My experience with Survival Servers, a detailed warning.

[MonnSTAR 1]

Hello all,

First of let me say that 3 weeks ago, I came into the world of hosting an Exile server with little to no knowledge about running a server on my own. I was lucky enough to have a friend who guided me along the way and helped me out as part of my admin team as he was experienced in running an Arma server.  Needless to say, I as a newbie admin have learned quite a bit in the past weeks.  A lot of headaches, but a lot of valued learning nonetheless.   I am here writing this so you don't make the same mistake that I did, here's why.

I found a solid thread on these forums discussing server hosting and saw Survival Servers and they seemed to have good reviews from sources I was looking at and matched my price point so I decided to jump in head first.  initially I had paid for a service for installs of 4 mods that would help me alleviate more work on my end, on their website they advertised 24-48 hours for mods to be installed.  After day three I opened up a support ticket to find out where my mods were and pointed out the fact that they were over their stated install time by nearly 24 hours, about 6 hours later, I get a reply telling me that my mods were installed...The first couple days afterwards were solid, and we got lots of compliments on server stability, frame rate, the whole 9 and despite the slowness on the mod installs, support AT THE TIME, seemed adequate enough in responding in a timely manner to issues I  had.  After the first week of an operational server, we started having issues both with server issues and response times culminating into our mySQL database exploding causing players duping gear left and right, after dying on respawn, spawning back at their bodies 30 seconds before they died, in full gear, with their duped body in front of them.  On our end, we had done nothing to cause this error, we started to get reports of these issues happening and I decided to stop the server and to a manual restart to see if that would resolve it.  After stopping the server, it wouldn't come back online no matter what we did like uploading old sterile files to make sure we hadn't borked anything in any recent hotfixes we had implemented, we tried everything, even changing server locations and attempting to start from scratch... then finally opened up a support ticket.  After nearly 24 hours with no response, no tweets from their company account, nothing we FINALLY get a response on our ticket with "We forgot to update our mySQL certificate.  The issue should be resolved."  Gee, thanks...now that I'm staring at this fresh new server directory.  Not once did I receive an apology, a "we will make this right" statement, or any sort of compensation.

Wow..

So grudgingly I spent the next 15 hours getting the server back to where I had it, with an unhappy player base because all of their progress had been wiped due to no fault of my own, that was 3 days ago.

This morning I logged in to all kinds of reports by my players that our BEC timers were conflicting with infiSTAR restart timers, the night cycles were off, etc...nothing too hard to correct.  So, I log into my admin panel to which it shows that my server is "stopped" which was obviously impossible due to me chatting to players currently on my server with Rcon/Battlewarden.  So I tell my players to log off as I was going to do a manual restart, and when I did that, it said server "online" and so then I immediately stopped the server so I could upload my fixes to the timers and night cycle.  I get greeted with FTP error 550, and all files failure to transfer.  I do a manual restart again, then stop the server again...try to upload my fixes and new .pbo files....error code 550.

 

So, I opened a support ticket at around 9:30am EST with a detailed description of the issue, and listed the error code not once, but twice.... 4 hours later since they are on the West coast I finally get a reply... "Please upload a screenshot of the error.  I am looking into your issue now."  I was livid but I complied.  I waited a few hours and checked my support ticket again, still no replies...and so I laid into them about their customer support on the support ticket and waited a few more hours....still no reply.  At this point, I decided to dive deeper into the internet to find more honest reviews of Survival Servers and I came across this website with appalling reviews of their service. https://www.trustpilot.com/review/survivalservers.com

I was so mad at myself for not having seen this before giving these guys my money, because I am big on customer support and when an overwhelming 70% of reviews are only giving you 1 star out of 5...something is seriously wrong.

So I took to Twitter and started to fire shots, because at this point I was out for blood, because to me if I am paying for a service, especially one like a hosting service and there is a game breaking issue of me not being able to upload to my FTP, I would expect that to be a critical issue on their end & handled in a timely manner.  NOPE, so again, I took to social media especially after having read through the mountain of terrible reviews.

About 2 hours after making those post and taking my hate out on Overwatch games, I get a message from my other admin telling me to check Twitter.  I log in to see this...a company who was not my provider saw the disdain in my tweets and hit me up nearly 1 hour and 10 minutes before Survival Servers hit me back telling me to wait 12-24 hours for a response.  Classic.

So at that point, I still wasn't able to upload to my FTP, no issue had been fixed, and I still had no new replies on my support ticket I had opened at 9am... and that Tweet from another company that I wasn't a customer of having a faster response time than my current provider was the straw that broke the camels back. I opened up another support ticket and requested a full refund or I would be contacting the BBB.  Survival Servers responded to my refund ticket from a ticket that was probably 8 days old telling me that I was being refunded in full from their "CEO" Ryan Pennington.

I bought their service on 12/27/16 and since then, I have probably put in 10+ support tickets concerning issues not able to be handled on my end resulting in about 7 days of downtime due to incompetency on their end.  That's nearly 1/3rd of the time I've had their service being spent in server downtime.  Somehow, my now old server is still up and running as there are players on it now as I am typing this, I tried to log into their website to see if I could still access the control panel and low and behold I get this gem.


Normally, when I get a bad customer experience, I just chalk it up as just that, bad customer experience and perhaps it doesn't reflect the overall quality of that particular company and I move on with my life and take my money else where, keeping to myself about my bad experience.  I don't write reviews, they take too long and I just don't care that much.  With Survival Servers, I felt that it was my duty to let you guys know about my experience so that you don't make the same mistake that I did in choosing these guys to "run" a server hosting service for you.  Survival Servers is straight garbage, please don't ever give them a dime of your money.

[kuplion 1785]

@QGS, looks like this inmate needs your services!!

https://qualitygameservers.com/

[MonnSTAR 1]

As an update, nearly 8 hours after posting this SurvivalServers.com is still down.  What a superb service they provide, am I right? Further cementing my argument against them and my decision to write this post, because if I can save just one person from spending money with them I will feel like I have done my job.

[BetterDeadThanZed 1006]

28 minutes ago, MonnSTAR said:

As an update, nearly 8 hours after posting this SurvivalServers.com is still down.  What a superb service they provide, am I right? Further cementing my argument against them and my decision to write this post, because if I can save just one person from spending money with them I will feel like I have done my job.

Their website works fine for me.

I think you should file a PayPal dispute claiming they aren't providing the service you paid for. Chances are they won't respond and PayPal will give you your money back. In the meantime, go to Quality Game Servers.

[MonnSTAR 1]

4 minutes ago, BetterDeadThanZed said:

Their website works fine for me.

I think you should file a PayPal dispute claiming they aren't providing the service you paid for. Chances are they won't respond and PayPal will give you your money back. In the meantime, go to Quality Game Servers.

So get this after reading your reply about instantly going to their website, it got me thinking, they surely wouldn't have banned me from their website would they? So I tested it out one more time on my computer, connection error timed out.  I picked up my iphone that was currently connected to my home WiFI, and tried to get on their website, connection error timed out.  I disconnected my phone from my home WiFi and tried to connect to their website, instantly connected.

They literally banned my IP from their website after openly criticizing them.  Amazing.

[BetterDeadThanZed 1006]

12 minutes ago, MonnSTAR said:

So get this after reading your reply about instantly going to their website, it got me thinking, they surely wouldn't have banned me from their website would they? So I tested it out one more time on my computer, connection error timed out.  I picked up my iphone that was currently connected to my home WiFI, and tried to get on their website, connection error timed out.  I disconnected my phone from my home WiFi and tried to connect to their website, instantly connected.

They literally banned my IP from their website after openly criticizing them.  Amazing.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

[MonnSTAR 1]

I've been thoroughly enjoying crucifying them on Twitter.