SoftLayer reviews

Softlayer is worst!

My customer has been working with Softlayer for about 4-5- years. My experiance is only 2 years and it was enough to decide that it is worst hosting provider I eve worked with.

First of all they are very expencive:
We paid for old out-dated servers like this (1.7GHz \1Gb\80Gb hdd) for about 300$!

Ok, I think if the price a big - quality should be also good.
Support can ask to question for a hours.
In case of abuse they post an ticket and in a few hours switch server OFF! Most time When I was abused - I get known about it after I get "server down notifications" from monitor system at morning.

They do not care where are you from and do not give time to fix problems.

All this issues forced us to move our web-servers to another hosting provider.

But we still kept some time one server with some software because we need to keep fixed IP adress.

All aur payments was set up to charge automatically from Credit Card.

One day we realized that server is down. I tried to log in into softlayer panel - it says "This account is not avaliable".

After Live chat with support appeared that they REMOVED our account with FORMATTING our server because of only 6 days payment delay. Can you imagine this? We where their customers over 4 years and they removing server with loosing all data with any chance to restore it. Only 6 days they required to say "Bye bye!". And they think that it is normal. They did not regret about it, did not appologize.

When I asked them to restore at least IP adress. We was going to open NEW server with new price, but wanted to get our old IP adress - they said that it is impossible because they have automated system IP assignement (random).

So, I would extremely reccomend to do not deal with Softlayer!

Biggest Con: They do not wory about your uptime at all. Switching servers without any reasin.

Horrible experience

incredibly frustrating system. Constantly down, either whole site or just pages.
Customer service/ support is so rude and condescending if you do not speak jargon.

hours on the phone with zombie like techs to only result in a waste of time.

Biggest Con: Rude tech support

I am disatisfied with Softlayer and CEO Lance Crosby

Folks,

I hope if you are considering Softlayer Technologies, you consider my post, it's coming from an actual customer. Softlayer Technologies had acquired The Planet, where I hosted my dedicated server technologies since 2004. The Planet was a great company, with fantastic Support and in terms of payments always worked with their clients through any hard times.

Softlayer on the other hand is a complete about face from The Planet in terms of their policies. If you choose to do business with them, all I can say is buyer beware. If you are one second late, and I mean i second they have no flexibility and refuse to work with their customers, especially in these tough times. As I wrote directly to Lance Crosby, CEO of Softlayer as a customer for over 8 years and complained;

" I am very dissatisfied with the new policy that if it doesn’t happen by exactly a certain time on the due date, a late charge is immediately assessed and services are terminated within 5 days. In my opinion, this is a draconian policy and it doesn’t bring good will with your customers, in fact I am betting that since SoftLayer has instituted this policy, your employees spend valuable time haggling with customers over petty fees. For me it’s about principle. Ask the CEO of Netflix or Bank of America whether the fee increases they thought were going to be well received by their customers. I fee the same way about your late charge fee with no flexibility whatsoever"

The statements I received from Executive management "it is not a feasible request" "all customers are treated fairly" really shows the arrogance of Lance Crosby and his management team, towards their long time customers. Keep in mind that Lance Crosby was the ex COO of The Planet.

After 8 years of business from my firm, I think it is time to move on to find a company who appreciates their customer relationships.

Biggest Pro: Web Portal And API's
Biggest Con: Terrible Customer Service and Support Policy and General Arrogance From Executives

Softlayer

I don't understand where all these negative issues are coming from. You are paying for a dedicated server, NOT a manged server. A dedicated server generally means you fix all your problems yourself and that you have a basic understanding of administration.

I only have one server with softlayer, and it was an express server that was on a one-week discount. After 2 months of owning it, I noticed that all the new servers got 3 TB of public bandwidth per month while I only got 1 TB. I sent in a ticket asking how much it would cost to get the 3 TB and they stated $40 per month to get it. I said that the special was pointless if all it was was removing 2 TB per month of public bandwidth from my server. They agreed and upgraded my public bandwidth to 5 TB per month with no question, and no charge! Furthermore, even when I was placing the order for the server and was not a previous customer, they gave me an upgraded CPU (I got a 3.0 GHz x 2 rather then the usual 2.4 GHz x 2) that would've cost an extra $20 per month.

The uptime is phenomenal and they warn you whenever there might be potential downtimes when they're upgrading their network. Even during those, the connectivity doesn't stop as they just route the data through other parts of their network. I genuinely think these other clients have NO idea how to administer a server.

Now I've been a client for 7 months and could not be any happier as I am getting a great deal, great uptime, and great support.

Leaving Softlayer

After months of frustration with Softlayer I finally broke down and asked for a very small discount when compared to the monthly $1,700 fee I have paid religiously. They gave me just $281 when I asked for $989 which should have been thousands.

I am currently looking for another provider and hope to be out of Saftlayer by the end of the month so they don't hold me hostage any more.

They act like they want to help, but that is just a ploy to get you to pay now in hopes for a discount latter. Don't fall for their line of B.S. - protect yourself now by not becoming their customer and whipping boy.

Biggest Pro: My sites are up some of the time
Biggest Con: Lost thousands of dollars in business.

bad support and service

Never user softlayer i work with them for 2 years and i lost too much money they never admit they have internet issues . many times servers connection lost due to there network problems

you can prove that by setting up real time ping monitoring for there servers and you will see how many times your server is down and not accessible .

Take care

Beware of SOFTLAYER

Beware of Softlayer stay away from them!!!!!

Hi all

I was delayed payement for couple of days after signing up with them for more than 7 months. they charge me $20 for late fee which I hesitated to pay and the recent month also my payement gone delayed for two days so they charge me another $20 which I wasnt payed that late fee too. so they stopped my services for this $40 late fee. I am having a dedicated server with them and paying $134 a month still they stopped my service for that late fee.

I contacted sales and accounting department immeadietly for to make a quick resolution and they said you need to pay otherwise we cant restore your service.
then I payed the amount soon after they said your server is up within couple of minutes. I trustem them and went for bed as it was early 2am(GMT). but when I checked early morning my service wasnt restored. I contacted again they asked me the same question start from scratch asking wether you paid full amount etc..

Then said server is up. but I checked it was still down. then again I told them so said they will check again and then wow it was came online.

And I asked why this was delayed they said IF you wont pay lin time this may happen. in my case late fee...and restoring service TDS and they dont have a software to check my account details like whether I paid in full or how I paid, when I paid....they ask all these details to you and then they will do..and also they are very polite to keep you hold for long

and now they owns The Planet.com too...poor customers!!!!!

Disgusting Support by Softlayer

We Hiox India, a leading web hosting provider in India maintaining about 1500 domains. As the domain volume went high, we thought of getting a dedicated server and moving some domains there. So we got dedicated server from softlayer, created VPS and moved some of the domains to that VPS few days before. From the next day itself we were encountering problem in starting the VPS. And the error we were is that the container inside the dedicated server is not starting up.

We raised a ticket asking for resolving this issue as soon as possible because many of our websites went down due to this. But they just giving some forums link and wiki links which makes no sense at all. And the links are nothing related to the issue we were facing. Then they some how the resolved the issue temporarily. After some time again the issue raises that cPanel quota was not working and whenever we start the VPS we are getting this following error.
Restart Container
Stopping Container ...
Container was stopped
Container is unmounted
Starting Container ...
Container is mounted
Setup slm memory limit
Setup slm subgroup (default)
Setting devperms 20002 dev 0x7d00
Setup ioprio: 4
Adding port redirection to Container(1): 4643 8443
Adding IP address(es) to pool:
Adding IP address(es): 174.36.185.48 10.20.29.192 174.36.185.49
arpsend: 174.36.185.48 is detected on another computer : 00:1b:0d:e6:58:40
arpsend: 174.36.185.49 is detected on another computer : 00:1b:0d:e6:58:40
vz-net_add WARNING: arpsend -c 1 -w 1 -D -e 174.36.185.48 -e 10.20.29.192 -e 174.36.185.49 eth0 FAILED
arpsend: 10.20.29.192 is detected on another computer : 00:1b:0d:e6:57:c0
vz-net_add WARNING: arpsend -c 1 -w 1 -D -e 174.36.185.48 -e 10.20.29.192 -e 174.36.185.49 eth1 FAILED
Hostname for Container set: host.dnsbreeze.com

Many of our customers were very much disappointed as our websites were down for 2 days. We were really fed up with the technical support by them and asked for the refund. Now they are asking us to wait for 14 business days. Is this the way how a leading hosting and data center provider responds to their customers. Really shame on them. Actually i don't have any necessary to escalate this issue and posting it in all review sites. But i don't want this to happen again for any of the new customers who are thinking to opt for softlayer.

Softlayer - Incompetent Hosting Company

I'm the lead web designer at a company using Softlayer for upwards of 500 clients / small business websites.

We've only been using them for a month and have already lost two clients (around $400 a year worth of business)

Whenever something goes wrong they refuse to take responsibility for it, and are clearly more interested in getting me to stop calling / emailing than resolving my issue. In the 20+ instances i've had with errors on their part they have not taken responsibility for even ONE of these issues.

This includes things that are OBVIOUSLY their fault.

Like emails bouncing back, customers hosting being permanently suspended (and me unable to un-suspend them) etc

Their usual tactic is to suggest I do so and so (in overly complicated tech language) They know that most people would be too embarrassed to tell them they don't know what the hell they are talking about and they are counting on the fact that if they send overly complicated BS responses like this repeatedly that eventually people will just give up and stop trying to get their problems fixed.

In every other respect Softlayer does well (uptime, speed etc) but it's hard to overlook that when I end up having to open 2-5 support tickets a day to resolve issues that are 99% their fault and they show little interest in helping.

Biggest Pro: speed
Biggest Con: their tech support is awful

Softlayer

When I went to Softlayers unmanaged service, I was prepared to do a lot of things for myself.

Softlayers customized control panel makes it easy to administer multiple servers.

It's not like CPanel, in that it doesn't control anything in the internals of the servers.

It does allow for easy hardware customizations after the sale.

I had bought 5 servers, and accidentally selected a 10Mbit port instead of a 100Mbit port.

With Softlayers panel, I was able to see the traffic in and out of each server on both the private network (internal to Softlayers data centers), and the public network (connection to the internet as a whole). I didn't have to install statistics program myself. My old hosting service lumped public traffic with private traffic by default. As a result of the details provided by the panel, I was able to quickly diagnose the issue and request a port upgrade.

Then I learned the best part about the panel: I can control my own port speed. I can easily cap my speed at 10Mbits for a run away server (useful if you're getting a DDoS attack) or I can disable the port completely. Their instructions for configuring the server software to use the newly enabled port is unfortunately out of date and did not work for my OS. However, they are an unmanaged service so this is outside of their SLA.

Another nice thing about Softlayer is their sales plans. From the start, you know exactly what you are getting.

They define:
- The CPU spec: model, clock speed, and cache size
- The type and speed of the RAM
- The type of the disk controller
- The type and speed of each individual drive

And you can add extra options like anti-virus, firewalls, and choose from a list of OS's.

This was a big selling point to me because my previous provider never listed the clock speed in their sales info, so the configured servers would have wildly varying speeds on set-up and the CPU speed could be changed at anytime. It made debugging slow-downs hell.

I know I'm new to Softlayer, and later on I might want to change my mind on this review, but so far no complaints.

I have 5 servers with Softlayer. They are all Quad-Core Intel which is pretty high end. I can't say how their service is for lower tier clients.

Biggest Pro: Lots of hardware to choose from. Great price.
Biggest Con: Unmanaged