Is Santrex.net a bad choice for hosting, or the worst choice for hosting?
And yes, this is just my side of the story. If you want to read their side of the story, well… Their website doesn’t seem to mention this little outage yet, nor does their public forums. Weird.
Anyway, here’s what happened: around noon April 12th, one of my VPS servers goes down. I open a ticket, then a few minutes later notice the system status indicates a possible hardware problem and some services are offline. No problem, we all have hardware failures once in a while.
4pm, “we’re currently experiencing major issues… in all locations”
April 13th the system status is updated with a (Resolved) tag, but I’m still down. File an update to my ticket, they’re still having issues and are documenting things in another location. Fair enough, although the “resolved” was a wee bit misleading.
April 14th/15th We’re still down, absolutely no sign of things returning, I move my services elsewhere and request a refund. Technical support says to contact billing.
April 17th I get a new “account activation” message, apparently Santrex.net threw out all of their customer data and started over after being down for 5 days.
Over the next few days I’ve exchanged several emails with their billing department, and apparently this is an acceptable level of service, and they’re standing behind their “we might not actually provide the service we sell, and we don’t offer refunds” clauses in their terms of service.
Seriously? A week of downtime plus 100% data loss, and a refund is too much to ask?
It was also nice that they took the time to yell at me for opening a second ticket formally request cancellation, after I followed their instructions to cancel service. Thanks for that guys.
Luckily, this is why god invented credit card chargebacks, Visa will stand behind a consumer when they purchase something and the seller doesn’t bother to deliver.
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Tags: rants
Stephen Hancock
15th May, 10
I find this to be a false claim, since santrex has notified all the users via email and and network issues section about the outage the minute it took place, they haven’t just decided to lose the data and keep it as a secret, we all were kept up to date with what happened, I myself got compensated for the losses which i appreciate so much.
I’m afraid your claim is totally wrong, and misleading.
atthedave
15th May, 10
The email indicating there was an outage was at least 4 hours after the outage started, and this was mentioned in my post, as was the immediacy of the outage being documented in their status page.
My biggest complaint though, beyond the 5+ day outage and complete loss of data, was that at no time during this process was any timeline for a fix given.
If they’d said on Wednesday “we’re screwed, looks like massive data loss, it will take a few days to get back up” I probably wouldn’t have minded the wait so much, but after 2+ days of an outage and only a “We are doing out utmost best” without any indication of whether it will take days, weeks or months to come back, I moved elsewhere.
After being offline for most of a week and losing all data, I don’t really think giving people their money back should be that big a deal, should it? It’s pretty much contract law 101, if you can’t deliver the service you promised, you don’t get to keep the money.
So I’m not really sure what part of my post is misleading or wrong, the facts as I described them don’t seem to be in dispute here.
at