Jim Skamarakas

Vault Networks in Miami, FL operates a data center where we have hosted servers with them for 2 years. But no more. In that time we have had an arms length list of just unprofessional service, performance issues, a total lack of communications to their customers, and overall unacceptable service.

To set the baseline, we are talking leased servers. This market segment is businesses spending $150 to $500 per server per month. So it is easy to see them getting a revenue of $5000 per year per customer. This is more then just web hosting for $1.99 per month.

There is an expectation for a level of uptime, data connectivity, responsiveness and service. And Vault Networks has given less then acceptable performance over the 2 years we were with them.

The blogs and forums here and filled with some of the notes, but even with our service cancelled with them 2 months ago, they just called trying to collect on monthly fees. Sheer I just don’t know what, except to call it piss poor customer service. The day we change service was after an outage that brough down one of our servers for hours. And when it came back, we spent even more time dealing with the data corruption and disk issues from a power outage. And yet no word of this came from the data center. We had to tell them, and even then they tried to deny it. Hard to deny a log showing unexpected shutdown, users unable to connect and no network responses for hours then it comes back on its own.

One absolute given in leased server hosting in a data center is that they monitor the physical plant. A box being rebooting or a box hung is active monitoring and a different level of service. But a box having no power for hours is 100% unacceptable. Let alone not telling us about it in any manner. Had we been at a convention, we might have been down for days before the repairs started.

Well not really, because we monitor the servers from other servers and an external service that reports on web site traffic issues. A few dollars a year for external monitoring is something anyone who depends on a server being up 24/7 on the Internet should investigate.

Would we do business with Vault Networks again? No. Their lack of communications, are constantly having to call them to ask about network connectivity issues only to be told they are having problems with Level1, ISP that, carrier this. Even these past few months, when we sere adding new servers, we would call and tell them what we needed. And not hear from them for days or weeks. We had stopped adding new servers with them a few months back, but finally took our hosting business from them 2 months ago. Of course you would not know that from their invoices.

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Categories: technology
Tags: computers, hosting, internet