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Date Submitted :
December 25th, 2011
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 6 months
Overall Rating :
5 out of 5
Reliability :
5 out of 5
Support :
5 out of 5
Pricing :
5 out of 5
Verdict :
We are developing a new website and we go live on Jan 11, 2012. So far we have gotten a huge attention from the online media before going live and we decided to upgrade our server to get prepared to serve a huge number of users.
I contacted Calpop for this and they all did a great job helping me transfer my server to a more powerful one.
Since my old server was not compatible with the new one, it created some complication during the transfer. The tech-support at Calpop worked for about 15 hours non-stop to resolve the issues. The work started at 12:00 in the midnight and ended next day.
I would like to thank everyone at Calpop specifically Shiny, Josh and JP for doing such a great job on Christmas Eve.
Clouditems.com is so fast now and can go live with a great confidence that it can serve so many concurrent users!
I read these reviews before I signed up with CalPop but I felt I was too smart to have any issues.
I signed up when they had the $350 a month 1/2 rack. It was a great price, so great the bad reviews couldn't keep me away. So I signed up and things went pretty well. I could never get more then 250k of a sustained connection from the bandwidth but that seemed per user which was fine. The only issue that came up was that they raised the price to $500 a month. They did, at that time give me 30 days notice. I could not afford the new price but in order to move down they wanted 30 days notice and an extra $500 for that 30 days plus to pay immediately for what I wanted to move to, the now $350 1/4th rack. They made it a huge expensive hassle. The smaller space came with less electric so I had to drive to LA twice to take out servers. The 2nd time I had to take out my monitor/keyboard 1u otherwise they wouldn't let me move down, it wasn't even on.
The second challenge I had with Calpop is that after moving down to the 1/4th rack it took them only a few months to decide to raise the price of that to $500 a month. This time with 15 days notice, but they didn't even point it out they just sent a higher invoice. So again, I had to drive to LA again, take out another server, pay $500 to give 30 days notice and pay another $200 at the same time to move my two remaining servers to the individual co-location.
The third, and final challenge I had which was the 'staw' which broke the camels back was that they took my payment for the individual co-location of $200 for the first months fee's and kept it even though on the terms and conditions it said it would apply once I moved. But not to worry, the other day CalPop merely deleted that part of the terms and conditions out. They also added a joke to the terms and conditions section 6 part G, read the first five words to get the full effect.
I finally decided to abandon $1,300 worth of server equipment to CalPop. I realized if I paid their double-charge, when would it end? They were trying to back bill me for a month that I already paid and when I emailed them they not only didn't respond but deleted the terms in their own terms and conditions that I was referencing.
I liked the technical support guys at CalPop and personally there was only one outage during my time there for a short time (maybe 1 or 2 hours). Otherwise the service was alright. Personally, if I were to do it again never buy a rack from them. Individual co-location is alright and expect them to bill you from the second you sign up even if your server is not there (regardless of what sales says because sales doesn't have any pull with billing).
Feel free to email me at gscott at officeroam.com with any questions.
I used CalPOP as my server rental service for a little over three years for my company until December of last year. Now before I get to the reasons they should even be in business let me take you over the experiences I had year-by-year.
2006 (March is when we signed up) we subscribed to 8 servers for one year at the time. At first the speed and service was aboslutely amazing. Not one day past 90 days after I paid them with my credit card (outside of the charge-back period) I started getting issues.
Earlier that year they said an air conditioner went out and caused half the data-center to go down, but their phones were also out of order with the "this number has been temporarily disconnected" for more than half the day. Everyone makes mistakes and I just let it slide.
No more than a week later, the connection to my servers started running extremely slow, as I was supposed to be getting a 10mbps per server I was getting no more than about 10kbps. After emailing, calling, and eventually threatening legal action over the course of 8 months, they finally said it was the network port on their switch and just changed it out for me.
That brings us to 2007. This year carried a lot of the issues from te previous with the slow network, sometimes a 80% packet loss rate which anyone can tell you when Google can't index your site because of how slow the connection is, you loose page ranking. As a SEO company we had to do something quick.
This is when we offloaded all of our servers except for one for redundancy to another provider that was much more expensive. As we did this and called requesting them to shut down all the accounts except one; they had the owner jump on the phone and cut a "deal" with me. He stated, "We will cut your rate in half for this year and refund you 25% of last year's price as a credit to this year if you keep your accounts active. Sir, thats 75% off."
I asked then about the downtimes and he said he would refund 8% of the total bill to me for each time the server was down for more than 1% of the month... He also said they then had a 99.9% network up-time guarantee and if I wasn't satisfied he'd refund the money.
Guess what, I didn't have many problems with them through the entire year of 2007 from this point!
In 2008, in about Feb (close to reup again) the server started to experience problems again. First of all it was packet loss, then the server would go unresponsive for days at the time. Finally I got back up with the owner about it and he said his staff was working on it.
Though 5 mins after talking to the owner he called me back and said the staff found the problem, it was the network card (hard ware issues) which we were just renting the server. I didn't "stickler" him about his word on the network thing because, "Sure it may had been the network card".
Then it hit me... All 8 servers down at the same time with network card problems? Well he lied right there and that ticked me off though I still didn't press it.
12 days later (still 2008) guess what? Once again the servers were down. I called in again and they said the owner was out (was really about to get my deal then). Later on that day, the server was still down and I called in again to see if they were working on my ticket. They said they had been yet they didn't know what was causing the issues.
In short this issue took them 2 weeks of all my servers being down to figure out, and it was simply that they had performed an unscheduled upgrade on all the servers at some point and didn't change the configs in linux. 2 weeks of no servers -- unacceptable.
I looked up and found the personal phone number of the owner and waited till it was approx 8pm pst and called the owner at home. When I got up with him he said it was no problem and he'd call me back the next day and would give me the next year with 50% off for my troubles.
I had little issues again until 2009 rolled around approx November. Its funny I say "little issues" because at this point, little issues were the network going down for approx 2-3 hours per day. In November reality set in as our sites (all our clients) went offline again due to their network.
What happened this time? Oh they say another ac unit went out *note it is winter time!* Reality hit during this period of time when I had 8 clients contact me that day after their sites had been offline for 12 hours saying they were dropping us as their internet presence provider. We gross approx $2,000 per client per year.
That was $16,000.00 gone in one day. I knew at this point any more deals and I'd be making deals with the devil himself and with the track record so far of CalPOP my company would loose. 3 weeks later, now with 113 clients less than we started with 3 years ago at this time, I called CalPOP and calmly and nicely told them I was making a change in service. I stated my account was still positive and paid up until March of 2010 and if they would to utilize that remaining balance to send me the hard drives of those systems.
THREE MINS LATER AFTER THAT CALL: all my servers go down, all other servers on CalPOP's network are up and running fine. I wait a while, give them some time to make the copies I asked for, and nothing... Still down. 24 hours later I call them, "So whats up with my servers?"
THE REST OF THIS IS WHY THEY SHOULDN'T BE IN BUSINESS
They respond, "You terminated your agreement with the owner thus you now owe us $32,883.87 for the credits he's provided you with. You see Mr. Wells those credits he issued were only active while you maintain active service with us."
My response was rather irate and unappealing to be posting here but in short I stated that the credits were due to shitty service and that I was tired of making deals with the devil. Then I asked for my hard drives back... here is the response:
"You currently owe us $32,883.87. You have until the first day of 2010 to pay us or we will be destroying the data on every hard drive."
(Date this was said was December 23rd, 2009)
I'm assuming they destroyed the data because they got not one more cent from me.
Deal with them if you want; but I'd suggest making no deals with their owner, and make sure you keep every darn receipt.
I can't believe calpop can still get recommendation from anyone. The experience with calpop is freaking unbelievable. We used to have most of our servers there because of their pricing, the network and support was so bad that we had so many outages, and we had to move to other hosting companies after a while. We still have one server there, for the purpose of testing our server application under extremely bad network conditions (seriously). But even that server is not usable because there's a problem with there hard drive that it hangs the system when you read/write to HDD, which is even reproducible under FreeBSD by running the command "portsnap fetch". A month ago I started to file tickets asking them to replace the HDD. First they ignore the part about replacing HDD, then after I called a few times, they told me it would be done the next day, which didn't happen of course, so after a week I called again and they promised me that it'll be done within the day. Guess what? A month after I first filed a ticket, nothing has changed. It's just unfortunate that we already paid to June and there's no way to get our money back.
Oh and yes they are LIARS. One of the tech support always told me he couldn't see any of my tickets, while obviously they are always there and I can still see those tickets. The funny part was that that guy would *cough* when he was trying to tell a lie.
OK I've done my part. Guys I've warned you, so DON'T GO TO CALPOP for the sake of your life.
my experience with their systems has been very bad. I have hung in there for 6 mos. hoping that things would get netter but they got worse. poor quality systems, poor service, There have been 5 outages in the 6 months that I have been there. a couple for several hours.
Also, calpop has a love affair with spammers as far as I can tell. The block that my ip address is in is now blacklisted and they will do nothing to resolve the problem even though they have been given the exact ip that is a problem. they are probably being paid quite well by the spammers.
I was renting a dedicated server from ServerBeach since 2001 (which is a fantastic company). In 2005 I decided to give calpop a try and rented a server from them. I was up 99.9% of the time. My technical support issues were solved right away even in the middle of the night. Reboots are fast. The only problems I had were cause by myself, not them. I outgrew my server there and decided to co-locate. I personally dropped off my server. The building they are in is 1st class. The doors are locked with security cameras and you have to leave your ID with the security desk in order to go in. I was greeted by 4 guys on a sunday afternoon so I know they have a real staff. They installed the server and got me up and running right away. They are in the same building as many other service providers and have hundreds maybe thousands of servers. I have read negative reviews from others but i guess everyone has different experiences. After seeing their operation and having been a customer for almost 2 years, I can strongly recommend this company for anyone who can manage their own server.
CALPOP is very BAD! It just happened recently. One of my server had problem with \"error 17 grub\" (which should not be hard to fix this), but they gave up, and ask me to reinstall the server or cloning from another server (off course there was a fee for doing this). I asked to clone the server from the other one..BAMM they broke the other server..I lost everything on both servers (my script, database, data)....therefore traffic to my sites dropped completely...
Calpop is awesome. I have had no downtime. Tech support really quick. They always answer their phone. No press one for this, 2 for that, etc. They are the best price i found, and i searched for a very long time. they are awesome. I know i can count on them.
I cant believe any positive reviews of this company. I was with them and even after moving had to deal with their issues for months.
Bad service, Bad support, crazy billing, I can go on.
They lie about everything.
I moved to another host and could not be happier.
Do a search in webhostingtalk.com for calpop and the results should give you some idea on how bad these guys are.
I am truly apalled at the people who wrote these terrible reviews about what in my experience has been a GREAT service provider.
Knowledgeable staff, superior customer service both on the tech and the sales side.
For example, a few days ago I needed a few extra IP addresses to set up some extra DNS servers for my resellers... BAM! right away I was up and running.
I have hosted about 100+ sites since October '04 on my server, and my one downtime was caused by a faulty power supply cable, which they replaced immediately. Total down time in ayear, a couple of HOURS, through no fault of their own.
Look, for bandwidth/disk space you get for the money, it is very much worth it.
I have e-commerce stores running on the site with SSL security, blog sites, more MySql databases that you can shake a stick at, and I am yet to experience a single crash or issue with them.
I have a dedicated server, and I keep it secure because I have full root access, so I installed my own firewall (Kiss), Spamassasin, Spamblocker, and I have the wonderful Directadmin control panel which beats all the other control panels combined.
Calpop resells lifetime licenses to directadmin on their servers, and that is ONE GREAT BUY.
Another support example. We were using a domain to do our own DNS hosting, and the contact info was lost and the domain was lost. We were left with no DNS. A heroic effort by Calpop got all my sites back online immediately and AT NO COST WHATSOEVER. They provided their own dns servers to host all those 100+ domains, and they did it in minutes.
Now, THAT'S SUPPORT.
I Recommend Calpop 100%
Regards,
Carlos
panamaspace
p.s. Did I add I am not even in the United States and I still get great support?
We are mostly a Gaming server provider and have 4-5 machines with calpop at any time, they have 24 hour service, and techs that know thier stuff, I've never waited longer then 15 minutes for a task to be done, recently we have a HD failer due to a new undetectabled virus (norton, F-Prot, Microtrend all failed to detect it) and calpop had us up and running in a matter of hours with a new server
We've been in the game server biz for almost 10 years now, and the speed and pricing we get from calpop are 10 times better anyof the 8 other we have tried, most other server companies we have left due to poor tech support and poor contact, with calop they are allways there when you call or leave a ticket and this makes them #1 in our books
www.roughnecks.org
Have had a couple rough bumps with them but got over them just fine. I have never had any major downtime with them since I have been with them. I would recommend calpop to any one who can manage theyre own server.
CalPOP has thousands of game servers on the west coast and hundreds of game servers on the east coast. I have seen them and many of them are mine-- all rackmount. The backbone is multiple gigabit lines- mostly Level3.
I have been with CalPOP for years and they are the best place for game servers because they have 100% uptime and low ping times and good peering with local ISPs. Prices are low too compared to everyone else.
Many big game companies are there. I think any bad review of CalPOP would be an odd exception -- probably fake reviews written by a disgruntled spammer or by the competition. I've never had a problem - they may be the biggest company in California -- I have heard that they use more power than Equinix.
I SERIOUSLY THINK THAT PEOPLE THAT TALK BAD THINGS ABOUT CALPOP ARE THE ONES THAT TRIED TO GET AWAY WITH HORRENDOUS ACTIVITIES...FOR EXAMPLE, DESIGN WORLD GOT TURNED OFF FOR ABUSE OR SPAM WHICH HE ADMITTED HIMSELF ANYHOW..AND DALLAS FOSTER PROLLY CHARGED BACK HIS MONTHLY FEE COZ HES TRYING TO STEAL FROM SUCH HONEST PEOPLE AND LOST...I HAVE ONE THING TO SAY TO PEOPLE TRYING TO GET AWAY WITH HORRENDOUS ACTIVITIES...WHEN YOU POINT A FINGER TO SOMEONE THE OTHER FOUR'S POINTING RIGHT BACK AT YOU!!!
P.S.
DALLAS FOSTER...BEFORE TALKING CRAP ABOUT CALPOP MAYBE JUST MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE THEIR PICTURE OUT OF YOUR WEBSITE!
Basically, CalPOP destroyed my hosting business, lost all my customers for me, and ruined whatever reputation I had begun to build. It's long story, but essentially, my server was suffering continuous downtimes which I had to repeatedly apologize to my customers for and which made me look and feel like a complete idiot. It was a horrible, frustrating and embarrassing time with CalPOP. Finally a DoS attack kept my entire server inoperable as a websever for an entire week. A datacenter is supposed to know how to shunt a DoS attack to a null IP so you can bring your server back online. I spent a full week trying to get CalPOP to do something, but they didn't respond to my emails - or do a single thing or respond to the problem what-so-ever. The only thing that happened is a technician on the late shift took interest in the problem - and he was doing searches on Google to find out how to stop a DoS attack. This is extremely unknowledgeable staff.
CalPOP has no internal organization whatsoever. If you have a problem, they have no place to 'put' your problem so it gets addressed. I just read a review by someone else from 3 years ago, and everything in it is still true:
"Very bad support - emails to their support address are bounced back or never replied to, and even when you call them you usually get someone with no technical skill who barely speaks English. You are told the "real" techs are not there and they will call you back ... they never do."
This review was written in 2003, and I had the exact same experience. I cannot tell you how many times I was told that the 'real' tech to handle my problem wasn't there, that a message would be left (which never was, since I was never contacted), or that I should call back tomorrow.
I've had servers at 6 different datacenters. Simply stay away from CalPOP.
They moved my server about and also thery deleted £20,000 of webistes and all backups from the server and all the said was (sorry)
I have had nothing but problem after problem and so much trouble nothing seems too get sorted. My sites and server is down while im writing this message, ill be moving within 12 hours. I have never had a full week with my sites up and running 100%.
if you go with this company you are a fool...lol
This company has no remorse at all. Remember if you want to lose your sites and backups.This is the host for you..lol
I know 5 other people who have had the same experiance.
