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.
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.
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.
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I wonder how come they can lost all data? One of the possibility was due to they are reseller and their server get suspended by their provider due to serious abuse issue. This might be one of the reason to cause the server down for so many hours but end up with data lose. That’s just my point.
Ken, their story was that it was a “security incident”
I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.
Server down more than 48เนhrs. But no more update .
Nice to see Santrix.net keeping up their commitment to lack of quality
It is the worst experiencingof me.
which I have used Santrix.net 2 package
Support worst No No No Update description that the problem is something indefinite period. Nothing to be comfortable at all.
Having been a customer for 4 agonising months I wish to share this with you, read from the bottom up:
2011 February 93.05 % Poor 5 2804 mins
2011 January 95.28 % Average 4 2106 mins
2010 December 98.52 % Good 2 660 mins
2010 November 100.00 % Excellent 0 0 mins
Who notices a pretty pattern?
In there terms of service there is this clause “Ensure reliable service to our customers”. This record does not, in any way, constitute a reliable service, but they have covered themselves, scroll down to “Network Performance” number 8.
But how about this one? “Maintain our reputation as a responsible service provider”. They have not done that, Google around, I can guarantee 80% of the reviews will be poor/diabolical.
Not only taking into account the amount of time the servers have been down, and they have not being providing my service (paid for), but the money I am also losing as a direct result of their negligence is appalling.
The servers will go offline not in spurts of 5-10 minutes every now and then, but for DAYS on end (their favourite number appears to be 3).
I say a class action suite for extreme negligence, loss of business, failing to meet the TOS, providing a poor quality service, etc, should be set-up. I know I’ll join.
I have the same story as you, TheDave. To the letter. Although, after some sleuthing I discovered that the reason for the downtime was because of the old version of the VM management console they were running and the way they had the consoles setup. Basically, there was a mysql injection bug in the version they were running that was patched several months earlier, but santrex never updated the software. To make matters worse, these management consoles were all sequentially named like: linux01.manager.santrex.net, linux02.manager.santrex.net, etc. So someone armed with this information sequentially injected an ‘rm -rf /’ to all of their customer’s boxes.
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Hello, first of all I am not a staff in ANY hosting companies. as you will see I do not promote.
I just want to warn you about the “services” that hosting company named SANTREX offered me. They are fooling people
with their low prizes. They have the most incompitent support I’ve ever seen( that mean they are absolute idiots ).
Here is a log of the messages we were sending since the FIRST error occured … they were 2 errors and from 1 month VPS payed
we got one FINGER .. stick in a very tiny place… First the VPS was cutting the Internet and every 20min it turned off the internet
for 2-3 … like DDoS. Then they ‘moved’ us to other country. There was a ‘fine’ 3mbps connection without stop. Then the machine fucked up
some HDD drive problem .. it was lagging and so. For 3 weeks NO SUPPORT. See our chat and look the dates in the messages.
Right after they feel the threat that I will spread how they were fooling me , they started to respond REALLY FAST? Why ? It was
too late. Now ALL users that think of using of SANTREX ‘services’ BE AWARE ! They will fool YOU too !
Here is a screenshot of my ‘conversation to their support’ ..
http://goo.gl/q1GSA
AT ALL DO NOT USE SANTREX. YOU WILL WASTE YOUR MONEY !
I am not hosting promoter , I am just user trying to help you not to get fooled !
The real reason could be that Santrex hosts hackers. On July 27th, 30th, August 1st, 10th and 11th, servers they host were used in attacks on our servers – over 500,000 attempted email logins (dictionary attacks), port scans and more. I would recommend blocking their IP range from your servers.
I been a customer with Santrex for more than a year (since June 2010) Had issue 2-3 times ๐ but u can’t call its the worst ๐
Sure I can… I’ve never had a company lose 100% of data without so much as a refund offer. That’s up there, especially since its reported happened to other users in separate instances.
It’s not like they’re super cheap either, vs the other options. Comparable, but not cheaper enough for it to matter.
Hello,
Santrex is a scam, this is what they did to me:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1096279
Regards
Personally I’ve been a customer with Santrex for over 3 years and faced about 3-4 Downtime. One of them I lost all my data and this is nothing to do with Santrex since Santrex can not guarantee any data being intact, and in worst cases that data was lost. Kindly read their TOS; http://www.santrex.net/termsofservice.php you will find
4. santrex.net is not responsible for any damages your business may suffer. santrex.net does not make implied or written warranties for any of our services. santrex.net denies any warranty or merchantability for a specific purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, non-deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by santrex.net.
Also note that Santrex compensation is given as double the downtime caused.
Kindly don’t spread the wrong words, they have changed alot since they started.
So true had the same experience santrex.net is the worst company ,poor customer service .
Allways down and non responsive customer service .
Lost money
santrex is worst web hosting company. you know this is problem with all UK company. they sell products but fail to provide service and support. I made my mind never trust UK service providers they sucks
I’ve worked with a number of UK companies that are absolutely fantastic! Santrex just isn’t one of them.
See this for my experience
http://www.wildcatsclan.net/santrex-sucks.html
Read bottom up.