Bad experience with Ecatel

[muad_dib]

At the moment I'm with aruba.it, with one dedicated firewall and 8u of colocation. Anyhow they announced me a change of their pricing model, in effect from the 1st of January, that makes them not price-competitive anymore. This is why I'm looking around for a dedicated servers provider, and a friend of mine suggested me to try ecatel, because they are one of the few european provider with a dedicated uplink to Italy, via Tiscali.

At first they seemed sketchy, because they don't have a website, anyhow I took the time to contact them. I knew from the past that their sales support is rude, sometimes even insulting customers. Anyhow I didn't knew that the turnaround of their sales support was so bad, taking from a minimum of 24 hours up to 96 hours to answer basic sales email.

I was just trying to understand if I could move my actual setup in their DC, gradually. Who would move all their webservers to a DC without a website, which they didn't ever worked with before? My goal was to rent their cheapest dedi and test their network for a month or two before moving the bulk of my hardware.

In their sales brochure they invite to contact them to test their network free of any charge, or to make any question. The problem is that they don't reply to basic sales question, which could be easily answered by simply pointing to the above mentioned brochures.

The answer they gave me, left me astonished:

Dear A.,

Our business is just simple. We try to keep all correspondence short and simple. You/your customer is asking everything what's possible to ask..
We cant make pages of text for a simple sale we make a few EUR profit on.

the best with your search.


Best regards,
ECATEL (NETHERLANDS) LIMITED.

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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: EGC-190305
Department: Information & support
Priority: High
Status: Closed

I still kept my composure, as I understand that if you are a businessman you need to eat a lot of shit:

Dear Ecatel,

Yes. Customers make questions. If you want to reduce the cost of sales management, create a website.


I will ask you just one question:

Which is the cheapest dedi?


Thanks,
A.

But their second answer, this time very quick, was even worse:

Dear A.

Thank you for your advise.
Regarding your question about cheapest dedicated. We are not interested in making you any offer anymore.

Kind regards,

Here's a pastebin of the whole email exchange, so that you can judge by yourself.


Keep in mind that I always let AT LEAST 24 hours pass by before contacting them again, not counting Friday or week ends.

I'm not trying to save some bucks, as there are much cheaper providers out there (hetzner anyone?). All I wanted is to use their Tiscali Uplink which is very good for Italy.

Telling a customer that he is not appreciated, only because he is making some questions, after they invited me themselves to make more questions, is VERY rude.

I have a dedicated sales team of 2 people, and I pay roughly 1500$ a month. I'm MUCH MUCH smaller than they are, and still I can afford it.

Given that in the past their sales service insulted other customer, I think they just need to fire the sales assistant. I bet their management would not be happy to hear about this.

Do you think I made too many questions?

I didn't asked for the moon, just for very basic questions. If you don't make these questions, you can end up with a very bad surprises.

Look at the setup they proposed me: 1TB Disk.

What 1TB? Raid? JBOD? Or maybe I shouldn't care?

They lacks the most basic infos.

muad_dib Reviewed by muad_dib on 16th Nov 2011. Bad experience with Ecatel At the moment I'm with aruba.it, with one dedicated firewall and 8u of colocation. Anyhow they announced me a change of their pricing model, in effect from the 1st of January, that makes them not price-competitive anymore. This is why I'm looking around for a dedicated servers provider, and a friend of mine suggested me to try ecatel, because they are one of the few european provider with a dedicated uplink to Italy, via Tiscali. At first they seemed sketchy, because they don't have a Rating: 5

[accyuklad]

not good service at all but it would be better if they did a site so you can pay for the stuff you want setting up

[masterbator]

to be honest, that is a hell lot of questions mate...

you could've made your questions shorter & gave them some hints about server specification you after

[l0calh0st]

Been a customer for a year.

- Bad english typing support.
- Slow support, 1or2 days to reply.
- They are rude, you are correct.
- Their main site is still under construction for more than a year.
- They mentality is not okay, they think they are the best.

THIS ALL is the reason that they are cheap, they HAVE to provide low pricing because they know they suck with the rest.

[msk19994]

So i guess with the above reply i shouldnt go with them in buying a new dedi

[l0calh0st]

If you require the following:

- Good communication with support.
- Fast support.
- Friendly support.
- Helpful support.

Then you should NOT go with Ecatel.

EDIT: Their support system is a bit laggy too, you also need to submit a ticket if you want to reboot your server instead of clicking on a reboot button.

[Teks0427]

Assuming I'm gonna ignore the problems with the staff (since the staff won't make the servers work any better, at least not directly), what can you say about their hardware and connectivity?

[Kw3rLn]

Switch hosts. And first search for reviews, when you want to buy hosting.

[l0calh0st]

Their hardware is okay, and network is okay for now. Some times an upstream provider stops working with Ecatel and your server will be offline in a few countries but they got a new provider fast. These things happen with Ecatel because they ignore loads of complains.

[Sp32]

If you require the following:

- Good communication with support.
- Fast support.
- Friendly support.
- Helpful support.

Then you should NOT go with Ecatel.

In all fairness, by what you're saying is that they seem decent if you don't need support.

Ontopic: Personally I know what it's like when you're selling something to someone and they ask you loads of questions, usually the person who asks all the questions never ends up buying.