I cannot believe I have been forced to write this, however I feel it is absolutely necessary to warn YOU, the possible Centova Cast customer of the trouble you're about to get yourself into by clicking that "Order Now button"
Well, according to their website
Centova Cast is the world's most advanced Internet radio stream hosting control panel.
Manage a single station with ease, or automate a stream hosting business with thousands of clients. Centova Cast can handle virtually any stream hosting scenario!
BUT, there's one scenario it can't handle.. A customer needs some support, and expects a response in less than 10 days! More about this below in the Centova Cast sucks section.
First, I need to give you a bit of background information on Centova Cast, only for the purpose really of optimizing this page for the search engines etc.. This page really needs to contain a lot of information about Centova Cast, so that we rank highly, and can WARN people about buying into this terrible, un-supported, piece of shit control panel.
So, if you want to skip the Centova Cast "Bloat" and get straight to my rant about this, please click: Centova Cast
Centova Cast is an internet radio stream hosting control panel. It includes Auto DJ, shoutcast and icecast server control, and playlist scheduling. Some of the features it boasts are:
So, Centova Cast can do all this. - It's a shame they can't offer a little bit of customer service now and then eh?
Centova Cast "support" is among the worst I have ever encountered! Here, they've got people literally throwing their money at them, and the guys at Centova are just shrugging it off like they're not interested in making another sale. Tickets go unanswered for days, and don't even get acknowledged as existing. It seems as far as Centova believe "Once we have your money, you're on your own!"
This all basically came about when myself and a friend decided to start our own Internet radio station. We only have a few presenters, but we would like to stream music round the clock. Sounds pretty simple.
Having heard of Centova Cast before and knowing what it was capable of, I placed an order for a single station license. In fact, I knew this was the software I wanted, so I went ahead and got the full 12 month subscription. So i paid on Wednesday 6th April at 11AM UK Time. My payment was approved right away, and minutes later the "Awaiting payment" status in the Centova Cast client area was updated to "Payment Received!"..
GREAT i thought! I can get it all installed when I get home from the office, and get my friend uploading the tracks later on. "We're cooking on gas people!".. If only...
By midnight that same day my license was still "Pending Approval".. Figuring that i would give them 24 hours, I waited patiently.. NOTHING.. another 24 hours later... STILL NOTHING. Only after posting about it on a popular forum, was my Centova Cast license finally approved..
Confidence shaken, I decided that it would be best to hold off on launching a PayPal dispute, and try the software.. I set to it that night, after the missus had gone to bed. So, I SSH to my server, download the installation package, and get to work.
I've been managing *nix servers for many years, so making sure all the dependencies were in place, making sure the required ports were allowed through iptables, was not a problem. The install went without a hitch, and i proceeded to head to my squeaky clean install of Centova
Everything looked okay on the surface, until I realised that I was unable to create servers using the panel. Googling the error, it seems a restart of the Centova Cast control panel was required. So, i ran the script to restart the server and was greeted with a skin crawling message
Starting Centova Cast: cc-control License validation failed
I got this horrible feeling in my stomach, and my balls!! - Now i'd have to try out Centova Cast support. So I open a support ticket and wait.. and wait... AND WAIT!! AND WAIT!!!
As I write this, my ticket has been "New" for 5 whole days!! 5 Days without a single response, considering im paying for a license, I expect some support in some capacity. I'd like to sign up to the forums and see if i can get some help from the guys there, but unfortunately it seems that the Centova Cast forums are broken, where they do not send out activation emails.. It's not only me experiencing this. Google it!
After a little digging, a few things have got me worried
UPDATE: I had a response from support, which didn't solve the problem, so I thank them for trying, but alas. When telling them the issue wasn't fixed, my ticket has once again, continued to be ignored. It's now been in the queue for nearly two weeks!!
And now for some strong words
Centova Cast - You really need to sort your fucking act out, you bunch of scamming, dirty, fuckwits.. HOW CAN YOU treat your customers like this? It is absolutely dispicable
If you have any comments on this page, or you would like more information, please email me at djeuphoriauk [ A T ] hotmail [D O T] com
Oh, and blinchy!!!! I'd love to hear from you.. Cockwipe.