SoftLayer Cloud Hosting Review. Softlayer vs. Digital Ocean vs. Rackspace vs. Amazon AWS Cloud Hosting Comparison.
My experience with SoftLayer cloud hosting by IBM was terrible. The server was slow and confirmed this with several stress tests by our server tech. Worst we have ever seen.
I can't believe they charge 'premium' prices for this service, because the performance was by far the worst out of the 15-20 hosting companies we have used over the years.
I've never experienced such a nightmare company before in my life. Constant downtime, they even accidentally deleted one of my SQL databases, which had no backups! This resulted in several weeks of lost work.
Support is extremely unhelpful and slow. I tried to cancel our server due to the amazingly terrible performance, horrible support and extremely high price. But they would not allow me to, they keep rebilling me for a server I've already cancelled. I cancelled a full 48 hours in advance but due to their own incompetence, I still was billed for the next period.
A typical trait of a scamming cloud hosting company is having a fee for trying to do a chargeback with your credit card:
"4.6 Refunds & Disputes. All fees paid for Services are non-refundable. If You believe that any fee for the Services is incorrect, Your exclusive remedy is to seek SLA credits by opening an accounting ticket within 30 days of Your receipt of the disputed bill. Any charges not disputed by You within 30 days of receipt will be deemed conclusively accepted by You. You may not chargeback any credit card payments to SoftLayer and any such chargeback will result in an additional payment to SoftLayer of up to $500, which You agree is a reasonable estimate of SoftLayer’s additional administrative costs. You are responsible for any fees and costs (including, but not limited to, reasonable attorneys’ fees, court costs and collection agency fees) incurred by SoftLayer in enforcing collection of fees."
^ This is what one of their employees sent to me after saying I'm starting a chargeback dispute with my bank. A $500 fee for making a chargeback dispute. Sounds like a legit company.
I'd recommend (((competitors' names redacted))) as a better cloud hosting alternative to SoftLayer by IBM cloud hosting. Their servers are much better, support are responsive and care.