lex
11-06-2007, 08:06 PM
I'm not sure if anyone bothers reading these anymore, given that unixshell isn't taking orders... but here goes. I just sent an email to cancel my service, and they requested a reason for my cancellation, so I took the opportunity to get a little long-winded. I'm going to include here what I wrote to the sales team:
The reason for my cancellation... well, if you check through my support ticket
history, you'll start to see that I've become rather upset with the service at
unixshell.
I joined in march or april of 2006, and the service was priced aggressively
and performance was awesome. I moved in and got all nice and comfy, and my
server started to become an increasingly important part of my day-to-day
internet life, professional and personal.
Sometime around the end of last year, performance started to plummet. I know
you're aware of the epidemic of "io wait time" on unixshell VPSs, because I
and others have reported it to you repeatedly. I know that a VPS is a type of
shared hosting, and that I have to wait my turn for resources, but performance
on my VPS reached the point where I was waiting minutes for my email box to
open in PINE. It was completely unusable, even though my VPS doesn't use much
in the way of resources. Very often, any time my VPS needed to hit the disk,
it had to wait a minute or more, which is just untenable.
Unixshell did move my VPS to a new machine at one point, and that did help for
awhile, but the performance problem showed up again within a month or two. At
that point, we began to see that the unixshell product was being mothballed,
the sysadmins no longer were active on the forum (and come on, that thing's
full of spam at this point!), and that it was pretty clear that your company
no longer cared about Unixshell. It was obvious from the comments we saw that
you were waiting for us to either drop away or switch to tektonic.
I started making my plans to move to a new provider, but my VPS host of choice
(slicehost.com) wasn't yet able to offer extra IPs, so that was a bit of a
deal-breaker for me. As well, it was a pretty difficult task to move my VPS
since I was so entrenched in it. I wish I could have left sooner, to be
honest.
Also, I felt pretty upset by the offers to switch to tektonic. I see this as
a blatant bait-and-switch tactic, and while I know I've heard from one of you
that you don't think it is, I'd like to elaborate on that while I've still got
a "microphone":
I joined unixshell at a great price with awesome performance. Performance was
great for a long time, so I moved in and got all cozy, and started to depend
on having my VPS where it is and having performance be adequate. Then
performance started to get crappy. Despite TONS of complaints in the forums
and many support tickets (mine included), it seems like Unixshell didn't
really get a handle on this problem, and didn't really want to deal with it.
In the end, we were given an option to switch to Tektonic... at twice the
price we were paying.
So I felt like I'd been shown/promised a service long enough to get me to like
it and even depend on it, and then performance was degraded, and my only
recourse was to either leave (a huge expenditure of labor on my part) or pay
more to retain performance. That makes me feel like I was blackmailed... "if
you want your performance back, we can do that, but you'll have to pay more
per month".
I did attempt to take you up on the offer (which was then revoked and never
re-offered!), but that was only as a temporary measure until I had the spare
4-5 weekends to complete the move. I had and have no intention of ever using
Tektonic's services.
Anyway, there you have it. I understand that Unixshell was a bit of a losing
venture for your company, on the technology side, and I know that these things
happen... but I really feel like you left me and your other customers out in
the cold. I only wish I'd managed to complete my move sooner.
The reason for my cancellation... well, if you check through my support ticket
history, you'll start to see that I've become rather upset with the service at
unixshell.
I joined in march or april of 2006, and the service was priced aggressively
and performance was awesome. I moved in and got all nice and comfy, and my
server started to become an increasingly important part of my day-to-day
internet life, professional and personal.
Sometime around the end of last year, performance started to plummet. I know
you're aware of the epidemic of "io wait time" on unixshell VPSs, because I
and others have reported it to you repeatedly. I know that a VPS is a type of
shared hosting, and that I have to wait my turn for resources, but performance
on my VPS reached the point where I was waiting minutes for my email box to
open in PINE. It was completely unusable, even though my VPS doesn't use much
in the way of resources. Very often, any time my VPS needed to hit the disk,
it had to wait a minute or more, which is just untenable.
Unixshell did move my VPS to a new machine at one point, and that did help for
awhile, but the performance problem showed up again within a month or two. At
that point, we began to see that the unixshell product was being mothballed,
the sysadmins no longer were active on the forum (and come on, that thing's
full of spam at this point!), and that it was pretty clear that your company
no longer cared about Unixshell. It was obvious from the comments we saw that
you were waiting for us to either drop away or switch to tektonic.
I started making my plans to move to a new provider, but my VPS host of choice
(slicehost.com) wasn't yet able to offer extra IPs, so that was a bit of a
deal-breaker for me. As well, it was a pretty difficult task to move my VPS
since I was so entrenched in it. I wish I could have left sooner, to be
honest.
Also, I felt pretty upset by the offers to switch to tektonic. I see this as
a blatant bait-and-switch tactic, and while I know I've heard from one of you
that you don't think it is, I'd like to elaborate on that while I've still got
a "microphone":
I joined unixshell at a great price with awesome performance. Performance was
great for a long time, so I moved in and got all cozy, and started to depend
on having my VPS where it is and having performance be adequate. Then
performance started to get crappy. Despite TONS of complaints in the forums
and many support tickets (mine included), it seems like Unixshell didn't
really get a handle on this problem, and didn't really want to deal with it.
In the end, we were given an option to switch to Tektonic... at twice the
price we were paying.
So I felt like I'd been shown/promised a service long enough to get me to like
it and even depend on it, and then performance was degraded, and my only
recourse was to either leave (a huge expenditure of labor on my part) or pay
more to retain performance. That makes me feel like I was blackmailed... "if
you want your performance back, we can do that, but you'll have to pay more
per month".
I did attempt to take you up on the offer (which was then revoked and never
re-offered!), but that was only as a temporary measure until I had the spare
4-5 weekends to complete the move. I had and have no intention of ever using
Tektonic's services.
Anyway, there you have it. I understand that Unixshell was a bit of a losing
venture for your company, on the technology side, and I know that these things
happen... but I really feel like you left me and your other customers out in
the cold. I only wish I'd managed to complete my move sooner.