Giga-International Reviews

I tried to stay away from this thread but after the worst experience of my life at any ISP I simply cannot go without a warning to the rest of the webhostingtalk.com users.

They can try to calm and satisfy random users that dare to speak of them online with 'special treatment' but should you really be forced to write on forums for them to START helping you out as a REAL support team should have from the start? In my opinion absolutely not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Giga-Hosting
Dear users,
just like the individual problem of izghitu in this thrad has been solved successfully by our support-department so that the customer is very happy now with his server at Giga-International.com, we always care about any problems of our customers and I'm sure noone will be in a uncomfortable situation when ordering a server and reporting a problem to us. We always help and many customers order a 2nd, 3rd and more servers after having stayed with us for a while (Maximum until now: One customer with more than 15 servers after having started with only 1).

Well take me for example, I bought the second most expensive package they had with an extra HD.Oh and we also payed extra for an Ubuntu installation. The server was up after 1-2 days as stated on their page which was a good start, but this was just the calm before the storm.

Since being a 'above average' server admin I know my ways around Ubuntu, so ofcource the first sane thing to do is to keep it up to date right? So apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, it finds another kernel update installs successfully "as Ubuntu does 99% of the time since it's tested by so many before they release it to a stable environment, also note that this was the server edition".

Then came reboot nr 1. The server didn't come up and we were left without our newly installed server. It literally took DAYS for them to "resolve" this issue. And do you want to know how? Well after telling me that the various reasons why the server didn't boot they finally agreed that the boot partition wasn't found (wtf has never happened before, could it be that the apt-get messed up this much?). So then came the first fee of 30€ just to reinstall our newly installed machine since we were the ones to blame I guess. After about (at least) 7-8 days we finally got our 'new' server back online with newly installed Ubuntu.

Then came reboot nr 2, since I was sure of myself that an apt-get didn't break the boot partition I desided to reboot the new server just to see the result, and indeed it did not boot up (keep in mind that this was a newly installed Ubuntu by the infamous giga team). Well we mailed and called them yet again and told them that we didn't touch anything but just rebooted the server. After yet another 4-5 days our 'new' server was up again, they didn't say how maybe they reinstalled it again but this time I wasn't going to try to reboot it but just see if I could use as an image server using something as simple as lighttpd.

Ok finally things are rolling our way, the server was up hosting the images at a pretty decent speed I might add, BUT this was to good to be true. One day when looking in df -lh I saw both the HD having their own Ubuntu install (wtf?) Ok so they complicated things by having 2 HD's with 2 Ubuntu installations but they never told us why they did this and since I thought I'd never have to reboot I thought I'd ignore that bit to.

So what happened next you ask? Well after about 2weeks I started to see in our main server logs that it couldn't ftp to the giga server anymore to upload pictures? So I login to giga, and see something I've never seen before. No commands were working, ls - dir - cd - rm - reboot.. You name it it gave an error, looking it up on google I quickly found that the HD was damaged and that a REBOOT would probably solve the error as chkdisk would eliminate the bad sectors.

So reboot nr 3 was impossible to dodge and that's where the story ends. They wanted us to pay yet another 30€ to fix this since when they checked the boot up the (boot partition) was yet again broke as in boot nr 1. Mike says that in MANY cases the customer is left without this fee as it isn't their fault. I'd say that only the cases that are brought up on forums are the ones not having to pay. And was it my fault with the boot partition and the HD breaking down, you be the judge...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Giga-Hosting
Well, if the server didn't come up after a reboot AND the server worked without any problem before, there exist two possible reasons: Either there's a hardware damage or the customer has installed / upgraded something wrong and so the server has a software-problem (very often: firewall which excluded the customer when he activated it on the wrong way). If we would have sent a technical operator right to your server without any knowledge about the reason for this and he invested his time to fix this problem which - for example - has been caused by you, and we would then compute a 30Euros-fee for our work, in MANY cases customers don't pay for it because they know that they're on the other end of the world (or something like this) and if they don't need a server anymore anyway, they see a good chance to save the payment. This is why we say in many problem-cases: Please send us a small security-fee of 30 Euros one-time so our technical operator can look up what's the problem and fix it. IF the problem has been caused by us (hardware problem), it's OBVIOUS that we will fix it for free and charge back your money. We NEVER had a problem with any customer about this (because everyone gets back his money if it was a problem from our side). Only ssnet doesn't understand this point. Perhaps, because he is a newbie to server administration and data centers.

We asked for a refund of course since we didn't use up all the 3 months that we payed for but they would not let us get anything back.

So if you want to feel secure that your server is taken care of do NOT choose giga-international as you will be sweating every time you reboot the machine or something else happens. So use google and search the forum for reviews before you choose an ISP as it might save you both time and money later on, and not to mention all the stress.

I'm currently a very happy customer at softlayer, with their unbeatable web interface I get easy access to upgrades, FREE os reloads, hardware monitor (temperature etc..) bandwidth. Just as an ISP should be.

thanks for reading

kind regards

My company has been a giga customer for about a year. It did take them a couple of days to setup the server, but we have had no hardware related problems since they set it up. The server has been extremely reliable, they are always responsive with support, they always reply, sometimes it takes 24 hours, but usually its within a few hours. We've never had an issue go beyond 24 - 48 hours.

In terms of network performance, put things in perspective here, $999/mo gets you a dedicated 100Mbps port at most providers, $99/mo (depending on the Euro) is what you pay giga. Thats 10% of the cost, what you essentially get is 10Mbit thats capable of bursting up to 100Mbps. We have never seen more than 5Mbit / sec out of a single connection from gig, however we've ran multiple TCP connections from different locations, each getting between 1Mbit and 5MBit / sec, and never adversely effecting the other sessions. So my guess is they might have some kind of per client IP / per port bandwidth management policy in place, but thats not really a bad thing.

Within Europe we see very fast speeds, from the United States, not so much. Most US connections never exceed 3Mbit/sec, typically between 1Mbit and 1.5Mbit. Before anyone says its the other end, we can dump full 10Mbit/sec between our other servers.

So my advice, need to provide services to US customers, use a US provider - Colo4jax, Openreaction, Zogmo, all provide pretty decent services from my experience. If you need to provide services to EU customers, then giga is definately ok in my book.

In short - don't go with giga international.

From the start I have had problems. I tried to order a machine to be set up, took a very long time despite me paying immediately via paypal. Then, I try to reboot the assigned server and it won't come back up. Their solution is to send multiple reboot signals to the server - then, without checking properly to see if the machine was responding, they tried to charge me 30EUR for remote hands. The problem was CLEARLY a HARDWARE issue, not a software issue (proven by them sending multiple reboot signals and it coming back online) - which they are supposed to look after, not charge out for.

After paying for additional IPs and having to send a reminder about 3 days after, I get an e-mail back stating I must pay for 6 months in advance for it. NOTHING like this is even remotely mentioned in their terms. NOTHING.

I e-mailed prior to ask what speeds I could expect from the service. I understood it was shared because nobody can offer 100Mbit unmetered for their prices. I got a reply stating I could expect around 10Mbit during busy periods and 20-30Mbps during US mainland time. Neither of these were even close to what I got. Around 150kbps (note the lower case kbps) at any time. On the odd occasion I'd get 2Mbps (again, lower case letters) but only for a few seconds.

As a result, no more business. Thanks giga-international for that!

After first trying to make contact with giga-international and then resorting to filing a dispute through paypal (after no response) and having no reply from GI regarding the paypal dispute - and a decline from paypal (they do not cover "services"), I've now followed through with VISA (thank god I paid through visa via paypal) who say I definately have a case, so Giga-International and paypal, you'll be hearing from them soon. Oh and I'm not just asking for half back now. Now it's going to be the full amount. Plus a chargeback fee.

Hello,

I decided to write a review of giga-international.com so nobody else does the same mistake as me by getting a server from them.

First of all I got my server only 3 days after placing the order.

Second after 2 days of the server being online the HDD got screwed up(and I payed 70 euro for the setup)

It took them 18 hours to reboot the server so it gets back online.

It has been a week since I am begging them to get me a new HDD, all they do is ignore my requests. Because of the bad HDD the server goes down every day at peak load(during day) and it takes from 4 to 6 hours for them to reboot the server.

I ordered yesterday a remote reboot device and I didn't get it yet. I asked for a reboot 3 hours ago and the server wasn't yet rebooted.

I am sorry for myself that I got a server from them.

Overall: THEY SUCK

I hope this review will stop many people to get a server from them.

Thanks