Honest Review

[Smedrek]

I see too many "omg so great" reviews, and I think it's time someone is honest about this service..

To be frank, I've seen much better deals for hosting elsewhere and the only response I get is "they don't offer the same support as NFO", you might be correct but let me explain my experience these past few months.

I started a Garry's Mod DarkRP server, then began a second Gmod server, and lastly a third. The past two days my community has downright suffered because NFO has been unable to fix a problem with the "machine" my server is using.

On multiple attempts to contact the support, I was told, "Did you enable -condebug to see what is preventing the server from starting? Please let us know."

After spending hours looking through these things I had had it and I finally said, that I KNEW the issue was on their end. My server was booting as usual and then failing out, even their attempts at remote repair of the server had failed FROM THEIR END.

It was at this point that I became very upset. The ranking from my DarkRP server alone went from 200th to 670th.

I decided that I would just grin and bear it, considering these types of things happen quite frequently, I've seen many larger issues than that. However, a day later, the GMod Jailbreak server I had begun running began having the same issue. Once again I was told "Did you enable -condebug to see what is preventing the server from starting? Please let us know."------ THE SAME COPY AND PASTED RESPONSE THREE FULL TIMES.

Sure they will respond in >3 hours, but the quality of the response is mediocre at best. When I used Dayz.st for hosting as well as a few other affiliates, it took them >5 hours, but at least the person on the other end was actually checking into my issue. It took me a full 2 days of back and forth with NFO to actually get a human to reply. They told me the following:

"It actually seems the machine hosting your server is seeing some type of issue at the moment. We're still investigating and are working to put a fix in place."

I feel really sorry for whoever else was on my node with that issue, I still can't believe that after two days of attempting to get them to fix something that I technically pay for, they were unable until early this morning, and even so, the Jailbreak server is still down.

This is not a plea for help, this isn't a request telling you not to buy or use NFO for rentals. I am simply trying to show everyone that sometimes the things they claim are complete and utter subjective material.

If you are looking for a place to START a server and MAINTAIN a server that YOU KNOW will have a decent following regardless of uptime, I would say NFO is a decent choice. But buyer beware, although the nodes aren't crowded, I often get email alerts for (D)DoS's against the other idiots on my node. I'm severely upset that they haven't offered to remedy my issues with the destruction of my community base. Telling people "hold on it's still being fixed" for 2 days, when they're looking to play the game, hell, most of them already found somewhere else thanks to NFO.

Regardless

tl;dr

6/10, NFO is fantastic when you know what you're doing and how to maintain your own server, but really awful when it comes to customer service replies.

Also, because NFO is a "well-known" community of servers, they tend to receive high-packet denial attacks frequently, sometimes causing the entirety of one region to come to a grinding halt, as I've had happen more than once.

[soja]

NFO's value decreases with the more you know about how to run your servers. It is very rare that normal support can solve any issues that I run into with my servers. I have had plenty of cases where support replies either don't fully read my posts, or suggest something that a previous reply covered.

With that said, I couldn't run my community without them. NFO's ability to filter and mitigate (D)DoS attacks is unmatched IMO, and even escalated support replies are usually handled within a few hours if there isn't something crazy going on. If you run into problems and you have done everything you can, and I mean everything, and you are sure the issue is on NFO's end, ask for the ticket to be forwarded to John.

[Edge100x]

I see too many "omg so great" reviews, and I think it's time someone is honest about this service..

If you're reading the testimonials forum, you'll see testimonials there. You can find regular reviews elsewhere (here and on other sites). It's fine to post reviews (even flame-type reviews, like this one), but if they're not testimonials, they shouldn't be in the testimonials section of the forums.

I don't think anyone has been dishonest with their testimonials or reviews. I don't know why they would be, as we do not provide incentives or rewards for them, or penalties for posting negative things -- we encourage honest feedback.

To be frank, I've seen much better deals for hosting elsewhere and the only response I get is "they don't offer the same support as NFO", you might be correct but let me explain my experience these past few months.

You can, and should, test multiple providers and find the one that is the best fit for you. It is valid to say that most providers do not offer our quality of service and value, however -- I haven't yet seen a "much better deal". The old saying that "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" has a basis in fact.

I started a Garry's Mod DarkRP server, then began a second Gmod server, and lastly a third. The past two days my community has downright suffered because NFO has been unable to fix a problem with the "machine" my server is using.

I don't know the specifics of your personal problem, but I have personally been working night and day to resolve a variety of issues related to the emergency security maintenance that we had to do, and staff have been swamped. This is a unique situation and it has made everything harder for us in troubleshooting regular issues, since we also have to investigate the new setup and whether it is causing the problem.

I decided that I would just grin and bear it, considering these types of things happen quite frequently, I've seen many larger issues than that. However, a day later, the GMod Jailbreak server I had begun running began having the same issue. Once again I was told "Did you enable -condebug to see what is preventing the server from starting? Please let us know."------ THE SAME COPY AND PASTED RESPONSE THREE FULL TIMES.

If this is a new request, it is reasonable to ask that -- -condebug is a very useful tool. If it is an existing request, then it would make no sense. What was your response?

The "Please let us know." makes me think that this is a specific employee who works only in the morning, and often alone. This employee was completely swamped this morning and is less capable at troubleshooting complex problems than most other staff members. You should not hesitate to ask for escalation if you have a particularly troublesome problem that needs another set of eyes.

Sure they will respond in >3 hours

You said ">3 hours" but I think that was a typo and you meant "<3 minutes".

We always strive to not just be fast, but also accurate. I do not want multiple replies sent back and forth when only one will do. I will want to review the support request that you're referring to here once things calm down, and we can use it as a training opportunity.

It took me a full 2 days of back and forth with NFO to actually get a human to reply. They told me the following:

Since that exaggeration is confusing, I should clarify for anyone reading this that we do not use any automated responders for support here. A human reviews every support request, every time. We have few prewritten responses and use them only when they are an exact match for what the customer needs, such as our description of the materials that we need to override our risk check (http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... =91&t=9052).

I can appreciate that you are accustomed to much faster and more thorough responses from us than you may have received over the last two days, and that you're frustrated by some problems that you wouldn't expect us to have. This is, thankfully, a temporary problem due to the internal changes that we had to make.

"It actually seems the machine hosting your server is seeing some type of issue at the moment. We're still investigating and are working to put a fix in place."

Without seeing the problem, I can't say whether that was the same issue that caused you problems previously. With some of the requests that I saw today, there were multiple problems involved, and that's why they were confusing -- the customer made a configuration change, but the security change also caused a permissions problem at the same time, for instance, or the FTP site needed to be fixed.

In any case, if the root cause was a machine problem, please make sure that you also request an SLA credit. This is something that other companies don't offer, so it might not be obvious to do this, but we do provide credits for downtime.

I feel really sorry for whoever else was on my node with that issue, I still can't believe that after two days of attempting to get them to fix something that I technically pay for, they were unable until early this morning, and even so, the Jailbreak server is still down.

I have been ending up seeing many of the thornier problems myself and I have not seen servers still down for awhile, so make sure that I am sent this one.

If you are looking for a place to START a server and MAINTAIN a server that YOU KNOW will have a decent following regardless of uptime, I would say NFO is a decent choice. But buyer beware, although the nodes aren't crowded, I often get email alerts for (D)DoS's against the other idiots on my node.

These are actually quite rare. Are you instead thinking of messages in the DDoS section of the control panel about location-wide problems? Those are also uncommon, but we've had to post a few recently because of attacks.

It is not normal for companies to provide this type of information at the level that we do. We are intentionally up-front about problems.

Also, because NFO is a "well-known" community of servers, they tend to receive high-packet denial attacks frequently, sometimes causing the entirety of one region to come to a grinding halt, as I've had happen more than once.

Thankfully attacks that cause problems for multiple customers are not frequent, no . We are very vigilant about watching our network and protect customers as much as we can -- our quality and consistent performance are two of our trademarks.

[kraze]

I'd say everyone's support becomes less valuable the more an end-user knows about their service. A majority of what we deal with is helping customers understand the service they ordered(adding addons, gamemodes, reading logs..etc). For an end-user which knows all of this and is capable of handling it on their own they'll find our support is less useful to them.

The security upgrade we did on the 3rd did run into a few complications and we were worked very hard to resolve them as quickly as possible, unfortunately due to the nature of this upgrade and the issues that arose they were not simple or easy to resolve. This type of upgrade was also a very time consuming one. In your specific case not all of the servers on your machine were updated properly and we ended up needing to re-trigger the process on the 4th at 1:14 A.M. This is likely why you noticed your server start working out of the blue.

It is true that this process didn't go as smooth as we would have liked, we're very swamped with work and mistake were made.

I decided that I would just grin and bear it, considering these types of things happen quite frequently, I've seen many larger issues than that. However, a day later, the GMod Jailbreak server I had begun running began having the same issue. Once again I was told "Did you enable -condebug to see what is preventing the server from starting? Please let us know."------ THE SAME COPY AND PASTED RESPONSE THREE FULL TIMES.

I'm not sure where you saw this but this wasn't the case. Yes, a few mistakes were made in the request you're referencing and I'm very limited on what I can say publicly due to our privacy policy(though you aren't), but no we didn't copy and paste the exact same message three full times as you're indicating.

It seems you've also only contacted us a couple of times since becoming a customer, from what I can tell the only problem request was the one being referenced above where a few small mistakes were made. Other then that it seems our previous answers were acceptable to you.

I feel as though you're basing the quality of our support and a majority of our review on a single request that didn't go over perfectly, which really isn't fair(especially since you haven't really used our support).

As mentioned above, this process didn't go perfectly and a few mistakes were made. We're very sorry about that and will work to improve.

[Edge100x]

A staffmember brought your requests to my attention and I reviewed them and looked for the downtime and delayed responses that you're referring to here. I don't see the extended back-and-forth that you described and there wasn't anything close to two days of downtime for any of the servers involved; no server was still offline at when you made the post here, either. Please post more specifics and we can discuss them further -- maybe we're looking at the wrong customer.