Well here I am,
Thank you all for being patient for my response. It took me awhile to get to gfy because I am currently in Spain working and when this thread came out I was out and about, nowhere near a computer. Doctor Dre didn't respond because he has no part in this, this is between Brad and I.
Well, its regretful that Brad decided to take this to the boards, but I guess this is where we are now so lets have at it. This is gonna be a long post?
Cliff notes will be provided at the end. God I wish I didn?t have a hangover right now?
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For those who don?t know, Doctor Dre and I work together on various projects, both off and online. This matter concerns a TGP submitting project we launched many months ago. When shopping around for hosts, I received many suggestions from friends on whom to use. I had met Brad at the Phx Forum and he seemed like a stand up guy (which, on a personnal level, he still is).
I spoke to Brad on the phone about his hosting plans and was reluctant to use his services because his prices were higher than the other 3 companies I had contacted. But he assured me that his prices were fair due to the fact that his company offers
?exceptional service?, meaning great customer support and a family feeling for every valued customer.
Great I assumed, if I have problems I won?t have to go through hell trying to find a technician to help me.
So we started out with a simple 5 mbit/month plan to debut my Gallery Submitting game. At first all was fine and dandy, I was slowly growing and wasn?t even near my 5mbits limit. Then in July Doctor Dre really started helping me out with the project and our business started sky rocketing.
We had ample traffic and thus decided to launch our own TGP.
This was around the
end of June/beggining of August and this is when the problems began.
We were investing a lot of time and money into growing our TGP + Gallery Submissions and we where having problems almost daily.
I don?t have a list of all of the problems anymore cause I no longer have access to my ticket admin, but here?s just a FEW problems we encountered in August that we could remember because of our ICQ logs.
- For over 15 days our server was unbearably slow (some days we couldn?t even submit galleries because our server couldn?t send the 5kb/s minimum to be listed) in our peak traffic times for growing our TGP (we had reached at one point about 180 000 uniques per day according to Sex Tracker...) and at the peak of ours submitting days, this was killing our business. It took daily phone and ICQ conversations and approximately 15 days for Mojo?s technicians to figure out that the reason why our servers were so slow was because they forgot to increase the number of incoming connections?
- Often we would send in tickets with simple requests and it would sometimes take 2-3 days just go get a response
- While they were transferring their data centers, there were MANY incidents (without letting us know ahead of time that they were gonna be transferring everything) such as not giving us our new FTP info without us having to send in a ticket and wait for a response, SQL databases loosing connections, SSH login info changed overnight without letting us know (so our programmers trying to fix problems in our scripts couldn?t do squat for days), etc. This may seem like small fries, but when you?re rapidly building up a huge TGP and spending a lot of money on it, its quite annoying to be halted by such things that should be automatically taken care of when you?re paying for ?exceptional customer service?.
- We we?re getting hotlinked VERY BADLY by Russian sites, so we asked on THE FIRST WEEK OF AUGUST for a anti-hotlink script cause I didn?t want to be paying the BW bills for our movie galleries being hotlinked by Russians. Well, on NOVEMBER 15th I get an email from Brad asking me to call his technician so that we could setup the script (I still have the email in my inbox). Three and a half months later they finally get back to me about installing the script (even though I had asked them numerous times and send numerous tickets about it? meanwhile I?m getting charged for the BW the Russians are sucking up from all my content.
Brad offered over the phone to give us free hosting until the anti hotlink script was installed. Nobody mentioned anything about overages and at that time we were already well over our limit. This was clearly a missunderstanding and we are not asking for a free meal ticket here, just putting the story straight. To give you an idea of how badly we were getting hotlinked : If I look at my server logs on my new server, some video files are getting more requests then files in galleries I had listed on thehun. This was a serious problem, and definitly making a big difference in our usage.)Note : The script never got installed
- Many times we would have problems with our FTP, thus keeping us from submitting our galleries. We would often have to open new tickets just to make sure old ones would get resolved.
- Often our server was so slow, it would literally take hours just to be able to upload a movie gallery.
- They auto disabled our email accounts when the server load was at around 40%, this caused many many fuckups while trying to submit galleries cause (as most know) you need a working email address to confirm submissions. So a lot of our confirmations were lost forever before we caught on to the problem.
- Last but not least, he sent us NO BILLS (even though I requested them) from the period of August to December 15th. So its not that I wasn?t paying bills, I wasn?t getting any.
Those are just some of the problems that we recall from this summer due to the icq logs of us talking with Mojo?s technicians and between Dre and I.
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Now that you all have a brief explanation of the story, here?s the big thing. Why have I been ignoring Brad?
Here?s the answer :
Brad knew that we weren?t 100% satisfied with the service we received, and to his credit he often tried to patch things up. Despite all the setbacks, we had managed to grow our little business into something that was worthwhile. It could have been MUCH bigger had we been able to set everything up on time as planned? we lost a lot of potential money and a lot of time dealing with stuff we shouldn?t have needed to deal with.
Somewhere in
November I get a call from Brad and we talk about upgrading my box and hosting plan. He says that he?s sorry for the inconvenience (especially about the 3 and a half month wait to get an anti-hotlink script installed on my server) and that he?s going to give me a
good price on the BW I?ve used, which up to that point I had no idea how much I had used because I hadn?t received any bills nor did I have server logs due to them being deactivated so that my server CPU wouldn?t be overburdened, supposedly causing the slowdowns at the beginning of August.
At this point I am already shopping around for a new host because I was looking for alternatives in case Mojo was going to give me trouble again. I was giving them one last chance.
We hang up concluding that Brad would send me a bill for the month of August, September and Octobre (since I was still trying to budget everything out and not knowing how much I owed to Mojo yet, I didn?t know if it was worth the trouble of sticking with Mojo, upgrading my box and my hosting plan) and I would think about my server requirements for the next boost in traffic I was planning for.
Well December rolls around and I still hadn?t gotten a bill from Mojo, so that?s when I said fuck it and moved my servers away to another host who?s always been good to us.
I guess Brad had noticed that we had moved our servers cause on December 15th I FINALLY get the bill.
And boy did I laugh? He had said that he would give me a
?good price? (at near cost if I remember correctly our phone conversation), but, when I looked at the bill, I saw that he was charging us 40$ per mbit in overages!
That's a good price? close to cost? Other people are offering me about 25$ a mbit!
That was the last straw?
I don?t know about you folks, but I don?t like being taken for a fool.
If threw all of this, he had been fair with his price, I would have paid it off in a heartbeat and moved on. I know the worth of money and if I owe someone for a service properly rendered, I pay him, no question about it. But honestly, this time, I somewhat felt scammed.
Brad and I always had nice conversations. When Doctor Dre would call me up fuming mad because he couldn?t work due to hosting issues, I would give Brad and his techs a call and try to work things out amicably. In return, they were also very amicable with me.
I have nothing bad to say about Brad?s personality, he is a very nice person and from what I gather a very loving father.
However, when it came to our hosting agreement, he underdelivered and overcharged.
Therefore I did the only thing I could do : I blacklisted him and moved on. No need for drama, I don?t have time for that shit.