This article is about vps.net and how I officially loathe them.

What does 30 hours of downtime mean to you? To me, it means it is time to find a new service provider; especially when it is a mission critical web server that hosts real businesses. How am I supposed to justify extended amounts of downtime to my clients, of whom are loosing money every minute the server is down?

Short answer is: I can’t justify it.

From a technical point of view, I understand when the shit hits the fan; things get bad. Though, my biggest gripe is that their support really fuckin’ blows. The story goes like this: I open my ticket, 1 hour later I get a response saying it has been escalated to their Level 3, they’ll get back to me. So, 5 hours later I ask for an update because the shit ain’t working. After another 3 hours of waiting, I decide to report a “disappointing experience”, that way the managers know I am not really that happy and would like to be enlightened.

I wrote to them:

A little more transparency would be appreciated. I understand that there are probably lots of issues being handled, but I am without my server, files, and services; so I have some angry clients.

I would just like to be enlightened on what is going on so I do some damage control.

After that, I decided I wasted enough of my birthday worrying about the fucking server and their lacking support. I went to bed. In the morning I woke to the following from Rus Foster, Managing Director:

Hi
Details are currently being placed at <url to status> regarding this. Currently I’m personally seeing a massive overhall of all aspects of the business which should be complete within the next 1-2 months. This includes the staffing and technical sides of the business. This should gear us up to provide a much better and more fluid service for all customers. I can guarantee you that the issues you are currently seeing will be a thing of the past in the near future.

You know what I though after I read this? I bet you do! Too little too late; shouldn’t they have already had in place a way to provide “much better and more fluid service for all customers”? And seriously, one to 2 months to implement this? Fuck that, my server is down now, what are you going to to fix shit?

Well, it was at this point that I had committed to moving to a new provider, because I don’t fuck around. Since, I had planned on doing this, I left a mildly terse but necessary response to Rus:

Hello Rus,

I hope VPS.net is planning on giving out some service credits or something to the your clients affected by this issue.

It is hard for me to justify 24 hours, and counting, of downtime to my clients.

I can guarantee you, as soon as I get my server back up (if your damn SAN ever finishes syncing) and running. I am transferring out. I have never been so upset by a provider as I am now.

Sweet, sweet justice.

Also, fun fact, when you claim 100% uptime because of “auto-healing” (it’s on their homepage), you better fucking mean it. And I don’t think that they do.

Related posts:

1. Adventures in VPS Providers