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Burst.net emergency bailout of Dallas

Jonathan

Woohoo
Administrator
Verified Provider
Several BurstNET customers have reported receiving the following email:
 

Dear valued BurstNET Customer,


We have been having major problems with our Dallas, TX hosting provider. We have been working with them diligently over the past week in an attempt to resolve these issues, but we have not reached resolution. As a result, you are at risk for potentially permanent business interruption. We will be closing our Dallas, TX hosting facility immediately and migrating our clients to our flagship facility in Scranton, PA. We understand the severity of this issue for you and your business. Please understand we have done all we can here at BurstNET to extend this deadline.

We advise you to begin transferring all of your important data off of these servers immediately. If you do not have current, up to date external backups of your data, please create these backups. Once the Dallas facility is closed, your servers will be taken offline and data will be unrecoverable. We will not be able to migrate your data during this closeout. 

Once you have completed backing up / migrating your data, we can offer you hosting services in our Scranton/Dunmore flagship facility at our corporate global headquarters. To help ease the burden of this transition, we will include a free month of service.
They've been using CoreXChange in Dallas and few other Corex customers have chimed in a reported they've not had any issues.  It was also posted at one point that Burst has cut their cage size in half recently and their tech hasn't been on-site in a few days.
 
OP is at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1342218
 
Thoughts?
 
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NodePacket

New Member
Verified Provider
I think it may be affiliated with the volume drive issue. Key word may. The fact that they are basically telling the customers to F off and not assisting with migration or switching them over, is terrible and bad business. Overall, It's a wtf situation.
 

DomainBop

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
I think it may be affiliated with the volume drive issue. Key word may. The fact that they are basically telling the customers to F off and not assisting with migration or switching them over, is terrible and bad business. Overall, It's a wtf situation.

I don't think it has anything to do with VD.  This is the 2nd location in the past year where they've done a short notice shutdown/migration (the other was their sale of the UK division).
 

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
What do the email headers look like?
This is the big one.

Someone claims they were called but that they didn't have a chance to confirm the caller ID (which is easily forged).

They still haven't commented on WHT.

Francisco
 

ryanarp

Catalyst Host
Verified Provider
I talked to their tech on-site sometime last week, granted our topic of conversation was about the crazy weather and what not. So no idea anything like this was in the works. Hopefully it is a misunderstanding that can get worked out with the people in charge. I am on-site monday to friday and I haven't noticed anything crazy, so I am sure it is behind the scenes type stuff. 
 

Jonathan

Woohoo
Administrator
Verified Provider
I would think if it was fake that someone from Burst would have called this by now.  I know as a corporate member they get keyword notifications on their name...and "BurstNET Benji" on WHT was looking at the thread earlier today and didn't comment.  At this point, there's not much reason to believe this is false or they'd have commented on it by now.
 

MannDude

Just a dude
vpsBoard Founder
Moderator
So, curious to see what the true cause of this is. Contract dispute? Must have been a big dispute to risk losing hundreds, if not thousands of customers. Even if not lost, they're certainly going to be pissed. Just ask URPad customers how they felt when they got moved from Europe to Dallas, or Seattle to California or from NY to Atlanta. People choose the locations they choose for a specific reason.

Also, if you go through the Burst.net order process... try to order a Dallas VPS. They're all out of stock. So that, combined with the screenshot Fran posted and their silence when they're usually quick to bark (I think a Burst staff member spent an entire 40 hour work week participating in the VolumeDrive thread) leads me to believe this is legit.
 

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
Hello WHT community and BurstNET Clients,

I know this is going to come up so let’s get it in before the posts trail off topic.

Yes, this is a new account; yes this is my first post to WHT.

As part of our client services reform I am the new Director of Client Services here at BurstNET. Go ahead and check our sites news for confirmation if you must. 01/09/2014 burst.net/news.php

Firstly,

I can confirm that this email is in fact an official BurstNET Email.

I cannot stress this enough to all of our clients. If you do not have recent offsite backups get them ASAP. As the email states, we are willing to work with our clients and get them services in our flagship facility in Scranton, PA should they so choose. But the main thing here is getting your data OFF of these servers.

I see some concerns about the Promo Code. We are not here to try and push sales at a time like this; the promo code is simply for tracking and priority purposes. The free month is offered for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately we are not working with clients in the migration of their data due to the immediate severity of the situation. If / when this becomes an option you will be informed.

The situation at hand is that we have been having major problems with our Dallas, TX hosting provider. We have been working with them diligently over the past week in an attempt to resolve these issues, but we have not reached resolution.

You asked, "if we knew a week ahead of time why didn't we tell our clients?" The answer is we did not think it would come down to this.

We are at an impasse now, and our provider can shut us down at any time. This information came to light this morning, and is why the email was sent out so urgently.

Our CSS Department as well as myself have been on the phones nonstop all day calling/working with our clients to try and get through this with them the best as we can. To anyone who has not had a chance to get through to us on the phones, please understand that we are fielding the most calls we can at this time. We apologize for the delays and dropped calls.

Because all of our clients in Dallas are at risk for potentially permanent business interruption, we found it necessary to inform all of our clients that making backups and migrating their data should be top priority at this time. I am repeating myself, but it bears repeating.

We do not have an exact timeline on when the shutdown can happen. Ideally, in a perfect scenario, we would like to make sure it does not happen until we are certain our clients have all of their data. Unfortunately this is just not an option at this time. Our executive management team is working hard to get us this perfect scenario. Either way we cannot sit and wait for the negotiations to pan out.

We sincerely apologize and understand the severity of this issue for you and your business.

If you have any questions:

Open a ticket with BurstNET Customer Service ([email protected]), put Dallas TX somewhere in the subject to help us out, and we will assist you and answer your questions to the best of our ability.

If you have received one of these Dallas TX emails, get your data flowing, and respond to the email keeping the subject in tact with any issues or concerns you may have.

Jamey Bulford,

Director of Client Services.

BurstNet Technologies, Inc.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=8990996&postcount=65

Francisco
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
Burst just bursted.

Overdue.   All these companies went whacky expansion mode in past few years.   Not like they opened own DC or anything.  Kind of like colo/rack build out small companies do in remote DCs.

New Director of Client Services Jamey Bulford confirmed the legitimacy of the closure, email, etc.

Troubling language:

"I cannot stress this enough to all of our clients. If you do not have recent offsite backups get them ASAP."

Not something you should be hearing from an established and "large" provider.

And, essentially, they are giving customers ZERO notice.  Not 7 days, not 30 days, no notice.  Makes runners, VPS fails and others look experienced and kind.
 
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XFS_Duke

XFuse Solutions, LLC
Verified Provider
I got the email earlier today and got a phone call, but a customer of mine now has a server offline due to this... I'm slightly pissed off about this and I will in fact let them know how screwed up this is... They can't do anything to help us, but they expect to keep the money that I paid for my servers? Not a chance in hell... :|
 

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
I got the email earlier today and got a phone call, but a customer of mine now has a server offline due to this... I'm slightly pissed off about this and I will in fact let them know how screwed up this is... They can't do anything to help us, but they expect to keep the money that I paid for my servers? Not a chance in hell... :|
So hold up, the plugs been pulled now?

Francisco
 

Jonathan

Woohoo
Administrator
Verified Provider
So hold up, the plugs been pulled now?


Francisco
I doubt it's been totally nuked yet.  Maybe this is unrelated, or simply due to so many outbound data migrations?

I think if they were totally offline at this point then WHT would be blowing up a lot more.
 

Hxxx

Active Member
Overdue? Seriously? After all the glory honor they throw at themselves?

IMPOSSIBLE
 ​
Such failure cannot happen LOL
 

wlanboy

Content Contributer
No surprise if you look at the offers in Dallas and at the amount of new vps hosters that jump out of nowhere.

Prepare for the second wave.
 
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