Hosting adventures
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 07 Mar 2008 at 12:12 pm | Tagged as: Internet, Software
The 1and1.co.uk hosting package I’m using just failed massively, and it’s the second time week. Out of 4 servers (2 dedicated, 2 virtuals) 3 were inaccessible this morning, and the response the technical support gave (after fiddling around trying to ssh in themselves I presume) was “here’s the number to the server team, call them in 2 to 3 hours for an update”.
2-3 hours! In server time, that’s about a year. It is seriously bad form for a hosting company.
On to buy a box from another hosting company, I opened two browsers and typed in the address for slicehost and vpsland (I’ve happily used the former so far and the latter was suggested by a colleague). It took 30 seconds to choose a slicehost package and by then the vpsland website hadn’t come back. It subsequently took 2 minutes to complete the very short order form in slicehost, and vpsland website had come up by then, but too late. And in 4 minutes, I was ready to log in to my server. Brilliant, well done slicehost.
Hosting is a highly commoditised industry, and reliability and good service makes all the difference…
8 Responses to “Hosting adventures”
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The advantage of VPSLAND just from reading the website (which worked fine when I tried it) seems to be that they have an SLA, and they will issue credit back if the server is available less than 99.9% of the time.
I may have been slightly harsh with their website, it is there and it did load, it just took a couple of minutes first time round.
An SLA sounds good, I’m about to call 1and1 to see what I can get from them for this travesty of service (the servers are still down).
When Robbie realised his small slicehost slice was too small to develop Ruby reliably, he filled in the upgrade form. It was double the size in 5 mins.
Yannis -
You may also want to check out Linode virtual servers - http://www.linode.com/. Our control panel rocks and we offer the most resources for your dollar. Most importantly, we pride ourselves on excellent customer service.
-Tom
Hey Yannis welcome aboard. Let us know if you need anything.
Tom: Next time I need a server and I have a reason not to stay with slicehost, I’ll take a look.
slisematt: Thank you, I will, but I hope I won’t need to. Perfectly happy so far (already ordered a second box!)
This is turning into a proper hosting party, let’s see if anyone from 1and1 or vpsland will make an appearance…
Let me know how it goes dude, i’m beginning to think that Dreamhost is too limiting for my needs (quite fairly they won’t let me run continuous processes). BTW What do you use the host for, because i’m thinking of using one for a CI box i.e. cruisecontrol and you know how much of a memory hog that beast is!
…Slightly off topic…
@Milan, surely you can find a cheaper way to run a continuous integration environment than on a public internet host? I thought the idea was think light, think cheap, think near end-of-line hardware.
Think wall.e http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/walle/