 6GB DDR3 RAM

- 250GB HDD SATA2

- 1GBPS Network Connection

- Unmetered Bandwidth

- FTP Backup Space

After ordering on the 24th December, knowing they only had 72h server's in stock, I couldn't wait to use the new i7 server! So, on Monday 29th I queried when the server would be ready, hoping it would be before the new year as that works out to Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, which are all business days calculating to the 72 hour setup time.
Later that day, I received the following response via email:

"I can see that the order is being processed, however with the kimsufi's orders can take up to 72 hours to be delivered (not including the bank holidays). If you can, please be patient and it should be with you before the New Year bank holiday."

So basically, they were saying it should be up by Wednesday, I thought great! However, it would seem this is not true after all. I rung up on Wednesday via phone this time, the first call at lunch time asking about my order, the guy told me he would chase it up and let me know via email. Three hours later, nothing. So I rung back again and it was the same guy I spoke to earlier, he said he had no response on the enquiries he was making and would get onto the matter now. About 20 minutes later he rung me back to explain that the order appears to have been stuck in processing and would not get processed till Monday at the earliest, of next week. A moment later, possibly after I wasn't too pleased, he told me to hold the line, then a moment later told me Friday would be the earliest, of this week. After phoning back later and talking to option 2, rather than option 1, I spoke to someone called Sophie. We had quite a lengthy conversation, but in the end it resulted in the situation being resolved on Friday, by which she would contact me regarding the situation.

On Friday morning I received a phone call from Sophie stating the distribution I had chosen during the ordering process is encountering problems and would be delayed until Monday (VMWare Server), so I chose to have CentOS 5.0 64-bit without VMWare Server instead. She told me this would be done within an hour and I would receive login details, in the meantime she would keep an eye on the progress every so often. Almost 3 hours go by and nothing has happened. I then emailed customerservices to try and get in contact with her via email, but after two emails within a span of roughly two hours, I had no response. I then got a colleague to phone them this time, as I had given up with this fight for a server order, and after talking to Sophie, she told them she would ring my mobile phone shortly to let me know what has happened. Another hour goes by, no phone call or email from OVH or Sophie herself. During the span of that afternoon I had several colleagues hassle OVH regarding my order, to no success.

As of now, it would seem my server hostname pings and responds to SSH, where it did not a while ago (as if it wasn't made yet), but unfortunately some wise person hasn't bothered to send out the login information to me, and change the pending state on my account on OVH to an active state. After phoning the french phone number which is available till 11pm, they told me they could not resolve this issue and therefore I must contact their commercial support number at 9am tomorrow morning. I have high doubts that they will get this resolved tomorrow after all the running around I have had to do and have been given by OVH support.

To say the least I am not amused by the disgusting order process. I have never encountered anything so shoddily put together in my entire life. The worst part of it is, by Wednesday 23:58 they will have technically exceed the 72h setup time which the site stated when I ordered on the 24th, as 72h is 3 business days (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), and no compensation has been offered other than a simple apology and a 'happy new year', I'll give them a happy new year for sure...

Due to this experience, I would NOT recommend to anyone who is looking for dedicated servers to order from OVH/Kimsufi unless you are willing to put up with a possibly bad ordering process as I did, or worse, having to chase up support several times on this matter.

Maybe commercial support will fix the problems tomorrow, but this is my review of OVH/Kimsufi to the date I posted this.