Hello,

I thought I will share my experience with edgehost.com (or edge-host.com) where I had a dedicated server for 5 months.

I want to make clear that my intention is not to hurt their business but to provide feedback for future clients so that they will be able to enquire more in depth before they sign up. After all, that's how I see the value of this board. It is through feedback from other people that I learned a lot - I would like to contribute by sharing my experience. The more people provide feedback - good and bad - the better informed we will all be.

Overall - I am bitterly disappointed from the service I received at edge-host. The only reason I stayed that long was that I have pre-paid for four months and finding an alternative host (now that I have been so badly burned) took careful research. In addition, I tend to be very forgiving at first, giving them the benefit of the doubt. It was only after it became clear that the failures are NOT freak accidents that I decided to move.

The number of things that went wrong is too long to detail here. I'll just give some examples:

- I was told that to get a server I have to sign up and pay four months in advance. The server delivery time was supposed to be UP TO 10 days. That meant the 17th of Sep 2002. It was delivered on the 21st of Sep, after innumerable emails. Did I mention that I was charged from the 7th of September? I guess not...

- The service was very unreliable. See just two threads here
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=80371
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85922

In addition, there were so many times that there were problems - all related to network reliability. I would raise a support issue. No reply. After six hours I SOMETIMES get a message: 'We do not see any problem. Do you still experience it?' Well, no - the problem was obviously fixed. I say 'sometimes' because I didn't get ANY reply on several occasions. I asked why is it that I receive no reply - and was told that sometimes they lose the support tickets. Losing support tickets??

- I needed to have rDNS enabled. After many emails and equal number of different excuses, I became exasperated. What did the trick was the following post:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=86043
The rDNS was enabled immediately.

- I was allocated IPs that were blocked by email spam fighters. For several MONTHS I asked for 'clean' IPs. I got MANY promises - but to the very end none were delivered. AT the end I just gave up and learned to live with it.

- I guess that the incident that really killed it for me was a 24 hour outage. There was no connection to the server. I have raised a support issue - nothing.
I get the CEO on ICQ - he tells me that the network is in good condition and it must be my machine that needs a reboot.
OK, I say, please reboot it.
> OH - we don't have anyone in the building.
Right, I say, when?
> In one or two hours.
I wait. Nothing. I wait some more - nothing. I raise the issue here
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=107784
> OK, we now know that it is a switch problem!!

Indeed - they fixed the switch problem and all went normal again. It then transpired, obviously, that the server was rock solid and didn't require any reboot. 24 hours!!! I asked:
Don't you think you should offer compensation in such case?
> This is not our policy.

Every site wants to be up 24 /7 . Clearly, problems are bound to happen. For me, the test of the provider is NOT if they have 100% up time, but how they handle the inevitable DOWN time, and their customers. In my case, at least, it was a total failure.

To end on a somewhat positive note, see the post here (http://www.edge-forums.com/showthread.php?threadid=3). My impression is that edgehost recognizes that their service wasn't good. They declare, in great detail, what they INTEND to deliver. It is not difficult to infer that all those things are NOT available now ... However, they may be available in the future.

Hope that helps anyone...

MC

Just a quick note (I'll write a longer review tomorrow) to say that I've been with EdgeHost for like 6 months now and have nothing but good things to say about them.

I can't comment much on the support since I've never had the need to contact them besides asking general questions which were promptly answered.

I did request extra IP's (from a different block than the spam-banned one) and got them the same day.. Not to say that your case was an isolated one but there might have been some kind of misunderstanding?

Anyway, they've been very serviceminded and are always glad to help their clients which is a huge plus.

Oh and I have nothing to do with EdgeHost besides the fact that I use their dedicated server services and am a pleased client.

I'm having the SAME probelms with them. I feel we've tried to approach this the same way mrdch.

Only problem now is I'm planning on travelling for 6months-2years and i need to KNOW that my service will be uninterrupted.

What provider are you with now? Please let me know how it goes. Thanks.

Hello HeMoPHiLiaK,

OK - I wanted to get better perspective before posting about them, but since you ask - here goes.

I got the following offer:
=================
AMD XP 1700+
512MB RAM
60GB 7022RPM HDD
200GB/m of high quality bandwidth
( AT&T + Internap )
test ip: 66.78.15.129

24x7 support:
AOL IM during regular business hours,
pager ( from website or email via trouble ticket system ) 24x7
phone 24x7

All of this for $150/m + $150 set-up fee

Please contact Gregg via email: gregg@justedge.net or IM:
AOL: greggcz
ICQ: 28899170
===================

I took it - with some minor changes to the terms. The verdict:

- The server was delivered on time. I was told three working days - and that's what it took.
- They installed all the latest software packages we asked for
- I was NOT charged for the build time.
- We got clean IP addresses
- There was not a single hardware or network failure so far.
- The network speed is amazing - and very stable and reliable

My only 'negative' remark is that part of the deal was some FTP backup area. They run out of disk space and had to order more hardware. It took few more days until it arrived and the backup login was sent to us.

Gregg is online quite a lot and is highly responsive.

If it will continue like that, I will be a real happy customer.

Hope that helps

MC

In response to your server setup time:

Your server was NOT setup within the timeframe that we gave you (10 days), and you were charged the 7th. However, a simple email to the billing department could have cleared up this issue, and issued you a partial refund.

At the end of the month (when the new billing staff takes over) all payments will be charged right after a verification phone call and right before the login information for your server is emailed out.


In response to the network issues:

Our network did have many issues with us, however, most of them were out of our control. Since then we have improved our network greatly and will continue to keep doing so.

The problems (such as bad cisco router, bad switch, dos attack) have been taken care of. Although these problems were fixed, we knew that our responce times should be better - and we have improved those issues.


Overall:

We were going through growing pains while you were with us, and you were a great *patient* client. We don't admit to being problem free and we know that we still have many things that we need to fix.

If you or any other clients have any questions or comments, please contact myself (alec@edgehost.com) - so that we can address these ASAP!

Thanks,

phpcoder,

It's not his job to email billing you guys were late so someone from your department should have done that to him. That is what we call customer service!

I think that edgehost is one of the most friendly dedicated server providers around. I havn't ever directly ordered one of their servers but I have a friend that has one. I've talked with the ownder of EdgeHost on AIM and he is always quick to respond and helps me with all the questions I have about anything in his company and the hosting community as a whole.


-dennis

Looks like they are revamping and improving hopefully. I can't say my experience was a good one.

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=94521

Noticed in their forums that around Jan 27th they said they would be up and running again in a couple weeks. It's 3/11/03. Maybe they meant a couple months, who knows.

I realize I am cheap and these issues are par for the course. I also realize that they are trying and hope they can work it out. I won't be going back though.

I hope that all this publicity will make a difference. The two people (I never encountered anyone else) seem to work very hard - but they certainly let other people down. In this business (perhaps in any business), being a nice person can only take you that far.