Good riddance Expedient
Posted by Sam
When we purchased Ripple Effects we inherited the data center that they had been using. I don't want to mention them by name so let's just say it starts with a Ex and ends with an pedient or you can hit their site if you really care. They have the absolute worst customer service but it was mostly a non-issue until recently.
Most of the stuff that was hosted there was pretty quickly transferred to a local data center where the rest of our servers currently reside, but like always we had a couple of stragglers. The bad service started when we had a database backup request. It's a fully managed SQL Server and we didn't have access to make backups. After waiting for more than an hour I called and was told that the person handling this for us had just left for the day without handing it off to somebody else. So me, my fellow admin and the client are all waiting on a backup that was never going to come because somebody decided it wasn't important enough to take care of before leaving for the day. Keep in mind we sent the request at 4:00 their time so it wasn't like we requested it at quitting time. Thanks, because my time is clearly less valuable than yours!
The next example of their wonderful customer service comes when we shutdown a mail server that was no longer in use. Whoever setup their network seemed fond of handing critical tasks to others so Expedient was supposed to handle monitor critical services. Well about 2 HOURS after we shutdown the mail server we got a call from their NOC that the service was down. Awesome! Thanks for the responsiveness. If this was a critical service, which it was at some point, then two hours is unacceptable. I probably would have heard from a client that the server was down long before Expedient and their crew noticed it. Well done sirs, well done!
And finally comes the straw that broke the camel's back. If I wasn't already disappointed with them before this certainly would have pushed me over the edge. I contacted Expedient last week to let them know we'd be removing the equipment from the data center the following week. Our contract expires late January and I wanted to get out there and remove all the equipment so I didn't have to wait until the last minute. There are several other things that need to be done in Pittsburgh anyway so the trip and timing made sense. All the sites have been moved and the services have been turned off in preparation. I was told that I could not remove OUR equipment until the contract was paid in full. Huh!?! You're holding our equipment hostage because you're afraid we MIGHT not pay? We've barely been using your services for months and yet we are still paying your ridiculous bills every month. Not to mention we have this thing called a contract. Maybe you've heard of it?! It says we agree to pay you this amount until this point in time. It doesn't say anything about us paying that amount unless we move all of our stuff out. We are a multimillion dollar company and as far as I know we don't screw over the companies we do business with. According to John Rosenson this is their policy. Might I recommend you adopt a policy that doesn't treat your clients like criminals? I'd also like to see where in their contract it states that we can't remove equipment whenever we want, because I really doubt it's in there. Also, let me clue you in to something. The equipment that is in your rack is worth about 1/5th of the last couple of payments so when you are trying to get leverage on a client you might want to make sure it's worth it. Expedient's solution to all of this was to ask us to write a little note saying we promise to pay through our contract. Yeah, because that's way more enforceable than a CONTRACT! Clueless! If you do host your servers at a colo I highly recommend NOT hosting at Expedient unless you like to overpay and be under serviced.
Comments
2 days later SamC said
I like that you start off not wanting to name them, but writing this made you mad enough to name them 7 times. :) Also, you double-posted this (I assume accidentally).
2 days later Sam Freiberg said
Well I think deep down in my heart I wanted to call them out. :)