BEWARE IDWS!!

[Beaver]

IDWS / Altonet has failed my business and cost us dearly in terms of time, money and business reputation.

Technically the IDWS service is unsatisfactory and unreliable with a server that consistently crashes at weekends and after hours. We experienced their technical back-up and after hours support as being absent to non-existent.

Their customer service is well below par, even by South African standards and the attitude of the senior management is defensive, unapologetic and openly derisory when clients pose legitimate complaints.

After weeks of traumatic dealings with t[:(!]heir senior management, who took no accountability for their failure or were totally dismissive of our concerns and complaints, we made a business decision to transfer our domain and database.

At this point IDWS became highly obstructive and seemed to take a deliberately vengeful approach by delaying the process at every turn. The transfer of our domain was deliberately delayed by them for no reason, with resultant loss of business for us.

A simple transfer was delayed repeatedly for over a week. It amounted to being held to ransom by a band of cowboys who pose as a professional outfit.

I have nothing good to say about this company, their service, their professionalism or their integrity and can only hope this letter will serve to warn the unsuspecting.

[loosecannon]

please post up there website so we can look furhter into this and find out more.

never should bad service be accepted ...

[Dean_Henstock]

Agrred. An as an owner of an ISP, we also try and give customers the best service possible, so this would be intrested to read about ?

<font color="red"><font size="1">If you fill up a station wagon with data tapes and drive to capetown you could transfer 10000 GB in 11 hours, and it would cost you R 500 in petrol, Thats the kind of internet I wanna see !</font id="size1"></font id="red">

[Scandium]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by loosecannon</i>
<br />please post up there website so we can look furhter into this and find out more.

never should bad service be accepted ...
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">


Here is their website, thanks for the heads-up Beaver.

http://www.idws.com/

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away
if your car could go straight upwards."
--Sir Fred Hoyle

[TheRabbi]

there are always two sides to the story.

how does this post fit into "General ADSL discussions"?

[kaspaas]

I have to disagree with theRabbi:

There are not two sides to a story, there are at least three: Mine, yours and the truth. Usually some more twists are added hiding the truth :-)



South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

[playkiller no.2]

Rpm will see if it belongs here or in the off topic section

Google is so smart,I typed in Hellkom and guess what google said

Don`t you mean.....&lt;insert evil laugh&gt;
TELKOM!

[Karnaugh]

As a dialup ISP they have been nothing but great to my clients.

I dont really agree to defamating a company over one instance of bad service, as was said there are two sides to a story.

- Colin Alston
colin@slipgate.za.net

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett

[RealXchange]

A few years ago I had a single domain hosted with IDWS and often would need to call them and speak to their technical support. The guys name was Robert and he was as friendly as you could expect from a guy doing all the work. Their servers seemed fast enough and I never had any technical issues. After a while they seemed to have hired an additional support guy to help Robert, since on occasion i would phone their 0860 number and be greeted by a new voice. All seemed well. Over time I left the domain dormant and wasnt really using it, but suddenly received mail from a new bunch..Altonet...telling me I was over disk space usage etc. I thought, who is Altonet? and didnt take much notice. After receiving the same automated mail over a month or two I realised....IDWS must have had some form of management change ? In the pre-Altonet days I signed up a few clients on IDWS ISDN services, and the feedback was that their speeds were very good for gaming. Currently I no longer use them, since we're able to offer more for less. IDWS were a bit expensive and you had to pay for every little extra, which we add in for free. I'd be interested to hear who Altonet are, and if there was a management change/buyout at IDWS?

Regards
Dean

www.hostingresellers.co.za
www.realxchange.co.za/resellerplan.html

[DFantom]

IDWS was actually a company called Maxtin Corporation CC. Altonet is the same management but now a pty ltd. The offical reason for the change, was so that they could get BEE to keeps their VANS licence (the contract between the two owners of the CC made it impossible to have any BEE ownership). Unoffically there was talk of it being done to liquidate the financially screwed company with as little ramifications as possible on the owners.

Oh and Robert left IDWS last year July to move on to better things.

[antowan]

Hi

The topic has nothing to do with ADSL or broadband. I moved it here. Will see if we can open a general rant and rave section on the forum. Seems like people are pretty divided on this one. The addy for the company in question is this: http://www.idws.co.za/

Regards
Ant

[DFantom]

Divided on IDWS sucking or divided on if to have a rant/rave forum?

if it is rant/rave forum, they generally turn into a flame war zone.
If it's IDWS sucking, if you think otherwise then you are an idiot ;)

[AndreSC]

I'm hosting some sites on Altonet's linux servers for the last year or so, just noticed them down, they came back online about an hour after logging a call.

Their MySQL server crashed over a long weekend recently and was only remedied after said long weekend. This all concerns me a bit, how do other ISP's compare? Especially in terms of up-time and after-hours support vs. cost?

All in all I've been mostly satisfied with IDWS/altonet but would like to know which SA ISP are recomende and which to avoid. Are their any local ISP review sites? (except maybe for the billing system which makes me feel like an idiot sometimes):confused:

[srick]

I have been hosting emails with them for past year and regularily their servers go down for days at a time. Luckily my emails were for my personal use but I pity those who host their business emails there - I have now shut down all my accounts as this is spiraling out of control. I also had a mate of mine hosting there and after 3 months he closed off all his accounts and moved to another ISP where to this day he is extremely happy. These people also move your mail from server to server without even telling you of the configuration changes until you have to call in - speak to dumb techies (not Robert) - and then by some miracle you get the right config. settings which has cost you a few days of loss of emails. Even though their costs are enticing, beware for this is a company once in control of your domain will assure you 0% client services (their attitude stinks!!!). Obviously there are 2 sides to any story but I have given them chance over and over again to rectify their mistakes to no avail.

So my advice to all you guys, do not go altonet/ idws route whatever you do!!!

[ghoti]

I have to disagree with theRabbi:

There are not two sides to a story, there are at least three: Mine, yours and the truth. Usually some more twists are added hiding the truth :-)
.

Unless you are telkom. then you have 50 diffferent ones depending on who in management is doing the talking.