Savvis quality?

Wed Jun 3 02:58:42 UTC 2009

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.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source  
and other randomness