After posting the last message about Clay, I once again found my web server unreachable. (Yet another S4Y network outage confirmed by trace routes at www.dnsstuff.com.) Imagine calling your server company for support and hearing the following. Call at 1:15 PM PST today:
Server4You Technical Support Call (MP3)
I would like to say that this level of service is the exception for Server4You.com but unfortunately it is appearing to be the norm.
OUCH! Kick em to the curb!
Brutal!! Drop them and get your money back. And I thought GoDaddy was bad…..
hey brian – thanks for posting on my log about your issues too. it’s good to see that i’m not the only one upset by this.
i made another post on the forum about it
and in my log
My overall impression of Server4You:
Server4You offers decent Linux servers that run well most of the time (by nature of Linux), the S4Y network is up most of the time, so for the low monthly rate you should be happy most of the time.
That said; when things go wrong…don’t expect much. There is no phone-based tech support — everything is done through email — a real problem when their own servers are unreachable as was the case on 11/27/05. S4Y generally sticks to their guarantee of one-hour email response but S4Y answers to all but the most basic questions are generally more dismissive than helpful.
S4Y basically offers white box servers connected to a high-speed network. If you are comfortable administering Linux servers and need little support, you should be happy. If you need anything beyond rudimentary support, you should probably look elsewhere.
The entire Server4You.com network went out again today. Lovely.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468967&highlight=server4you
our company virtual server has been very flaky as of late, and now is completely down. no website, no mail, no control panel. couldn’t even leave a ticket — message says “no virtual environment active” or such. got a canned response from sales chat yesterday that alluded a major hard disk raid had crashed and they were reloading software, trying to recover and rebuild stuff i reckon. server4you service and tech support has been great for us up until this. hope they can get it fixed soon.
S4Y still down now FIVE DAYS.
Called today… got some guy who cant speak english and he asked me if i had opened up a service ticket… He had absolutely no answers and didnt even pickup the phone for 10+ rings. I honestly think the call was forwarded to his house as there was no background noise. He said he was going to try to find out what was going on and for me to call back in about an hour. This smells of a complete shutdown of the business!!
Ugly stories, guys. Kevin and Jim, are you on shared/virtual hosting or dedicated servers? (Ironically, this blog is on a S4Y dedicated server. For the most part, the server has been solid. The S4Y network however should be as reliable.) Sounds like in your case it’s a shared server issue and S4Y support is slow to react. Ofline for five days? Sounds like S4Y may not be the best choice for shared/virtual hosting. Brutal.
I also have problems with the server4you performance … on a virtual server. My MySQL gets stuck every day and waits for disk I/O and gets none … and the only thing the support said was “This is a RAM issue, you should upgrade” … but I limited the used ram and it simply cannot be a RAM issue that writing to /dev/null needs 5 seconds for 512 Byte *rolleyes*.
But if their dedicated servers are good I will try to upgrade to one of those … their virtualization is definitely not working good.
[…] Aimed at do-it-yourself type Linux server admins, the appeal of Server4You has historically been great technical products at low monthly rates. The tradeoff has been a lack of live customer support; instead customers are expected to rely on an email trouble ticket system. The email system generally works with the notable exception of network outages where it can be difficult to determine if a non-responsive server is due to an internal or network based issue. As a side note, Server4You would be smart to create a network health monitoring system for its customers. […]