beinguseless

I wanted to write up a short and sweet review of an experience we had with VitalStream (www.vitalstream.com), now part of InterNap (www.internap.com), in case someone is doing searching about their CDN (Content Delivery Network) and streaming services before they sign up.

During the spring of ’07 a company I’m affiliated with began to offer flash streaming services for their clients.  We looked at a few companies and in the end choose VitalStream because the quality, service, and products were right up our alley.  They sounded great and and we were off and running with their service in just a couple days.  Responses from the sales rep were always friendly and timely with a thorough answer.  When we received our invoice there was a mistake and made a call to him to get it worked out.  One call turned into two, then three, as well as emails.  We were given the contact information of someone in accounting to help us out and after numerous calls and emails there was not response.  We then in turn contacted our representative again and was given another person.  We promptly received the same treatment when we contacted the first person in accounting.  By this point the problem has turned to be quite annoying for us and unfortunately it was the tip of the iceberg.

Skipping forward to late summer/early fall and the transition to InterNap began and we started to experience random outages, and while the technical support dept was good to talk with on the phone I got the distinct impression they were over burdened and when an email was sent with a question or status update more often than not they never responded to it.  This was even after they asked us to send an email for them to follow up with from a conversation.  At one point the outages became really bad and did receive some great support at that time with phone calls back on status updates.  After some digging with questions the problem had to do with the content not making to all of their delivery servers. The transition as a whole between the two companies for their flash streaming and CDN network was chaotic and were becoming very nervous with them.  At one point while calling about one outage we were told the problem was related to various typo’s on the server which took down part of their service, and was given quick and vague excuses to what we felt was to get us off the phone.  From that point we began to sought out alternate providers we know can maintain a quality service.

Jumping forward again to present day, we’re about to switch providers and still trying to resolve numerous billing issues which we’ve been blown off, passed around, and many ignored emails and voice mails in addition to what was previously mentioned.  It is to the point that we will only get some form of direct answer or progress if they happen to pick up the phone when we call and spell out precisely what they should do while on the call.  The whole relationship has been a nightmare and is the worst experience I have encountered with a company both professionally from another business and personally with a service provider (comcast, verizon, etc).

To be fair to InterNap these dealings have been with VitalStream and their CDN network in particular. InterNap is only mentioned because of the acquisition that occurred.  As far as InterNap’s other services and network I have no comment or opinion on them since they were not used.