Bye Bye Cologroup
 

Post Mortem Report:

I should've changed way before. Back in May 2002, when I searched on Go Fuck Yourself for "Cologroup" there were only a couple of messages and they were all positive.

So I decided to move. The price was good.

Two weeks with them and it was perfect (That's what I thought). Then the problems began.

- Their virtual servers down almost every day (from minutes to hours of downtime)
- Non existant tech support (I once opened a ticket and received the response 21 days later.. 21 DAYS! Thank god it was not a urgent one)
- Disk Full
- Huge problems with the e-mail servers (Like not being able to send messages because the destination host is not on their list LOL!)

And the list goes on..

If you search "Cologroup" you will find all my messages and you will see how a whining bitch I was with them.

Everytime I would write a message about the problems, Jason would respond promptly about the issue here. I have nothing against this guy. Everyone says that he's such a great guy. I am sure he is, but Jason being a great guy won't pay my bills.

I am sure he's also doing his best. But if they want to keep their customers, They're gonna have to do something about these horrible issues. But they just lost one.

The dedicated customers seem to be very happy with Cologroup and I am very happy for them. But the virtual servers with Cologroup has been so far for me the most horrible hosting experience.

Some will say that you get what you pay for . I don't agree. It's not a general rule. But in this case, I think it would be more appropriate to say "Don't offer the service if you can't support it".

I was willing to give them chances.. But 5 months is enough. I just couldn't take it anymore.

Now the new DNS servers from my new host (thanks for the suggestions guys!) have propagated and I feel relieved. I can breathe.

The new host is simply awesome, You can create and manage your e-mail accounts, domain name. everything is automatic with the account manager.

So far, so good. I'm crossing my fingers.

Use Sin Host or just dont bother running websites...simple as that... best support going...Brad is awesome

Sin Host

If you want awesome Canadian hosting(keep the dollar home) checkout HBhosting.com ask for Doug, tell him I sent ya.

Also checkout likewhoa.com , as for Nick or Ray F., again tell em I sent ya.

They both kick ass, both have awesome service and I do about 800gigs per month on both with NO downtime.


Later

Thats funny, i also closed my ColoGroup account today. After i forgot my password for ftp i made a support ticket asking for it and that was over a month ago still no reply :(. With the other problems i have had enough so opened a suppport ticket asking them to close the account, if i dont get a reply im gonna be REAL pissed.

The first hosting company to directly post to this thread will be boycotted.

I was thinking about trying these guys. Thanks for the warning.

check out pipecrewhost

5% uptime
16 dollars a gig

Damn.. i was about to pull out a www.mrthumbshostingpalace.com link..

Ouch.

I have never had to wait longer than 24 hours for a support ticket, and I've opened tons.

My support tickets have always been answered fairly quickly.

Cologroup is the best host I've ever had.

I don't like the whole ticket system. If I need to talk to a tech, I talk on ICQ.

Try locogroup !

Its understandable to see a few people leave from the virtual hosting setup. When we launched it, we did not expect it to grow as quickly as it did, which caused some problems. We have been working on a new system for quite some time now and it is scheduled to go live on Tuesday. The new system has twice as many servers, full control panel, new live support system, and it is going to be on Internap instead of Cogent.

So, basically, No Carrier is right, the virtual hosting has not been the best since it got to its capacity. I do however recognize that, and I am making the appropriate changes to improve our system to be one of the best available. I know the changes will solve the problems and I think we will not see anymore complaints after next week.

Let me guess no carrier.. You are with Prohosters now...?

Amen.

No, I left Prohosters for Cologroup in May.

I just joined Gighost.

So far, the process has been 100% satisfaction

I have never seen a virtual host that fast so far. Uploading the files were lightning fast.. I still can't believe it. And I have no "affiliation" with them. It's only a personnal opinion.

Below you will find samples of all your replies about the problems since may 2002, I hope this time you are right about your existing and future customers.

If you look at the post you made on may 5th, wich was supposed to be great news according to the title, we were supposed to be transfered to semi-dedicated servers with only 6 people max, wich never happened. And on may 21st you promised automatic processing with an account manager?! We never received it.

Are we supposed to believe you this time? Make sure it does for your existing customers. Thanks.


5/04/02

"Virtual Hosting Server had problems for the past 2 days, I posted that on another thread as well. We've been working on it and doing upgrades and part swaps.

It is alright you posted this on GFY, because I was considering posting it myself in its own thread. Just wanted to let everyone know what was going on.

So basically, you should not see any more problems from the server. Also, to avoid this we are making all the virtual hosting clustered as of this weekend. Meant to do it last weekend, but it just did not happen.

If you see any hiccups tonight, let me know because the issues where all worked out from what I see now."


5/05/02

"For all of our customers:

We are turning off sign up's next week on Wednseday. We got a lot of cutomers, but we want to make sure you are properly taken care of.

Our virtual has had problems, so we are addressing the problems by making our virtual hosting into semi-dedicated. The virtual servers will be the same, but there will be a max of 6 people on each server. That is $300 a month guaranteed income for us, which is as what we are looking for as a minimum on each server.
All of our current customers will increase speed and reliability increases over the next week. Your $50/Month accounts will now be semi-dedicated servers.

We manufacture our own servers and generally have 30+ on hand, but because of the demand in the past 30 days, we have sold every one of them (special note: if you ordered a server with us, your order is being fullfilled this weekend.).

Just to sum it up, our goal is to deliver the best value possible, and that is what we will do. I am planning on shutting off signups next wednesday, not because we can not handle it, but because we want to ensure that our customer get the proper level of service that we offer.

This is not a hold back, but a mile stone for us. We plan to increase our capacity, our staff, and quality of service over the next couple weeks.

If you have any questions or requests for what you need, just get me on ICQ, email or my cell phone. I am always available for a good conversation and I would am very interested in what you are looking for. We are be working to deliver what your are asking for and attempting to exceed those needs.

It is 6:50 Am and I have to catch a little sleep before I bust my ass for you tomorrow.

Sincerely,
Jason Trindade
Cologroup"


5/07/02

"OK, after the craziest week of my life, it seems we got things figured out and fixed. The virtual accounts are smoking fast and we got the reliability back to speed.

Suprisingly enough, for the most part everyone understood we had some problems to work through and everyone waited for us to fix them. So now they are fixed and things will return to normal.

Just thought I would let all of you know. Here are a few sites on the server that you can check out for speed:

http://www.opticalamplitude.com
http://www.xxxpicshere.com
http://www.zenra-movie-annex.com/

Jason"

5/07/02

"Some of Amps other sites are still with us, like pornxxxxxxx.com.

The virtual hosting did have troubles last week, but now it is up, rock solid, and the customers who are on it are happy. The problem we encountered was traced to the promise raid drivers on the motherboard that could not handle certain operation being done. We upgraded memory, changed drives, changed entire servers, re-installed software, if it could be done, it was done, and it all came back to the driver for the promise raid. We found this out by re-creating certain loads on a server in a test environment until we came up with the same problem.

We lost a couple virtual customers, but that is life. I plan to get things on track and come back better than ever."


5/17/02

"I understand where you are coming from No Carrier. The virtual hosting has not been at the level it should be, but we are working on a solution. The imediate solution as I mentioned before has been to add additional servers for balancing and we've done that. It is running smoothly today.

We'll keep adding servers for virtual hosting as we do appreciate your business and want you to be satisfied with the service."

5/21/02

"I have noticed all the chat about virtual hosting and I am going to throw in some actual info on our company, since so many people have an opinion.

Overall, Virtual Hosting is not that difficult, it basically requires the right infrastructure and system to manage virtual hosting properly. We never in our minds expected the kind of success we have seen with our virtual hosting and we did not have the right infrastructure to handle the load.

If you 've been on our virtual host service, I can tell you, as a result of these problems, we have done nothing but take in all the input from what is going on and used that input to develop a system for virtual hosting that meets all your needs and ours.

From our recent experiences, the support breakdown has been as follows:

30% Setups
30% With maintenece (adding adding domains, emails, CGI, MYSQL, etc.)
30% Dealing with problems, creating solutions
10% Billing and Contracts

What we learned from this is, we did not have a system in place to handle the demand for our services both in relation to equipment and overal management. We have spent a lot of time delaing with issues that could have been automated or avoided.

We are lauching our new solution on the 1st and it will solve all of the problems for both you and us. It is already built, just being tested and improved for launch. It will effectively automate the virtual hosting business, so we can concentrate on keeping the servers running, which is what we do best.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


Here is some of what we have done with the virtual hosting..

#1 Automated the Sign Up Process
- Instant Account Activation from our site, no waiting.
#2 Automated Feature Setup
- MySQL, PHP, CGI, SSI, already enabled and setup by default.
#3 Advanced DNS Integration
- Integrated with Network Solutions
- You can control domain name registration, transfers,
renewals, and the overall management of your DNS.
#4 Automated Domain and Email Management
- Instantly add domains to your account
- Instantly configure your email
#5 Improved Web Stats Tracking Software
- Added SUpport for tracking Geographic Regions.
- Giveing more data on your visitors.
#6 Automated Accounting
- View your usage, monthly bill, etc online.
- Pay your bills online.
#7 Upgraded to a Multi-Server clusted solution
- Fail Over when a server Goes Down
- Load Balancing for faster service

---------------------------------------------------------------------

So, if you have been a customer of ours, you should be able to see that this should solve your problems. If you are one of the guys dissing us, just wait and see. The system will rock.

Thanks for you time,
Jason"

7/21/02

Cologroup SD Router is fixed :)

Just thought I would let you all know.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by .:Frog:.


After a 12 hour downtime. Great job on fixing problems ASAP. Keep up the good work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I really can't tell if that's sarcasm or not.

Cheers,
Matt


8/9/02

"Well, just found out what is wrong and it is being fixed. Looks like someone just lost their job when I get back, which should eliminate any fuutre problems. A specific tech, brought down a switch, which is why multiple servers went offline. And, if anyone knows how screwed up the Hotel Internet access is here, you would understand why I could not do not much in the way of diagnosing the problem from here. I am basically on a big TV screen where I can hardly read what I am typing. So, if it makes you feel any better, someone is loosing their job over this one. I wont keep a tech around that takes 20 servers offline for almost an hour and then says nothing is wrong when I call. Thanks for pointing this out Tipsy. Email me your account name and I'll take care of you....same with anyone else who went down. Needless to say, if there is a time to not go down, it would be this weekend. If all is fixed, see some of you guys on the boat."

:1orglaugh :helpme :1orglaugh

why dont you bitch on emails instead..

SinHost
:thumbsup

I am not bitching, I am showing the facts from my personnal experiences. I am not building a religion against Cologroup. I respect everyone's opinion, but it's my right to post mine. Bitching for no reason is useless. I didn't like sending tons of ICQ messages about the problems to Jason or swampfox , I didn't like creating tons of tickets also.. Do you think I did that on purpose? Yeah right, I am going to pay 50$ a month just to be able to bitch about something..

All that time wasted on asking what the hell was going on about the virtual servers was enough to make me mad about the service.

Come on.. I have more important things to do like gain more traffic and make more money. I created that thread to share my experience with Cologroup. You do what you want with it. I hope it's going to help someone if they are looking for a new host. If they choose Cologroup, at least they will be able to choose from the negative and positive points.

If I was sent an email complaint, I would reply to the email. When people post things on the message boards, I reply to the message boards.

Anyways, we just upgraded the hardware about 2 hours ago. You'll see the difference.

We use http://jesushost.com and have had no downtime and you just pray and your support tickets are handled.

Chris

If anyone is interest .

www.cyprusmedia.net
$0.50 per Gb
control panel
and all the extras

cologroup = shit
swift will = worse than cologoup
like whoa = worse than swift will
is prime = worst



canddi hosting = best

Hopefully it will be better next week...

Why not call their 24/7 support number (as you had mused before you edited your message)?

Jesus Christ, FreeXXX. Lose the goddamn FPA signature.

You said that same line about upgrading your virtual servers Months ago??...:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

ISPrime is the Ferrari of Adult Hosting, period.:thumbsup

http://www.fiero.net/86gt/86gt1.jpg

No doubt!

Hey No Carrier....

don't let people get you down for making informative posts....if you've got gripes and you can BACK UP YOUR SHIT, then you are doing a service to everybody on the board.

I'll never forget the first "big name" virtual host I had, came recommended by several on GFY....they:

1) Didn't process my account startup on their website, I had to email them to set me up

2) set up my domain incorrectly, didnt admit to the problem, lost 2 days on my tgp gallery traffic, who knows how many banned me


3) were extremely rude with smart ass replies from tech support, dude was REALLY nasty

4) Could never get my stats working properly so I couldn't analyze my overages, stats broke every 2 days, I had to tell them to fix it, finally they just stopped fixing it entirely

5) Last straw, my site is down for 6 hours, I finally get someone on the telephone, my homepage is now coming up in Chinese...I'm yelling why is my site down....they are telling me, oh your site was never down, give me a break.

Needless to say, I ended the relationship that day...after talking to the President of the company who tried to blame it on me and never would admit that my site was ever down, received a full refund for my horrible experience.

Lessons learned.

Nz

:321GFY

Put down the crack pipe and face reality :1orglaugh

isprime is l33t =)

NoCarrier 100% right cologroup is not watching their virtual hosting at all - so i am moving from them also to Isprime :)

quit whining... this is old news... problem rectified... go get your wallet raped somewhere else for more stability for christ sake...

You're good in making jokes, especially the last 3

Andre

Nobody is interested. Excuse me while I start my boycott now.

Fucking dumbass vulture. :321GFY

XFR or Sinhost ... both awesome.

My experience there has been less than stellar and it has been only about two weeks on the virtual plan.


It took about one week to get set up. After FTP was setup by Jason, it took another 3-4 days to get the email up and working.


After about 5 days of things running pretty well, this weekend has been up and down with lots of short outages, both web and email.

I may have an option to share some bandwidth with someone on their dedicated boxes. There don't seem to be too many negative comments about those.

I hope Jason's comments about the improvements to the virtual hosting materialize.

ronbotx


:321GFY

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh Obviously their problems are NOT rectified:Graucho

I clcik on the link to check out pricing...site seems to be down or just really, really slow...

I agree all my problems have been answered within 24hours.
I've been up for 4 months and no problems.
Thanks Cologroup!:thumbsup

if you tallied up all the negative votes in this thread you will never find a host that satisfies everyone.

it's just like life, you can't please anyone. hosting companies: keep trying to do your best. hosting customers: if they aren't giving you proper service, MOVE. that's as simple as it gets.

Cologroup,

Oddly enough I find myself posting to this thread. My name is Ted Hickman, as most know I am the President of another hosting company, I post as a fellow hoster and not as a competitor.

This post actually touched me, first because of the
harshness that consumers show towards their hosts. We too had virtual server problems before clusters and after. Our virtual cluster was down for 3 days BECAUSE we did a cluster, and later found to be bad drive connectors in our RAID units. Our customers stayed, and were credited appropiately and that is the most they know. What they don't know is that I and two of my guys slept on the floor of the datacenter for 3 days while this was going on. I sacrafice for my customers as I am quite sure you do by your posts. However that is the business we are in, we made the choices we need to learn to deal with the lack of appreciation. After the last downtime, I learned I would rather raise my prices and charge and maintain for a premium service then charge absolutely ridiculous prices with which I could never maintain my service. I would much rather be a National Net type of operation than a dollarpergig.com type of hosting.
And I am striving towards that goal everyday.

About clustering, let me first say it's very difficult to do and expect lots of problems. It took me nearly a year and half to iron out clustering for our virtual clients. F5 had a problem with someone who had 40 thousand ips used as vips on their BIGIP's, the user management fell out of sync. The ability to provide logs and a good stats program plagued us for a LONG time, NFS And redundancy also became a huge issue with replication costing 2k per server with 15 server cluster and 4k for the raids themselves. I and my team came up with solutions, as fast as possible, and now have a very good operation in place. Trust me I have been through the clustering nightmares and there are a lot. Just don't kill yourself if you can't get it right the first time, you will get it right, and customers will come and go as they have with our company.

On the subject of redundancy and failproof systems, they simply don't exist, redundancy CAUSES a lot of issues. Infact, 99% of the issues with the CLUSTER has been with the redundancy and would not have occurred if it were not redundant. Redundancy is a very sensitive fragile thing, any provider that uses two of anything exactly the same is in for trouble. DOS, natural bugs etc will hit the same devices the same ways every time.

I hope that in some way I have helped by this post to let you know that other hosting companies go through this sort of thing. WE all do, whether we admit it or not. OUR industry as a whole goes through these problems. Qwest isn't even selling virtuals anymore because of the headaches. Likewhoa getting shut off by VERIO is another classic example of problems hosts have and how they deal with them. This I think in the end is what customers base our business on, service and how we deal with the inevitable problems that will happen. And yes there are some customers that will never be reasonable no matter what you give them or how you serve them.

I know how frustrating it can be to build something up just to have someone or something knock it down, but it does and will continue to happen in the hosting industry.

Lastly, I think it's a cut-throat business, everyone jumping down everyone else's throats, vultures picking at your body before you are even dead, however what goes around comes around and I am quite sure their problems are lurking around the corners, and they will soon learn what pain it is that you feel. The thing that bothers me the worst, is the dozen's of tutorials or posts out there by people that have never run a hosting company trying to illustrate and instruct on how to run one. They think it's as simple as bandwidth and servers, I can tell you from experience it's not. I applaud you for being honest and direct in your posts and making progress in fixing the issues that plague you where most are content to laugh or make fun of others, before looking at their own.

I have said my piece, please no flames.

Ted

What a swell guy.

:winkwink:

Never had a problem with Cologroup!

Any questions or additions we've had have always been taken care of in 24hrs or less.