Jo Rhett wrote: > On May 27, 2009, at 10:35 AM, David Hubbard wrote: >> Just wondering if anyone can tell me their >> opinion on Savvis bandwidth/company preferably >> from a web host perspective. Considering a >> connection. > > > I wouldn't touch them with a 10g pole. They were the first and only > provider we have dropped for inability to provide reasonable service. > > 1. They have problems in the bay area (and I've heard other places but I > can't confirm) coming up with ports to connect to people on. We had > long since outgrown 100mb (was 1g or higher with everyone else) but they > couldn't come up with a 1g port to sell us. Then when one became free, > they demanded a 700mb commit to get it. After I argued that we never > run ports at that level of congestion they backed down to a 500mb commit > but that was as low as they'd go. They had no budget to deploy more > ports in any of the bay area peering facilities. > > 2. Their national NOC staff was gut-stripped down to 3 people. 24 hours > a day I'd find the same person answering issues we reported. Often > outages weren't resolved until they could wake the engineer up. (this > isn't surprising in a small company, it's very surprising in a network > the size of Savvis) > > 3. We had repeated issues that needed escalation to our salesperson for > credit. We never got calls back on any of these, even when we had > escalated through phone, email and paper letters to him. > > 4. One day they changed the implementation of their community strings to > start putting other providers and international customers in their > US-Customer-Only community strings. We escalated this issue through > management, and the final conclusion was that their community strings > advertised to us had to be inconsistent to meet their billing needs. > (ie get peers to send them traffic they shouldn't have gotten) We were > forced to drop using their community strings and instead build a large > complex route-map to determine which traffic should be routed to them. > That's nonsense, and was the final straw. > > In one of the marathon phone calls with the NOC staff about this, a NOC > manager frankly told me that Savvis had been stripped and reamed, and > they were just trying to stay alive long enough to sell the low-cost > carcass to another provider. > > Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up. >
Out of curiosity, how recent was all this? It doesn't really match my experience, however mine isn't very recent. I'm going to be disconnecting my last SAVVIS circuit in a few months so I haven't really tried to do anything new with them. ~Seth