Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : review of selfserveur.com

[foldingstuff]

I thought I'd share my experiences of dedicated servers from selfserveur.com so that others may not have to go through the pain I have.

They claim to be "10 ans d'hébergement de serveurs dédiés, au service des PRO" nothing could be further from the truth sadly.

I've been renting a dedicated server from them since 2008, support has never been good, if you log a call late on in the day or on a weekend don't expect a reply until the next working day.

If as has happened to us twice the disk in your dedicated server fails it will take 3-4 days for them to resolve, usually by giving you a new server, it seems simply replacing the disk is beyond them.

Everything seems to be their convenience rather than the customers so don't be suprised when they try replacing your dedi with a vps without telling you - excuse given they no longer offer dedi's at the the price you are paying or try to give you a new server on a differnet ip address.

They appear to be a small outfit who use remote hands at their data centre and the remote hands aren't very good. Tell them you rebooted the server and it hasn't come back up, ask them to check the console, many hours later they just reply it's been rebooted, but clearly no one did check the console as when they finally do its clear the disk has failed. That process will generally take most of the working day and once a disk failure has been diagnosed it will take 3-4 days before you finally have a working server on the same ip.

Log a network fault and get a response 3 days later just saying everything is working.

Needless to say having had a 2nd server failure in 18 months and having had the exact same support issues I will be cancelling the server as soon as a new one with another company has been setup. As things look the new server will be available before the one with selfserveur.com is fixed. I logged the reboot issue at 1oam Friday and its now 12am Monday and no resolution yet!

Overall a very unproffessional service, no apologies for any issues and they respond to support calls as and when they feel like it without any apparent concern for the fact your server (and your business) is offline. Fortunately I have measures which mean I can cope with such issues but it is still far from ideal to have a server offline for many days.

[fdmu876]

well, i feel sorry for you but i just have one question, why stay with them for 4 years?

[foldingstuff]

When the server is running the service is pretty good, just when you need anything from support its not so good. I've logged about 3 tickets a year with them, mostly network issues.

I don't generally walk away from a provider on the first instance of an issue but when they repeat the same thing it is time to leave.

As I have measures in place to cope with things like this its not business critical but as with all things there comes a time to say enough is enough and I decided to post a review so others can at least enter into any dealing with them with open eyes.

Finding a dedi server provider in France of any quality for a reasonable price is in my experience difficult to say the least!

[fdmu876]

Have you ever considered OVH? theyr cheaper than those guys you linked to and better reputation around here , i just mean i wouldn't have stayed that long unless they had rediculous low prices wich they don't, 4 days to change a harddrive is not acceptable, should have been done within 30 minutes, and detected even before.

Anyways, you allready found a new provider i guess so my suggestion with OVH dosn't realy matter .

Thanks for sharing experiance and hope you have better luck with your new provider.

ohh and at least, do you have any uptime %? is it above 99% uptime or under?

[foldingstuff]

Unfortunately the server I had ordered has been delivered but they can not supply centos 5 32 bit which I specifically require (and stated when I ordered). I know that may be an issue to many hosting companies (not sure why) but sadly at the moment I have not tested my application on Centos 6 or 64 bit.

I have considered OVH and have just sent them an email to see if they can do centos 5 32 bit, their website says yes, their ordering process says no.

[fdmu876]

OVH does offer CentOS, and i have never realy found any company without o.O? Anyways, never seen france terms of use and how its driven in france. However remember to look though OVH's ToS and bandwitch limits in france as its not the same as ovh.co.uk(unless you can buy from here ). Except ovh i dont know any companies in france sorry, this was just a big reputable company i thought of in same second you said france.

[foldingstuff]

32 bit?

Their website lists 32 bit but ordering process only allows 64 bit and at the moment that's dumping out with a server 500 error and an ajax error.

[fdmu876]

May i ask why you need 32 bit? 32 bit only allow you to use 4gb of ram wich probaly is why they dont list it as all their offers have 8gb+. Anyways, im sure they are able to do 32 bit if you just massage them, and it sounds like you allready did. If your looking for even cheaper try kimsufi.com or kimsufi.co.uk, its OVH's cheap version of the company, however you might expect lack of support from kimsufi as they rate the tickets from kimsufi lower than tickets created from a OVH server.

EDIT: for me order saying down for maintance.

EDIT2: look at http://travaux.ovh.net/ if you understand france... i think its saying 1 hour maintance but not sure.

[foldingstuff]

As I stated "at the moment I have not tested my application on Centos 6 or 64 bit." but thanks for the help and yes ovh is now in maintenance.

OVH replied but just told me the latest version of Centos is 6, bangs head on wall, sigh, still they have a kvm option so I've asked if I can install Centos 5 via virtual media.

I'll get there eventually.

[fdmu876]

Give them this lovely page: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_serve...5.xml?sort=all Its clearly stated they still offer CentOS 5 64 AND 32 bit.