www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Layeredtech’s thanks to old customers

I have been a customer of Layeredtech for years, at present I have only 2 machines there but at times I've had 7 or 8.  My one machine is pretty old, I think I got it circa 2002 or so and it's been doing well, same hardware etc.

Yesterday I received the following email from them:

Layered Tech is committed to being the leader of the Hosted
Infrastructure market by providing our customers with the best products
backed by the best service.  In an effort to improve our customer
experience, we have determined that a small number of existing servers
will need to be relocated from their current data center.  As you are
receiving this message, we have identified that you have one or more
servers in the in area of the Savvis facility that will need to be
moved.  It is our intention to minimize any interruption in service and
we will do our best to work within predetermined time frames that are
convenient to you.

Due to the form factor (chassis type) of
this server, we will need to migrate your data to a new server. We will
work with you so that the impact is as minimal as possible.  

Below
are the servers that are affected by this migration.  Please respond to
this message acknowledging the need to relocate your server(s).  At
that point, we will move this ticket to our Operations Department where
we will work with you on a migration schedule.

From reading this you might assume they will assist you with the migrate and this is a notice of an impending change, perhaps a month or two from now?

In reality the situation is that no, they will not help you migrate your data.  They want you to take out a contract for a new machine and then migrate your data yourself - something which even at best will take 5 to 10 hours on oldish machines like this.

They do not offer any compensation, and when pressed on that point only offer 1 month...the cherry on the cake is that all this has to be done for 18 days from now, in effect they are terminating your old machine forcing you to take a new one and doing it with less than the agreed 30 days notice.  Like it or not.

The sales person who has been coordinating this from their side is incredibly unhelpful and frankly useless, only after much pushing back by me do I even get a hint that anything other than do-it-yourself migration is an option, at this point still waiting for details.

This kind of disregard for customers is typical of large hosting centres, they have thousands of customers and their hard handed handling of their customers is acceptable because at worse they'll loose a fraction of a percentage of customers, so being unhelpful really does pay off for them since most people will probably just take this crap.

This is shockingly poor service, if you value your data, avoid Layeredtech.