:cartman: My funny story with UnitedColo

I ordered a TEST server at UnitedColo at 28/11/2002. Just after ordering I got an Email from them that
Thank you for your recent purchase. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday
tomorrow, your server will be ready on Friday -- November 29, 2002
Ok, fine no problem I can wait. Time passed .. I infact ordered a Win2K Box and provided them my own license. Got a reply from them I've tried to use your win2k server key but it is invalid with our version of win2k server. we have a copy of oem server so I was told that keys may be different based on distribution channels. Do you have another key we can try?

Ok fine again, I sent them my own Win2K copy to install and finally at 4/12/2002 I got the server Online. I logged in and tried some network tests .. the network seems creepy. Things were working umm .. normal .. until yet. I on inspecting the system's hardware noticed that the system has 60 GB Hard Drive where they have 80 GB stated on their website. I asked them about this and their reply was Our current inventory has a mixture of 60GB and 80GB servers. We only introduced the 80GB drive two weeks ago due to the shortage of the 60GB EIDE worldwide. There's no upgrade available unless you want to pay the full $200.00 USD upgrade fee.

BTW -- We are offering all 60GB EIDE customers an additonal 100GB of data transfer per month free of charge.

:eek: poor me, I thought its fine. After that day till 8/12/2002 I didn't logged on the server. It was a test server for me that's why I almost forgot about it. On 7/12/2002 I sent them an Email stating that my server is down. No reply from them. I called them and got a tape on their phone that the support is off on Saturday and Sunday. :eek:
I sent them many Emails but none of them were answered and I was really unaware for how long the server was down. I took it easy and waited for them to reply and finally got the reply on the other day 8/12/2002
Didn't you get the email that was sent to you yesterday? It turns out that IP block 38.* was already in use by another customer so our engineer moved you to another Ip block. Your login is as follow --

Server IP: 66.111.43.8
IP Block: 66.111.43.8 -- 66.111.43.*
Username: same
Password: same

Ok fine, I logged in the machine and found that It was a fresh new install. I was shocked on this. They reinstalled the OS without any notifications. They stated here that "Didn't you get the email that was sent.." funny isn't it? My email server never went down and I was constantly receiving Emails. They actually never sent me any email about the problem.
I asked them about the OS reinstall and their reply was
As we've mentioned in the previous email, there was already another customer / server in the 38.* block. Plus, we had complication with the various W2K license keys and ISO that you gave us so the engineer probably just put you on a clean box with a clean ISO.

lol they figured it out after 3 days of server activation and while the server was doing fine. I asked them again to give me a nice answer and still waiting for the reply.

My Conclusion
What was that all about? They charged $99 from my credit card. Money is not an issue here but the poor support and negligence on their part is making their name bad and bad. Though I have sent them a server cancellation Email but that Email still haven't replied yet. I definitely not going for charge backs and will be wasting my rest of the time trying to get my $99 back .. but I will be enjoying the server for the rest of the month.

LOL When I recall this bullshi* I can't resist to laugh on them. wow, isn't this Funny? :D OoOoman I am still laughing ... :stickout:

Mmm. a resurgence of posts against unitedcolo these few days... maybe they are on a downhill again.

Like I mentioned in many posts about them, they seem to have the absolute disregard for customers interests and do what they please, be it with their terms and conditions, their server offerings or as it indicated here, your server with them.

Its very simple, as long as they don't care for their customers, no one will care about them. Secondly, even If you do make a mistake, don't lie and don't stick on your lied words.
As we've mentioned in the previous email, there was already another customer / server in the 38.* block. Plus, we had complication with the various W2K license keys and ISO that you gave us so the engineer probably just put you on a clean box with a clean ISO.

ouch, what an excellent example of poor management.

First i think you got loky they instaled for you the windows 2000..

They don't support that OS...


Secound you got another 100 Gb beacuse they ur out off thr 80 Gbs HD....


The email that they send you, mith got stop on the dos atack that happend these last's days....



You guys complain too much....ervy one here looks like a girl...


bla bla bla not in the @$$ .. ai ui ai ui .... not there....

I could be wrong. but the extra bw is moot if you don't need that much and most don't since they never use their limit anyway. And unless I read wrong it's one off. they may not provide boxes that comes with w2k, but they do allow installation with your own key. That's what they agreed, so they should deliver. But that's not the main point either. What if some information has been lost due to their decision to reinstall without informing the customer? Even if information is not lost, it's not very professional.

anyway that's a rich reply.. had a good laugh. ;)

Originally posted by hostingsp
First i think you got loky they instaled for you the windows 2000..

They don't support that OS...


Secound you got another 100 Gb beacuse they ur out off thr 80 Gbs HD....


The email that they send you, mith got stop on the dos atack that happend these last's days....



You guys complain too much....ervy one here looks like a girl...


bla bla bla not in the @$$ .. ai ui ai ui .... not there....

I don't know what your idea of a business is, but if they advertise 80gb drives and said nothing about using 60gb drives until after the customer found out...that's called false advertising and is illegal in the US. Minus the laws, that's just bad business ethics not to tell a customer about a hardware change--they should have done that before setting the server up and charging the credit card.

As for Win2k...if they offered to install it then there's no problem. The customer didn't ask for them to support it as far as I can tell...they simply wiped his server for no reason. Wiping a server just to reassign IP addresses...man i thought rebooting windows after installing an update was harsh.

As for the missing email...I don't buy this. Most companies will wait for some kind of reply or even authorization just to avoid this situation. Even a simple phone call would work as well...the notification to the customer should have been verified.

Originally posted by hostingsp
First i think you got loky they instaled for you the windows 2000..

They don't support that OS...


Secound you got another 100 Gb beacuse they ur out off thr 80 Gbs HD....


The email that they send you, mith got stop on the dos atack that happend these last's days....



You guys complain too much....ervy one here looks like a girl...


bla bla bla not in the @$$ .. ai ui ai ui .... not there....

If people here complain to much then why aren't they complaining about other companies at even near the frequency of complaints that UCG has about them.

Originally posted by Hostkookster


If people here complain to much then why aren't they complaining about other companies at even near the frequency of complaints that UCG has about them.

Its not about the complaints. Doing complaints here won't fix the problem. This is a public forum and anyone has a right to *share* its views with others as far as they are legal. Won't you be pissed off on your server being REINSTALLED without any authorization or even a notification? Does it really requires a REINSTALL for assigning new IPS?

One thing I forgot to tell, the OLD IPs were working fine. I never got any conflict with them. If they say they were assigned to another customer, why they assigned it to me then? Again .. really poor management.

Well I don't know whats wrong with you guys complaining about UnitedColo, yes they do have some downtimes but so far in a month I only had one.

Also their support is fast and they are very flexible, you tell them what partitions you want, they even offered to install plesk for me.

So my point is its a flexible company, unlike others they provide support for multiple OS's and just the fact that they credit you automatically for downtime is a good sign and with the new connections coming in it can only get better.

They aren't bringing new providers...if you're a regular dedicated server customer they're taking you completely off their wworks connection and sticking you on single-homed Williams Telecom. The ONLY way you'll see the he.net/internap mix via wworks again is if you order 20Mbit or more. I pay $800/mo for "Internap" but I'll take a he.net/internap mix. Wil-Tel does NOT cut it, however.

Originally posted by mushrew
They aren't bringing new providers...if you're a regular dedicated server customer they're taking you completely off their wworks connection and sticking you on single-homed Williams Telecom. The ONLY way you'll see the he.net/internap mix via wworks again is if you order 20Mbit or more. I pay $800/mo for "Internap" but I'll take a he.net/internap mix. Wil-Tel does NOT cut it, however.

Single-homed doesn't bother me - there isn't really much of a loop there (carrier nuetral facility, probably direct GigE from their racks to some Williams equipment in same building) but switching us off the existing connection to pure williams is not acceptible to me either... Where did you hear this?

This is yet another example of the reason I left UCG. You cannot offer 80G hard drives and then deliver 60G hard drives without letting people know this. The extra 100G is irrelevant. What if I advertised 1G disk space and then really only gave them 500meg, but let them have unlimited emails instead of the usual 10 I might have for that package? Especially without letting them know. How long do you think I'd be in business?

If they are out of the 80G drives, then that's fine - things happen. I just have a problem with letting people sign up for something with them and then not finding out until you do some investigation that they are not providing what they promised. It just seems like they are in a habit of doing this kind of practice. It's certainly not an isolated case.

I didn't hear this...they told me via e-mail after I asked about their situation with wworks and DDoS.

Oh well I don't like that.. I never tested williams backbone but apparently many people say its not that good, also how is the Williams GigE going to reduce the effects of a DoS if right now we're on the same type of connection and its going down.. well I think it will reduce the effects of DoS but only for the 20+Mbit customers and it'll be the free for all on the low cost servers. I'll email them to confirm this and if its confirmed I'll be moving back to rackshack, I found some howto's for installing freebsd from a linux partition which was the reason why I chose UnitedColo over Rackshack.


Originally posted by mushrew
I didn't hear this...they told me via e-mail after I asked about their situation with wworks and DDoS.

What irks me is that they've already decided on their actions without caring about the needs of their customers. Half my complaint e-mails end with the e-mail of their accounting division so I may cancel my servers if I wish.

You could offer people a "dedicated server" made of dog turd connected to a string and as long as the price was low enough, there are people on WHT who would buy it. Heck, I would probably test it for a month or two myself ;)

Originally posted by Goni
:cartman: My funny story with UnitedColo
. . . the poor support and negligence on their part is making their name bad and bad.

Originally posted by freakysid

You could offer people a "dedicated server" made of dog turd connected to a string and as long as the price was low enough, there are people on WHT who would buy it. Heck, I would probably test it for a month or two myself

Unitedcolo is like Timmy. People know they're going to get burned but they keep diving in anyway. Not that anyone is asking for sympathy, but it's like buying a 1995 Pontiac Grand Prix and then being disappointed by its reliability.

http://www.epinions.com/content_44260494980

Originally posted by atr




Unitedcolo is like Timmy. People know they're going to get burned but they keep diving in anyway. Not that anyone is asking for sympathy, but it's like buying a 1995 Pontiac Grand Prix and then being disappointed by its reliability.

http://www.epinions.com/content_44260494980

lol, everyone has a chance to give a try :D

Originally posted by hostingsp
You guys complain too much....ervy one here looks like a girl...

They reformated his server without getting any kind of an authorization first. Oh ya, nothing to complain about there. :rolleyes:

UC is having rough time.......
Goni you should look out a pro company for Win2k server.
:D

ah.. they are trying to isolate their dedicated servers from the coloc servers. They are not trying to solve the problem then... they are just trying to isolate the problem all to the dedicated servers, so that when a ddos happen, it will at most kill off all the other dedicated servers and not the coloc ones. Sounds like a plan to me ...:rolleyes:

Originally posted by silversurfer
ah.. they are trying to isolate their dedicated servers from the coloc servers. They are not trying to solve the problem then... they are just trying to isolate the problem all to the dedicated servers, so that when a ddos happen, it will at most kill off all the other dedicated servers and not the coloc ones. Sounds like a plan to me ...:rolleyes:

It won't work until they are single homed. A DDoS makes a bottle neck at their core router making impossible for any of the traffic to move. Yes, they can do some isolation by down different pipes with each dedicated and colo. But what if one attacks both of them? :confused:

Beside all this, there is one thing to be taken care of. And that is to put customer's servers off from their installation desk after installation. So that they won't be REINSTALLED again by someone else thinking "Ohh, my boss left a system on the table for me to install. Ok, lets do it !"

I've tried to use your win2k server key but it is invalid with our version of win2k server. we have a copy of oem server so I was told that keys may be different based on distribution channels. Do you have another key we can try? I hope they asked for a copy of the license as the CD is not a license :)

Originally posted by RackMy.com
I hope they asked for a copy of the license as the CD is not a license :)

lol, yea .. and I provided them 2 licenses and none of them worked. Then they downloaded the ISO of my Win2K CD from where they were able to install it. I should rather say .. install it again and again. LoL I forgot to tell them to install it JUST ONCE :cool:

maybe they thought that 2 keys... so they have to install it twice. :lol: