Expedient negative review #30455 by -anonymous- on Nov 2015


Expedient got a negative review on
expedient.com
Expedient
1 Allegheny Square, Suite 600
Pittsburgh , PA 15212
US
☎ Phone +1.4123167827
📠 Fax +1.4123167899
Customer review #30455
1.5/10
-anonymous- ( -hidden- )
Time Hosted 2 to 3 years
Global rating
Oh boy, where to begin. Disclaimer: I once worked here. Now I'm a customer.

There are some things that Expedient does very well. For instance, if you're rolling your own hardware, and you're looking for colocation space, then Expedient is pretty good at that. The network engineering team, back when I worked there, was really smart. And I do have to say that we've had nearly 100% uptime since I've been managing the website I manage in their "cloud."

Expedient's "cloud": A couple of guys talk to Dell, get some good pricing on mid-level enterprise gear and decide that if they stand up VMware -- and that's it -- that people will come.

And people do come. When these people come, there's zero monitoring, zero capacity planning and yearly - if that - plans for upgrades, so as all of their gear starts to groan under the weight of trying to run a city's worth of dumb companies' "managed" servers on enough storage and networking gear designed to host an insurance company branch office, everyone suffers. Most people don't notice, because most small/medium biz IT operations are terrible. Expedient's IaaS business model is to make its money from dumb IT managers.

These dumb IT managers, who point-and-click their way through life in 2015, don't script, so they don't know that real clouds provide APIs for self service, and are elastic; to the minute. If you have to call someone or file a ticket to get something done, you're doing it wrong. But I digress.

The privilege of riding on top of "the Expedient cloud" is costly; like 2x as much as AWS, *without* even optimizing your workload at AWS. Storage is prohibitively costly because they can't afford it ($1.05 per GB/mo for 15K spinning disk?! Are you kidding me?!), or just costly and slow (7200RPM NL-SAS at $0.35 per GB/mo) and here's the best part: everything is on a contract, which means that once you buy it, you're stuck with it. Nothing's elastic. And, boy, do those costs add up over time.

Compute costs used to be better than Amazon. Used to be; and that's why we are Expedient customers. Well, that and a contract that I'd have negotiated my way out of, if I made those decisions. The cloud price wars have brought competitors' prices well below what Expedient is charging.

Crucially, support is a joke. Issues that don't get resolved include:

- Admission that the hardware you're sitting on is oversold.
- Admission that the hardware you're sitting on is underpowered.
- Anything more complicated than "add more expensive disk, more expensive compute, reboot this, reboot that."

I have tickets over a year old that are unresolved. Annoyances, mostly, but unresolved, nonetheless.

If you run anything other than Windows, DO NOT buy managed services. Nobody speaks linux.

When you have a complaint, be prepared to provide all the data you can to support it. You won't get any useful data from Expedient. I think they've recently set the granularity of their VMware performance data tables in MS SQL to the minimum setting for all retention periods, in order to "boost performance," which means that for anything older than 20 minutes, they're flying blind. Just get your own monitoring provider.

When you supply the data from your own monitoring system to support your complaint, you may as well have just stuffed it into your front desk lady's mouth and had her try to taste what you're talking about, because nobody is going to read what you present, and if they do make an attempt to read it, they're going to interpret it completely wrong anyway.

Either that, or another engineer will have gone "on-call" by the time you start to get any traction. Then the next engineer won't know what's up, and it's not really the new engineer's fault, either; their ticketing system is extremely unhelpful. IF you can crawl through the useless ticket labels, and IF the search feature on their support portal works, then MAYBE you can have a decent conversation about your issue.

After hours support (outside 8-5) is a joke. There are no qualified engineers (technical, nor human skills) on the phones at night.

There are NO SLAs. We were actually told this.

Self-service:

Nope. What you get is VMware vCenter, with a crippled view of the datacenter. This means you can't import/export VMs. You can't import vApps (do people still use those?). Forget about any PowerCLI; won't work. No vCloud, or vCAC, or whatever they call that nowadays.

Monitoring:

Nope; not even of their own gear. The only things I've ever received from them are SAN metrics from their EqualLogic SAN manager, and maybe some base-level VMware stats from vCenter. No vCOps, No VEEAM. No customer portals.

Other services:

Their managed backups are agent-based; no fancy-pants volume level backups here, folks! If you have a terabyte of data to back up, then forget it. They're going to try to drag your data out of your machine, across the wire. Backups were the first thing we dumped, and we never even got an apology that they couldn't do it, nor any service credits for backup jobs that never completed.

We asked for a simple point-to-point VPN, and we were quoted $475 per month with an exorbitant setup fee. We politely declined.

Now, this is a very negative view of their IaaS offerings, but I have to reiterate that I've had nearly 100% uptime on Expedient. That reliability comes from hyper-conservative operation of each datacenter's "cloud" to a prescribed standard, which is WAY out of date. Maybe 7 years ago it was enough to stand up vCenter and allow people to use it, but today it's not even close to sufficient.

73 out of 80 users found this review to be helpful!

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