Dedicated hosting: Around the world in (almost) 80 minutes

This site is now hosted by a Danish Company, EasySpeedy. After becoming fed up with Layered Technologies, and the prospect of 55 hours of out-of-my-control downtime looming, I moved. The main reason for choosing EasySpeedy (I’d had one positive reference for them, and they’re a bit of an unknown in rating sites such as WebHostingStuff) was that they promised to have the new server up in 30 minutes.

There were two seriously bad pieces of customer service from Layeredtech that annoyed me. In the first, the machine was exploited. Layeredtech are in the US and I’m in South Africa. At 11pm they mailed me to say the machine was in trouble for malicious use of IRC and would be shut down in 6 hours if I didn’t take action. Since 6 hours was 5am in the morning, I was still asleep and the machine was shut down. All this is fair enough so far. Layeredtech have a responsibility not to let these sort of things happen from their infrastructure.

I woke up, saw what had happened, and requested access to the machine so that I could investigate. There was no response. As the mails got more irate, there was still little to no response, and it turned out that since it was after hours, and the staff who had authority to give me access again only worked office hours, I had to wait until they pitched up for work at 1pm my time to gain access.

The second incident happened last Monday. The server went offline. I couldn’t ping it. I asked Layeredtech at 4pm to reboot it, which they did reasonably promptly. The machine was still dead, so they started to investigate. It took until them until 11pm to finally report back, saying that I needed to request a reload. What had happened wasn’t made clear to me at all. Hardware failure, a machine exploit? When I requested a reload, the not-so-fine print said that this would take up to 48 hours. Since that sort of downtime is completely unacceptable, I moved everything to EasySpeedy. The new site, restored from backup, and DNS changes, had all happened while Layeredtech were still restoring (if I recall the ticket hadn’t yet been assigned to anyone to even START reinstalling yet).

I could even have flown to the US and done it myself (well, to be fair, someone who knows a bit more than me perhaps) in the time it took Layeredtech to restore everything.

The day after moving everything, I got a message from EasySpeedy saying that the site would be down the next day, as they were moving premises! Not a fun week at all. However, the downtime was at least planned, so affected people using the server could be informed in advance, and the move didn’t take long.

Let’s hope things go a bit more smoothly from now.

12 comments

  1. Aaah u moved to EasySpeedy. I’ve heard some horror stories of them. One of them involved one of their clients using a friends IP address and they claimed that the friend was using someone elses IP although the logs on his box said that someone was using his IP.

  2. I’m sure I’ll have mine to add soon 🙂 What other horror stories do you have?

  3. I’m currently searching for a new hosting company. Let me know if you get any problems with EasySpeedy.com The other companies I’m interested in are completelydedicated.com and bocacom.net

  4. Yes, I’ve had no complaints with easyspeedy. You know where you stand with them, as you’re responsible for everything, and can’t expect any service on top of the hardware, but that’s been great so far.

  5. Dear all,

    I started renting a dedicated server from EasySpeedy in May 2006.

    My server was often off-line and did not respond to remote control panel.
    They do not read support tickets, also for hardware/network problems, during the night or weekend.
    As they don’t discover the problem autonomously, they leave your server down for days. The customer cannot put his hands on his server to fix the problem, so it is not a responsible and professional behaviour to leave the customer alone till next working day. I cannot describe the terrible feeling I experience whenever the remote interface fails to control the server and I cannot get it up and running (no reboot, no reinstall, no hardware reset possible) until they decide to give me help during normal working hours. In my opinion such a service is not reliable for business that requires that your server is up during week-end or during the night.
    It happens to me so often that I can’ go on this way.

    I am now looking for an alternative with basic 24/7/365 support (to ensure access to the machine at least) and reading of support tickets at anytime (at least to understand that something wrong is happening).

    I just discovered http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/full-remote-control/

    They offer a control panel with full remote access (that should show the remote server’s desktop screen).

    I have no experience at all with them, but, at first sight, their solution seems interesting.

    They say they have 24/7 email and phone support (as it normal to expect having a remoted machine).

    Thanks,

    Pier

  6. we have been renting a dedicated server with EasySpeedy for more than one year.
    Every time we tried to use the remote interface to install an OS or reboot the server, we have lost control over the machine.
    A couple of days ago we tried again installing a new OS.
    Once again the server went down and there was no way to recover it through remote interface.

    It was Saturday and they neither answer to support ticket nor fix any problem during week-end.
    They do not help even in case of a hardware or network issue like this.
    This time, we’ll ask our credit card for a full charge back since the beginning.
    You can imagine the disease of having a website down and have no way to get it up and running.
    Once again I am convinced that their remote interface is a very stupid project.
    I hope nobody will lose their money in this way, like we did.

  7. Stay away from Site Genie/CompletelyDedicated!!

    When things go wrong (and they will; their tech staff is woefully under-trained), you will not be able to open support tickets (because if their network goes down, so does the ticket server!!) and they will be evasive on the phone.

    Today their data center has been down for nearly 20 hours straight and Scott Litke, the owner, has avoided the phone like the plague. All you get are their college-age part timers saying “I don’t know what’s wrong. They’re running tests. Should be fixed within the hour.” That was 20 hours ago.

    If you need a test/development server then the price and service is justified. But if you need a reliable server for production, you will anger many clients (and lose them) by going with Site Genie. Don’t roll the dice on these guys. Learn from my pain, move on to the next company.

Comments are closed.