Server Beach www.ServerBeach.com

Good Prices at Server Beach , but you get what you pay for. The Tech Support is sloppy and worse dangerous. They shut down one of my servers improperly and ended up corrupting the OS. Fortunately, I was preparing to migrate away from SB because of other problems with their offerings, but still took me days to recover and extended downtime for my customers.

Like the reviewer above (intargc), ServerBeach reported a hacked server (or rather didn't report it, just suspended service and left us to call to find out what was wrong).

They refused to allow us access to the "hacked" server, refused to tell us how it was hacked and/or what their proof was that it was hacked and refused to tell us what proxies were running (since they claimed it had "many open proxies") until two days later (when all they said was they ran nmap on it and it showed some proxies, not which ones, nothing).

Now, it is certainly possible it was hacked and was running proxies and/or many other things, but we deserve to be able to examine the server (and get our data off the machine). At the very least we should want to know what happened so we can protect our server in the future (given than we will be charged another $100 if we are hacked again).

Note that our server was loaded with Redhat 7.3 (by Serverbeach, and not upgraded by them even though they seem to indicate that this was the reason for the hack) and we installed every update available and made sure that we weren't running any software with any security concerns.

Serverbeach's only response is that they will reload the server (without our data) for $30 and if we want they will attach the old hard drive for a week for $50 extra. Don't even try contacting the 'Big Kahuna', he won't even bother to respond.

Bottom line, we had been a customer for over a year and a half with only one tech support request (server down due to fan failure), and they treated the situation like it was our fault (rather than we were the victims of a hacker) and further didn't even bother to notify us. They offered neither help nor support and would not even return messages left on their voicemail. I think that even if we were hacked, our service provider (Serverbeach in this case) should be on our side help us rather than treating us like crap.

We are now happily running on Interland. I would highly recommend Interland. They have actual sales reps that can take care of you and you can actually speak to someone in tech support (as I have on two occasions, with them even calling me) and their techs are knowledgeable and responsive (just try to even find a tech support number for Serverbeach!).

I'm a Linux SysAdmin for a client that has a server on ServerBeach. After I setup my client's box, he pretty much left it as I set it up and let some software go out-of-date and such. This opened security issues for his server. Well, his server was eventually hacked. I was hired to get the server back up and running. I will lay out my experience dealing with ServerBeach's support and customer service below. It's not a pretty site:

Server is hacked. ServerBeach recognizes this hack and immediately shuts down the server without warning or contact.

Found out the server was shut down due to AUP. It's a standard procedure to shut the server down if it's been hacked. Apparently, it's also standard to not notify the owner by email or phone that their server was hacked and has been removed from the network and is COMPLETELY inaccessable.

After about *48 hours* of waiting, contact is returned from a trouble ticket opened. They want to do a complete OS reload. They will not allow to bring the server up and let us remove the tainted binaries and do server work. So, on top of that, we have to pay for a new hard drive so that we can connect the old drive up to the new one, mount it and copy data off of it. Total comes to around $110 for this.

Before doing this, we ask 3 times in a total of 24 hours as to what "hack" they found on the server. There is no reply. Finally, 5 days later, after we have already reloaded the server and copied over some binaries, they reply and tell us that they never did an analysis on the server.... They just think it was hacked. Well, this isn't good enough reason to make us reload the entire OS, so we ask for more information as to what brought them to the conclusion that the server was hacked and we needed to pay them $110 to fix it and bring it back online. Finally, 1 day later, we get a reply. Someone had noticed a "rootkit" in the /dev directory... He doesn't know what rootkit or anything about it, but he thinks he saw one in there... After I checked, there was no rootkit in /dev.

If anyone can understand, knowing what hack they found is VERY important to me here... I need to be able to find the hack, remove it, make sure it doesn't get copied over to the new load and also patch any software that was the culprit. The owner that hired me only wants the stuff that is broken fixed... I have my hands tied here. However, ServerBeach refuses to tell us what they found. We need to pay them $75/hr in order for them to describe what they found on the server. So, in the middle of all of this, a few infected binaries were copied over onto the new server. So, guess what... The server was hacked again.

14 hours later, ServerBeach shuts down the server again. A ticket is put in to bring it back up. 24 hours later, I get involved because I'm starting to get annoyed at the lack of support or care from ServerBeach. So, I call their customer support at 9:50am Central time. A message saying they don't open until 9:00am Central time comes on. Great... So, I call back at 10:30am Central... Same message. Try again at Noon, same message. 2:00pm Central time, they answer the phone! I speak to a nice man (Forgot his name) that was helpful. He brought the server up for me so that I could gather some data. However, since the server was unstable, it was flakey... I performed what is called a "Rapid Reboot" from their control panel web interface. This shuts down the server, but never brings it back up... What do you know, the server won't boot now.

So, a ticket it put in for the reboot. 3 hours later, they reply and say it won't come up. Needs a fresh reload. That's fine. I reply at 5pm Central time stating that it is fine to reload on the secondary drive and attach the primary as the secondary so that we may archive old data. 11:58PM Central time, a reply finally comes. Not to tell us that the server is reloaded, but to tell us that they're waiting to hear back from us to confirm we want the server reloaded....................... So, they put us on hold for 6 hours to RE CONFIRM!! After waiting until 11 for a reply, I went to sleep. Woke up at 9am to see this ticket "stalled" due to them reconfirming we wanted a reload..........

So, I call customer service at 9am Central time. Of course, a message comes on saying they're closed until 9am Central time. So, I try again at 10... same message. I tried again at 11... same message... Nobody has replied to the ticket.

Needless to say, these people just don't care. They get to the tickets when they can. Maybe they're understaffed, but that's not an excuse. If you're not able to meet the demands of the customer when their server is DOWN, then you need to hire more people. Plain and simple. It shouldn't take 24 hours to reload a server. It shouldn't take even 6 hours to do so. I'd say 3 at the most. It takes 45 minutes to slap an image on a hard drive. I say 3 hours because I'm allowing for a buffer of communication between employees... So, I'm being completely reasonable... I work in such an industry and make my living off of it. Never in my life has it taken me more than 3 hours to communicate down a chain of people to get a server reloaded... NEVER.

This company is just slack... I personally have my server being hosted by Interland and have never had ANY such issues. They have a ticket system just like ServerBeach. The response time on a ticket for the company I use is 6 hours max... We waited up to 5 days for some of these tickets to get noticed...

I'd find another company. Other companies are more expensive, but when you need them to be there, they are there to help you. ServerBeach is not. Since you don't have access to this server physically, if you install a new kernel or system binaries and need to reboot and say you goof a bit and the server won't come up, you're in trouble. Be prepared to wait 24 - 48 hours just for them to recognize the ticket. The, be prepared to have the RELOAD the entire OS instead of just fixing what is needed.

My friend uses ServerBeach.com and I am one of his Admins and we haven't had any problems yet... The only problem is one time someone deleted a system file so we had to get another server... So they set us up another server quickly.