I come here with my review on Santrex.net, before I thought of creating this thread i've read some reviews that were already against Santrex, and I come to share my bad experience with them.
Alright, It all started off in August when I purchased one of their UK VPS', for five days I received an uninterrupted and overall good service, but after them five days thats when problems started to occur, litterally every day I was experiencing downtime, therefore I created tickets concerning the downtimes, out of the 11 tickets i've made 6 of them gave me the answer that there were "troublemakers" on the UK node and therefore caused the node to crash but after experiencing 1 months worth of downtime i've started to get annoyed and made a complaint, and the reply that I received was that the UK node wasn't experiencing downtime because of the "troublemakers" but instead hardware problems and it would be fixed soon.
So I waited for the node to be fixed and a few days after they replied saying its now fixed, but what happens after? In a short amount of time, around 20 hours to be exact the same thing started to happen again with the downtimes and this carried on happening for the next couple of days until I completly ditched the VPS and made a complaint that I wanted to be moved to another node.
So we agree'd on moving to their France node and all my files from the UK node to be transferred, I myself also made a backup just incase there were any problems even though I knew that if there was a problem I wouldn't be able to upload the backup due to a large file size and I was right, there were problems them transferring my files, and apparently they lost the backup and them blamed me because they asked me to make a backup which I did and even though I told them I would not be able to upload the backup due to the size of the backup.
So we started to argue about the backup and got fed up and requested a refund as I was left with a useless VPS and most likely bad service still as I heard that other members on this forum experienced problems on their France node too.
They directed me to their TOS where it says that they don't give out refunds so I was left nothing, and had to put up with this K Kook guys sarcastic replies to my tickets for 3 months.
And then they terminated my account for using minor abuse to him which I don't care about as the VPS at the end of the day was useless to be afterall.
To conclude, with many of my experiences with web services this has got to be the worst one yet as many others can back me up too.
P.S: Although this is my first post, I roughly joined here the same time I purchased the VPS on Santrex, and hopefully will bring some more reviews on some other webhosts.
I've had a VPS with Santrex since earlier this year, and for the most part I was satisfied with the service.
As of the end of last month I no longer had a use for the server. I emailed their support, requesting termination of the account, and in doing so, I told them the reason. At this point I had nothing bad to say about Santrex.
2 days later, a paypal subscription I thought I deactivated apparently was still active, and a few days before the bill was due, $29 was leeched from my bank account.
I figure that since I no longer had a a service with them, that it was justifiable to ask for the money back, as I was not even their customer anymore. Simultaneously I requested a refund and a paypal dispute.
This was the first email I got back from support:
Hello,
As far as I can see, you disputed and your dispute was unsuccessful since you have falsely claimed it to be unauthorized.
I'm afraid we can't do anything further since you broke our terms of use.
Thank you.
K Cook Executive board Santrex Internet Services
So it's against the terms of use to file an unauthorized claim dispute? That puts the company in a position that if it is corrupt, like I think it might be, they can hide behind TOS violations to justify their actions.
I sent them another email, pointing out that I'm an IT business, that I do have a foreseen need for servers in the future, and that I'd love to continue doing business with Santrex as I enjoyed their services and pricing. This is the response I got:
Hello,
Dear user since we Santrex Internet Services DO NOT practice any refund policies in place as stated clearly at *URL REMOVED BECAUSE I HAVE LESS THAN 5 POSTS HERE(but it's their terms of service link)*
5. Refund and Disputes: All payments to santrex.net are non-refundable. This includes any one time setup fee and subsequent charges regardless of usage. All overcharges or billing disputes must be reported within 30 days of the time the dispute occurred. If you dispute a charge to your credit card issuer that, in santrex.net's sole discretion is a valid charge under the provisions of the TOS and /or AUP, you agree to pay santrex.net an "Administrative Fee" of not less than USD 50 and not more than USD 250.
7. Account Cancellation: Requests for cancelling accounts may be made in writing with at least 7 days notice but not more than 60 days prior written notice and sent to billing@santrex.net
Since you the user have agreed on that Terms of use and signed up to it then you are bind to obey those rules same as we do.
Please feel free to contact us for further questions and help.
Regards,
A. Cook Billing representative Santrex Internet Services
Ok so they are now hiding behind their ToS? Lame but understandable. My response to that was asking for service for the money I paid, anything really. I had been interested in a seedbox from them for a while now, and the entry level seedbox costs.... $29 a month. The exact amount that I paid inadvertently.
To add insult to injury, I cannot even access my billing account on their system, to SEE the $29 sitting in my account there, much less place an order for a service that I really wouldn't mind having.
Let's be honest here, while they may refuse to give me a refund for my $29 (it's honestly not THAT much money), at the very least, they could give me service for what I've paid. Then of course, they'd look like honest businessmen, and I think that thought makes them cringe...
Hey, I'm a business myself, I provide IT related services to companies and individuals. I exited the hosting business earlier this year because I couldn't turn a profit from it. Maybe I'm an idiot? Then again, given the nature of the biz and the current economy, hosting is a particularly tough industry these days, and if you're doing well, hats off to you! Back on topic, as a business I am well aware of the value of providing service to your customers, when they pay. If I try to apply Santrex logic to my business, and run off with someones money and not provide a service, that's FRAUD.
And for a little more tidbit of info, look at their history page. At the very bottom it says "And with Santrex we can guarantee you that you will always get more than what you pay for."
Summary: 3 weeks, 2 Santrex VPS located in different countries, 63h of downtime, lots of short and extended outages (12h, 17h, 24h), lots of packet loss, slow network.
Uptime (Munich monitoring server):
FR VPS
Uptime 92.5235% [22 d 22 h] Downtime 7.4765% [44 h 29 m 7 s] Uptime coverage since 07.07.2009 17:29:36 [24 d 19 h ago]
NL VPS
Uptime 96.6310% [21 d 19 h] Downtime 3.3690% [18 h 15 m 24 s] Uptime coverage since 09.07.2009 22:37:55 [22 d 13 h ago]
Details: Please see the attached images.
Conclusion: If you want a reliable VPS look elsewhere.
I paid upfront for a month of service. They didn't create my account because they didn't have the service I ordered, but they did have a variation on the service, and wanted to know if still I wanted it. I didn't accept the service and requested a refund instead, but their "Tier 3" support said that unfortunately they had a 0 refund policy and pointed me to their TOS and stated "that I should have read it and contacted their Pre-Sales to clear up exactly what service they had before paying upfront".
I never got anything out of them, no account or server or username details, and they insisted on keeping my money! After numerous emails and escalations they finally agreed to "give me a credit" but I refused. I filed a Paypal dispute and I of course won. What a bunch of scammers.
I'm about to change my VPS, these three look very interesting to me which one do you think I should go for? VPSByte Santrex ConnectSwitch Cost - $39.95/mo - $79/mo - $61/mo Guaranteed RAM- 1GB - 3GB - 2GB Burstable RAM - 2GB - 6GB - 4GB Storage - 50GB - 100GB- 17GB
I registered for one of their services and paid in full but I have yet to receive anything from them. Is this normal? When I used 1and1 everything was setup immediately.
I have been using Santrex shared hosting for some time due to their low prices - below 3$ per month. And it has been quite good quality/price ratio. But now it's time to upgrade, so my question is - has anyone got experience with their dedicated servers and support?
I read a lot of bad reviews about that companys, but all of that reviews are of shared hosting and vps. I want see a review of someone who buy a dedicated server from they.
A month back i signed up for reseller hosting with santrex, earlier I've had a VPS since a couple of months which i regularly pay for.
The reseller account was however not according to my expectations as i did not get required amount of support as i should have got.
I did not wish to continue with the Reseller account so i simply did not bother to pay the due RESELLER invoice, however i paid the VPS invoice, BUT my VPS account got banned and the reseller went on being active.
What sort of stupidness would you guys call this? Carelessness or slow at understanding? This kind of services can never be expected from a well known host.
I've liked their services, but i must say after this i am really disappointed.
I've read bad reviews on Santrex, guess I'm just one more in their glut of unhappy customers. I ordered a NL vps 2 weeks ago after being convinced by a friend who has been with them for two months. I was a bit wary, but it was only $10 so I thought what the hell.
Right off the bat when my vps was set up and while I was insalling kluxo, there was some brief downtime. Wasn't that bad, but pretty bad timing for a first impression. Hosting was fine for the next week really, not much downtime, until last week that is.
All NL VPSes were down for more than 72 hours. I didn't pester their support, and it would have been pointless since their support was clueless about the issue. Their reply was that they didn't know how long the downtime would last. Granted it was problem with the datacenter, but thats not what I thought was the worst part.
Normally I'd think that when a host screws up and gives unacceptable uptime, they should at least offer some discount for the next month, if not give it for free. Granted thats not in their TOS, but they shouldn't be surprised at all of these bad reviews and customers leaving from the terrible service. I mean santrex didn't even apologize for this, now I'm not sure if the terrible downtime or the lack of caring by the company is worse.
My VPS hosting ends on the 17th, not gonna do much with it until then most likely, I doubt that santrex expects someone like me to pay them again for the service I got. The fact that these guys have 7k clients amazes me with the fact that these clients stay, and that these guys act as if they have 7 clients.
In closing, you can clearly see this is not a host to bother with, the cheapest vps hosting for sure but even a cheaper level of quality. All Santrex has really provided me is to test out webmin briefly, and it's changed my opinion about the control panel, but really thats it. Hope this review saves anyone from my experience. I may not have had an active site, but anyone hosting a business on one of their NL servers must have gotten big losses from this.
