Re: Savvis quality?

[Seth Mattinen <sethm () rollernet us>]

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