Score: 9.5/10 - My best yet!
Following my ordeal with burst, I travelled to Fastservers. In the 3 years that I have been with them, everything has been beyond great. In fact, it’s been super. You can read my original review here, but I’ll expound a bit on that in this post.

Firstly, I chose Fastservers because it was a LOCAL company. You know, wanting to contribute back to my local comunity and all that (and no, I didn’t/don’t live in California). I’d had my eye on them for some time but just couldn’t get things settled at all. Either they had a setup fee (long since removed) or their prices were too high.

Finally, I got a deal through one of the sales individuals there on a server that they were just going to toss anyways. The thing wasn’t anything powerful (still isn’t), but it is STILL up and running (and still in my name) to this day. As I’m not using it (my needs grew), I’m leasing it to one of the original customers of that server, and they’re just loving it as much as I am.

Now, why continue the quest, right? You’d think I’d found the perfect experience and server here. Well, the quest MUST be continued, because not everyone’s perfect. Case in point:

About a year ago I went back to FS sales and told them what I needed for a new server. At the time, the 2.6 kernel was getting a lot of good reviews, so I was using it. There were numerous performances, etc, and when you’re running a site that makes a ton of queries , well, you want something beefy enough to handle it.

The problem? I was given no OS choice. No worries, I figured they’d load the latest EL/CentOS on there. Well, I was wrong. They loaded a 2.4 kernel OS on there. When asked why, they simply said “We don’t support 2.6 kernels right now”. Well, oookay, maybe they should publish that somewhere. Thankfully, they have since reversed said decision.

There have been minor network hiccups with these guys, but if you want perfection, well, you are going to pay a LOT more than what these guys are charging (and they’re towards the top of the food chain). Nothing major, however, and they’re always more than willing to lend a hand whenever necessary.

These guys are the ONLY individuals I still have a server with, after 3 years. Usually, I’ll just close out the service altogether, but FS deserves every bit of support they can get.

Keep on kickin ass guys!

Score: 3/10 - Not even worth the pipe the place was built around.

This entry was posted in late 2003, originally, and the original entry can be found here. There’s plenty more like them on the same website, but you have to dig quite a bit.

Now, it’s been 3 years. Have they changed? Not really that much.You still see a good number of reports and complaints in the outages forum, and their “president” still couldn’t control his temper if he tried. Lots of things HAVE changed, but not really enough to warrant not posting this.

Enjoy gang!
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Over the past year and a half, I’ve been either a Nocster customer or hired by a Nocster customer to do various things on their servers. This is just a summary of the past year and it’s experiences. I would highly advise ANYONE considering Nocster and it’s companies (including resellers, because they’re just as affected) to read this post thoroughly before actually making the purchase. It’ll save a LOT of heartache and trouble down the line.

I’ll start in the beginning. The server itself was ordered during the Halloween sale of 2002. If I remember correctly, this was one of Nocster’s first major sales, at least advertisement wise.

As traditional with ALL large Nocster sales (do the research, search for the threads yourself, you’ll see), setup time was not the GUARANTEED 24 hours (yes, they guaranteed it), but it took 5 days of me calling them constantly, them saying “It’ll be here tomorrow” to GET it here. I wouldn’t have cared much, but the deadline for my other was expiring quickly, and I didn’t want to deal with all the nameserver updating garbage at the last minute.

Finally, the server was setup and ready for action. Right? WRONG. When the server order was placed, there were 2 drives (one main, one additional) requested. The main was 9 gig, the additional was 40 I believe. I was specific on the input of what should go where, which was to be the primary drive, yadda yadda, which partition was to go where. Well, instead of setting up the server as I requested it, the tech set the server up BACKWARDS. The 9 gig drive was set as the primary, the 40 as backup, with the home partition on the 9 g drive. Uggh.

Now, had I been smart, I would have learned from this, and gotten the hell out of dodge, but I figured I’d give ‘em a break, new server, sale and all.

Everything went smoothly, or pretty much so until the client who was paying for the server decided to sell the biz. Well, that wasn’t a surprise, so I ordered a server from Burst again, this time in MY name, with MY cc info and all. Great, wonderful. Again, a 3-4 day wait instead of the guaranteed 24 hour setup. This was around Valentines Day (or their sale close to that).

Finally, new server gets setup, they actually got it RIGHT this time, and I tell the client to shut down the old server after it’s been up for a week or so, to ensure he doesn’t get billed again. I told him to SPECIFICALLY put in the ip addresses for this server, and he did this. The reason for this was I didn’t want my new server to be shut down as well.

Well, lo and behold, a week after the cancellation request, I get calls from 2 clients saying “hey, your server’s down”. It took me -=2=- hours to get through to someone who had a clue as to what was going on, by which time the server had been down 5 hours. When they got on the phone, they were told they’d shut down the wrong server, that the new one needed to be up, and they turned it back on. The problem wasn’t with the client who put in the ip, but with the tech who turned off the WRONG server. Imagine that.

I’d love to say that the story ended there, but it didn’t. Far from it in fact. Move forward to March of this year. Anyone who was in the clutches of Burst/Nocster knows what a WONDERFUL month March (or was it April, really I don’t remember) was. There was an entire WEEK where networks were just slower than molasses for one reason or another, and it just didn’t stop.

Well, during the hassle of all of this, SOMEHOW my server got unplugged. I don’t know how, and really wasn’t told how, but it was done. Hours after everyone was rejoicing because their server was up, MINE still wasn’t. When I called (for the 3rd or 4th time that afternoon), I was put on hold by Mike (CS manager I believe), and told that the problem was that the server was accidentally unplugged. YAY, that made twice. So, he had it plugged back in, and it worked fine (for a day or so), untill the next network problem.

During these problems, or right after it, I started getting notices from a client’s server. Root passwords had been changed, various problems had come up, and the whole server wasn’t responding as normal. So, I call the client, the client says “I don’t know, nothing’s changed”, yet, his entire shared dns is gone.

Again, I call Burst/Nocster, speak to Mike. This time I’m told that the client’s ip has been stolen. Not something entirely uncommon in a network situation, but it’s still a bit odd. The client has had this ip for MONTHS, yet it all of the sudden goes nuts.

So, Mike handles the situation, gets the server up and running on a new set of ip’s. Great, wonderful, except NOW the client has to update dns, do all the usual moving server stuff. It’s a nightmare.

Just when the client gets the ip addresses updated at the nameservers, guess what? Burst shut DOWN the server, sending him a nasty email stating that HE stole the new ip addresses.

The time frame for all of this has been about a week. Meanwhile, client loses business due to ip address problems, nameserver problems, you name it.

Once I get wind of this, I call Burst (again) and try to get the problem rectified quickly. I mean, 2 days is enough hassle. They say that we’ll have to take the OLD ip’s, which have been distributed to another customer or stolen. Nobody was sure at that point. This process takes 2-3 days, and by the time all of this was done the client was just so fed up that he gave up trying to run his biz and sold it to someone else.

After ALL of this, you’d think I’d be smart enough to switch providers, but, nope.. Me being the always nice guy I am said I’ll give them another shot.

For a while, things were good, and I mean really good. Then, I got a message regarding problems on the server from root (you know the one, cpanel oopscheck). I ran my usual root checks, found nothing. Well, at this point the only thing I could assume was that it was hardware related, so I opened up a ticket with the vendor (burst).

2-3 days AFTER I open this ticket up, I get a reply saying “you’ve been hacked”. My mind was going “huh??” Of course, I knew it was entirely possible, so I logged in again, did a root check and still nothing. So, I checked the last logins for root, and lo and behold, they didn’t even LOGIN to the server. The tech that responded just automatically said “hey, you’ve been hacked”. I upgraded the kernel , rebooted the server and voila, problems gone. I closed the ticket saying “no, I haven’t been hacked, and you didn’t even log in”, and just forgot about it.

Well, a month or so AFTER this fact, I started getting these again. I knew this time it wasn’t a kernel error, so I opened up another ticket, told them what the problem was. They said they’d replace the memory that night. Since then, well, no more error. Go figure, it wasn’t a HACK, but a tech too lazy to look into the issue.

SO, again, things go smoothly untill last month, when I start noticing incredible latency on the network. I post in a couple of forums, provide links to the proof that there is latency or downtime, and get shot down by BurstNet, told that 1 server doesn’t indicate the whole network. Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that 1 server’s output is WRONG just because they want it to be. After incredible downtime and lag over the past two months, FINALLY my server is on a dedicated and stable network, away from everyone at burst/nocster, and I haven’t had ONE problem yet (nor do I expect any).

Over the course of the year I’ve been with Burst, I’ve submitted countless tickets for reboots, and called in countless times for a reboot. Average response ? 2-3 hours. That’s nowhere near acceptable for any reboot time.

The (way) long and short of it all:
In my experience with providers, I have never seen one with worse techs or worse service than that provided by BurstNet.

I have RARELY seen any network worse than that provided by the people @ BurstNet, but they claim (note, I did say claim) that it’s getting better. To me, it’s all the same, up/down/up/down. The problem is there extraordinarily slow response times. I’ve never seen major networks down half as long as burst has beeen in the past month, and I most definitely haven’t seen any network with the lag and all that was provided by Burst earlier in the year.

The support staff @ burst really need to learn to do their jobs, instead of pawning it off on someone else, or claiming that “you’ve been hacked”, or throwing out the traditional burst lie “Our network is not down”, when nobody can get to it.

If you’re looking for REALLY slow response times to tickets, REALLY crappy customer and technical support, then by all means, Burst is the place for you. I’m just thankful I got out of there in one piece.

I apologize about the length of this post, but it was necessary to go into detail to explain the problems that I’ve had working with or through Burst in the past year or better. I highly advise individuals to find a more respectable and professional server provider if they’re considering the Burst or Nocster network.

TJW
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