Tag Archives: hosting

Over 30 Hours of Downtime

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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.

Adventures in VPS Providers

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I thought I would take a few minutes and write about my disastrous trip though VPS Provider territory. About four years ago, about the time I started coming up with more ideas for sites as well as acquiring hosting accounts, I realized that the slow reseller hosting account I had was no longer going to cut it. Since I had my business, I decided I would pick up a couple servers off eBay and host them on my business line located at my grandpas house; smart move (not really). Things went well for a while, using some open source control panel on the boxes, but as it turns out home-office internet just can’t hang in terms of the quality and speed of data center.

After a year of struggling with modem issues, router lockups, a couple DoS attacks, I decided to look for alternatives. The issue was that my business was not making enough money to justify some $150-250/month hosting cost with a dedicated server. Well, behold the almighty VPS; cheaper, less management overhead (compared to hosting servers myself), and generally easier to work with.

The first VPS provider I hooked up with was VPSLink; they had prices that I could fit into my budget especially if I paid for the year upfront. So I took a stab in the dark and went for it. Throughout the year, I had a couple small issues; issues you would expect from time to time, no complaints. Everything was peachy until VPSLink slyly announced they had been acquired; I mean they were cryptic; I didn’t even get the email until a week after it initially went out. So there was supposed to be some sort of pre-planned and announced transition. Well, that didn’t really work out too well for quite a few people, me included. I once again never got an email until the transition was finished, with my new username and password. It is lucky I didn’t have any mission critical sites at that point.

I did quite a bit of research on the acquiring party and noticed a trend of VPS provider acquisitions and the looming loss of customers due to poor support and lack of professionalism. To clarify, I read horror stories about them. I decided it was time to move somewhere else, and I still wanted a bargain.

The second provider I found was IntoVPS, their prices were a tad higher but I decided you do get what you pay for. I signed up, this time on a month-to-month basis, just in case my luck followed me. To shorten the story a bit, I used IntoVPS for about 3 or 4 months. The server performance was sub-par, as if one of the nodes was just screwing it up for the rest of us. After trying to battle with their support about constant load issues, (1-minute average was at 12.0+ every night, I didn’t know that was possible), I decided to move somewhere else.

After those trials/tribulations, I ended up at VPS.NET (Affiliate Link), I now pay about double what I was with the above two providers, but the quality of service is at a minimum 200% better. I think I have had one small issue in the 8 or so months I have been there, but small issues are expected from time to time, their support is quick and helpful. There interface and scalability impressed me from the beginning, I think it is pretty cool that you can in-place upgrade your VPS without having to contact sales or support.

Oh, and apparently you do get what you pay for.