Hello:

I recently had a bad experience with a company that is selling dedicated servers. Below are some of the grips i've had, and i'm curious what you all think I should do, if anything.

1. It took about 4 - 5 days before the server was on-line and operational after I sent in my payment. I'm not 100% sure if this is bad or not, I thought it took to long.

2. The hard drive was formatted for a different type of os (I requested Rh7.3) and they had to reformat the hard drive. It took about 2 days.

3. The new hard drive worked good for a few days, then it suffered major kernel panic errors and had to be rebooted daily.

4. I requested another OS, because I thought it was an operating system error, so the host installed fbsd. The server seemed to worked fine, although the kernel panic errors happend again which made the box useless.

5. I requested them to investigate the problem, which they then blamed me for the problem. I requested them to re-install RH7.3 and make sure the server works perfectly fine before they gave me access.

6. It took nearly 4 to install RH7.3 back again, which I was told everything was working fine. Once I logged in I found out that gcc was completely messed up, so I couldn't compile anything. That wasn't a huge problem, because I just re-installed it.

7. Everytime I requested a reboot it took from 20 minutes to 3 days.

8. For the last 4 days the server has been off-line. I've Emailed the company 5 times in the last 4 days asking/pleading for a server reboot. They have yet to reply to me.

9. They said they have 24/7 customer service. I have yet found this to be true. I can never reach them, and their phone number does not work 24/7. They also offer a 95% uptime gurantee. Although since my server was down 60% of the time they did give me a free month. Although a free month with 60% downtime is not acceptable.

I was just wondering how much would you all put up with this? I just recently put my companies website on-line (We are going to sell over 250,000 golf shafts, so its going to need a lot of bandwidth and a dedicated server) and was wondering if this is totally unacceptable, or just regular? I hope its not something that is normal in the web hosting industry.

I'm not going to say what company this is right now, unless the *company* does not Email me back. I feel obligated to post their URL and name if they do not contact me. Its unprofessional and bad business.

It's either:

Unitedcolo

Or

FDC

Or so I think.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It's either:

Unitedcolo

Or

FDC

Or so I think.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I've never dealt with FDC, although I ran into a problem with UnitedColo, although this gripe is not about UnitedColo. I purchased a dedicated server through UnitedColo, they did charge my card. Then Emailed me back a day later saying no more servers were left. They took their time giving my money back. Although this isn't about FDC nor UnitedColo. I do not think they will Email me back so i'll post their name and URL soon.

I dont think UnitedColo would give a free month for downtime.

The setup length sounds normal. I would leave them if they do not respond back in a timley matter, even in the 'wee hours'. Seems like you had a bad HD, or bad ram, or some bad component in your box that they are either not seeing as being possibly faulty, or not wanting to spend the $$ to replace.

Well, lets see....

1. Not horrible. They probably order the machine when you do and it takes a couple days to ship it in. Although they should have given you a time frame up front.

2. Could have been an honest mistake.

3. Not really thier fault. Hardware does go bad.

4. Obviously a bad hard drive. it happens.

5. Hmmm... They probably shouldn't have blamed you right off the bat. A simple reformat and some testing would have told them what the problem was.

6. I assume you meant 4 days. That does seem to be a little much. We would consider this a critical system and make it a priority. 4 days is way to long. 4 hours is not bad, but still pushing it.

7. I consider 20 minutes to an hour to be an acceptable time for a manual reboot. 3 days? 3 days with a dead server is bad. Very bad.

8. This would scare me. Are you sure they're still in business?

9. heh, not if you haven't heard from them in 5 days. :)

My Advice? Run. Run fast.

Aaron

O.k obviously this *company* isn't going to Email me back. I searched for their name WHT username which is dside443 and saw they have not posted since 04/25/03. You can basically find out what host i'm talking about by searching for that username.

I just Emailed them telling them to cancel my account. It will be amazing if they actually respond.

Those are too-good-to-be-true prices...

Anyone care to post who/what for the lazy people?

versehost... some of their servers costing $69/month...

Have you tried talking to David personally? From what I can tell he's the owner of VH and I am sure he will help you when he's online. He hasn't been around for the last few days though so I don't know.

Hey Steve:

I've tried numerous times to contact David, I've Emailed his personal Email address many times but no reply. It kind of bothers me because David and versehost.com represent themselves as a professional company. But when they don't reply to Emails I tend to think of it as false representation.

I purchased a new dedicated server, so its not like i'm mad or anything. I just wanted to post my experience with them, and hope they read this and fix their problems.

I'm currently a customer of VerseHost. Downtime has been frequent (and sometimes prolongued). I think the main problem is that they are understaffed, because David hasn't been on the Internet for over 3 days now. :(

Having said that, it's extremely good of David to give you a free month. David is always willing to assist, if only he was here more often.

Originally posted by CFU
I was just wondering how much would you all put up with this? Boy, what a horror story. I would have jumped ship early. Sounds like you already did so. There are a lot of providers in this industry, and quite a few good ones.

Price is a funny thing. It seems so important at the outset, when you're comparison shopping. But when you actually get a fantastic product/service, price seems very secondary. Get yourself a good host (probably by paying more), and I'm sure you'll conclude there's no going back...

All of your reboot requests, etc. were sent to my e-mail address ta david@versehost.com. I am not here 24/7 and would not be able to assist you 24/7. If the e-mails had went to 911@, support@, and/or noc@, the problems would have been resolved immediately. I am frequently away from my desk for prolonged periods of time as my position requires my involvement in a non-tech support related agenda.

We've went through at least 3 different hardware configurations (adding to the time it took for each setup), as well as provided free hardware upgrades, and numerous RAM & hard drive swaps for this user. Not many dedicated server providers would do this for you.

Our Linux OS installs are automated and no server to date has experienced any similar problems. Replacing server hardware three times with both manual and automated OS installs, I had asked the user to check if it were something running on their system that is causing it to crash. I would believe that is reasonable.

Any users on our shared hosting services (stephenM) who are/were experiencing downtime are isolated users who are either non-paying or paying a highly discounted rate for being on a pre-production server. Those highly discounted rate users are always issued service credits on request. Uptime for shared hosting is higher than 99.9% on average.

We are adding additional staff to our shared hosting services support department and tier one dedicated support, but our network operations center is always well staffed - that means you'll get your reboot whenever you need it, whether it's 9:00 PM or 1:00 AM.

Regarding low prices, we occasionally put out extremely low-priced specials to get rid of excess inventory as well as to promote our services -- we do not plan to make much of a profit off of those servers. Our standard dedicated server prices are not that cheap.

Thank you, CFU and stephenM, for your feedback on our services. We always appreciate any input and constructive criticism that allows us to further improve our services. Your thoughts have been noted and we will be working on preventing any of these type of issues from reoccuring.

David WTF? You never told me that I was on a pre-production server?!

Steve,

I believe it was made quite clear that you would be put on a brand new server in a brand new datacenter when we arranged the pricing.

These are pre-production because we do not sell to the general public but only make special deals. They are the same quality or higher quality of our production hosting servers. We credited for downtime the same way we would credit for a full price hosting account or more than that.

I only used the term to differentiate between web hosting clients that arranged special orders and web hosting clients that purchased through our site.

You told me it was a new Datacenter, but you never mentioned the fact that it was in any way pre-production or of a lesser quality (and judging the amount of downtime over the last few months, it is :() to your other clients :/

Did you read what he said?

"They are the same quality or higher quality of our production hosting servers"

Meaning that you are not on a "sub-standard" server.

Originally posted by savageghost
Did you read what he said?

"They are the same quality or higher quality of our production hosting servers"

Meaning that you are not on a "sub-standard" server.

Yes, ofcource I read what he said. However judging on the amount of downtime the network has been experiencing over the last few months it is no where near a production level.

That's cool, I had missed the part of your post in parenthesis...my apologies.

David:

I do appreciate you replying to the thread. Although I always had a problem on trying to Email your 911@ address. They Emails always went through, but you said you never got them. I would assume it was an Email problem on my part (funny to say, but its true) i've never had a problem with Email on my AOL accounts and i've had that account nearly 8 years.

Despite the lack of communication in the end, and the server problems I did enjoy the server. Although I had to move on because I do need a 99% uptime server. Thanks