[review] Servint

In early 2011 I decided to give ServInt a try, I'd heard good things about them on a lot of forums although that was 2 years ago, and a similar search of ServInt now reveals a different story and I'm afraid to say I have only bad news too regarding their servers and support.

Initially, things went OK, their support staff were great and moved everything across from our previous server (was hosted by a friend) to their new servers.

I noticed a slight delay in some page loads, but nothing major - settling in pains I reckoned.

Then, only after a few months our site was hacked. This was the fist time ever our site had been hacked and I was so disappointed. I put it down to me slipping up with security on my PC and someone gaining access to my stored passwords via FileZilla or something, so I changed all passwords and had the site restored back to a known good time. Fair enough I thought, could happen to the best of us I guess. Reformatted and reinstalled my own PC too and made sure saved data was clean.

Then in the same month (Feb 2011) the site started dropping off randomly and a check at host-tracker.com showed that multiple locations across the world could not resolve my site. I checked the DNS cache at opendns and half failed to resolve my site. I raised a ticket though the resolution was never found, yet the problem seemed to go away?!. At that point also, it was obvious the server was consuming nearly all of it's resources.

This went on for some time until in May 2011 I raised another ticket when I noticed the download speed from my server was painfully slow - I got the usual response along the lines of "I am not seeing any issues with the server". Eventually, something changed which resolved the issue, and I was told "A network engineer has just made some routing changes that should resolve the problem".

In the same month, and after noticing more slow responses from the server I upgraded to "Ultimate VPS" in the hope this would make a difference, but the following month I raised another ticket regarding the high loads on the server which was making browsing a terrible experience and the result of that was they changed my server and migrated me to a completely new one !.

Again, the following month I had to raise another ticket because images were barely loading from the site, again, the download speed had been crippled. Multiple MySQL slow-queries were building up in the logs and despite all this I got the usual reply "At this time everything appears to be running smoothly.".

Fast forward the next few years and with a catalogue of similar tickets raised from Feb 2011 till Jan 2013, I eventually had enough. A total of around 24 ticket are in the support queue for ServInt, that's one per month just about and the best one was every weekend my server would just become unresponsive and begin timing out. They eventually blamed googlebot for coming onto my site every weekend! LOL They went around in circles trying to figure out the problem, but just couldn't - I was paying for a managed server yet they could not figure out why my site was constantly running so slow. I even got Invision involved and asked for their assistance in determining whether something was wrong with the script, they came on and checked and confirmed I should talk to my host. They still denied anything was wrong with the server and continued to act as though nothing was wrong !!.

I installed and configured MySQLTuner and tried tweaking this every week or so but nothing made any difference.

The server was then hacked again somehow and I had been 100% sure that the vulnerability had not came from me and I even asked support to look at the logs and determine which IP address had managed to get in and change something cause I hadn't been on for a while - they couldn't even do this.

Slowly but surely, my site died a death, people just stopped coming to us because we'd be up one minute and impossible to reach the next. I would get emails from Google telling me of an "Increase in server errors" and more specifically "Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs we could not access." I eventually even stopped updating our downloads for a long while because it became too frustrating waiting for the page to change which could take anything between 30-50 seconds to complete.

The site's revenue had then dropped to virtually zero in 2012, and I was paying for the hosting from my own pocket now and hardly anyone was hitting the site, at one point I thought I hadn't placed the Google Analytics code on the site, but I had, it's just there were hardly any visitors to report!.

I left the site to it's own devices cause I was literally fed up trying to convince these people their servers were killing my site till eventually last month (Jan 2013) when I announced I was closing the site for good and walking away from it. I then received multiple messages offering support and free hosting, and one guy in particular who runs another download site, so I thought what the hell, let's give it one last chance and I'm glad I did because overnight I went from a sluggish and empty site to a quick, snappy and vibrant website which most members who stuck around are delighted with.

The first day we hosted with our new friend who is on a Softlayer server, it was pretty obvious that we were being sold short by an absolute mile. I actually thought something is about to break because I didn't for one second believe our site could be this fast and work perfectly, I honestly expected to get a MySQL error at the next page because this didn't feel like a site connected to MySQL, it felt like a HTML site with no database or overheads.

After a couple of minutes browsing my site on the new server I was speechless, and this server also host's another two sites which are extremely busy and although I can appreciate some people (especially ServInt) could claim the new server may be dedicated/full of memory, etc, etc (which I don't know the answer to if I'm honest), the fact of the matter is, when I pay $90 per month for a VPS running only two sites which decline in popularity fast, and those sites run like pigs in mud, something is wrong, something is very wrong. Then when support staff cannot figure out why things are running so badly it's time to go.

I decided I would stop paying ServInt in January and wait for them to contact me, cause no doubt they would deal with non payment far more efficiently than non delivery of satisfactory service. It wasn't long till the emails began to roll in, telling me I had overdue invoices so I responded and told them I would not be settling the bills, and to my surprise they didn't waive the outstanding amount and ask for me to reconsider and please could they do whatever necessary to make me stay, oh no, they just agreed. However, they are insisting that I pay one months hosting (from January) as they will waive February's hosting very kindly (normally we have to give 30 days notice) lol. Well, if anyone from ServInt is reading this, I wish you well in your endevour to recover the sum of $89 from someone over 3,000 miles away because I can assure you, it will cost you more to send the letters or make the phone calls although if you wish you can raise a small claims against me here in the UK and pop over to our courts to see the case out if you wish.

My advice, ServInt was allegedly once a great hosting company (so I'm told) but in the two years I've been with them, I've still to see it!

 

This is an example as to why a hosting company should require payment upfront for their services. It sounds to me like you used their services, and then did not pay them, which is kind of sad to me seeing as I own my own web hosting company. Hacking incidents are sometimes out of the host's control.

 

You're obviously just an idiot who doesn't read thread's properly, go troll somewhere else.