Hello there, I believe I should post about my experience with Kolanos (www.kolanos.com - site is down, I will get to that).

I signed up with them and pre-paid for 3 months at $79/mon. First week my SITE was down because of different things; first was mysql driver for DBI not installing properly, 2 days and they installed that for me. Then needing FastCGI installed which they did. This was all ok, I expected some unseen problems. It then went from things needing installing that kept the site down, to just plain old downtime. In total, 3 weeks downtime. They claimed they didnt know for the first 3 times down, then the forth they said they think it is the HDD as they replaced everything else. They also would not pay a cent for 3/4 of a month down, they said they only pay on network downtime, but come on, it was 3 whole weeks - maybe 6 hours here and there up. A support staff said they were also going to lease a whole floor in the datacenter so they could do 15 min reboots - that is 3 days before this.

This is an email myself and all their other clients recieved on the 28th of Feb:
Due to ongoing contract disputes with our upstream provider we are forced to begin restructuring and pursue additional investment opportunities. What this means is that we will be winding down our dedicated server hosting services until we are financially able to offer a quality service.

We received notice of this today, and we want to give you as much time as possible to get your operation moved to a new provider. As of now, the date we're being told by our upstream is February 28th, beyond that point they will no longer honor our contract (which we have paid up until April 1st).

We recommend the following providers that offer similar services to ours, they should be able to help you:
- ServerBeach (www.serverbeach.com)
- FDCServers (www.fdcservers.net)

Please let us know if you have any additional questions or if we can assist you with the transfer process. Again, we apologize for the problems that our constrained circumstances have caused you and your business.

Best Regards,
Kolanos Networks Team
www.kolanos.com
[4.0.1 RC 8 TZ]


That was a whole 60minutes or LESS before my site (and theirs) went dead. Talk about professionalism ay?

So now I am 2 months pre-paid money (+ the 3 weeks downtime I 'should' get) down ~ $200USD. I paid through PayPal so I requested the money back, but I have no hope that they will do that. Also, because I paid through PayPal I can not claim it back as it is a "service", yay for me.

Although I would love your sympathy, this is just to tell everyone of my experience of how they do business and to also give a potential client of theirs the heads up (if they go back into hosting).

Thanks for reading,
Andy

P.S - If by any chance the user "kolanos" reads this, I would like a refund, thanks.

60 minutes to fix a new server, that's really a nice "heads up". Although all I can offer is sympathy, I hope everything turns out OK in the end, and you get some compensation.

If nothing else, here is a :beer:

To fix the server? No no, it was 60 minutes to pull the server and all operations. I would think for a company to stop operations would be atleast a 1-2 months heads up.

But thats ;)

An update: they denied my request for a refund through PayPal.

if he s a business member of paypal try to inform them about kolanos :mad:

too bad, man, i hope u ll get your money back

good luck

Owch, No refund= stinko