They overcharge and screw up your billing, then shut off access to your servers and take days to respond.

reason 462 to leave alabanza: reason 461

Hmmm... then I guess 463 would be the fake bandwidth usage reports and 10.00 per fake gig over.

Same customers moved to new NOC, and used half the bandwidth... no joke.

Tim L :cool:

You mean the fact they are telling me I have a server pushing 300 Gigs a month might be fake? Though hasn't crossed my mind since the last time they overbilled me at 200% my agreed rate for bandwidth.

-Brendan

How about I have a outstanding bill at Alabanza, for 2 servers for 3 months, more than twice what I have paid VDI in total for 17 servers we have with them the whole time we've been at VDI.

Call your account rep. Keep calling until someone answers. Get someone else's rep on the phone. Contact emergency@. All sorts of ways to get things like this straightened out. Although I sympathize with you and I hate our billing issues as well, that doesn't completely stop contact with them.

Originally posted by superiorhost
Hmmm... then I guess 463 would be the fake bandwidth usage reports and 10.00 per fake gig over.

Same customers moved to new NOC, and used half the bandwidth... no joke.

Tim L :cool:

HAHA $10/fake gig over I missed that the first time around... they should put that on their site.

I have gotten 3 responses from them, all three being the same response saying I have to contact their billing dept, which is 1 guy who is impossible to get ahold of, or my account rep. Both of whom work 9-5.

-Brendan

Nope. Don't even bother with billing, as they never respond to any sort of contact. Call your rep or somebody else's rep every 15 minutes until somebody picks up the phone or calls you back. That's what it took once for us, and that was all it took. We now have decent contact with our rep, even if he does irritate me from time to time. You'd also be amazed at how quickly you can get a live response from someone by doing the emergency@ routine. That only takes once, too.

Ive contacted emergency@ 3 times today.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for contacting Customer Care Center. hostrocket.com was locked up for non-payment. Please contact Billing Department, or your Account Manager if you have any questions.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Daniel Antonov
Emergency Technician

Brendan, wow! Things were that bad at alabanza?? You never told us that before, no wonder we moved ;)

Idiots (not you). Who is your rep?

Mark D. Hes actually not that bad I can usually get ahold of him, but not today for some reason.

Check for a PM with another contact. Try that route instead and see if you can get squared away.

Annette,
No.. I tried calling everyone you can think of right up to the owner who would not return my calls or emails. This was before moving to vdi. Then once I got all the sites to vdi, and after the dns settled, I had only lost 19 accounts. The bandwith usage was cut in half on all servers.

I kept trying, and trying to resolve the issue with alabanza. They refused to fix things. Their faulty program couldn't have been lying.... yeah right!

I bet you would give up before getting it resolved if it were you too. I spent 3 months trying, before I said the heck with it. When the owner won't reply to emails to him about issues like I had, then the company is out to do no good in my book.

Tim L

You'd lose that bet. I don't bother to call people that can't seem to get things done, and that means the owner and billing, thus far. The issues we have had (and there have been issues that have driven me to the edge) I have discussed with our rep, and for the most part those issues have been addressed. The emergency team is fairly responsive to things in their realm, as is the abuse guy. Other issues, such as their current crap billing software, are beyond my control, but I can voice my opinion regarding them - and have on more than one occasion.

I don't like to be combative with them, and it does come down to that from time to time, but there are ways of getting a handle on things that are bad, or wrong, or need to be addressed that do not involve simply throwing one's hand up and walking away. There are those of us who elected to stay at Alabanza, even while pursuing other avenues, who do have a desire to see Alabanza return to the company it once was. They have the tools and the capability to be more than the butt end of peoples' jokes (at least until it isn't their turn any longer and the Big Problems(tm) move on, like to VDI). The question is, do they want to be more than they are today. I think the answer is yes, as it should be for any company. Our clients are happy, and I'm willing to work with Alabanza as much as possible to help them achieve that, since their success means almost as much to us as it does to them.

You had me confused there for a minute.

The date looked wrong and the people looked old, so I thought it was an old post that was bumped.

:blush:

The comments in this thread are interesting, a bit one sided but interesting.

We've been using Alabanza for almost a year and a half. We've only had two problems with them:

- Once last year one of their other customers did something that sucked up a tremendous amount of bandwidth. Our servers and many of their other customers' almost went to a creep and crawl state. I was able to get a response from Support on the situation and it was resolved in about a day.

- One of Alabanza's OC3 connections went down thus forcing all of their traffic onto the other two. The result, slow response time. Again, I was able to get an explanation and the problem did not last long.

In regards to the comment about billing, we had a situation where one of our other vendors processed an electronic check three times. As a result, we had insufficient funds for our Alabanza bill. It took us about three weeks to get Alabanza paid. At no time did they stop service or shut us down.

We never have problems getting responses to business questions, however sometimes tech support is a bit slower than we would like. It's never been a problem, just an inconvenience.:(

Hostrocket (if thats really you) I am surprised you would post this message about Alabanza.

I tried Alabanza for one of our servers. We have had the server for over a year, just have not had the time to move the clients to a different server.

The automation software is outstanding. I wish I could find that could a package elsewhere to match it to put on our other servers. I've looked at quite a few, but none are that good.

During the first two months it was excellent and we were discussing moving all our clients to their servers, based on the automation software and how easy it made everything.

They are expensive, compared to what we pay for our other servers. They cost over twice what our other servers cost and the bandwidth is 3-4 times what we pay elsewhere. But we were willing to pay the higher rate for the automation, had their customer support remained acceptable.

We have never had a billing problem with them.

But their customer support is bad and getting worse by the day. Initially we could count on getting a replay within 48 hours.

Now it takes 3-4 days if you receive a reply, which happens about 50% of the time and the odds are great that the reply will by wrong if you do receive it.

Fortunately we are able to telnet into the server and handled most of the problems ourselves. But I don't like their non-standard set up.

I believe their basic problem is they have grown too fast and can not keep up with their rate of growth.

And owning http://nomonthlyfees.com doesn't help them. (At least I have been told they own nomonthlyfees.com).

Well I'm staying with alabanza mainly because of the automation software. If it wasn't for that, I don't think anyone would stay.

Even though they don't backup as much as they should and I lost the /home directory last month, I'm still going to stick in there.

I've heard of a few new things coming up which I hope are implemented soon and that they are not just leading us on. It's great to hear that Annette is working with them to help improve their services which in turn will end up helping our customers. This is what we all should be doing and not whinging about their service. I know that when I have server problems, I really appreciate the clients who understand what kind of pressure I am under when there are problems.

Support is really slow but I'm able to work out a lot of the server problems now. I still have to wait for support on things I can't fix though.

By the sounds of it, lots of people are leaving alabanza so hopefully they have more time to help the rest of us :)

Annette : Can you give us any ideas about what is currently happening with alabanza at the moment?
email me nigel@quickdns.net

Alabanza owns http://www.hostingventures.com/ . If you go to that URL and click on get started you'll see a picture of "Corey W. Blanton." Corey is now a VP of Alabanza.