JasmeowTheCat
Impulsive advertising practices, deceptive discussions, disrespecting competitors and no SLA/poor TOS.
Unfortunately, this isn't going to be a good review for SurfHosting. Let's start with the marketing tactics. It's extremely impulsive by the marketing team who consists of mainly "alissagearht" and "kyleejohnson" who join MC networks on the social media platform Discord and go through the complete rules and onboarding, just to contact the owner and push SurfHosting's business offerings. I also want to make it clear that this is not against the "Keep private information private" section of the ruled guidelines of TrustPilot. Both these staff team members are publicly known in the Discord lounge and can be pinged for their usernames. It's unfortunate they use their full names, but I believe this to be a requirement of SurfHosting. Next, let's discuss a potential pathological liar in the team. On numerous occasions, one of the founders of the company has been caught lying to potential clients by stating that another client moved to them from another bad company, which is completely false, using this as a potential persuasion point for the client joining them. Additionally, they’ve attempted to persuade this potential client by copying snippets of one of the announcements written by me inside a clients Discord showing that this “bad company” had faulty hardware at the time. I fully understand the hustle of trying to obtain clients, but it’s truly disrespectful to them and a complete lie as Surf did not have the full context. Finally, the founder in question states “You know it’s a little rude to screenshot a conversation without asking” when the potential client informs the “bad company” of their disrespect and responds with “I know but I don’t like slander”; The founder then states: “It’s not slander” & “Slander is making a false statement”. Why do I mention this? Well, it’s ironic really, as they stated previously “We just had someone switch from us to them.” – No, you didn’t, as shown above. Finally, one of our own clients had an outage at 17:26 and had service restored at 01:01 the next day, so around 7.5 hours. This was due to a faulty motherboard and that needed replacing. Upon asking for a potential compensation for the downtime, this was the response received: “We understand the hassle it’s caused for your client but it’ll sadly still be a no. The servers are being rented out to ClientName at a huge loss to our company, while we appreciate your business we don’t deem this downtime significant enough for compensation.” What I wanted to make clear here is that SurfHosting purchase the hardware outright then co-locate it with their partners, so a massive overhead is created with a ROI (Return On Investment) of over a year, so a client leaving them or refunds/compensation cannot be completed. For the secondary founder to state “A huge loss to our company”, this isn’t the clients fault, it’s yours (Surf’s). Not sure why we have to deal with the burden of 7.5 hours outage cost due to a fault you know very well happens with the brand of motherboards you order. Before stating this is inaccurate, this did include a few hours for the upstream provider to reply, out of Surf’s control, but this did include Surf’s responses also. I want to make you aware that there is no SLA (Service Level Agreement) set by SurfHosting so refunds and compensation are at the discretion of them unfortunately, so I wish you luck pursuing this avenue if you need to take action. Please take this into consideration if you wish to purchase a dedicated system with this company. They also state 24/7 on their website support, which is completely inaccurate. Now, no company can do this, so we fully support it taking 30 minutes to an hour for a response, but 8+ hours during night hours? No, that’s not 24 hours 7 days a week. Note: This review is written on behalf of my client and from their system administrator. This includes the views of my team as a whole and the clients personal wishes. We've worked with several hosting providers over the past 5-6 years, and unfortunately Surf falls extremely below the belt. EDIT: They have flagged this review for "containing defamatory content" on 18/07/24 UK @ 21:22 UTC. This was proven false by TrustPilot, obviously, on 19/07/24 UK @ 07:59 UTC. EDIT 2: Asked for more information on 24/07/24 UK @ 14:45 UTC. I am presuming this is to attempt to take the review offline with providing false genuine customer info. Additionally, I am expecting this review to be flagged by the team for numerous reasons, as done so to other 1 star reviews on their TrustPilot. Please take the time to click on "See all" on the main page and scroll to the bottom to check the flagging activity as 3 flagged reviews remain. Feel free to reach out to JasmeowTheCat (Discord) if you wish to have more information or a discussion into their abysmal business practices.
Response from Surf HostingJul 18, 2024
We do offer 24-hour support, however, our main hours as stated are 9:00 am - 11 pm EST. While we are typically available outside of these hours, responses may be delayed until support hours resume. Your client's situation was also very particular considering the circumstances and we notified you of that as well. We also have a clear refund policy which you can see in our TOS, what you have said is very misleading. We offered that specific deal with your client as an exchange of services, we offered your client our services at a discounted rate in exchange for promotion, however, your client failed to keep their side of the bargain yet we still maintained our promotional rate. Our representatives look for suitable servers that would make good partners after engaging with their community and playing on their servers. The practices you claim are not an accurate representation of how we do things at Surf. We sincerely apologize for the negative experience you had with Surf Hosting. We are committed to providing transparent and ethical business practices, and we take your feedback seriously. Rest assured that we will address the issues you have raised internally to ensure a better customer experience moving forward. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.