I’m upset, bootstrapping a startup, and VPS providers can be horrible!

I am bootstrapping a startup company, which will remain anonymous for the time being, however, I have to rant about a few things:

• Horrible service from Web hosts
• The inability to get services up and running, and not taking responsibility for their mistakes
• The inability to try to save an account

First, I have been trying to buy a Windows based VPS for some development of a new product over the past three weeks.  What a horrible experience.  The first vendor I purchased a Windows VPS from is a hosting company which I believed would be a good fit.  The cost was right, the ratings on many of the hosting rating sites I read were good (now I suspect they are not), and it was an easy sign up process.  Their website boasted Intrusion detections systems and advanced systems to fight DDOS, excellent firewall technology, etc.  A sign that they have their proverbial technology “stuff” together.  Um, no.  I could not have been more wrong.  Clearly they misrepresented their technology network, or were just republishing their data centers information (which I believe).

After singing up I provided my developers with the login information so that they could start uploading files and keep developing.  They weren’t quite ready, and it would be a week or two before they got to it.  Fine.  Two days later I get an email from my VPS provider telling me my VPS has been compromised and that it has been disabled.  What?  No one has touched the VPS, and they disabled it.  Here is the message I received:

Hello, During recent monitoring of the VPS hardware node that your VPS account is on we have found that your account seems to be exploited and had many processes running that were using excessive resources and causing resource issues on the entire hardware node. Since this effected the entire server we have been forced to temporarily disable your vps until we hear from you that this issue will be addressed and resolved. Looking over the issue itself it appears that the SQL server that was running on your VPS was the victim of an SQL injection. Files were uploaded to your server in the location as follows: C:\WINDOWS\Application Compatibility Scripts\Uninstall Within this directory there are two directories and two batch files. Your direct and urgent attention is requested in this matter as this form of injection could possibly be spread to the Hardware node and effect all customers in negative manner. If you have any other questions please feel free to reply to this ticket and we will assist you further. Thank you for your patience and understanding while dealing with this issue. *—————* Kind Regards,

What???  Oh boy.  So after trying to discuss with them that no one has been uploading anything to the VPS from my team (after verification, of course, we went round and round for two more days.  What happened to their intrusion detection, what happened to their DDOS protection, their Firewall protection???  They suggested I install a firwall from Comodo.  What?  Really?  Well, that was that I canceled the account, and they refunded my card.  No apology, nothing.  It was a very matter of fact transaction.  So much for helping out a small business.

Second, I signed up for another VPS from a prominent Web Hosting provider.  They are very large.  I thought, wow, I can’t miss with these guys, although, I was immediately skeptical based on my first buying experience.  This was a much larger organization,  much larger customer base, and they have been around for years.  Hey 10’s of thousands of happy customers cannot be wrong, can they?  I am here to tell you yes they can.  Initially, I tried to set up the VPS through their order journey online.  No dice the link was broken.  This should have been my first clue.  I then called them, placed the order with an inside sales person, who promptly took my order, my credit card, provided me with my master Virtuozzo password, and hung up on me.  Was that clue number two?  Yes it was…  After receiving no sign-up email for 24 hours, I called them back and asked them what the deal was.  They sent me the signup email and apologized.  Fine.  The password to log into the account didn’t work.  We tried it for about 24 hours, thinking that the VPS might not be completely set up yet.  No dice.  I called support.  They wanted to charge me $15.00 for the call, and I hadn’t been able to access my account yet.  Needless to say after some stern conversation they didn’t charge me.  This went on for almost a week.  Yes, a week.  They had to open an internal ticket, they screwed something up, they couldn’t get it fixed, and they provided me with no ticket number, no emails to follow the trail, etc. until I called today to check on the VPS.  The rep said the ticket had been closed and everything was fine.  Great, albeit I was angry no one in the major hosting company even took the time to inform the customer who’s money they took already. So, we tried to log in again today because the account is fixed.  No dice.  My developer calls to try to sort it out because I am fed up.  He gets into an argument with them because they are not taking responsibility for files that are deleted on the VPS that we have never been able to log into.  Literally I had been on the phone with them 10 times.  And each time I had the same rep, you think we might have been buddies after that.

I am fed up.  I call to cancel my account.  I get billing on the phone, and they are happy to refund my money.  No questions asked, no one to save the account, and no one to try to fix the issue.  Not even an apology about having the issue.  So it goes.

What is it with hosting companies today?  Do they have enough business?  I was willing to pay 50+ dollars a month just for a test environment.  It is much higher ARPU than a shared hosting account.  All they had to do was make me happy and I could have been a grid/cloud computing customer or a dedicated customer looking for scale and growth.  I just do not understand.  To boot, they both refunded my money no questions asked.  Really?  They didn’t even try to save the account, or want to know why I was leaving.

My point to this is this:

• Why would you let a company leave you without knowing why?
• Why would you not try  to fix the issue so you had a new customer and prove to them you would go above and beyond?
• Why would you argue with a customer, period?
• Why would you hang up an a new customer before asking them if they had any questions?
• Why would you blame the customer for events that did not take place from the customer’s side?

What I see are very poor sales skills, very poor support skills, and a serious inability to understand why the customer is even buying, or what to do when an issue occurs.

If anyone knows of a VPS provider that is RELIABLE for a Windows VPS and SQL Server, please let me know.  I am now in week three of my search.  Maybe I should just bite the bullet and go dedicated…

Hosting companies, take note.  I work in this industry and I know a lot of people.  I am a dissatisfied customer, and they say dissatisfied customers tell an average of 11 people and those people tell another 11 people, and so on… Seriously, you need to get your act together.  How do you expect your customers to stay or go into business with you when your staff and teams cannot get the job done right?

The companies will remain anonymous, but should anyone want more detail, feel free to contact me directly here: jack [at] jackbrandt DOT com.