Since neither you nor Brad previously posted this information, I wonder where people got that idea... :upsidedow

ADG Webmaster

Are you calling Brad Mitchell a liar? Almost 30 hours after he posted this thread, he said he still hadn't heard from you. But now you're claiming you contacted him "a couple of hours after this thread was made".

And Brad also said both of you had ignored his attempts at communication, but you're saying NoWhErE has been dealing with him since day one.

Nice lies, superstar. Pay your bills.

We talked 01/11/2007 5:59pm till 6:15pm about this thread and the fact that he decided to involve me into this. If Brad made it appear like we ignored this thread, that's not my fault. nowhere basicly just arrived to spain when he posted this thread.

:party-smi

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?


__________________________________________________ __________

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.

1. 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?
   
   
2. Often we would send in tickets with simple requests and it would sometimes take 2-3 days just go get a response
   
   
3. 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?.
   
   
4. 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
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. Often our server was so slow, it would literally take hours just to be able to upload a movie gallery.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.


__________________________________________________ ____________




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.

Anybody who knows me personally will know that Im a teady bear. I am always there to help people out, always polite and I?m also generous with my money. I also pay my bills on time.

But if you jerk me around, you?ll see just how fast I am going to move on.

CLIFF NOTES :

• Very brief explanation for those who don?t like reading long posts :
  
• I got a small hosting plan from Mojohost for gallery submissions and eventually a TGP
  
• I teamed up with Doctor Dre to make my business grow
  
• Business started growing
  
• Fuck ups started happening, Mojo was either slow to fix them, didn?t fix them or was the cause of the fuck ups.
  
• My business was greatly hindered
  
• Brad called, apologized, everything was cool. We decide to move on together.
  
• Another broken promise occurs when he fails to deliver the bill after about 5 months (even though I asked for it on numerous occasions ? its hard to budget a project when you don?t know what you?re paying in hosting fees) and still no anti-hotlink script installed (even after waiting for 3 and a half months)
  
• I decide that?s enough, pack up and move on to another company
  
• I receive ridiculously big bill even though I was promised a fair price
  
• I decide I?ve wasted enough time dealing with this so I move on with my life
  
• This tread is created to call me out
  
• I?m unaware and unavailable to respond to thread
  
• I wrote this reply
  
• You just read its synopsis.

Thank you all, have a good day/evening. Gonna stay to respond to a few replies, then I?m gonna jet cause I?ve got some nice restaurants to check out in Barcelona. Don?t know when I?ll be back to respond to this thread.

Cheers

very prescient! :thumbsup

sigspotting!!!!!

You didn't want to pay your bill so you blacklisted him? I'll have to remember that one... :1orglaugh

How much does he say you owe, and how much have you paid?

ADG Webmaster

wow this just got more interesting

on another note, it looks like apparently there's still some money in gallery submissions :upsidedow

I need to try that one..just dont pay:1orglaugh

Why the hell would you sign up for a hosting account without reviewing some sort of contract or terms of service that tells you what you will be paying? Wasn't this stated somewhere?

I have some sites I am selling advertising on. Don't worry about the price beforehand, I'll make sure I give you a fair deal.

My :2 cents:, pay the bill and move on and never do business with him again if the service was horrible.

Just wanted to add a small little something :
He charged me 40$/mbit in overrages based on 95% of my highest peak in traffic. So if one day I got listed by The Hun, World Sex and Al4a as an example, well you could see how much that would cost me.

As other hosts are now offering me 25$ a mbit based on average use.


So if I take my month of October as an example, according to our scripts, we used more or less 4000 gigs of bandwidth.


Here's how the bill worked out


Mojo : 34 mbits = 95% of our highest peak at 40$/mbit = 1360$

Our current host just quoted us : 4000 gigs = about 14 mbits = 350$


Now do you see where I feel ripped off?

Thats because he didnt send the bill for 5 months even though I had asked him too

$40 per mbit is highway robbery.
sending him $0 and blacklisting isnt the way to deal with it.

i dont know how he bills but if you just got the bill on december 15th it isnt even 30 days. it isnt your fault he waited to bill you. (if what you say is accurate)

Ofcourse there is. I made 176 last week with my galleries :thumbsup

Ripped off or not, I'm sure it's in the terms you agreed to when you purchased hosting from Mojo.

You're unhappy with the price you're being charged, so you're not going to pay anything? That's not how life works.

Give me a quote for video work and then see how you feel when I don't pay a cent because I'm unhappy with your rates.

That's true, if he just sent the bill out less than a month ago then he had no real reason to make this thread. Sounds like he is bitter that they stopped using his services, but since there was never any type of agreement on what the hosting was going to cost they should just pay it and move on.

It's just going to get ugly for both parties if it is dragged on any further.

When I used Mojohosting a few years ago,they had an automatic billing system.
I always got my invoice within a few hours after the clock ticked midnight.

Overall I thought their service and response to the few issues I had were dealt with quickly and professionally.

My billing invoice comes in automatically every month. I signed onto a program with ample bandwidth to avoid any overages, and should any occur, since I have a longstanding relationship, we would just kick me up to another deal that avoids overages. That way I can easily budget my server costs.

NoWHeRe, have you tried making him a reasonable settlement offer based upon what you think is fair?

I assume you don't think it is fair that Brad should just have to eat your 4,000 Gb of bandwidth, do you?

ADG Webmaster

Not at all, like I said in my initial statement. If he had actually stayed true to what he said and given me a reasonable bill, I would have gladly payed.

But what I got felt more like a spit in the face.



I'm not some cheap whiny prick, anyone who has dealt with me knows I am very fair, but I expect to be treated the same way.

So a solution could be for you two to communicate and work out a fair settlement, or get an impartial third party to mediate a settlement.

ADG Webmaster

^--- i agree with stupid

No, you are talking about the other Dr Dre

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefme...8/T028114A.jpg

sounds like the auto generated bills stopped for the period in question due to some problems. those who had the auto billing in place were under what terms? balance in 30 days? if so this thread is uncalled for (yet) - at the same time it dont sound like the check is in the mail either =]

I did have a house at 19 but I'm in no way close to be able to retire ! lol

P.S. Like NoWhErE said, I don't have much to do with this. This is betwen Nowhere and Brad. I contacted brad about him getting me off the hook on this thread just after this thread but it seemed he wanted to use my name for drama leverage.

Neither party are gaining anything from this thread.

I hate to sound stupid but I am...How many gigs of BW=MBit?

Or am I totally incorrect?

If you use the whole mbit it's +- 320 gigs of bandwidth. But there are hours/days where you use more bandwidth then others and there are different ways to bill theses peaks.

Thanks, Dre...I swear GFY is better then college sometimes :thumbsup

did you actually talk to brad or did you just msg him and mabye he didnt get it? if you talked to him i think that was a pretty shitty thing to do, i mean you didnt buy the hosting from him or sign any contract so you cant be held responsible. i would consider that defamation of character.

one fiddy drama threads

Yes I have definitly talked to him. I've been running some of the stuff on the server so I can understand his concern. But I'm not the one that have been dealing with him on anything related to money.

Here's a quote from him in the convo we've had :
But I do think the bill is definitly inflated... and that not sending it for 5 months was what made this whole thing so damn big.

This is why you *MUST* get a formal quote that outlines the structure of the deal terms that you have in a business relationship when making the decisions to move forward with any service provider to your business.

Once you decide to hand your needs over to a provider, a contract is an absolute must to have. Spelling out the roles and responsibilites clearly at the onset of a business relationship in contract form save for countless headaches later and other assorted drama.

Reading how things are handled here sometimes boggles my mind. Just use contracts and stop the bullshit.

*cough*.....

so unhappy with 95th percentile pricing wtf signup for it... scammer

Hi Everyone,

I have been out all day and am now I'm getting ready to turn around and go out for the evening. Obviously, there is quite a bit to respond to today as much has been said. There isn't anything here I won't address in full, I am after all the one who started the thread.

Few quick things:

- Yes I spoke with Dr Dre over ICQ, I'm not at the office to re-read the logs but the jist of it was that he said the server wasn't his and he needed to wait for NoWhErE for a response. I reiterated that his not having involvement with the server was the farthest from my understanding. I know that he had at least one domain on it and over ICQ we talked quite a bit about the server. From the phone conversations I had with Jason, it was my understanding they were partnered on the submissions and revenue. But just like I told Dre on icq, if I was wrong, I would own up to it. If NoWhErE says it's all his then it's all his, just seems odd that they are both sharing a server together again at their next host but under Dre's name. He said he was waiting to talk to NoWhErE and I thought that by not discussing our brief ICQ conversation here on GFY that they might have a chance to sort things. Dre, I don't deal in "drama leverage" - I don't need it. NoWhErE has clarified this is his responsibility, I apologize that I misunderstood the relationship I think with all conversations considered it was a very honest mistake.

- LinkSentinal (hotlinking protection) never got installed because doing so requires the client to interface with our staff because it's custom. You have to work together, otherwise you run the risk of breaking something. When you're a host, that's a sin.

- Regarding the phone conversation we had I said that I wanted to get LinkSentinal installed so that we could assess how much of the usage, if any, was hotlinked. I did say that I would be happy to discount the bill but that required subsequent conversation and an installation of LinkSentinal and you went MIA. I absolutely did discuss the amounts that were generated in overage with you over the phone. It was after this conversation that somehow we were unable to get ahold of ever again.

- The invoice you are speaking of was "late" was because I continued to send emails, call both of your numbers that I had on file and leave voicemails, all asking you to call me. I didn't want to send a bill out that wasn't going to be a 'final' one but eventually I gave up and did just that. I sent the invoice at face value and explained why in the notes section, yet again asking you to contact me.

- I didn't know that you vacated our service until just a few days ago when I pulled a report to look at client's December month-end usage. I always send invoicing around the 15th of the month and I had no clue when I sent the December 15th invoice that you were off the server on the 8th. Didn't you notice when I sent the invoice on December 15th that it was an invoice for January service at your base $200/month plan? I had no clue you left in the middle of the night, if I did I wouldn't have billed for the next month of service on a month-to-month deal.

- Contrary to how my invoices might be perceived as being automated, they are entirely manual. It's a little bit of extra work but I find that by doing this myself it keeps me very much in touch with our clients and responsive to the changes in their business. It's this attention to our clients that had me initiating phone calls and engaging in discussions about how best to change your rates, plan, etc and during that conversation tell you that I would writeoff some of your bill.

With regard to your complaints about the service, support and server I'll have to interface with Corey and Greg on that. Moreover, I need more than a couple of minutes to respond sensibly. I have to get going but will post again in the morning as obviously this is all far from resolved. There is certainly some truth to some of what you have stated but everything seems quite blown out of proportiom like this is all essentially spin to confuse the issue of you not responding to us after I talked dollars on the phone with you.

To pretend like I wasn't attempting to call and email you on a regular basis is wrong. At the end of the day you didn't have the decency to engage in any conversation whatsoever and you simply bailed without discussion, explanation or, even by your own admission, a "final statement" of what the full balance is that you would be responsible for at any host - that I was willing to discount. You make it sound like my bill was a "fuck you" - dude, you vacated your server a week before I sent that bill.

More later, I suppose. Glad we finally got the conversation going.

Cheers,

Brad

It's the kind of thing that happens when you ignore someone's emails and messages for weeks and months. I've seen it happen a thousand times on the boards and it is almost exclusively because one party ignored the other for too long instead of just keeping the lines of communication open.

So it's not regretful at all, it could very easily have been avoided.

who can you get 25$ average use from?

I'd like to know this too.

I don't know of anyone offhand that charges as low as $25 per mbit on overage, $40 per mbit on overage is actually quite a good price. Now committed bandwidth is a different story.

what host will do $25 unless it's crappy ass shit?

Otherwise I am getting ripped off paying $45 a megabit.