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Dedispec Complaint: Slow Website, Subpar Hardware, Bad Support
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Dedispec Complaint: Slow Website, Subpar Hardware, Bad Support

lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

Hey guys,

I really really dislike making bad reviews, but I thought I might as well warn others.

I run a small company that specializes in GPUs, particularly fully managed infra services for AI/ML companies by reselling other companies' servers and adding support. My company also runs like a dozen racks worth of servers now, so I generally sometimes know what I'm talking about.

In February of this year, I found Dedispec. Curious, I signed up for this server. Their pricing at $104/month for a 2070 Super GPU was below market rate for other suppliers, so I thought I might as well try it.

My Server:
i7-6700K 32GB + 960GB SSD + RTX 2070 SUPER + Preconfig

Complaint 1: Slow Website

Their WHMCS is really slow. It makes filing tickets, paying invoices, etc a pain. Literally 5 seconds. Try it: https://www.dedispec.com/client/index.php

Complaint 2: Subpar Hardware

On my tests, I've been only able to get the equivalent of PCIE 3.0 x4 bandwidth to the 2070 Super GPU. For reference, most providers (like stuff I personally own and colo) run 3.0 x16 bandwidth or 4.0 x8 for any 20-series or later GPUs (like NVIDIA 2070 or better GPUs). I couldn't get higher than x4 bandwidth in my tests, which makes it unsuitable for machine learning and even gaming. Unless your mining, you can't utilize the full GPU. I'm pretty sure they were running x4 risers or worse.

But, given how high mining profitability soared, I hosted a cryptocurrency miner customer to cover costs and used the CPU and disk for development needs. Eventually, I sponsored @Neko's Ultramarine Linux on this server.

I wasn't pleased with the server, but it was providing value for the money I was paying.

Two days ago, my server went down (from what I can tell, it is an issue with the SATA SSD being underpowered, probably due to some bad PSU). There have been sporadic downtimes too, according to my UptimeRobot. Ok, not terrible. Done data recovery before. But this time, it's different:

Complaint 3: Bad Support

Let me preface this by saying that at any other LET provider, I would understand bad support. Over the past year though, I've paid them $1144 for this single server, so I would expect something more personalized than repeated generic messages. I also understand that it's during the holidays, so I won't complain on the response time.

Here is a screenshot of my interactions over the past two days:
https://i.imgur.com/heqAOrQ.png

I have removed the names, IP, and root passwords to keep privacy.

  1. Initially, I start off mentioning that the server is down. They say that they "will check" and respond to that back 2 hours later with an update that it is down and that they rebooted it
  2. The server is still down (they could have pinged it after the reboot), and I let them know. They boot into SystemRescueCd
  3. The particular version of SystemRescueCd running was super old and only had disk fixing utilities (e2fsprogs) from 2014. I needed more recent ones that could repair LVM volumes that use different metadata. On a side note, they are very rigid and don't allow for any custom ISOs to be installed, only their templates (which are outdated -- I was running Proxmox and their only option was v5, which is past EOL, and Proxmox is on v7 right now). Their template forced the usage of LVM volumes, so I couldn't use ext4, which I am used to. This outdated version of e2fsprogs meant that I couldn't work on the LVM volumes, and I had trouble installing the newer versions onto the SystemRescueCd too (make failed). I asked for them to use a newer version of SystemRescueCd
  4. They reply again with the same generic "Your service has been booted into system rescue mode" message with the same old SystemRescueCd CD, obviously they didn't understand my message asking for a newer version.
  5. I reply again, and they say "We will look into this shortly" and end up booting into SystemRescueCd for the third time, still using the old version and not the latest.
  6. I reply again, and the first response that isn't canned has a support staff using a heading-sized font to say "Unfortunately, we don't have the latest version [of SystemRescueCd]"

To recap:

  • They've booted up the same version of SystemRescueCd 3 times, with the same 2014 release of e2fsprogs, evidently showing that they can't read my ticket responses
  • They refuse to use a newer version of SystemRescueCd, so I can't get my customer's data out
  • Support replies are canned and impersonal

Ultimately I feel like trying to get them to help is like trying to get a refound from cociu.

So, with these three straws, I think I'm done using them. I already submitted a cancellation request even though I'm still 2 weeks out from renewal. Thoughts/feedback?

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