Now The Cherry On The Cake

Sorry for the essay. I feel the need to tell you the whole story about this company. Let's start at the beginning. I am part of a friends group that enjoys long-lasting ark plays. This involves renting servers for many years.

For a server cluster that lasted three and a half year, I was the host and paid upwards of PS80 - PS120 per monthly. I never missed a payment during this period. That's more than PS3K in cash that I will never see again.

The website's UI is very dated and difficult to use. Also, the mod upload page is very annoying. Every mod upload brings up a prompt to update the server.

The general settings page is quite good, very user friendly which is what sold me on them in the beginning. Now, the support was better than other server hosts. The process is create a ticket explaining your issue and await a response, no livechat which is a big issue.

The response time would vary depending upon when the ticket is created. If the ticket is created during office hours in EU then the ticket will be resolved within one hour. Now jumping to the present, response times have jumped to between an hour and 3 hours. Customer service skills have been completely lost and all you get are very short and (mostly) condescending responses.

My most frequent problem was that my game/mods would not update. I would run the update but the server wouldn't. I don't have much knowledge about server management, but I know that there's something they're doing that is causing this problem. Because it happened a lot. Server issues would arise from every game update, and even a few mod updates.

So I had to deal with multiple server outages and a lot of waiting for support tickets to be answered, which slowly got longer and worse over 3 years.

Combined with a complete server outage which lasted over 24 hours a few months ago, with no compensation to speak of. While the amount of money that could be compensated would seem trivial, it's still not enough to even offer an apology. To top it all, I had to open a ticket with support in order to find out if there was a problem at their data centre in the UK. I was promised updates that never happened.

I hope you feel the same pain as I did when I dealt with this trash company.

Now the cherry on the cake. I was having financial problems, money not transferring to pay the server, etc. I screwed up, hey I'm human.

However, one of the servers was up in renewal (which happens also to be one the most worked upon) many builds/tames Ark which involve a lot more playtime and work.

I forgot to pay it. This is a common problem as it's usually all automated. Anyway server remained unpaid and after a certain amount of time Gportal deletes it. There were no emails to warn you or attempts to contact you. The topper has no recovery. Many years of hard work have been wasted for no payment in 7 days.

When I queried the deletion they responded with a crass "well you should have backed it up". Their own backup system doesn't work. If you want to try and work around there trash support system and look in forums they are all in only German. There is no translation beyond what your web browser can handle.

So TL/DR hosted server cluster for over 3 years with Gportal, got gradually worse over over that time, mostly due to the awful support provided. Final straw was when I failed to pay one of the servers in my cluster. Without warning or recovery, it was completely deleted. Support completely blamed me when I confronted them. Combined with there very poor communication, relatively high price, poor UI for the most part and lack of an English forum leaves me with the opinion that Gportal is awful and a recommendation to not purchase a single server from them.