A company that chooses GoGrid instead of Amazon has not done it’s homework.
I continue to get sent surveys from an entry level “cloud” called GoGrid asking me if I would recommend them. It’s beginning to get infuriating.
It seemed to me that GoGrid (part of Servpath) is cutting it’s teeth in the cloud market at my expense by having shoddy practices and fairly inadequate support staff.
If it’s not clear by now, I’m no longer a customer of GoGrid and will would advise anyone thinking about taking up cloud hosting to dismiss this company.
For a company which claims a nonsensical 10000% uptime, they certainly set a low standard which doesn’t really seem to be achieved.
GoGrid provided me with a fairly sub-standard level of service and support. There was a rapid response time to tickets but often the quality or resolution was below par. It remains (to this day) a fact that there are open areas in closed tickets. Attention to detail is something GoGrid lacks.
What in fact they have offered is actually 10000% worse level of service than Amazon, which, since switching, has offered me nothing but 100% uptime.
It is my opinion that GoGrid have developed a pretty good “blame culture” e.g. They were DDOS’d which caused interruptions over a period of days – a number of hours clocked up when the server was unavailable.
From their perspective, it was not their fault they were DDOS’ed and their systems became unaccessible. From my perspective it’s not my fault they were inadequately prepared.
Gogrid, on two occasions, notified me at 8.30PM (UTC) on a Friday evening that my server was going to be rebooted – for reasons to do with mandatory patching. The first time they left my web server hanging for 10 hours – at least I found it at 11am inaccessible because a key had to be typed in to enable a certificate – a key which had been provided to them.
Then , a few weeks later, my server mysteriously went offline for a number of hours. It was allegedly my fault – though no logs were on the system and GoGrid did not fulfill their promise to send me the logs as per the ticket request (did you Steve?). It is currently a fact that it has never been possible to determine why the server went off line. As a result an unknown quantity remains and it’s foolhardy to think you can build production quality systems in an environment that has inherent and unexplainable behavior of this nature.
In both cases it was “my fault” for not being technically apt enough to realise I should have at least 2 servers for high availability. My system never left a ‘test’ state – there is little point in building a production quality system on a bed of sand. The bottom line is, if a hosting company has to keep patching and rebooting a server they should provide a second server free in a different datacenter.
The biggest offence was the starting of an instance which I had shut down- I was migrating away from them and did not appreciate that instance being started mid-migration.
The emailed excuses and reasoning the instance was restarted were something I would be ashamed to have sent out. I don’t know if they think I was born yesterday but the response made me think that they think I am an idiot.
What I found most comical about GoGrid is the attacks on Amazon that can be found on their web site.
For your informatiom Amazon offers a very reliable console which makes managing instances very easy. They offer Elastic DB and S3 storage as well as Map Reduce for intensive tasks. There are a massive no. of builds available and I’ve not once had to contact their support. And I’ve never had any downtime.
I would, in fact, highly recommend Amazon and advise anyone to steer away from GoGrid. Do not be drawn in by their fake promises and free load balancer.
I would finally add that I see no use for or even a reason for GoGrid to exist. At worse we host our systems on clouds for reasons of economy and stability – unless GoGrid get a grip I can’t see how they can survive “as-is”. Also, it’s not really scaleable – it doesn’t offer the storage, db and other capabilities that Amazon does.
Frankly it’s pointless.
