Macstadium Reviews

I have been a customer of MacStadium for more than 3 years. I was happy about the customer service overwall until today. Without any formal notification they suspended my service since they decided to Upgrade their datcenter and as part of the upgrade my server will no longer supported. Their support team opened a ticket in their system 15 days prior the upgrade and we get a notification on our e-mail but we have to login in order to read the message. Since we didn t respond to their message they proceed and discoonected the server. I spoke with them and they said there is nothing they can do to bring up the server. (At least for another week until we sent a replacement server) Our business depends on this server. We do have 4 bare servers in different parts of USA and this is by far the most unprofessional Datacenter upgrade that we have seen. Usually we get notifications a week before the update then 2 days before the upgrade and a few hours before the upgrade. I WOULD NOT recommend this service unless you want to store any pictures (something you don t care much about or you would not need it in urgency)

The response time for support is not typically horrendous, but it can be unpredictable. We now have two servers hosted by them and we needed a firewall installed to enable VPN and thwart non-stop DDOS attacks. All they have available is a software appliance, which is not an option for us due to a machine that is currently overusing the installed ram. The appliance requires the use of 2GB of ram we cannot allocate. So we had to upgrade to a much more expensive server.
They don't have the ability to pick a server platform and upgrade it.
They also don't seem to have any clue how to migrate a server.
We tried to migrate an old machine running Mavericks up to a new one running Mojave.
The first attempt failed when they told us at the last minute the servers that came in that day were the wrong configuration.
The second attempt failed when they found they could not migrate from one to the other OS.
The third attempt failed when they could not copy the data.
We had to install from scratch and migrate data manually.
Every time this happened there were hours of downtime and hours of billable time my client had to pay for. To accomplish exactly NOTHING.

This has been a comedy of errors since I became involved in this slow-motion trainwreck almost a year ago.

I discovered my client was paying for a machine with 1TB dual drives in a RAID and 16 GB ram.
What was running was a single 1TB drive and 8GB ram. This is the way it had been configured on delivery. The machine was 3 years old when put into service on this account.
We called them on this and they agreed to upgrade the ram that evening.

They caused the server to become unstable by pulling the plug on it to upgrade the ram without properly shutting down the OS first.

When it came back up, the external backup drive was no longer connected.

A few months later when we were in the migration phase, one day the other missing half of the 1TB RAID suddenly appeared connected. I had never seen it before (in about 6 months).

We ended up with a large credit on the account for all the years of having half the hardware we were paying for.

We were assigned an account rep that was supposed to ensure a timely response to support requests. It seems this rep doesn't respond to email after 5 PM. I can get faster response starting a support ticket myself.

This place is like amateur hour on meth.

I've been a systems administrator and computer wizard for decades. I've designed, built and administered a vast number of Novel, Windows and Mac networks in addition to Linux systems over this time. I was a computer forensic analyst for 6 years. In all my time in this industry, dealing with these people is the worst overall common denominator I have encountered.

We've been working with MacStadium for years. We recently upgraded from 2 Mac minis to a Mac private cloud as our team grew. The folks at MacStadium helped me figure out what infrastructure I needed to support our iOS builds and walked me through setting up automation. My devs love having more reliable builds and it's a lot easier for me to keep everything working. Thanks!

Been a customer for almost five years on a hosted Mac mini that is crucial to our business operations. Asked them if we could upgrade to new hardware... no problem, we just copy your old computer and clone it to the new one. Scheduled it for late night on a weekend minimize disruption but found server was still down 12 hours after scheduled upgrade. OK, well, let s figure out what went wrong and try again next weekend. Exact same thing happened this weekend, except now they won t even acknowledge my messages. Totally left us hanging and we are going into the workweek without our most crucial business tool.

Was hopeful that this service was gonna solve a scalability problem for me. However, their website seemed like a standard sales-funnel-landing-page. So I clicked contact support to see if I could get info on their software and services...

There's no software and no service. From my conversation with their live chat person...

Drew:
If you are using a Mac product we would recommend using screen sharing. If not either RealVNC or TightVNC would work. We host the mini in our data center but we only provide support for hardware and basic network connectivity issues.
Me:
So I'm expected to pay more per year than it would cost me to buy the computer myself ... to have you guys buy the computer and make sure it works and is plugged in. Is there data backup? You don't provide any sort of service or software behind it?
Drew:
We don't storage or provide backups for customer machine. We physically host the minis and troubleshoot when needed.

For what they charge I could improve my internet service, buy a new mac (with insurance), and set it up as a server in my office... every year.

Amazing customer service, I never have to wait more than a minute to get a response on their chat.

Good place to get a Mac Mini if you are developing. Helps me keep my files all in 1 place! Everything is also pretty cheap.