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.
LT has lost the plot, prices keep hiking and the service keeps deteriorating. Only two machines left there thankfully and only a few months left on those.
They tried a similar lark with the last price hike.We will help you migrate. Yes with no assistance, at a hell of an expense for kit thats not much better, or not suitable. Really why would I need to replace my athlon XP 2400 with a New shiny dual XEON for doing DNS serving.
I think its unfortunate that a company tht in 2003 was really on the ball has grown so big and bloated that they seem to have lost the essence as to what made them so attractive int he first place.
After 3 years I have a similar experience in that my old server started crashing. None of the techs could offer a reason other than to migrate to a newer box with more memory. At first I was quoted 4 hours to migrate, now I am told it will take 7 or more days. They already billed me for the new box and I just paid for another month on the old box, so their tactic appears to be to double bill me on services while I wait. We can’t build anything worth a damn these days and now it looks like US companies can’t even provide fair & decent services anymore. They just want money for nothing.