I posted a TrustPilot review a few days ago describing my recent experience with Performive/Total Server Solutions. I have summarized that review here because I have benefitted from honest WHT reviews and feedback over the years which have helped me find great services as well as undesirable services to avoid. I'd like to repay the favor.
I was a big fan of Certified Hosting. I signed up for a budget dedicated server with them in 2011. The signup/setup was smooth and speedy, their data center speeds were superb, and their tech support was fabulous. In late 2018, Certified was acquired by Total Server Solutions, now called Performive. It wasn't long before tech support went downhill. Since then, I've had to contact TSS/Performive repeatedly about downtime and other problems that kept popping up every few months and never seemed to get resolved. However, I dreaded the chore of finding a new server host and migrating to another machine, so I grit my teeth and dealt with it.
On 03/12/2021, I was auto-billed by Performive for my customary six months of prepaid service at my negotiated rate of $75 a month. As usual, they charged $450 to my credit card. However, a month later, a guy I'd never heard of blasted into my inbox declaring himself to be my new sales rep and spouting dire warnings that my server had reached its "end of life," I was in breach of various banking compliance laws, a terrible security meltdown could happen at any moment, and I MUST upgrade my server immediately!!! I knew where this was going, and my suspicion was confirmed when Performive DOUBLED my monthly rate and demanded that I sign a 36-month contract at this new, inflated rate. They also switched me from managed to unmanaged and wanted to upcharge me to make the server managed again.
To be clear, this was completely unacceptable. I stated that the time to re-negotiate a six-month prepaid rate is BEFORE I've been charged and paid in advance, not a month later. Moreover, Certified had agreed to keep my server hardware and software up-to-date, and if TSS/Performive had allowed it to become an antiquated piece of junk with gaping security vulnerabilities as they claimed, the liability for that was on them. Nevertheless, I was given until May 31 to accept the mandatory upgrade and doubling of my monthly rate, which I declined. I agreed to vacate the server by May 12, the end of my second prepaid month, which left a $300 credit for the four prepaid months which Performive declined to provide.
I spent ten sleepless nights finding a new server hosting firm and migrating my web content, which I didn't plan on doing at a very difficult time of health and other personal issues. But I got it done and vacated Performive's server on schedule. Since then, I have sent multiple emails to their Billing and Sales departments asking that my $300 credit be promptly refunded. ALL of those emails to both departments have met with dead silence. Adding insult to injury, Performive emailed me three robo-surveys asking "How Are We Doing?" This is such a demeaning and insulting way to treat a 10-year customer.
Last Friday, I sent another refund demand, which I expect Performive's missing-in-action billing department and sales staff will again ignore. So, when my June 4 deadline to refund my $300 credit passes, I'm wondering if my 30-day Notice of Intent to Sue will bring another robo-survey asking, "How Are We Doing?"
I've been trying to contact them for the last month via support tickets, their online chat, and I also called in by phone call to reach their billing department, and left a voicemail, no response.
After multiple non-responses for WEEKS, I ended up powering it down and asked for it to be either reduced, or canceled in lieu of not able to reduce the price.
Now I see that I'm still getting new charges for $308 for a basic E3 server that I haven't been using for 6 months anyway and has been powered off. I've exhausted all private channels with them so thought I'd ask here for advice, or if I should ask my bank for help.
But, it all seems very strange, and avoidable. I wanted to keep giving them business and possibly redeploy a node here, but just at reasonable-market rates. I've had this node a very long time, it was acquired by them after staminus/tss. I've been a quiet customer since I haven't been using the system anyway.
Originally took these servers out on a 12 month contract and paid up front as they gave good discounts for that.
When renewal time was due I noticed there was almost no discount when paying for 12 months upfront/12m commitment so I changed my billing to monthly and no 12 month commitment.
Their support confirmed there is only a discount when renewing if there is a commitment. After some quick maths the discount worked out to be a few bucks a month, not worth committing 12 months for such a small saving.
Either way, I was on this monthly billing/renewal for a few months and then randomly OVH swapped my servers to a 12 month commitment and charged me 12 months upfront. Just about fell out my chair when I seen this bill.
I seen the post recently about a guy that forgot to swap to a monthly contract after the annual one ended - This isn't my case though. I swapped to a monthly billing.
Has anyone else heard of this happening?
I seriously can't believe what I'm going through.
Back in 2019, I decided to purchase a RISE-3 Server for 1 year, paid approximately 1.6k EUR. Fast forward to 2020, I have been paying this server month to month ( I didn't renew the yearly contract and instead decided to pay month by month). All went smooth until this month when I decided that I no longer needed this machine.
For some reason, OVH is bringing up the contract from 2019 and demanding that I pay 1.6k EUR for the server until 2022, they didn't provide any resolution, only paying the bill.
What's up with OVH??? This is just messed up for a small company like ours, I simply can't afford to pay that right now and they are still telling me that I have to.
IOFLOOD 3 Month Review
I signed up with IOFLOOD for a Dual E5-2680v2 dedicated server about 3 months ago and wanted to give an update.
When signing up there is a 24-72 hour set up time. They were able to set me up earlier as I was a Webnx refugee. (If set up time is important to you, just take a note)
Let's talk speed, the speed test's download is 600 Mbps and upload 400 Mbps
Now, server response time for webpages is 100 MS or less from the tests done.
Sometimes email response time is a little slower than the liquid webs of the world. (10 minute response time or less). But we have had little reason to contact support.
Most important of all is uptime. We have had 100% uptime since signing up. We did have downtime recently for a ram upgrade. (Which is to be expected).
So, I would give them an A+
I have upgraded some features of my server. But current specs and price are below. I added additional RAM from the base set up and some additional IP's.. But couldn't be happier with the service and the price is quite reasonable.
Server specs and price
Dual E5-2680v2, 100TB / mo bandwidth on 1gbps, 256GB RAM, 2x 1.6TB NVMe SSD, unmanaged, 2x /29 IPs, $191.50.
I'm a small business owner and developer since 2003. We have a few dedicated servers, each one with a different host. One of these hosts was sold and the new owner wants us to use a new server in a new location. We are considering switching to another host. This server runs some important client web sites, our own site, and web apps we're developing.
What we're looking for:
- unmanaged bare metal dedicated server, Intel Xeon 4c/8t minimum, 6 or 8 core preferred
- 16GB RAM, 32GB RAM preferred
- 1TB (or 960GB) SSD, 2 x SSD software RAID preferred
- FreeBSD 11 or 12 (our other servers are FreeBSD 11.4)
- $140/month or less (we're paying $130/month now for the current server, no SSD, 16GB)
- US data center, east coast preferred
Obviously we want a decent data center and good customer support but we also want a company who is going to be around for the next 10 years and isn't likely to be bought up by some Wall Street investment firm who doesn't care about the customers of the smaller hosting firms they're purchasing.
Hosts I'm researching:
- Vultr
- OVHcloud (the US branch)
- Linode
- Hivelocity
So far, OVH seems to have the exact hardware, price point, and data center but their billing system worries me.
If you have any experience with these hosts, good or bad, please share. If you work for one of these hosts, I'm open to offers.
thanks,
Robert
I attempted to sign up with PhoenixNAP at the very beginning of July, at the urging of a friend who was having trouble signing us up at OVH. Boy, was that a mistake.
I set up our account, and attempted to register for a 12 month reservation of a server configuration. It signed me up for 12 months... of a completely different server configuration. So I cancelled that.
Then friend attempted to use the account to sign up for the originally intended server configuration. It signed us up for 12 months of yet a different unwanted server configuration. So we cancelled that as well.
At this point, I decided we should not do business with PhoenixNAP, and went with OVH instead, paying with my Privacy.com virtual card allocated specifically for OVH. PhoenixNAP attempted to swing me back to working with them, but made no mention of the two reservations.
I removed my card information from CCBill, a business that Google searches would seem to indicate is a questionable billing service. They managed to bill my card regardless, so I reported them to my bank and cancelled the card and got a replacement. PhoenixNAP returned the money and my bank eventually removed the temporary credit they gave me.
I refuse to give any further details to either PhoenixNAP or CCBill now. They continue to email me multiple times per week with my "late payment" notices for these reservations for server configurations that were not only wrong, but that I have yet to use, and no longer want anyway.
On my webhosting journey I started with free hosts (110mb.com) then graduated to Shared hosting ($1.99 oversold?) and then lowend vps to much more expensive vps and finally dedicated servers.
My clients/visitors are from Asia so I was searching for a host with good connectivity in Asia. Servers in asia are expensive so after a little bit of searching I found out that the next best thing is a server hosted in the west coast. That is when I found out about quadranet.com(This is back in 2011). They advertise their network before as the "Asia Optimized Network" so I gave them a try and it was indeed the best network that I tried. Quadranet had the lowest ping that I could get on all the servers that I tried.
My business grew bigger and bigger and I ordered more servers from quadranet. One of services I offer is VPN so it was really cool that they can even accommodate my IP needs. I got a lot of /24s back then (A lot).
5 years later on I started having issues with failing drives on my servers. I still like quadranet even with those hard drive issues but I moved some of my critical services to reliablesite.net because of the hard drive issues (And because their name says reliablesite nah just kidding ).
A bulk of my servers are still hosted at quadranet. I rarely had any issues and if I do need support they really respond fairly quick. When I say I rarely had any issues I mean really rare because most of my servers are running for years without downtime.
Fast forward a few years later, I moved my critical services back to quadranet because I love their service. business has slowed down so I need to cancel some servers because I just don't need them anymore.
And then here comes 2020 and the pandemic. This is the year that it really went bad maybe because of the pandemic and the support engineers are not allowed to visit the DC, I don't know.
But quadranet's network has been really bad. Frequent lost of connection. Q4 of 2020 they had an un-announced maintenance on their network which lasted for hours. They said it was announced but I never received any email so whatever. And then another maintenance. Despite the maintenance network is still.. well "Shi*ty.
I cancelled some servers and move my services to another provider. I still keep some server just because I still trust them.
And network is down again.
I cancelled a few servers again. They even offered me a free 1 month service just to keep the service. which I declined.
And now 2021 network is still spotty. frequent disconnections here and there.
I opened another ticket asking them if there are issues with their network again. And you know what the support did? He rebooted my server without any warning. WTF!!! I mean yeah when you have a problem with your PC and you call for support sometimes they would ask if you turned it on and off already?
But why wont you ask me first if its ok to reboot it.
I can SSH just fine to the server so the server is fine its just the network is having issues. rebooting the server wont fix your network.
And they said it was blah blah blah that their system noticed it is not responding.
I cant copy paste their response anymore because you know what they did?
They fluffing deleted my support ticket.
When I asked why? They said it was a mistake. Really? Their delete button has no confirmation that you want to delete a certain ticket?
I completely lost faith on quadranet now. So I moved some services again and requested a cancellation. And after reviewing my services. I found out that the server that I cancelled which they offered me a free month of which I CLEARLY declined is still there and I got billed this January.
I sent a ticket asking for a refund to a server that I am no longer using which I already asked to be cancelled which they did not. (They can clearly see that on the bandwidth logs)
I believe it is not my fault if they did not cancel it. I mean I asked for a cancellation. They offered a free month. I clearly declined. Now whose fault is it if the server was not cancelled?
Well now I am scared because I am still on the phase of moving my services to another host.
I am afraid because they might just delete my servers and say it was a mistake too. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
So my rating?
Support 2/10 - I am still generous here. because I know they are trying to do it right. Its just not enough
Service 4/10 - I believe I reviewed them before and gave them a 9/10 but it is down now.
Value 3/10 - Prices have stagnated. There are better offers now out there.
Will I recommend them? For non critical services I still might use them but if you want a better service just look elsewhere.
Its like 10 years of hosting and its sad that it must come to an end like this. Thanks to Dustin whose always been there to accommodate my requests at Quadranet before (https://www.webhostingtalk.com/member.php?u=252125) I dont know what happend but since Dustin was gone it was never been the same at quadranet. Lol maybe just a coincidence or maybe there is a story behind it.
Ive been a customer of KnownHost for over 5 years. As my sites have been growing Ive used several of their different managed VPS and dedicated servers throughout the years. This has given me great insight both into their hardware performance and the customer support for the managed services they provide.
As most website owners know there are the occasional days which are nothing but headaches. Slow loading and watching as traffic drops. Its not fun at the moment but its part of the game. The most recent event was today and that gave me this reminder to take some time out of my day to write this review.
KnownHost is one of the best hosting providers out there which truly look after their customers. Today, as many times previously, they went far and beyond to resolve the issues with my dedicated server and helped boost the performance on my site significantly.
As someone who is not a developer it is truly a great feeling to know that a response from KnownHosts support staff is never but a few minutes away. This might sound too much like a 90s TV commercial, but I cant praise them enough! 5 years and they are still as good as back then (or maybe even better actually).
I highly recommend KnownHost to anyone who is looking for a trustworthy hosting provider with many years of experience in the space and who always puts their customers first.
Thank you KnownHost for being awesome! I will keep on recommending you.
We have been with HyperFilter for about 10 months now.
We host a game which makes use of both TCP/UDP and heard good reviews about HyperFilter and their protection, which is why we decided to go and get a server at them.
They are fairly priced compared to their competitors such as KoDDoS, DDoS-Guard, Voxility, etc.
The moment we moved to them, we haven't had any problems until a few days ago when we were receiving a continues UDP DDoS flood which took down the (game) server.
After discussing with the host, they provided a solution that has been working excellent so far. If you know what your traffic looks like, they can adjust the firewall rules in order to lower the impact on your server, which is not something that many other hosts provide. Their support is top-notch and extremely fast as well.
Overall, I rate HyperFilter a 9/10. I would definitely recommend HyperFilter to anyone who is hosting a game and has DDoS problems.
Hello, my name is David, new member
I'm recently learning about using server hosting or providing services.
And I realized that server hosting should also be provided to meet customer needs.
Below are the Top 5 picked from our own survey to learn more.
Server's stable operation, security, price, quick response, and data center location seem to be important values.
What do you think is most important in a dedicated server??
Please feel free to share your opinions and reasons. I would appreciate it