Savvis quality?

Seth Mattinen sethm at rollernet.us
Wed Jun 3 03:37:43 UTC 2009


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




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