This is a review for PCSmartHosting UK web hosting company under 30 days review from a ex-customer.
Paid VPS on 29-April-2008.
I wanted to move to other VPS hosting.
I bought from them a VPS and a dedicated IP.
They set-up very quick the VPS.
I understood that I'm not very good in setting it up.
Has limited support and there support team seemed to be busy so I did not insisted anymore with my questions of assistance and I informed them that I want to not continue to use there VPS anymore before the last 10 days because that is in there TOS.
Also in there TOS is specified that if I ask for cancellation they will terminate the account immediately not counting that I am in the paid period.
They deleted my post after some hours after they responded to my post because they probably want in testimonials to see only HAPPY CUSTOMERS, this really "IS A DEMOCRACY".
I post on there forum, they responded and informed me that they done what is wrote in there TOS, yes they done exactly that, but by there TOS (Terms of Service) they take at least 33,33% from client money for serving the client with nothing, only because the client wants to move to other company.
I was inspired and move the domains from them before I informed them because I was afraid that I could have problems.
So people from now on, read and TRUST TOS, some web hosting companies really think that is normal to terminate an account based on the TOS even if the client want to use what paid for and does not ask for immediate termination.
This is not a good tactic to force a client to remain with you, is like saying, yes you can move but you loose at least 33,33% of your money if you tell us on 19 that you don't want the service from us next month too.
I did not wanted to start a campaign against this web hosting company, by there action against a customer that did not liked there TOS because is at least immoral, forced me to take action and post here.
Is this legal?
Is this moral?
I also used the service of a2b2 and they had great service except some minor problems, this is the reason why I consider them to use in the future and never pcsmarthosting.com, because a2b2 (UK company) closed my account as I asked, that don't have a crazy term in the TOS like immediate termination, not counting what customers thinks or wants.
In the present I use a webhosting company from Romania webfactor.ro, I pay around 10 euro/month and I don't have problems.
I'm a customer of vps-hosting.ca from about 3 months and they are awesome!
I'm really amazed by the quality of their support,services and everything. Their support is awesome and very user friendly and i got all my tickets solved within a very short time period
Most of all i have never seen a thing like downtime with them! They are just awesome! I'm just giving them the credit which they deserve in return of providing such great services.
I am really happy that I found BibiHost.com hosting. I have used their services for sometime and I am quite pleased with their servers.
3 Reasons why I am happy
Cheap - I mean really cheap, less than $10 per year
Proxy Hosting - They allow proxy hosting, to put it in their words any script is allowed as long as your activity is legal
Responsive Customer Service - I found their customer service fast and they do answer try to solve your problem by answering questions instead of sending canned replies.
At $10 per year this is enough to make any customer happy.
1st i want tell you all im not advertsiting or working for this company, i registered here so i could post some thoughts of hostineuro.
I bought my vps-500(its not available anymore) 6.March.2009. And i made my decision because of good reviews everywhere on web back then (i always invest some time for research) so by time they have helped me alot things even when its not managed service. but they have helped me alot with their servers and there havent been any downtime for my time expect when i migrated my server from germany to netherlands and because of moving places they gave me double traffic! which is amazing! I havent runned any websites (only sub domains with some gameserver scripts) but i run several gameservers & ts2 servers with great ping and with no lag at all and irc bouncers too, by the time i had to increase my ram and specs, they have really great support and i hope that you understand my broken english but its just great provider for vps services and its kinda one man company KTHXBYE this was my review
I was a little disappointed with the speed of setup. I paid for the hosting, but it took them 5 days to get the VPS online and accessible for me. I was told this was because they were "waiting for the DirectAdmin license to be provided by the provider". Not sure what that means, but I paid for 5 days of nothing.
Once the VPS was up, I received very fast responses to my tickets as I got the server ready for my sites migration from another host. They upgraded Apache/PHP for me, plus installed a PHP module I needed. Later they installed an SSL certificate for me, which helped me out a lot (DA's interface kept failing).
Most ticket responses were within a few minutes, but on numerous occasions the responses weren't great (as you'd expect with such quick replies). Several times I had to retype details I had already provided in my initial ticket -- which made me wonder how carefully they read and understood my support requests.
Overall I was impressed enough after a couple months hosting my own sites, that I suggested that my company moved its customer sites to A2B2.
The setup for this second VPS again took 5 days, which just seems a bit too long to me. Luckily, we had no time pressure on us, but, if your project does, I would certainly seek some kind guarantee from A2B2 before you place your order.
=== Reliability ===
A2B2 have been less good here. Some of the problems I have experienced over the last 8 months include: backups failing (error message "system load higher than acceptable limits"); the VPS being non-responsive (tickets yield the same "the load on the node seems fine" response and there is never a satisfactory investigation); DirectAdmin license expiring and locking us out; Apache randomly going down and not restarting (I'm still waiting on an explanation); and running out of hard drive space.
The last one is the most worrying since it caused numerous failures on customer sites and locked us out of DirectAdmin. On the VPS in question we had used 211MB of 10GB, which raises the question of whether A2B2 are overselling.
The problem was solved by them "deleting some files", which didn't fill me with confidence for the future.
=== Value for money ===
I think the price point for the two managed VPS I have is good, in particular given the amount of work the support team are prepared to do. The margins on selling web hosting to our customers are tiny, so we can accept some of the issues we've experienced. Also, when there has been a problem it has always been fixed. This has sometimes involved Rus stepping in to take over from the off-shore support.
=== Conclusion ===
The good outweighs the bad and A2B2 still probably represents the best bet for UK-based companies wanting a managed VPS service. However, compared to some of the US companies I think they fall (a little) short on the quality of the service and technical competence of the front line support.
I'd rate them thus:
Support: 6 out of 10 (but 8 out of 10 for effort) Reliability: 6 out of 10 Value: 7 out of 10 Overall: a solid 6.5 out of 10
I haven't seen any reviews on these guys so I thought I'd contribute. I started an account with them last 5 or 6 weeks ago and had a great experience.
setup: was very very fast. It literally took 2 minutes. I paid with paypal and the server was made by the time I got the setup email to my gmail account. I got a town plan mostly for my new blog.
control: this is very important for me. I like to be able to reinstall the OS without opening a support ticket. vpsville does this very well, you can choose any Linux os you want and its setup fast!
I was also able to set the rDNS without opening a ticket. That was a nice change.
speed: the server is fast, so fast it seems like a dedicated box sitting beside me. my ping time is only 10ms from my house (Toronto, Rogers network) so that might be part of it.
Low ping time was very important for me as I will use it as a game server. compiling code on the server is really fast and so is yum or aptitude. apache loads pages quick. No complaints at all.
support: really good. No complaints. I asked about lots of stuff and I always get a quick reply. I was having some problems with iptables and they gave me a firewall script that does exactly what i wanted.
I have had a dedicated server with Axishost for just shy of 2 years.
Before moving to Axishost, I had done the shared hosting account thing with a few companies and was never impressed with the performance or uptime. After realizing that most companies grossly oversell their shared servers, I decided that investing in a dedicated server was the best route for my company.
I recall researching and sending some 'test' helpdesk tickets to a few popular companies. None of the companies I emailed were very helpful. They just wanted to close the sale and sell me more server than I needed.
Tina @ axishost took the time to find out what my needs were and offered me a good deal on a dedicated box.
Overall, I just wanted a dependable server that I could put a couple dozen fairly low volume accounts on...have a company fully manage the box, and run a server that is Very reliable and fast.
Axishost delivered.
For about $170/month they supply me with a fast single core linux server running Cpanel.
They fully manage the box and provide all the support I need in a timely manner. Rsync backups are included.
My server is in Gnax/Atlanta and has done a fine job for 2 years.
Support ticket responses are always fast. If I put in an emergency ticket it is taken care of within minutes.
I am a happy customer, and I recommend Axishost to anyone looking for a fully managed cPanel server.
just want to say this forum kicks some serious arse. It helped me out tremendously with a potential scam that I almost got myself caught in this morning. Secondly, since I am on here posting this morning I might as well post up a one year review of Singlehop.com and the dedicated server I am using.
My websites hosted on rig: www.svtsnake.com, www.nsgcenter.com, www.nextlevelhardware.com My host: SingleHop My sales rep: Miguel Villegas My hosting package: Dedicated Server E8400, 2GB ram, 250GB HDD (non raid), Plesk CP with 5 domain license. My monthly pricing: 189.00 even per month
At the beginning of my term about a year ago I was achieving 2.1 to 3.0 MB/s throughput down and close to 500 KB/s up which is excellent and really incredible for working on SSH Secure Shell for me with uploading and downloading DB files, etc. At this current point in time I have noticed a minor decrease in speed to around 1.5 MB/s download speeds and at nighttime hours around 700K, which is more than ample and still excellent IMO as you will see in this picture: http://nsgcenter.com/dlspeed.jpg
I am very happy with overall throughput of the server at almost all hours. You can check out overall network response time and server DB response by playing around with the vbulletin database I run at svtsnake.com. There is always a huge amount of concurrent users and never any slowdown.
Something else incredible for me with Singlehop so far is network downtime. I can honestly say, since my latest term with them. I was also a customer a few years ago and had a few issues with server downtime that I ceased being a customer with them because of it. However, I was refunded an compensated in a timely matter and everything was taken care of immediately.
However, it seems that as of recently they have improved there infrastructure tremendously because I have NOT been down for 1 second in over 7 months. Even when they schedule downtine, my server has never noticed it. My uptime has been 100% for every single day that I have owned this server on Singlehop.com.
There is one issue that I can say I am very unhappy with, and it is an issue where all partys can be blamed even including myself. I am well aware that there policy states after 3 days of non payment they can shut down server connection. So, I was a customer for seven months when a new single hop account executive named Miguel Villegas joined the team and was my representative. I had changed my cell phone and never updated the file, and at the same time I own multiple businesses and frequently close and open different credit/debit/rewards cards to be used for processing payment. Note that I have never missed a payment with them up until this point. The payment was do on like the 18th of the month or something, and I received the invoice thinking that my credit card on file was automatically going to pay my bill like it always does. But it just so happens that the credit card I had on file with singlehop was stolen at a nightclub in NYC called MansionNYC, and I was pick pocketed. I lost all of my credit cards that night and called up to report all of them stolen. So, obviously I was issued new credit card and I was waiting for them to issue me new cards in the mail and new numbers, which took about 3 to 5 days with most companys. So, here I am 3 days late for payment and I wake up one morning and ALL of my websites are completely shut down. No notification, no warning, just closed and I got an email from Miguel Villegas my account representative explaing that my server was turned off until I remit payment.
I called up Singlehop and I was furiated, yelled almost at the top of my lungs that they simply just shut off a server, after 3 days of payment. Especially in a situation like this and they never even called me up to let me know they were doing this because my cell phone was different on file - which was mis-communication on my part. At this point in time I called up my bank HSBC and got an emergency debit card number to make the payment to Miguel through email and my server was re-activated.
But, 3 days after invoice is due to just cancel someones server or suspend it is definitely not good business policy. I have been a customers for almost a year and the whole incident was a fluke, they didnt have to suspend the server. In my business, we give a customer at least 30 days to pay a bill. But thats not the point, I know there policy states you have 3 days to remit payment or policy account suspension. But I think that is a horrendous policy, especially for emergency situations like I was in. What happens if the owner of a business is dying of an anyeurism in the hospital and is 3 days late with his web payment for his website, does singlehop simply suspend his 16 million hit per month vbulletin forum just because of lack of communication and payment?
I am still a longstanding customer with Singlehop but felt I needed to share that story with everyone. So, yes I am very happy with quality of service, speed of service, tech support, packages offered. But, I am very upset about there payment policy regarding 3 days of lack of payment that just aint right. I really like the attitude and business practices of the execs at the company and they are going to hate me for the negative feedback of my one bad incident with them, but overall Singlehop has my business and will have my business UNTIL either the server is offline every other week, or my DB crashes due to SInglehop issues. LOL Neither I think will be happening anytime soon.
Thanks for reading everyone. If anything, I hope Singlehop reads this and considers modifying there policy regarding server suspension and lack of payment maybe to something more like 10 to 15 days. Not 3 days.
My question is targeted towards providers who sell unmetered bandwidth servers. Like out of 100 customers who have unmetered 10Mbps how many would actually consume full 10meg , lets keep it to peak time for now.
I've been using shared hosting for some years now but lately found my sites were getting more and more sluggish, so I started looking around for a new host. Problem is, who do you choose? And what kind of service? I wanted something better than shared hosting but didn't fancy the complexities of VPS.
After some research I signed up for MDDhosting.com's basic Semi-Dedicated plan for one month to test them out. If it didn't work out I'd only be out twenty bucks The set-up was fast - I was transferring my test sites within minutes of receiving their (five) instant welcome emails. When I had problems with the transfer, MDD's support team were very responsive (like, in minutes!) and when it got a bit tangled, Michael himself helped to sort it out.
After the initial issues (all my fault for setting things up wrong) the transfer of the rest of my sites was quick and painless. I'm now signed up MDDhosting's Intermediate Semi-Dedicated service.
I'm relieved, with semi-dedicated hosting, that they won't bog down over time with added subscribers. I'm impressed with MDDhosting.com's quality of service and I'm VERY happy at how fast my sites load now.
I give MDDhosting.com a ten out of ten!
Usual disclaimer: I'm not connected to MDDhosting.com in any way, other than being a happy customer. I don't normally post on forums but I was impressed by this company's service and I'm sure there are other small webmasters out there with the same kind of hosting problems I had.
I have the legitimate service and have never been involved in anything bad.
But now, the Intercage is dead and my servers are dead also.
Is there anyone in e200paul who could provide me with the connection to my old servers so I could get my information? It's my last chance, I can't wait any longer and I really need this information.
Suppliers offer anything from Xen to Virtuozzo, OpenVZ, VMWare ESX. As a customer does it make any difference to you? Which do you prefer, or don't you care? Do you search out a VPS provider taking into account the virtualization technology that they offer?
I am just dropping in my week one positive review of geekstorage.com. I migrated my two domains to them earlier this week from vistapages.com, after having been with vistapages.com for two years.
I had to endure too many growing pains with vistapages, and I am on a tight budget, so was looking for something similar to what vistapages offered at a similar low price.
Vistapages upgraded the server I was on in recent months and things had been a lot more stable, so I was about to give up my search and renew for two years with them until I clicked on the geekstorage.com link in one of Jays posts here.
Immediately I was intrigued by their name and site design, and then even more so when I saw their offerings. I really like how they don't have a typical commercial looking site and feel. After looking at maybe a hundred or more hosting services on the web that all look the same, it was honestly a refreshing experience. I know that's not a technical point really, but I guess the geek look and talk just appealed to my geek nature.
I've learned by spending time here at WHT, and from two years with vistapages to be skeptical and that whatever host I end up with that I need to be prepared to get what (in my case very little) I pay for, so I try not to have high expectations and just hope that I get pleasantly surprised by good enough service that I can endure, or maybe better. I have definitely been pleasantly surprised so far by geekstorage.com.
They handled all my pre-sales questions well, and thanks to their current 25% off coupon code available here at WHT, I got their developer plan for $4.50 per month, which fits in perfectly for me, where my sites are low traffic (currently under 2 gigs transfer for the month), but I have plenty of room for growth with them if I need it, and in pretty much whatever way I may need or want to grow.
I gave Geekstorage my login info for vistapages, and they migrated my domains for me the same day I signed up (3 gigs of data, a menalto gallery/database, a couple wordpress databases, etc...), they just plugged it all straight in and I was up and running that evening. I sure enjoyed not having to lift a finger! (thanks again to Geekstorage for that)
I made a mistake and changed my nameserver addresses when I didn't really need to (I had been using zoneedit.com and could have just left it that way), and that change caused me a day of down time on one of my addon domains, which always sucks, but that was obviously my fault, and they were completely responsive and polite to my unnecessary questions that I kept emailing to them...
The one minor issue after the move was because of the lack of Litespeed support for shtml, but they went to work on that right away when I reported it to them, and for me it was just for a little toy script I have anyway, and I had some php code as a workaround for it (for random text display), so no biggy there, but more importantly what I learned from the issue was that as far as customer service goes, these guys are on top of it, and have kept me posted with regular emails on the status...
I've noticed that the server speed is great with them for my sites and better than what I had. With vistapages it used to be a real drag going to make wordpress posts and stuff because the control panel was so sluggish, and there was always high cpu use at all times. This is not the case where I am now, at least not for now... I know there isn't nearly as much traffic or sites on the shared server I am on now as there was with vistapages.com, and I am going to enjoy that as long as it lasts!
Anyhow, I am very happy with my choice so far, and completely recommend if you are looking for a low budget shared host to go with these guys.
What webhosting/domain/server company has the best customer area - ie. the best control panel, billing interface, integration with 3rd party scripts and control panels etc etc.
I think Mediatemple has done a good job, mosso's is excellent and I like what softlayer has done with their server management interface... Anyone else?
my friend told me all i have todo is type user.domain.com to give my customers a subdomain. Its not working somehow, the subdomain is not reachable. How do i give an account an subdomain?
Ive had many problems with hosting companies in the past, and each time i gain advice from other designers, i talk about it on forums (inc sitepoint), and i like to say i learn from my mistakes.
However, i obviously cant be learning from my mistake as i continue to have problems.
Now, this time i chose a experienced host. You could say they sold me a package and everything was good. No complaints.. well that was until today.
I come back from working away to find my website is down (www.avillafan.com)
I also find my host's site is down, and i also got no reply from a email. So i took it one step further and decided to phone them to find out whats going on.
And i get this reply ' Yes, we are sorry man - ill get it back up very soon'
Now what does this mean? very soon is a few mins. Its now been a few hours.
Now ive lost money in the past, as i like to go for yearly deals and each time i get caught out. And once again, im wondering am i entitled to get my money back? Now every other business the customer should come first and is aways right.
So how come this doesnt seem the case in the web hosting/designing business?
I was host with lunarpages.com one day I got a mail from them that my account has been deleted. Sent them mail for the reason why my account was deleted because I need my account I register for two year and they have host me about one year, up to date I haven’t got any explanation from them and they have stop responding to my mail I have 5 domain with which need it badly could any one help me to get my domain from them. Right now I have register with deferent hosting company
I don't think I've given my thanks to KH yet so here goes..
I've been with KH for over 2 years now and worked my way up from a regular VPS to a Hybrid VPS. Their costs are low for their high quality of service, product, and care.
They have always answered my tickets in a timely manner and been lenient in my times of financial crisis when I fell behind payments a few times. They even allowed me to keep my 10% lifetime discount when I upgraded to a Hybrid VPS just because I've been a member for so long. They also have scalability opportunities for members that need dedicated servers (which I will be moving to in a few months).
There really is no need to fatten this post up. Just take away from this that KH is the absolutely best hosting provider out there.
If you're browsing for a new host, do you care about the design of the site you're looking at? Would you be put off a host if their site was poorly designed and ugly?
We are from Brazil and we've been working with US dedicated servers for 5 years (Staminus, SoftLayer and FDCServers). We are now looking for colocation options to reduce our costs.
Which companies would you recommend that would allow us to by servers directly from them, replace hardware and do upgrades ? (we don't want to ship hardware).
What are the "old" and well known companies that would offer this kind of service with great support ? (we just need hardware/reinstall support but with fast responses on emergencies)
I have no choice but to post this. I purchased a vps plan from them and couldn't login.
It was over the weekends. I tried to email them. No reply for more than 1 day. I emailed again, still no reply after many hours. I was quite shock because I read review that says support is supposedly good, even during the weekends. Have they closed down or are they posting good review for themselves?
I have a few customers that want to manage their own content. I don't think a CMS is the way to go (learning curve is too great) so I was wondering if anyone knew of a website software similar to Site Builder (but not Site Builder) that will allow a customer to edit their own content? Or maybe suggest an easy to use CMS~
I've been a satisfied customer at Servage for several years but the last couple a days is getting a little sweat on my forehead...
I'm not sure but some really weird things is happening at servage right now ....
I've tried to login at my controlpanel in almost a week - several times a day, but are not allowed access at all . Get the message that etiher username,password or captcha is entered wrong... I then try to reset my password etc - and it works all fine until I'm trying to login with the new one...same result - NOT working.
After several non working tries I decide to write them personal emails at sales@servage.net, support@servage.net, reply@servage.net ssf@servage.net (which is the founders private email ), but NO answer .... usually they're really kind and efficient and answers within a few hours, but this time : NO ANSWER .....
This evening I would then try to contact them again, and see on their webpage if I have missed some important email adresses, and I was QUITE surprised to notice that almost ANY of their subpages is leading to a non-existant page - EXCEPT from the order page.... pretty weird, I think
I'm not saying that they're on their way to close down, but it is actually an option if we take a look on the world economy in these days...
I would be glad if other Servage Customers could tell me if it is possible for them to login at their controlpanel at Servage
I usually don't do this kind of stuff but when somebody does a good job it's right to let other people know, most of all in this industry.
it was Saturday, 12:52AM Euro time, i had an issue with the DNS of our new server, sent an email to Leaseweb support, within 5 minutes i had the answer.
I just wanted to let you know that based on your recommendations I ended up with HostGator.com. The good thing I like about them is simplicity. I purchased an account and it was active VERY FAST. Compared to my previous experiences, this amazing. I was able to upload and start working with my space. They have a great interface with a cPanel link. They have a guide teaching newbies how to start they even offered tutorials on how to add my DNS using namecheap.com! which is my domain-name registrar.
The speed is excellent and I was using a webbased file uploader. I will check using FTP it should get faster. I have so many things to do to test their other features. I would definitely upgrade to their dedicated plan if I get a better bandwidth for their plan.
Conclusion: Great experience. Fast, professional and convenient. I recommend it.
I will keep this page updated if I get anything extra to add. Cons or Pros.
I've searched and have read the reviews of iicinternet and how poorly they treat customers but I had their service about 4 years ago and dont remember any of the reviews complaints being true. So I've decided to order service to see for myself and give them a fair chance to prove their critics wrong. I ordered service on saturday december 13th, it was the weekend and they dont say anywhere on their site that they setup new accounts over the weekend but I did not get a confirmation of my order, just a paypal email confirming I've paid for the service. So I waited, come monday no contact from iicinternet, then tuesday came and no contact so I used the yahoo pingbox on their site, bill would answer, ask for my last name then after about 20 minutes go idle and never return. So I waited, wednesday I did the same thing. I contacted bill via their yahoo pingbox, and he did the same thing asked for my last name then went idle. This time every 5 minutes when he wouldnt say anything I would ask if he was still there, he would reply with just the word "standby" and then go idle after about an hour. I continued to do this until friday dec 19th, when I emailed steve and support about the issue. I continued to contact bill on their yahoo pingbox to no avail. Today I called them and had the guy who answered pick up the phone, ask for my last name, then put me on hold for an hour never getting back to me.
Now when you buy a dedicated server for under $20 you dont expect much, but I do expect a server within a reasonable amount of time or at least some information as to why its not setup. Now going into this I knew that I might run into some bad customer service and I know you get what you pay for but I was hoping that I'd get at least some information on why it'd take over a week to setup a server, not to mention that the paypal subscription is automated and even if I've only had my server for 2 weeks they're going to auto-renew on the anniversary of the subscription which is completely unfair. For anyone thinking about service with these folks please reconsider, you will just end up losing your money.
I thought you should know about the lazy and rubbish customer service at Knownhost.
I have a trojan in my 404 file of one of my blogs, which a spammer is using to insert 1600+ links into my header and footer. This of course will ruin my SEO, and google my even ban me for spamming and linking to dodgy sites.
My web developer told me to contact Knownhost which I did, but check out this reply:
Hello Julian,
The abuse queue is only for abuse reports regarding our customers. Please open a ticket with our support team directly through our helpdesk if you require technical assistance with your VPS.
Thanks, Helen KnownHost abuse
The word "abuse" seemed suitable, becuase my site is being abused, there is no description to explain what "Abuse" is for. Plus it took her about 3 hours to contact me, even though i marked it as critical, and then she refused to deal with it. The last straw is the fact that she didn't even pass it onto the right department. Its a good job that i was checking my emails.
So now i have to go and open a new ticket, not happy!
For those of you who run your own dedicated server, How difficult is it to manage your customers? How many phone calls per day do you get from customers asking questions? Lets say you had 50 web sites set up on your server...How difficult, or how much time per day do you spend dealing with your customers or the server itself?
I am writing this message to share with fellow readers my sincere dissatisfaction and utter disappointment with the low standards and non-performance of customer service at 1&1.com. The following message is a copy of a feedback e-mail that I sent to 1&1 management after cancelling my Dedicated Server. I was a customer since 2005.
---- Dear Sir or Madam:
I am writing to provide you with feedback on my experience with 1&1, and the events and circumstances that led me to cancel my Dedicated Server Package (a "1&1 Managed Server III"). I have been a customer since 2005, and over the course of these past few years, have witnessed the gradual degradation of service, transparency, and accountability by 1&1 customer service and technical support staff.
I purchased a Managed Server because I wanted support personnel to administer my system, so that my business team and I could focus on building and developing content. We design and launch web sites and interactive communities focused around creative topics, and our sites are ultimately very successful and highly active. Upgrades of our server's operating system were often done reactively and late, rather than proactively and positively, at times exposing our server to security holes and performance inefficiencies. However, my real disappointment rests with how your customer service has been managed.
Over the past year, there were complete server outages that lasted several hours at a stretch. When I was aware of these, I would call the 1&1 Customer Service line, via the "dedicated server" 1-800 number that your company had established. What I received was an outsourced call center in India, with absolutely no ability to perform technical or quality maintenance on my server. The customer service representatives were marginally understandable through their thick accents, and were very clearly reading from a script. Their inability to think creatively and adapt solutions to the problems at hand is understandable, even if frustrating; but entirely unacceptable is the fact that, by their own admission on several calls over the past few months, the data center in the United States was unstaffed. Ordinarily, Tier-1 customer service escalates to live Tier-2 and Tier-3 technicians and admins; your customer service department, however, was left lodging help desk tickets into a system that, according to them, would not be checked in days.
In the latest episode, my dedicated server went offline on Friday night. Saturday morning, I was on the phone with your customer service personnel, who told me that the U.S. data center where my server was located was unstaffed on weekends and admins might not be able to get to my issue until Monday morning. They repeatedly offered insulting "scripted" suggestions as to why my server was offline ("perhaps it was my Internet Service Provider?", for example). Finally, they concluded that there was nothing that they could do - not even a remote-reboot, which is now standard in the industry (such as an APC-reboot). All in all, my server was offline for over 20 hours without explanation, with no clear accountability, and with zero communication. When I kept calling, demanding escalation, I finally got through to an admin in the United States, who managed to remote-force-reboot my machine. After I conversed with him briefly, he simply said he did not know why my server went offline.
Our Dedicated Server's system specifications were modest, but still competitive (a Pentium 4, 2 Gigs of RAM machine, with around 500 concurrent MySQL connections on a single site). Our site's system specifications, using out-of-the-box software that we licensed to run our site, should easily have supported thousands of concurrent connections before we needed to upgrade our system. Nevertheless, I specifically paid extra and purchased 1&1's "managed dedicated server" option because I wanted the extra care and attention to our business-critical web sites.
FEEDBACK ITEMS:
To improve upon your business, I recommend three immediate changes.
1. Train Your Customer Service Personnel.
Your Indian/Outsourced customer service appeared generally unfamiliar with both my package (they had to escalate several times, placing me on hold for over 20 minutes at a stretch, before they could conclude that I had a dedicated and managed server), and had been reading from an outdated script that left them uninformed and incompetent to handle even basic queries on system status, server and service readiness, and the functionality of my server. Furthermore, they were completely unsupported by not having any live technical team working during reasonable hours.
2. Staff your U.S. Data Center.
It is astonishing, and horrifying, to me that 1&1 is apparently selling any hosting services, much less dedicated/managed hosting services, on a data center that is apparently not staffed with technicians 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In my situation, my business-critical server went offline for nearly 24 hours, and there was no one that either I, or your Outsourced/Indian Tier-1 customer support could escalate to in order to get accountability. Furthermore, there was no transparency: there is no number to reach a live human being on-site at the data center, and your Customer Service personnel seemed either unable or unwilling to ask questions to figure out if anyone was in charge on the ground. They concluded to me, on the phone, that the "technicians were home for the weekend". That is entirely unacceptable, and it operates on a level of non-performance that is shocking to me as both a business executive and an organizational manager.
3. Provide full-time, English-speaking, U.S.-based Customer Service.
Your call center in India was staffed with people who, quite frankly, were neither qualified nor competent to handle the concerns of your United States and European customers. When asked questions that deviated from the script that they were reading (you could hear them both typing and flipping pages to try and find the answer), they ended up placing me on hold for long stretches of time. There is zero innovation, and absolutely no adaptability by your customer service at this call center. When this scenario unfolds, there absolutely must be an immediate, Tier-2 customer service personnel that can promptly, professionally, and courteously handle the concerns of your customers, and they should do so in an intelligent, dynamic, innovative fashion. I am extremely patient and forgiving of outsourced and offshore technical solutions, especially since my business leverages a global model similar to most information technology consultancies. I can only imagine the number of clients that your user-unfriendly, backward, and mentally-atrophied customer representatives have cost you. The fact that they are the only customer support you offer before escalation to a (non-existent or absent) technical team is unacceptable, and speaks of a systematic failure in your organizational management and escalation hierarchy structure. Please, for the sake of your future customers, provide a full-time, intelligent, responsive, and communicative U.S.-based customer service team.
CONCLUSION
In closing, I want to reiterate my sadness at having come to the decision to cancel my 1&1 account and close all of my business with your organization. I have been a customer for nearly three years with your company, and have been very patient and understanding of the delays and mismanagement with customer service, especially since it seemed that in previous years, you had an attentive and present technical support team that would resolve matters promptly. However, after the past few months, I have witnessed the apparent absence of any service level agreement to respond to issues, queries, or escalations, the complete incompetence and mismanagement at your outsourced and offshore Indian call-center, and gross non-performance of your technical personnel and utter negligence of your support staff on the data center. Within a matter of moments, I was able to identify a major and large-scale competitor of yours that offered me an enterprise server solution at a U.S.-based data center that was staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; a full-time U.S.-based customer service team that had guaranteed SLA's of responsiveness; and, professional management services for a comprehensive management solution -- all of this at a cost less than what you currently charge new customers.
The decision was one of the easiest ones I have ever made.
