SpringRacks review - Bad experience and downtime

I came across SpringRacks on reddit while I was looking for a hosting provider to host a Minecraft server. It was recommended to me by someone named Brandon on reddit. He seems nice and helpful online. But little did I know, Brandon was affiliated with SpringRacks as their staff member since 2022. While he did claim he was a former customer of SpringRacks to me later on, this still felt a little deceptive because I made my decision based on what I thought was an unbiased customer recommendation. He essentially lured me into SpringRacks.

As any person would, I did do a little research on them. Brandon claimed that SpringRacks was a verified host and I only found good things said about them so on. They also claimed to have "over 5,000 happy customers worldwide", but contrary to what their website says, my invoice has more truth than that claim. Their billing area shows the "Invoice number: ____" and "Customer number: ____". But both of my numbers were in the mid 2000 range, far from the "5000" that was boasted on their main page:

Those things I just pointed out should have been my first red flags. I can't blame anyone but myself for being so naive about SpringRacks.

I bought a server from them last March. Their network to say the least was unstable and unreliable half of the time. It had some rubber banding lag felt by all my players, so it's not my own internet connection. But the couple minutes of random downtimes were the worst offenders. In the past, their website and panel were also down for days in a row so I couldn't access my panel or their website:

They mostly relied on discord to communicate. Ironically, their discord server is more reliable than their website and hosting service itself.

By the 8th of May, my server has gone down for a really long time. Their dal02 node was down for almost 2 months. They took 2 months to repair the dal02 server motherboard, and we couldn't even get a backup of our Minecraft world if we wanted to during that time. Can you believe it? I'm also shocked to learn they store server backups on the same server. Aren't backups supposed to be stored offsite in case something catastrophic happens on the server itself?

They were being very communicative in their discord server about this incident, but they were being a little dishonest too. While they did give updates, I don't like how their staff handled this situation and the fact that they only used discord as a platform to provide status updates. They kind of lied trying to get our hopes up in the announcements channel that the server will be back up soon, but it was just done to stall us further. 1 week became 2 weeks, and 1 month became 2 months so on. Like I appreciate the honesty, but it just looks like they don't know what they're doing. How can they order the wrong replacement part? They claimed to order the wrong motherboard part that doesn't fit, drilled a hole in the case, and it ultimately didn't work. Is this some sort of joke?

Oh and this was what Brandon said after the downtime:

That's like saying "We chose a business model we can't properly execute, but please believe us, it's actually an advantage." Regardless of whether they own the hardware or not, that's not a plus of "owned hardware" because a 2 month repair time for a simple motherboard replacement is completely unacceptable for any good hosting provider.

While they did compensate everyone for the downtime, I do not see any reason to stay with SpringRacks so I cancelled. It's like paying for a server and not being able to use it for 2 months not to mention all the past network instabilities. And no thanks, I do not want a new server on another node when all of our data is on the old server that's down. All my players also lost interest in my server and that's something you can't compensate.

They also cleverly cleared their history for their dal02 node on their not-so-honest status page to hide their past downtimes. Status pages are supposed to be transparent in the past too and not just the present time. Fortunately, I snapped a screenshot of it when it was showing 69% uptime:

During the 2 months that my server was down, I started to research further about SpringRacks and my perception of them being a good provider has changed:

When you search SpringRacks on Google, one of the first few results is a post on reddit that asks "Is springracks a good host?" This post is very suspicious because there isn't a single comment on that post except for Brandon's comment, which has like 6 downvotes (You can guess why) Like what happened to the rest of the comments? The person I least wanna hear from is Brandon from SpringRacks himself. So I dug further and a nice redditor told me that they were deleting negative comments against SpringRacks. He snapped a screenshot just before this negative comment was deleted. This was one of the deleted comments on that post, describing the downtime issues in Dallas:

Brandon presents himself as helpful on reddit, but it's just part of his sales pitch. He warns people to "avoid summer hosts" and scam providers, then conveniently directs them to the subreddit's discord where SpringRacks happens to be listed as a verified host. The irony is that he's warning people about the exact type of problematic host that SpringRacks actually is:

And contrary to the claims Brandon made that SpringRacks has been operating since 2021, I discovered that SpringRacks didn't formally existed until the summer of 2022.

The first message in their discord server was this announcement on July 2022. Timothy claimed to be opening a new hosting company and looking for staff members, so SpringRacks was barely anything back then and their website probably didn't even existed. I assume they've informally operated on discord at the start, but I wouldn't count that. Selling hosting services on discord doesn't count in my opinion.

From my previous screenshots, I would like to make it known that "deleted_user_i6d27e29jd75" is Brandon's old discord account. Brandon also happened to have "deleted" his old discord account and made a new one recently? Like why? Is he trying to hide his past involvements with SpringRacks? Notice I put "deleted" in quotes because that's not what deleted accounts look like on discord. He didn't delete his account but instead he changed his username to "deleted_user_i6d27e29jd75". I still see those announcements he made on that "deleted" account dating back to 8/2022, which contradicts any claims that Brandon wasn't involved with SpringRacks from the start.

These people do not know how to properly manage a hosting company. SpringRacks is basically run by unqualified kids who don't know what they're doing. I believe the owner is Timothy who's currently 17 years old probably because he put "Level 17" on his discord profile. I also often see Brandon playing Roblox shown on his discord activity, so that's what he's been busy gaming about instead of fixing server issues. For all these reasons, I would not recommend SpringRacks.