BurstNET – What may have been my worst provider

February 2, 2011

Back when I did my review of Wooservers, I brought up my history with BurstNET. Wooservers.com basic claim was that I could not judge their service based off of my own experiences. But I have to ask, is a host only as good as their supplier? Supposibly BurstNET resellers get faster support, I have no idea because they could not handle 3 servers, so I saw no reason to invest in their reseller program. After all if they can not handle 3 servers, its not a good sign to trust them with hundreds of servers. I still think wooservers.com is no better then BurstNET. After all if BurstNET is willing to sacrifice support to their direct customers, they very well may skip lesser resellers to provide support to resellers that sell more then others.

Its been almost 10 years since I first used BurstNET

It really boogles the mind that any business can survive while being terrible at customer service. Back in 2003 I got service with BurstNET because my previous company was looking for a viable cPanel company. I was not particularly happy with Fastservers.net who would later become Layeredtech. My second provider was OChosting, who were in the progress of leaving after they were threatening to charge extra for reboots because of outages caused by defective equipment. Which is a story for another day. Also I have to say I prefer Plesk over cPanel another post for another day. I don’t exactly remember dealing with the BurstNET sales dept that much in the beginning. But after I got my second server there were setup issues and the server went down for 7 days. After multiple calls that went to an answering machine that was full I was not particularly happy. So I canceled the service. BurstNET was unwilling to provide a refund despite the issues being caused by them.

Second time is the charm with BurstNET?

By 2005 my business partner thought they would have the kinks worked out. His thoughts were that no company could possible survive if they kept up that level of incompetence. Clearly they can. This server was held no longer then 2 weeks. After 2 equipment failures my business partner was sick of playing my part with this company because I refused to take any part of using them as a supplier. Not once was he able to get someone on the phone, despite my recommendation that we call them first. Though I ended up having to deal with them on trying to get a refund that never came. Ultimately I feel I probable wasted more time then what a refund was worth.

This is one of those rare hosts where the searching for “BurstNET sucks” on google really does apply.

This is just off the first page:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/20467-BurstNet-STINKS ( 2 negative reviews from 2001)

http://www.webhostingstuff.com/review/BurstNet.html (12 negative reviews)

http://www.besthostratings.com/web-hosting/reviews/burstnet_technologies-Reviews.html
(6 negative reviews Oct 2006 – Sept 2010)

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting/web-hosting-top.burst.net-reviews (.5 out of 5 stars – 12 negative reviews)

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1609927 (negative review from 2009)

http://forums.cnet.com/7723-6616_102-337170.html (negative review from 2009)

http://www.000webhost.com/directory/reviews/burst.net (2009- 2010 8 negative reviews).

There are even more. For some reason the reviews on webhostingstuff.com about BurstNET start December 2008.

But there is also this tweet done on January 28, 2011

As for the what BurstNET reseller wooservers.com tried to tell me:

“Judging a different company with your own past experience of burst.net is very unsubstantial.”

Thats not one of their customers says:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=919430

“I saw there post on here and the high amount of bandwidth – space and price got me wanting to try them out, They tell you they have support in the uk and usa, and act like loads of people work for them when only one person was replaying to my tickets I checked out there domain and he’s the owner..

He also said they owned loads fof sites but all joined together to work on wooservers.com when i asked for the domains they worked on he refused to tell me..

He said server setup takes 12 – 24 hours but it look almost 3 days to setup, Once setup I asked a friend of mine to go over the vps to make sure I did it right, but he was unable to get on the server or open any of the pages and they wasn’t helpful about that..

I then asked for a refund as if he couldn’t connect or view anything on the server then it’s no good to me as me and him work together and they refused.

My advice is don’t use them, they seem to lie and it seem’s to be the one guy there, and not everybody is able to connect to the vps.

Is anybody able to recommend a good vps company that isn’t to pricey and have good connections to the uk.

– Matthew”

No similarities to BurstNET at all there right?

Then there is the negative review on Web-hosting-top.com

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting/web-hosting-top.wooservers.com/type/add-review

“horrible service. my vps was down for over 24 hours and i lost all my data. support is so slow it takes 18 hours to respond to ticket. STAY AWAY FROM THEM.”

This was on August 30, 2010.

Strangely another review was done on September 11, 2010:

“I think wooservers is very reliable. I have never had an outage. Network Speeds are blazing fast. Customer service very nice and Super Fast. Amazing prices No One can beat. Amazing Ping Times Overall 100% Perfect”

Then there is the one I love that seems like a failed advertisement on October 14, 2010:

“woo servers is one of the best hosts around and is the most popular for businesses and i recommend all to use their service.

I tried several hosts but i failed in getting support, technical assistance, reliability, cheaters but woo servers are trusted and one can expect 100% satisfaction

* Fast email supports
* Different levels of servers so you can grow
* Very reliable with 99.9% Uptime
* Excellent support
* Good knowledge technically
* Very helpful, probably best known for top technical support

But we were talking about BurstNET

There are two tweets I find the most intresting.

When it comes to BurstNET a fast response and 30 day guarantee don’t apply.