Servage

I have tried working with Servage.net. It is a miserable failure... because THEY are a miserable failure. NO ONE should EVER use them.

The web pages were so slow and cron and php would crawl, so I resorted for a while just using them for IMAP and FTP.

And then I backed up my office computers to FTP, on an account ONLY ever used by me... it took a lot of time. And then some Servage sysadmin went through my files and randomly deleted some (not all) and then sent me a message that I was using too much disk space (I was paying for and credited with bonuses that gave me 750GB, and I used 400GB for backups) AND they were going to delete anything they thought was copyrighted material.

They are friggin amateurs.

There are also wild differences in their different IMAP/POP servers. For example, srv15 will NOT work with iPhones, but srv9 and srv11 will.

There is also no SSL for email, they use vulnerable and antiquated ports to send and receive. They might as well just forward copies of all your emails to the myriad of Eastern European hackers that sift through their servers every day.

They also suffer from routine and inexplicable service outages. If you can access your email via webmail when client access fails - which happens to be about 4 hours of every week - and contact management, all they say is that "there is not problem so you must be doing something wrong".

Their customer service is a combination of keeping their head in the sand and outright lying to their clients.

There is no phone number to call, and their customer service email system (actually a web interface, which does no good when their own site goes down along with yours, which is often) is just full of emoticons and NEVER provides a real answer. They either deny there is a problem or give a :( like that is going to help your business and communications.

Furthermore, there is a glaring security problem with their client login. To wit, if you:

Log in the the CP as Domain A, then go to a different web page or even close the browser and then log into the CP as Domain B, you are taken to the the CP for Domain A even after Domain B's login being accepted. ONLY if you log out and quit the browser will you be limited to the CP for Domain A. This happens on all my Macs, running Safari OR Firefox 2.

I wrote into Servage about this very problem months ago... and they told me that it was impossible. Yet I still do it. I jacked into a client's website and created an paralell FTP account for myself to access his private files just to demonstrate. And Servage still denied that I did it.

In short, Servage should be run out of this business. They don't deserve at all to even be in the industry.

I quit my account AND I am posting this review/tip in as many places as I possibly can.

As i am writing this review all/most Servage Linux customers have been hacked (31 august 2008) and their index.html, index.php files replaced by a hackers tag line. The support staff have been returning canned answers and not understanding the impact on their customers (I have checked over 200 currently).

Naturally i am upset with Servage but lets be honest they are cheap webhost. Here are my experiences with them.

Windows Hosting: was hacked in may, and customers had to refresh their ftp passwords. Was sorted after around 5 days of messing. Post this been fine if slow and occasional non response.

Linux hosting: been ok till now, but currently compromised. The hacker '3rqu' is known for his Linux hacks.

Reliability: The Linux farms have been reliable until now, the windows ones not.

mysql is VERY hit and miss. Often with timeouts but this can be cured by moving to a less crowded mysql server. As you are not limited on the number of servers you can create just keep trying till you get on a lightly used one.

tools: offers very easy to install tools, ideal for a small home website, but the lack of backups means you are taking a risk. hint use Servage for personal sites and not customers

Data storage: Not tested their claims on disk storage limits.

Bandwidth: Here they probably are not lying, but are misleading. For example their bandwidth usage is counted weirdly and often is inflated. They count an access to a mysql database on their systems as bandwidth for example. With their high limits though this shouldn't be a problem.

What is a problem is their hidden 'high load' warnings and bans. I have had a ban of 3 days without notice because they have a limit on 'hits'. the amount this triggers at varies 100k to 300k per day but if you do you will be baned. The result is many sites can't pull more than 75mb per day without being banned (small files and database access). If you are providing large files on your sites you shouldn't have this hidden hit problem and hence provide data in the gigs per day. 100k does sound generous limit but given this can translate as low as 1000 impressions on some dynamic websites generated with a publishing tool using a database.(lots of small images , page refreshes etc).

support: Varies, the canned answers are good and quick, but it does take multiple goes to get a non standard answer out of them. Encountered worse customer support. Just don't trust the answers.

speed of setup: Not instant, but in around 24 hours max for everything to work, scripts like Dupal can be installed in under 20 seconds and work via a very easy to use install system.

Payment: takes paypal, use it! we used a single use pre paid credit card number to buy one account, and guess what? had a fraud transaction attempt the day after. Could be a coincidence of course.

Overall: Don't put customer data on the system, assume it will be compromised. Back everything up. This is the kind of host that suits a guild website, forum etc where you are taking a risk but don't want to spend a long time setting it up and can afford it having trouble occasionally.

If you get on a server farm that works you're laughing.

However, if not, they will update and change you service without warning or notice, resulting in several hours of downtime.

They promise never to do it again, and blam a week later, they've "improved my service" resulting in 12 hours of no email.

Also their SQL servers are pathetically slow.

Yeah, they're cheap, but you get what you pay for.. Servage charge peanuts, and the certainly provide the monkeys!

Avoid them if you expect service.

I'm suprised so see so many bad reviews i have been with Servage now for almost 2 years. I have never noticed any downtime on my sites i have however had mysql problems but they have lasted just for minutes. The support is great too i always get a reply within minutes. The online thing i have to complain about is the 5010GB/month transfer wich is not true when one of my sites was at it's biggest i had about 10-15k hits every day on it and i got daily notices from Servage about using to much resources, so i had to movie that site but other then that im realy happy with them :)

well m still hosting my site on servage yea m getting database error frequently and support is nice i think and page loading is really slow i think m gonna to change my hosting now

servage offers a lot of _real_ disk space and bandwidth for a ridiculous price (currently $4.90/month with the CRA100 coupon). You can expect some minor downtimes (minutes), but nothing big. Support staff replies very fast to support tickets, but not always with perfect and pertinent answers. The control panel they use is custom and not very advanced, but it will let you do most things in an easy and safe way. The only thing I feel is really missing is the lack of access to raw log files (they only give some basic statics).

On this page i have read a few wrong/misleading facts about servage.. I will try to reply to some of them.

> they calculated bandwidth equal to requests*file_size, not by actually downloaded bytes. This increase it 10 times and more.

Not true: bandwidth is computed on the bytes actually downloaded.

> you will NOT get 510gb space and 5000tb bandwith. IT IS a LIE. Your account will be suspended when you reach around 20gb bandwith, WITHOUT ANY NOTICE!

I average 15GB bandwidth a day with 50GB peaks. no suspension.

> Once your account is suspended, removal WILL take about 4 days.

suspension for bandwidth limit reaching is reset every day

> you won't get a yourdomain.com for FTP or for email server, it will always be servage.net

just create a CNAME record from the DNS control panel

> SafeMode.

Safemode can be disabled from the control panel

And so on...

If you wish to read a more detailed review, please go to http://www.toolshape.com/servage

The worst possible hosting decision I could have made was using Servage.net. The support is incompetent and it usually takes 10 support tickets to get someone to actually read the first ticket before they respond to it. Even then their response shows that they don't care one iota about their customers.

They MySQL database server gets as many lost connections as it makes, which I never once had with my previous host running on a celeron 2.0 processor.

I wouldn't use them as my host even if they were free!

Servage have been losing e-mails for me for nearly a year. You never have a clue if you received the data or what happened to the data. I asked for my money back but they refused. I was trying to run my company using them but its just not possible. I am so disappointed in their lack of professionalism and their blatent disregard for their customers. (They claim 97% satisfaction but I know one other customer and he is also leaving Servage so I do not believe them)

The customer support send you one ticket a day when you ask for an explanation and that ticket bears no resemblance to your question. As a consequence you spend weeks trying to sort out the continual problems they create. All that so they can keep on charging you.

My advise is not to use Servage as your hosting company.

I hosts on Servage 2 month and that was enough for decision to take my server back. So, now it's just a spent on air money.

The speed of downloading is good but loading time for simple html page may vary from 0.2 to 30 seconds! SQL is never working correct! They change my cluster again and again, but nothing has been changed! And finally, they calculated bandwidth equal to requests*file_size, not by actually downloaded bytes. This increase it 10 times and more. You will be very surprised when one day you have suspended account because bandwidth limit is reached. NEVER USE SERVAGE !!!

Servage was hacked end of May! Hackers compromised all index files with hundreds of links to malicious and porno sites and guess what? When they realized the hard fact, Servage did not inform customers! Instead, they just sent a mail saying that all FTP passwords were reset...

Also, when you enter a support ticket, you get a moronic answer with all kind of smilies but no resolution. I had up to 3 different people answering the same ticket...

You decide.

do never buy the services of servage !

There is no support whatsoever,

you wan`t get any not-non-sense answer to any technical problem.

Okay. To sum up what I am about to say about Servage.net; DO NOT PURCHASE ANYTHING FROM SERVAGE.NET!!!

Here are my reasons

PROS

- 510gb space 5000tb bandwith woow!

nothing else!

CONS

- BANDWITH AND STORAGE SPACE LIE -

- you will NOT get 510gb space and 5000tb bandwith. IT IS a LIE. Your account will be suspended when you reach around 20gb bandwith, WITHOUT ANY NOTICE!

- Once your account is suspended, removal WILL take about 4 days.

- and once they remove the suspension on your account you WILL still have problems. LIKE on my site, I had a huge problem with the images. HTML images were not loading fully on page load. you needed to refresh the page multiple times to get the entire page view correctly.

so don't get fooled by their overselling policy 5000tb bandwith, IT IS NOT TRUE.

- DOMAIN NAME -

- you won't get a yourdomain.com for FTP or for email server, it will always be servage.net

- INCOMPETENT IDIOTS AT TICKET SUPPORT SYSTEM -

- First of all you won't get a straight answer to your question at the first time you ask a question. I am repeating again, you NEVER get a satisfying answer at first, you have to ask in a different way!!! sometimes it takes me around 10 question before get an answer to my actual question.

- DATABASE -

- At least once a DAY you will get mysql database connection error! at least once a day I am REPEATING. Now tell me how can you manage a e-commerce-like site on a server like this. imaging your client will have a mysql connection error when they click on the purchase button. CHAOS!!!

- my account -

I only purchased for 14 months, but they kept on giving me free months, because i complained a lot. so my account will be active 3 more months. but i don't care even if they give me 2 years for free, i am going elsewhere once it is finished!

I can keep on going here. but anyway hope you guys get the point.

NO NO!

DO YOURSELF A FAVOR DO NOT CHOOSE SERVAGE

NO NO!

For a whole year, I was quite satisfied with Servage.

Untill some day in February, after getting an automatic e-mail from servage telling me of some "human mistake" about a domain transfert, I got

locked out of the server.

The login panel doesn`t recognize my admin name anymore, although I`m still existing as a client in their database (I can change my password and get the new one send via e-mail...).

Thinking that I maybe forgot to pay the second year (in cash), I rushed to the post office to send the next one-year paiement to their office in Germany + a long letter explaining the problem and a request to transfer the letter to the technical team as quickly as possible.

The answer to the paiement came very quickly - an automatic answer as ever, with no reply option -, but with not a single word about the technical problem.

Since I can`t access the support ticket panel (I would have to be logged in, and I can`t), and do not get answers to postal mails,

I`m really, totally locked out from my server space.

My intention is to send a second and a third recommanded letters to Germany, and then, if nothing happens, to contact Servage through my lawyer.

Should one recommand servage or not ?

well, when it`s working, it`s working really fine, but once you get problems... I don`t know right now.

At the time being, it`s for me a nightmare.

I been with Servage for over a year now i host 6 sites with the one 2 online shops with sales value of £10.000 month and so far so good , you can expect the odd problem now and then but never something that last more than 10 to 20 minutes , the support lcks a bit but overall is a dammm good host for the fee thay chargue thmumbs up for them

I've tried Servage for a year. Here goes a list of Pros and Cons.

Pros:

- Fast servers. Great speed indeed.

- Good control panel

- Decent array of features

- Plenty of space and transfer

- Nice remote storage/virtual disk application.

Cons:

- Horrible tech support. Nearly moronic answers.

- No real backups.

- No SSH.

- SafeMode. Lack of security.

- Unreliable SQL server

- Very CPU-load sensible

For the same price, go get DreamHost instead.

I've been with Servage.net for 3 months, as of February 2008. My sites have been innaccessible 5 times during that period. Entire sites were "unable to be found on the server. SITES, not files.

Responses to support tickets say, "We're aware of the problem." Once I couldn't access any sites for over 8 hours.

Whenever I have asked them what caused the problem, I get no response.

Another negative is their 5-day money back guarantee. There is no pro-rating. Once you sign up with them, you're stuck - unless you get smart and decide to change hosts.

I am changing hosts.

Bottom line. Servage is a webmaster's nightmare.

Nearly two years with this host and So far so good...I've had between 5-10 sites hosted with them though I can put up unlimited tld's. Almost without issue. - I backup my own sites though as they are My Responsibility as webmaster. I can't blame them for the one loss. Priced Right. When the site grows you'll want to move to dedicated hosting anyway. Great starter hosting, inexpensive, multiple domain owners. It's kinda of an incubator host.

If you want to lose your credibility as website/company/individual.

If you want to lose your customers quickly.

If you like to pay for an overpriced service.

If you want an primitive admin control panel/features.

If you don't care about having your bandwith fakely boosted up by several times.

If you want errors over errors at displaying your site.

If you need SQL crashes every 30 minutes.

If you want a bunch of clueless clowns as support.

If you enjoy reading your customers complaints/blaims about your site....

THEN CHOOSE SERVAGE!

www.servage.net

God help me, servage is the worst nightmare for any webmaster.

Do not use Servage. Wish I had read these comments before I signed up with them. Had nothing but problems with my mail servers, no emails getting through to hotmail or yahoo whether sent standard or through php.

Been continuously onto their support since the first day I signed up 7 days ago and now I know why they kept me hanging on…… they only refund within 5 days of sign up. Now my refund has been refused and they’ve kept an upfront payment for 14 months hosting!!!

Servage has not only left me out of pocket but with a list of cheesed off customers aswell. DO NOT USE SERVAGE

I have been with Servage for just over a year now and will definitely not be renewing my contract.

The biggest problem I've had is the amount of downtime my sites have experienced. It seems that they will just stop responding several times a day, or otherwise run so slowly that they might as well be down.

Technical support is absolutely useless - I've contacted them dozens of times and literally every single time I've ended up having to sort the problem out myself because they haven't got a clue what they're talking about.

The only thing this company has going for it is that it's very cheap, but that means nothing if it can't deliver on its promises.

I wish I had read these posts earlier. I've just lost 30 Gigabytes of storage there. And all BY THEIR OWN doing, entirely their decision and their loser-personnel. Nothing of it was my fault or related to overuse or anything close to that (you can find the emails in WHT forum), just amateurs too lazy to make backups or use their heads moving your account around like they're playing with apples or something, without even telling you about it. Idiots, is all I can say, they are absolute and utter fools.

I have referred a zillion new customers their way, I have a terabyte storage space with them now. All for nothing, and I'm ashamed I ever did. They don't care one bit about their customers. They've now conveniently blocked submission for new tickets too, if you have 2 tickets that are open. They have pretty much ruined at least an entire month of hard work for me, friends and relatives. Not to mention the non-backupped data of 20 different websites I had hosted there. And let's not forget; The fact that I didn't have backups of everything has A LOT to do with downloads breaking, and my FTP account being inaccessible! I couldn't get in to MAKE that backup. And they were aware of that too. I have the emails to prove it.

So yeah: AVOID SERVAGE AT ALL COST! Even if you're tempted, trust me: Don't do it. Their customer support is a big bunch of liars, no name is real either. They make promises they never keep in almost every message.

And if you're still a Servage customer: LEAVE NOW. Get your data out of there while you still can. I genuinely HATE them now, and I rarely hate anyone. They give a bad reputation to Danish and Northern German citizen. The worst IT-anonymous bunch I've EVER encountered. For crying out loud, I wasn't even using much of what I was entitled to!

[Ed: Combined two reviews from same person]

Following up my earlier review on them, I must add that they suddenly found a way to get my formerly lost data back! It seems that they still have a sensitive spot if you keep on nagging about it (which I did). They told me time and again to re-upload my content, but I refused to do so, and told them they were being lazy and I didn't buy their story on losing all the data just like that. Apparently it worked! This afternoon I suddenly got an email:

"Good news.. we have found your data. The backup is a bit old, but still all the data is not lost.

Kind regards,

Scott, Support

Servage Hosting"

Strangely though, the data isn't old at all. It's the exact same data the way I left it 30 hours earlier. I do notice that server response and download speed have gone WAY up as well. Just had to tell you this, so the review is true and complete. They've more than made up for their mistake(s).

I'm not sure if I'll be staying with servage forever, but they made VERY sure I would, for now I'm a happy camper again..

The Support rating should have an extra option added to the list: "Strange". Their support is actually not bad, it's just very weird. They change from being cold robots to nice friendly tolerating humans. They alter from BOsFH to lovable admins. You just never know what to expect or when..

The pricing would be good if they could do all they claimed to be able to do. Unfortunately they don't hit the mark for me on any of their claims. The technical support is 'basic' to say the least. - They really don't seem to have the technical ability to manage the hardware - The hardware arrangement with regard to physical connections/ routing between webservers and MySQL servers seems to cause nothing but problems, the software configuration (PEAR, PHP5 MySQL) is extremely poor and in some cases incomplete, the bandswidth monitor appears to be way off beam, the security is very poor (my sites have been the subject of many hacks even the basic html with chmod set as tight as possible). I can't criticise this company enough cos I don't have the time to list the endless poor service and laughable technical (ahem) support I've received. Avoid at ALL costs.

I too are one of those people who lost everything. Their response to me losing everything was that i was sharing fifa games.... i was like ugh. there was only 5 html pages there. I asked for the files to be put back and i was told that i can not share games from fifa.. :\ - This all happened after 3 days in to a years hosting :(. Thanks for taking my money servage. Please be aware of their unreliability and ability to lie to take your money.

They have been the best host i have ever been with and i have been with quite a few when i have problems they are always there to help always friendly and useful and the services that they offer are really high quality.

I'm a servage customer for almost a year now and let me warn you people, STAY AWAY FROM SERVAGE! From the start we were losing 1 or two folders which wasnt a big deal but recently, we lost the whole main directory! And of course servage said "it wasn't our fault". I find it hard to believe that they are unable to trace where a whole folder (holding more than 20 GB) went. After a few days, my friend also lost her whole directory, nothing was left from her website and again servage said it wasnt their fault and they dont really try to check what's going on.

Reason why you need to AVOID servage:

1. Poor support. They dont know a jack what's going on and they are painfully slow. I asked why my site was deleted, and they said they don't know why.

2. They don't have a log of what's going on with their site. Which gives you the impression that they don't know what is going on.

3. They don't have backups.

4. Their bandwidth statistics is NOT accurate. They say Im consuming 50-100 GB per day. I moved to a different host and guess what? I'm only consuming 6 GB per day.

5. THEY DONT GIVE REFUNDS!

I can forgive poor support but being clueless on what's going on and dishonesty is something unforgivable.

This host's a total ripoff.

When we first put our site there, we had daily lag from about 5pm til about 6am. We contacted tech support of Servage about this, and they always gave one of these two answers:

1) Either they waited til the problem period was over and said: "I just tried your site out and it loads just fine"

2) They offered to move the site to a different cluster. We once went ahead with this, which resulted in a day downtime, but the problem remained.

After 3 months, they finally said: "Then it can be difficult to say what it wrong. This is shared hosting and it could be that another customer used a little more resources than allowed." Shouldn't they have had logs of it, and keep each and every account completely separated from the others? I know that that's the normal way of business for hosts, to make it so one customer doesn't affect another's account.

The problem wasn't solved after that, though. The lag was gone most of the time, but we still kept having near-daily SQL connection failures (as my inbox can prove, as each failure comes in there), and there was still a regular downtime of at least 4h every two weeks.

To top it all off, they frequently put up their backups of random files up. That, on itself, isn't bad, weren't it for those backups being ancient, forcing me to put my own backups over them once I noticed.

Aside from that, their support always comes up with the same answers and never, ever solved a problem. Instead, they've pretty much always been telling me I'm lying about the problems (just not so crudely), which I find highly insulting.

The hit tracker often resetted itself, and didn't give any clear view for a day until two days after it, and the amount of webspace used showed 1300Mb while my personal backups showed 300Mb.

I changed to a different host, but they had to change my DNS information so my new host could get it (Yes, you can't do that yourself, but it has to go through them). My ticket for that was open for nearly a full day. I even sent out emails to them to tell them about it, which only resulted in the reply they don't answer such problems in emails.

Eventually, they changed the DNS and told me an admin would contact me shortly about the refund I asked for the months we paid ahead and for the refund I asked for those 3 months we had an acceptable connection only half the time. Another day passed and they said:

"Thanks for the updates.

If you have any other queries then please feel free to get back to us. We will be happy to assist you.

Have a nice day and take care:)"

I told them I still had queries unanswered, and eventually, after someone said they'd be forwarding it to an admin, someone else (Steffan this time) came to tell me that they can't refund me, because it says so in their Terms of Service. Since when can they hide behind a Terms of Service of a service they haven't properly delivered?

In short, they don't deliver reliable hosting, their hit tracker and statistics are one big lie and their support staff can't read and could just as well be replaced with auto-reply bots.

Hi paid for 6 months of hosting up front (Bad mistake). All was OK for about 2 weeks then they suspended my account becuase of a DDOS which I think didn't happen. They refused to enter into any discussion about the DDOS and I'm now seeking legal advice re suing them. DO NOT TOUCH THEM EVER AS THEY ARE THEIVES! Best regards, Richard Georgiou.

With the low price and massive storage space and transfer, I thought Servage was a great deal.

Then they lost my website.

Everything...every file and folder in my account was gone. Fortunately I had a backup. Support told me they would investigate, but I heard nothing. The support ticket was later closed by a robot.

Next, all my traffic stats started showing 0 hits, 0 transfer. I had been getting several hundred hits a day.

When I contacted support, they suggested I switch ISP !!

Needless to say, I don't plan to renew my subscription.

After I signed up I noticed that they do not have raw server logs available. This, to any professional website owner is necessary to determine if the traffic is real. You also need raw server logs to determine the success of your ad campaigns. Interestingly, Servage does not tell you this and leaves it buried in a FAQ behind a login.

After I requested to terminate my service (and well under their trial period), the owner refused to refund my money. They tried to stall by not answering the email requests, sending back email saying the refund period passed (totally untrue) and all sorts of other things. He was very rude and threatened me by saying he would give my name over to a credit rating company that would leave a bad mark on my records. Fortunately, I called up my credit card company to terminate it (which was successful).

Servage also tried to make it look like they operate out of the United States by putting up a U.S. flag in their site on their home page. This is far from the truth as they are operated out of Germany.

Beware of this company.

I lstudy by myself writing HTML.

I founded "Servage" as a very good company.

They have agood price, I have good pings to my domain name.

Whenever I wrote to the support it felt like I'm chat to a friend that answered immidiatly and solved my problem or question.