When I posted my interview with Terry Myers about cloud hosting, I wasn’t really prepared for the backlash that would come in on that post. Quite a few people responded and a lot of them weren’t too happy. On top of that, there were several instances of downtime in both the AMS and several US clouds over the last week. As you might know, I’m an affiliate for VPS.net, so I get a bit better every time they get a new client through me, but I was seriously debating whether that was still a wise choice. In fact, some people were telling me that I should stop recommending them altogether.
Now, I’ve been with VPS.net for quite some time, from their very beginning in fact, and I’ve always liked the service and the people working there. I’m not one to easily leave and on top of that, having had issues at other hosting companies before, I know that things are bound to go wrong at some point. So, I decided to confront my contacts at VPS.net and “talk to the boss”. That boss is someone I hadn’t spoken to before, Rus Foster. Rus has recently (7 weeks ago) joined VPS.net as their new Managing Director, although he’s been in the VPS business for years, replacing Nick Nelson, who’s gone higher up in the UK2 Group.
As you can see, I asked him some, I think, rather tough questions. I was happy with the answers I got, and must say that the changes he’s talking about below on the AMS cloud have indeed had a very positive effect on my yoast.nl server.
Interview with Rus Foster, MD of VPS.net
Hi Rus, thanks for agreeing to this interview. My goal is to shed some light on what is currently causing all the issues around VPS.net. First of all, it seems as though every day, somewhere in the world, a VPS.net SAN dies. Some locations have more issues than others, but in general, it’s been quite bad lately. What’s causing that? And, more importantly, what will you do about it?
Start with the easy questions eh? Nothing like whats your favourite colour? :)
Seriously though yes there have been SAN issues on some of our newer clouds.
Some of the SANS in multiple locations have been showing instability issues caused by the software running on them. As such we are starting to undertake a very aggressive upgrade schedule to move the SAN software to the latest version. Coupled with this we are also upgrading the storage network within each cloud to increase I/O speeds.
We are however also looking to start using the enterprise class Nexenta storage solution on our new clouds which is engineered fundamentally different to our current SAN solutions. The upshot of this is that the system is much more resilient to failure meaning in the event of a failure there will be no noticeable effect on customers.
This will be going live on our next cloud but more about that later …..
When you say “very aggressive upgrade schedule”, what do you mean, exactly?
We have identified 6 clouds where we feel significant upgrades, or full migrations to new facilities are required. We are doing 1-2 clouds a week and aim to have everything completed within the next 6 weeks, if not sooner. This is a significant investment in our infrastructure to increase resiliency and performance.
To be fair, some people would say that it’s a significant investment to make it work the way it should… Which clouds are we talking about?
There were decisions made in the past that were right at the time. Those choices however no longer reflect customers expectations as cloud hosting is becoming more mainstream. We are making decisions now that prepare us for the future allowing easier service enhancements to be rolled out to all our customers new and old. We are targeting clouds in both the US and Europe. Some of the work, for example on our Amsterdam cloud, has been completed.
Could you say that maybe you’ve grown a bit too fast? (Which would be partly my fault, perhaps, sorry about that)
We learn from mistakes. There is nothing wrong with growing fast. There is something wrong with not managing that growth. I would say that is where as a company we found ourselves tripping over our own feet. My personal focus is split into both pushing the growth of the company, looking at exciting new markets and technologies but also its vitally important that we look after our current customers. This is reflected in us bringing back such old favourites as sales live chat but also focussing on how we can help existing customers. This include things such as the cloud upgrades as well as some exciting upgrades we have coming for all customers.
Apart from the SANs, another issue seems to have been the fact that you weren’t responding during those outages, either on tickets, or on Twitter, with the status blog being deafeningly silent too. What are you going to do about that?
Communications. Communications. Communications. Nothing travels as fast as bad news. We need to be quicker. We need to be more open. We are taking steps to do that. We are now proactively emailing customers in the event of an outage. We are making it the sole responsibility for the manager on duty to communicate with customers. The status blog and twitter are important fields of communication but they can’t give customised responses to each customers. Our support ticket system is in place for that.
I’ve seen you jump in on more and more tickets yourself, are you one of those managers on duty?
Its best to lead by example. I never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. When things get busy in an outage its really a matter of needing all hands to the pumps. Thats why you will see me replying to all sorts of support tickets from simple reboots to full implementations of load balancing.
I get the feeling, talking to some of the people who bought a VPS, that they actually shouldn’t have a VPS. They have two types of downtime, the one caused by themselves as they don’t really know their way around a web server, and the ones caused by SANs or other hardware failures at VPS.net. I think that for people who have a lot of those first issues, the new Cloud Hosting, or a somewhat faster WestHost package, both a bit more managed, would be better for them.
Do you agree? If people think that’s true for them, is there any way for you to help in that?
We all love power. As a petrol head I dream of having a TVR Sagaris on the drive but do I need the power? Of course not. Some people do however need that power. It’s all about what matches your individual needs. If people just have a few websites that need to “just work” then a VPS isn’t always the best choice and there are other things in our current, and upcoming, product range that could suit them better. If however people do require large amounts of customisation VPS are still a good way to go. If they do require that little bit of hand holding they can always get an On-Demand ticket for a one time issue or pop management on top for unlimited help.
If a customer wants to move to another product we can move a reasonable number of sites free of charge.
Cool.
So you mentioned a new cloud… Tell me more.
Yes our Japan cloud is the first cloud to be running our new Nexenta storage system and OnApp 2.2. It will also be live next week. Coupled with this, as we know people might be a bit wary of the new solution, we are doing first month, free of charge, for customers new and old. There is a limit of 10 free nodes per customer.
What can customers do if they think they deserve more attention?
They can contact me directly at rghf@vps.net.
I think VPS.net is little bit costlier what they offer.. It would be also interesting how rghf@vps.net will respond, he can’t respond since VPS.net is really a big company.
I am a current VPS customer affected by the recent outage (and previous as well). When VPS goes down it hits us right square in the wallet, and that has a residual effect as well. The WordPress theme market is fierce right now and we are a bootstrapped startup.
I take exception to the idea that this is a recent problem within the past few weeks, when it has been going on for months.
We do not demand perfection from our business relationships. We’ve made enough mistakes ourselves to be sensitive to growing pains. The biggest concern we’ve had with VPS is not the downtime and lost sales. It is the communication void. Either no communication at all, or when we do get email, it establishes nothing useful. Nothing we can make plans around.
We are aggressively seeking a new host. The migration will be time consuming and frustrating. Yet another setback as we try and build our business.
My take-away from this interview, if I were in the market for hosting today, is this: Choose another host, and check back in 6 months. VPS *might* be a viable option.
Chris,
I tried to find your account by your name but wasn’t able to do so. I’d like to try and make things right with you, and possibly get a bit of feedback from you too. Could you send us an email at mgmt@vps.net? Would be great to get an opportunity to speak with you.
Terry
Terry:
Wondering how long I have to wait? It’s been 3 days since I sent you an email at your request.
http://cl.ly/3q0F4203091Q3V1s2V3X
Chris
Joost, thanks for being open about these problems. I had a very similar experience to Chris and I’d like to reinforce his points.
When I first started my business last year, I used shared hosting at Westhost (which I joined through Joost’s affiliate link).
Everything was going well at Westhost until my site started getting lots of visitors (which was good) and I eventually had to upgrade after optimizing everything I could (Images, caching, CDN, Cloudflare etc).
Strangely, Westhost support weren’t willing to help me upgrade to their managed VPS in any way, even though I offered to pay them. I was already flat out running a growing business and looking after my customers, so I decided to migrate to VPS.net because they seemed like good value and Yoast’s article said they’d help me migrate.
Big mistake. All I got after contacting them as Joost suggested was a terse email from a guy called Judah telling to setup my VPS and then they’d start billing me. So I was left to do it myself, with very little time on my hands.
Now, I know my way around Linux reasonably well, but I’m not a hardcore server admin. Occasionally I need some support and I’m happy to pay for it because it saves me time. I got no support, so I migrated the site myself.
I’ve migrated my site to local test VMs before with no problem, but for some reason I couldn’t get the migration to VPS.net to work. I started over quite a few times, deleting the VPS and building a new one, trying different builds of CentOS, Ubuntu and so on. I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. It didn’t help that in the midst of all this VPS.net seemed to be having their own reliability issues and, as Chris said, there was no communication.
After a frustrating week of trying to sort this out and achieving nothing productive for my business – for a whole week. I saw many other people asking about similar issues in the private VPS.net forums (you can’t see them before you buy of course). Some people were even complaining that their issues had been deleted because they made VPS.net look bad.
This really cost me a lot of money and when I found out that VPS.net had automatically debited my credit card every time I built a new box (even though I’d killed the old one and was only ever using one license at a time…) that was the last straw.
I asked a few friends for a recommendation and several told me to try Hostgator, so I did. Now, I know that the Hostgator homepage looks garish and I had my doubts at first. I also know they don’t give you the same scalability of performance in dollar for dollar terms. But Hostgator have been fantastic. Here’s why:
1. Their entry level VPS was better value for money.
2. They migrated my site for free and it worked perfectly the first time.
3. They’ve had zero downtime while I’ve been with them.
4. When I asked them to install APC recently, it was up and running in under 30 minutes.
5. Their support is really good and responsive.
Hostgator – 5
VPS.net – 0
Joost, the whole experience left me seriously questioning why you’re promoting them and I asked myself if you were just in it for the money. Now the fact is, you’re awesome and your plugins are the best, so I didn’t blame you. I also didn’t say anything on your earlier article because I thought, ‘this is how Joost makes his living and I don’t want to make it harder for him’.
I think if you made it clearer to your readers from the beginning that they’ll get basically zero support from VPS.net there’d be less anguish and it wouldn’t damage your personal brand so much. You have a large number of followers who aren’t that tech savvy and VPS.net isn’t a good fit for your audience. I really think you should find another hosting company to promote. One that provides half decent service and doesn’t just trade off your good name.
This interview hasn’t changed my mind at all. The fact that Chris has waited three days for a response to an email says it all.
Why wouldn’t I respond?
I’m one of the frustrated customers. Had close to 36 hours of downtime in last 2 days with ATL SAN.
Downtime with hosting companies is always expected. But, communication about downtime should be better.
Status Blog wasn’t updated for long time.
Ticket response was like “Your VPS is starting now and it should be available soon” and it took over 16 hours for VPS to come online.
I reported that ticket number to Rus and he responded like “Looks like your issue us resolved and if you need additional communication, let us know.”
Which is good, but I reached out to Management because support’s response was not sufficient and if this was planned downtime, customers should have been informed in advance by email. If this was not planned, then customers should be informed periodically.
I had invoice error and suggested them to improve invoice, because its additional overhead for customers to track exact node usage time and cost for the usagae.
i was like, I i see another problem with VPS, I’m migrating the sites to different provider. Same say evening came 36 hours of downtime.
Hi Raghu,
As I mentioned in the other post, I’d like to get a chance to look at your account. I think the billing issues you’ve mentioned we can certainly rectify. Unfortunately I need you to get in touch with me: can you email me at terry@vps.net?
Terry Myers
I suspect some more tips for various configurations would be helpful. I have a fractional server at VPS.net, and several times a week the Cpanel monitor reports various processes are down…and I haven’t found a cause nor cure. Manually restarting processes, trying to load-shed by temporarily stopping infrequently-used processes, monitoring resource usage, etc, have no effect. I can’t tell whether I have something misconfigured or if the virtual server is spending too much time in another dimension. Support didn’t notice anything when asked, and apparently what is happening is routine enough that the company’s monitoring hasn’t noticed anything unusual. I never saw symptoms like this on other servers, but maybe I’m just doing something wrong for the VPS.net environment.
Hi Scott,
We’re bringing our blog back, which will be devoted to have some server tips and tricks in it. I’m actually working on a few for content already, including a tool that will not only optimize MySQL, but also have a reporting tool that’ll show you usage by user and query.
Joost, I too was a VPS.net customer based on your recommendation. Last week I left them for good after months of on and off problems and some failure from their sales department to get me promised information for switching from one type of hosting for another — after weeks upon weeks of waiting. It just felt really costly for what I was getting so I turned elsewhere.
I can’t say whether or not you should be recommending them — that’s purely your call — but I thought I’d share my experience. Initially they were great (they knew I came to them through you), but it went downhill after the first 5-6 months.
One more thing: Closing my account was a surprising experience. I closed it and got simply an adios screen – no interest in why I was leaving, no follow up email, nothing. It was like they didn’t care. If I’d had any doubt about leaving them, I didn’t after that. Who among those of us in the service business wouldn’t want to understand why a client was severing ties?
Hi Tammy,
Your feedback is actually quite surprising to me. We have a number of reporting tools in place, such as our report to a manager tool inside the helpdesk. Additionally our management team is always available through email at mgmt@vps.net. We also have a senior member of our team on our website running live chat 9AM-5PM EST Mon-Fri. Finally, our ENTIRE management team staffs our Twitter account, so there’s that method to reach us as well.
With these communication mechanisms in place, we never felt it was necessary to make the user “jump through the hoops” to cancel an account, as we typically see plenty of feedback and effort made to rectify any negative situations already. We’d rather the user be able to get on with things, and not bother them any further.
Please do contact me at terry@vps.net if you’d like to discuss this further.
Terry
Hi, Terry -
I’m happy to forward you the emails with your sales department, including dates from long ago, with promises to follow up with my on the requested change in my account. I’ll do that to the email you provided. Having a team available at an email address is reasonable and good, but actually have them following up as promised is even better — leaving it to the customer to keep on them to follow through is part of the reason I left VPS.net.
I might add that what I’m talking about at account cancellation isn’t about asking people to “jump through hoops” (your term). Making it easy and simple to cancel, as VPS.net did, is terrific. But it’s most surprising that after cancellation you ask for zero information about why — which a canceled user can choose to answer or not. It seems to me that some of what people are talking about with Joost might have been preempted by data collection beyond the ranking of responses to service tickets.
Tammy,
Please do – terry@vps.net.
Thanks!
Same thing happened when I left them. I cancelled all of my services with them, and haven’t heard a word. I guess I appreciate it, because there’s nothing they could say that would convince me to stay, so that saves me the hassle of writing back. But I’d at least expect SOMETHING from them.
Reelseo.com just published a post about their negative experience with vps.net – worth reading.
I will be personally following up with other public blog posts over the next few days
I’ve been very happy with VPS.net since I signed up. The only major downtime (that wasn’t my fault, as a result of tinkering or misconfiguration) was a DDoS on one of their datacenters that caused it to go offline for something like six hours. It’s been very stable ever since, though. And I finally worked most of the kinks out of my sweet nginx+php-fpm setup. It’s snappy and stable.
I’ve been fairly bewildered by criticism of their service, and I do suspect that a significant umber of the complainers signed up expecting a managed service.
“I’ve been fairly bewildered by criticism of their service, and I do suspect that a significant umber of the complainers signed up expecting a managed service.”
Think about it. If this was true, the CEO wouldn’t be doing interviews with Yoast.
They have been having significant, routine, and lengthy outages based on real technological problems. Even today! Our sites have been going up and down. Very discouraging.
I also was one of those customers that got affected. And I was not mostly annoyed by lack of communication. It wasn’t THAT bad, however yes of course there is room for improvement in the form as more pro-active communication as they now have started doing by emailing customers when down time occurs, of course these emails should contain detailed info about what is happening and they should send follow up emails keeping customers informed (possibly with opt-in or out).
My biggest frustration was the loss of sales, the seo implications, angry customers that could not contact me etc. I’m not a big customer but I run my one-person business with them so being offline for 24+ hours (and then after a couple hours online again couple times couple hours down time) just means significant loses. And this is how I make my living so it is damn serious thing for me.
I have a pretty nice setup on VPS (UK + US server geo balanced) but I’m seriously looking into other options now.
Another VERY ironic thing I noticed is that vps.net just tweaked their homepage just right after all these problems and now they are advertising with 100% uptime!?!?!?! Not sure if I need to cry, shout or just laugh about this!
That may be nice, although my not-very-busy WordPress sites shouldn’t be having much trouble with MySQL. Except when mysqld stops responding.
(Hmm.. 5 times now I’ve gotten an all-white screen instead of my Yoast.com reply being posted.)
That white screen is a bug in my code somewhere, trying to figure it out but having a hard time replicating it to be honest :)
We found a tiny issue with vps cdn conflicting with dns caching in firefox and chrome that was causing load porlbmes on our site – adding a meta tag to disable the caching appears to have solved it for us…maybe could be the cause of your white screen issue?
No it was actually a line of whitespace outside of PHP in one of my plugins… I’m just a bit sloppy sometimes :D
We had a growing number of VPS servers with VPS.net but after various bouts of downtime ranging from 1-9 hours across a number of zones and the fact that the backup solution is a total unreliable mess and servers just power off for no reason we have started the move away to Rackspace (only 2 servers left to move).
I don’t think I would mind quite as much if their website didn’t say 100% uptime and automatic failover.
Rackspace cloud UK on the other hand has an unblemished record and seems to offer real 100% uptime and answers the phone when I need to call them.
Hi Simon,
I did the same.
I check the VPS cloud market in the lower price segment frequently and vps.net is for sure one of the better companies.
Proof: Joost’s website is online all the time.
I tried their services two times:
1st time a few month after the release and the last time about 6 month ago. Their panel is great and if there is nothing wrong in their network, their servers are fast. Their communications (about outages) are only 1/10.
I get for the same money a VPS from Rackspace or XLS (dutch company) and they offer much better (and faster) support and in case of outages, XLS reports them on twitter within minutes (never had an outage with Rackspace).
I will try VPS.net next year again (maybe).
We are launching our Japan cloud today/tommorow. That will be free for the first month. This is on our new SAN solution that is aimed to resolve the stability issues
“vps.net is for sure one of the better companies.
Proof: Joost’s website is online all the time.”
Joost is not their typical customer. I suspect he’s probably one of their top earning affiliates, which means his experience isn’t typical either.
When Joost asks for support he’s their top priority. His site would be running on their best boxes and when he asks for an interview, he gets one. Even if Joost doesn’t realize it, all he has to say is ‘jump’. He’s a VIP and I’d look at his experience as the best possible scenario.
Unfortunately the pattern I’ve seen with VPS.net is one that’s repeated too often in all kinds of organizations. The ambitious, career focused middle manager maxes out profits and short term growth, by running infrastructure, staff and customer good will down to the bone. Once he gets promoted for doing so ‘well’, the guy who comes in after him has to clean up the mess.
I feel a lot of sympathy for Terry Myers and Rus Foster. They seem to genuinely be trying to fix things. Meanwhile upper management is almost certainly grumbling about what a bad job they’re doing because profits are down and they’re asking to employ more staff and replace infrastructure.
That being said, I’m not willing to risk working with VPS.net ever again. They cost me and my business too much money due with their frequent downtime and total lack of communication.
I, too, moved over to Rackspace, and haven’t had a single issue with them since the migration. Coincidentally, I, too, am named Simon.
All of this is a real surprise to me. We have been with VPS now for just on 12 months – yes on Yoast’s recommendation.
Obviously we have been incredibly lucky to have not been affected by any of the outages.
The other day I had an issue with incorrect information that was supplied by an engineer via an On-demand Ticket. Was massively impressed that Rus stepped in and sorted it out for me.
With Rus and his senior team now being at the forefront and taking the lead I’m confident that as long as there are no financial issues that affect VPS viability I’m very confident that with this proactive approach they will sort all of this out.
I consider VPS an integral part of our growing business and look forward to a long and mutually beneficial association.
P.S. Rus hope you’ll look at launching a Cloud in Australia one of these days.
Hey Yoast – what is it with the White screen when you try and post a comment on here?
Would you mind sharing with us what cloud you’re using? No downtime in 12 months? I’d love to move my VMs there!
I recently asked in their twitter account if they could recommend one (just one!) stable cloud where I could move my VMs but got no reply. Figured they have no stable cloud!
Jake,
Certain things look like “bait” – asking us what cloud is the stablest looks to us like it’s going to start an unnecessary argument, even if that’s not the intention.
Many of our clouds are have had 100% uptime over the past year. If you email me at terry@vps.net I can make a recommendation over which cloud would be the best for you.
Terry
Rackspace cloud sites is the only solution I have ever used that did not have significant down time. A shame it’s too expensive for smaller sites.
I think VPS.net is at least doing a good thing right now by talking with their clients; especially at external places they could easily ignore. Yoast is also quite honest to question his affiliate efforts for them, where 99% of all affiliates seem to have no problem at all selling freezers to eskimos.
Last two days have been without any huge downtimes, but the day before that I experienced another hour (2 instances). Got quite a quick reply; which I was happy with. Still I am not certain that those problems are of the past right now.
Just like @Steven I rely on things like SERPS and such for my income. I guess I am lucky that the site hasn’t been launched yet, so I still have the option of moving elsewhere. Something is keeping me at VPS.net though, guess mainly the fact that I force myself to think that this is all over after a month orso when they have had ample time to fix everything.
The problem with too much growth might solve itself by reading the stuff at twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/search/vpsnet
When I chose the Cloud Hosting entry package I chose it because it was managed, fast and reliable (roughly how it is advertised). My contact with sales was pretty ok, so based on that and some of the reviews (and the ‘big’ names VPS.net advertises with) I went on board.
Still not regretting, but certainly not happy. Only actions can change this, specifically the results of those actions (i.e. no downtime!).
Thanks for the interview, I have a plan to move to a larger server and I was thinking of VPS.net.
I see from the comment above some clients got really affected, and I am sure that this post will get ton of other comments!
Now, I am so confused, even more than before I read this interview, not sure what to do and where to go!
Do you still recommend VPS.net? Yoast?
Yes. I still think that they’re good. Of course things go down every once in a while and admittedly they’ve had a pretty bad series over the last month, but they’re working hard to improve. I’ll tell you honestly that my experience with both MediaTemple and HostGator was far worse.
I’ve personally had an awesome experience with Media Temple (dv) servers over the last 7 years. Yes there have been issues now and again, but their phone/twitter support has been outstanding.
Hi Hesham,
We’d love to be able to help you out with your hosting needs. You can contact our sales team at sales@vps.net or you can contact our management team directly at mgmt@vps.net.
Terry
IMO it is not acceptable for any cloud provider that states automatic healing and 100% uptime to have any outage lasting more than 1 solid hour. Minutes are acceptable but hours are not. Maybe if it was just a one off but I’ve seen it happen (not always to me) more than a handful of times in about 7 months.
As said elsewhere I’m personally pushing a plan for major upgrades and improving the customer experience. Its in no-one’s interest to ignore things
VPS.net brings my sites down every night for one hour to do scheduled backups, there are also other periods throughout the day that my site goes down.
I have been with them for almost two months now and have repeatedly asked for this problem to be solved or for a refund.
Their support staff struggle with english and ignore any requests for a refund or to move site.
There is a huge lack of care and I was sold my package on the idea that they wouldn’t go down as my site would run off a different server.
I am now planning to move all my sites to one host and I think media temple is the choice for me.
Unless others can advise better.
Is this the same Rus Foster of the “Vaserv Incident”.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/
Yes, the same guy.
I left VPS.net over a year ago because they were having significant problems then. Things haven’t changed.
Cloud hosting isn’t there yet – and won’t be for some time to come.
There are plenty of Cloud providers out there doing great things – don’t tar them all with the vps.net brush.
Communication, communication, communication. That’s in my opinion at the moment their main issue. As you say, thing will go wrong but keeping your customers hanging by not communicating makes them lose patience and understanding.
Yes I totally agree and its something we are very much focused on
I was considering moving to VPS.net, based on Joost recommendations, I hesitated simply because there was no telephone contact, I might be old fashioned, but no phone always makes me really wonder how good is support.
I guess I will keep looking…
How can you trust a company that claims to provide “100% uptime” on their homepage? It’s a ridiculous lie, but exactly what I’ve come to expect from vps.net
I got my CDN account for http://www.hiphopstan.com/ through vps.net because of your recommendation Joost. Should I be concern? My other option was to go with Maxcdn. Also, I’m on a dedicated server… how beneficial is cloud hosting? Should I look into getting a cloud host package?
I am currently trying the cloud hosting option for a large music artist project I am working on as I wanted something up and running quickly with auto scaling etc for the launch. So far the basic WordPress site VPS.net set up for me is unusable in terms of speed both within the WP admin back end and the front end and the only option I have for location is Atlanta!
I have another proper VPS with linode.com and am about to pull the plug on this cloud hosting and skip the standard VPS.net cloud server and either go use Linode again or try this solution: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/pricing/
Andy,
Could you contact our support team at support@vps.net? Speed isn’t something we usually hear a complaint about so it may be a routing issue that we can have fixed for you.
Terry
Apparently the speed issue was something to do with the back up system you guys had set up and it was slightly quicker but unfortunately due to the delays caused by these issues I have now gone to the Turnkey WordPress hosting via Amazon and can’t fault it so far.
This probably describes me as I have a huge amount of downtime for someone just running low to moderate trafficked WP sites. Unfortunately I have lost a lot of business as result. Moving most of clients to WP multi site installs hosted elsewhere stopped the bleeding, but not before the damage was done.
If CS was able to explain to me why this is my fault and offer a solution, that would go a long way. When I had similar issues with Slicehost, their folks were all over trying to point me in the right direction.
It would be good business if your CS took the approach of trying to help me get the right solution if VPS actually offers it.
I must be lucky or blessed by some god. I’ve been with VPS.net since August 2009, and have had, for the most part, quite a good experience. FWIW, my production servers have always been on the Salt Lake City clouds. I recall having some annoying downtime when I first signed up with them, but since then they’ve provided me with great uptime.
While I can’t say that responses to tickets are always super speedy, I also don’t have any complaints. Again, maybe I’m lucky, but I usually am answered with reasonable alacrity, intelligence, helpfulness, etc.
I’m in no way employed by VPS.net — just a happy customer who’s experienced the other side of the coin.
Cheers.
I think VPS.NET is simply not fit for purpose. Not for us anyway.
We are an ecommerce agency and VPS.NET is NOT the provider for an agency. Certainly not one reliant on uptime.
Our ethos is geared around along lasting relationship, something we couldn’t establish with VPS.NET. I am very disappointed with VPS.NET.
The good news is we discovered Firehost.com, they are simple the best quality and the best supported hosting company I have ever dealt with.
I have personal relationships with lots of the staff and they genuinely care, they proactively suggest improvements to our infrastructure which is simply above and beyond.
Wow! Same Ryan! that’s where I ended up and they are amazing: http://tentblogger.com/firehost/
I honestly feel like i’ve gotten to know some of their techs… pretty awesome.
100% up they advertise. Bollocks. After your last post that I read while I had 5hrs downtime on London H, I’ve now experienced 2 cosecutive days wit over 10 hrs down time on London H. According to the tech guy this is due to the (unexpected) san sync which originally would take 36 hrs but is now close to 72 hrs…..
good luck with that… it starts with “it’ll be about 4 hours…” and expands to over a few days. sorry to hear about it but it doesn’t seem like it’s getting any better. hope you’re not losing a lot of business like I did.
For the SECOND time in a month, their Atlanta system is down. The last time (4 or so weeks ago)…they were down for 48 hours. Yes….my site was down 48 hours despite paying a ton of money for their service.
From their site: “100% Uptime – Auto-healing and auto-scaling for your website or VPS ensures 100% availability.”
My site being down for 2 full days says otherwise…
For those of you scoring at home (and congrats on that, btw…) VPSnet’s Atlanta system has been down for 41 consecutive hours…making it 90 hours of down time in the past 30 days. Perfect for the internet entrepreneur ;)
that’s not the only one… i think they have some serious global issues…
Funny how VPS comes on here to respond to the easy stuff, but its crickets when 90 hours of downtime is the issue.
Joost, now you know why so many have an issue with your endorsement of VPS.net. If your sites suffered this much downtime, would you continue to endorse them?
For the people with downtime issues we are working on them on a 1:1 basis. We have not been ignoring issues but rather facing them head on. Reiterating what has been said elsewhere.
We are doing large amounts of maintenance on the clouds which need it.
We are pushing ahead very heavily to preemptive fix any potential future issues.
We are investing heavily in our new SAN solution that we are looking to roll out once it is out of beta.
We are listening to customers are taking their suggestions on board.
So yes we will answer our critics and we will answer them with actions rather than just empty promises.
Rus, you have missed the point. Many of us went to VPS.net on Joost’s recommendation. VPS.net did not deliver. Many of us have lost clients and money as a result. Meanwhile, VPS.net is currently advertising 100% uptime yet you still have huge downtime.
Do you understand that we are actually paying customers, not critics? That is insulting.
This happened in August…down 48 hours. When it happens a month later – your clients begin to wonder if you’re competent…very embarrassing…makes you look like you’re too cheap to invest in a real site.
Rus,
i wish you had answered me with some actions and not just an empty “no, we won’t give you your money back” type deal… and you’re reply to me wasn’t a 1:1 basis… it was a “we apply this to ALL customers”…
sad.
I’m a free man…I left vps.net for greener pastures!!! (today)
excellent! i left them as well: http://tentblogger.com/blog-host-fail/
I had a viviotech server built…moved…boom…no more Atlanta drama.
I migrated my sites 10 days back. Waiting for another few days to close the account. What Rus and Terry post here is just empty words. Response that we get from support is at different “Yeah, we know your site is down, it will be booted ASAP”. ASAP is several hours to days.
Rus – my site has been down 90 hours in the past month…I paid for Server Density, Managed Support, and a backup. I have literally lost thousands of dollars from the outage. I have request a refund for August and September…your billing department says the “managing director” (you) say no. Are you going to refund my money? You didn’t deliver as advertised – and it was a huge disaster. Let me know – publicly … here (since you answer your critics as you say).
expect a big heap of silence… or a copy and paste email like the one i got below… #sadness
My website is down AGAIN with file system issues. VPS.NET is the MOST WORTHLESS HOSTING EVER. I strongly recommend EVERYBODY to stay away from these incredible amateurs I’ve totally f-ing had it with their shit and will make it my personal mission to tell everybody about their WORTHLESS hosting. It’s not even good enough to host your testing environment because its not online enough. Host with VPS.net and LOOSE MONEY!
yep. see my comment below yours… lost some money and they won’t even pay out the credit they owe me…!
finally left them for good:
http://tentblogger.com/blog-host-fail/
They are now holding my credit hostage and has refused to credit it back… even after having me lose tons of business over the last two months due to downtime.
Worst hosting provider ever. I cannot believe how pompous they are and how ridiculous it is to not refund my businesses money!
Check this out from Rus himself:
http://cl.ly/AMX4
And here’s how much credit we have that they refuse to refund (I’ve lost more than this in business via online transactions though…!)… salt in the wound…
http://cl.ly/AMLI
Un-freakin’-believable.
I think it’s telling that absolutely nowhere in the original interview or in any comment here do you see Rus or Terry say, “I’m sorry.”
For those that would like to see how customer service should be handled, here is an example: We’re Sorry!
Also, here is a TERRIFIC article with @dhh on the topic: What to Do When Business Breaks Down.
Food for thought.
They are refusing to refund my money. “Company policy”.
Yes. They work with you on a one-on-one basis. They tell you personally, “We treat everyone the same, company policy.”
Forked tongue!
Hi Chris & Jeff,
Sorry for the issues – we do try to work with clients as closely as possible. We’re more than willing to do what we can for our clients, but we can’t do refunds. I’m more than happy to credit your account for you, which you can use for any of our services, including domain registration.
Terry
I’ve been with VPS.net since May 2009 in Chicago’s C cloud, and I’ve been very pleased… There have been a small amount of down-time here and there, but I’ve been hosting sites with large and small companies since 1999 and everyone has downtime. Recently they moved me over to Chicago’s A cloud and it seems faster browsing my sites.
I think support is very good… I use the ticketing system and usually get a pretty quick response and solution from some very polite and knowledgeable staff. In general the support staff seems to actually care about my little account: only 2 nodes…
Several things I like a lot about there system:
1) Backups work great… I had to use many times until I had them install DotDefender, now I don’t have any problems.
2) I love the On Demand ticket options for only $10.00 I can get some pretty amazing things done to my vps, such as upgrade php in about 5 minutes… or intall a mysql sandbox to run multiple version of mysql.
3) I also like the ability to schedule the adding of nodes, so when a client of mine runs an advertising campaign I can avoid RAM going into swap.
I use my VPS strictly as a webserver for joomla sites… all my mail is routed through Google, and 99% of my DNS is managed through my enom account. Any extensive videos/images are hosted at Amazon or Rackspace with one client using Flickr.
This page has been pretty brutal for vps.net, but a company can’t get any better feedback than what’s going on here, and It seems like they are listening to us, and making efforts to improve. The key to a company surviving such a rant is to reply, reply, reply… and it seem like that’s what they are doing; and in the long run, I think this page will make them a much better company/solution, and bring them new business; but only if they continue to reply.
I don’t work for vps.net nor do I have any monetary incentive to give this company positive review. You are welcome to skype me @ gene-ballard. Also, I don’t plan on subscribing to follow up comments, so please don’t expect me to reply on this page.
Good luck… and Best Regards!
Gene Ballard
I’ve been with VPS.net since May 2009 in Chicago’s C cloud, and I’ve been very pleased… There have been a small amount of down-time here and there, but I’ve been hosting sites with large and small companies since 1999 and everyone has downtime. Recently they moved me over to Chicago’s A cloud and it seems faster browsing my sites.
I think support is very good… I use the ticketing system and usually get a pretty quick response and solution from some very polite and knowledgeable staff. In general the support staff seems to actually care about my little account: only 2 nodes…
Several things I like a lot about there system:
1) Backups work great… I had to use many times until I had them install DotDefender, now I don’t have any problems.
2) I love the On Demand ticket options for only $10.00 I can get some pretty amazing things done to my vps, such as upgrade php in about 5 minutes… or intall a mysql sandbox to run multiple version of mysql.
3) I also like the ability to schedule the adding of nodes, so when a client of mine runs an advertising campaign I can avoid RAM going into swap.
I use my VPS strictly as a webserver for joomla sites… all my mail is routed through Google, and 99% of my DNS is managed through my enom account. Any extensive videos/images are hosted at Amazon or Rackspace with one client using Flickr.
This page has been pretty brutal for vps.net, but a company can’t get any better feedback than what’s going on here, and It seems like they are listening to us, and making efforts to improve. The key to a company surviving such a rant is to reply, reply, reply… and it seem like that’s what they are doing; and in the long run, I think this page will make them a much better company/solution, and bring them new business; but only if they continue to reply.
I don’t work for vps.net nor do I have any monetary incentive to give this company positive review. You are welcome to skype me @ gene-ballard. Also, I don’t plan on subscribing to follow up comments, so please don’t expect me to reply on this page.
Good luck… and Best Regards!
Gene Ballard
Joost
You make a lot of promotion for webhosting in the US , but what if i have a german or italian domainname
for several years every one told host in the country from domain
Now with all the clouds is it still the rule ?
thanx
Jan
Its been 3 weeks since I migrated my sites away from VPS. I’m trying to understand couple of items
1) RAM usage at VPS – 2.5 to 3 GB
2) New node was added by auto scaling few minutes back.
With current VPS provider RAM usage is 450MB. Same sites, same traffic. I’m not sure why there should be so much difference in RAM usage in VPS.net
Why new node was added when there is no traffic to the VPS.net servers.
In September, My site had 776,240 page views.
My VPS.net bill: $826.
Rus Foster ey… all the reasons to RUN LIKE HELL. He’s that a2b2, fsckvps and what-not-I-sell-and-run guy.
get. out. now.