Hi,

I've been looking around for cheap entry-level virtual private server options, with complete control over your virtual server. I've come across a company called "TekTonic" (www.tektonic.net), which seems to offer a pretty good deal.

Has anybody had an experience with this company? In particular, I've seen no reference to them anywhere else, does this mean they've just started and might not last long?

Thanks,
Paul

It's kind of funny how tektonic.net boasts so much bandwidth and network resources, yet they do not even have their site hosted on their own network...

$ host www.tektonic.net
www.tektonic.net A 69.57.156.208

$ whois 69.57.156.208

OrgName: Everyones Internet, Inc.
OrgID: EVRY
Address: 2600 Southwest Frwy., Suite 500
City: Houston
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 77098
Country: US

NetRange: 69.57.128.0 - 69.57.159.255
CIDR: 69.57.128.0/19
NetName: EVRY-BLK-13
NetHandle: NET-69-57-128-0-1
Parent: NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.EV1.NET
NameServer: NS2.EV1.NET
Comment:

RegDate: 2003-06-20
Updated: 2003-07-02

TechHandle: RW172-ARIN
TechName: Williams, Randy
TechPhone: +1-713-400-5400
TechEmail: admin@ev1.net

OrgTechHandle: RW172-ARIN
OrgTechName: Williams, Randy
OrgTechPhone: +1-713-400-5400
OrgTechEmail: admin@ev1.net

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2003-10-02 19:15
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

So they use Rackshack for their servers. What's wrong with that?

I will be transferring to them soon. Their staff appears to be quite knowledgeable. Receive detailed answers to my technical questions via email within 5 minutes.
(in eight years and eight web hosts that I've been in reselling with, they are the most on the ball I've seen-I won't name any names)

IPv6 supported with multiple backbone providers
fully scalable VPS technology
very reasonable pricing
experienced Unix staff

That's all fine with me.

I tried tektonic.net for a week and their uptime was closer to 1% than the promised 99.x%, the support was slow and often neglected to answer my questions, after a week i had enough of their crapp and requested my money back according to their guarantee.

I have'nt got my money back and it looks like i never will.

Hi,

I'm from TekTonic and would like to openly dispute this.

1) This user just registered.
2) 1% is 8 hours of uptime in a 30 day period. I don't think we would still be in business with uptime like that.
3) According to our ticket system, average response time to initial ticket submitions is less than 2 hours.
4) You state after a week, our TOS is listed multiple times on our website and users must agree to it before an account is created. In our TOS it states the money back guarantee is valid for 72-hours from account setup. A week is more than that. I can guarantee your refund was not processed due to this. We feel that amount of time is more than enough to decide whether you ordered the wrong product (which does ocurr often, and refunds are given).

Thank you.

One of my friends too out a debian vps with tektonic and had both billing and support problems.

He used the vps for very small personal sites and email. Tektonic's control panel told him he had transfered 30gig of transfer (in 17 days) but his mrtg graphs proved them wrong luckily - support took 4 days to respond :eek:

Unsuprisingly he left..........

This may be construed a bit. We have had errors in our bandwidth statistics a few months ago, but we always given the customer a benefit of the doubt. We haven't had to charge a customer for over bandwidth usage in over half a year, our allowances are fairly high.

Regarding the support, he most likely meant it took 4 days for the ticket to be resolved, not for the initial response. A problem such as bandwidth disputes needs to be monitored to find out where the differences are coming from, so it may take some time.

The occasional problem with a customer does arise with any provider, we just try to resolve it as best as we can. Sometimes it works out, other times it doesn't. We are keeping a 97% customer retention rate for 2004, so we are confident that the majority of customers that sign-up with us are happy :)

Actually it was 4 days without a response.

Hopefully you have sorted everything out now as he said everything else was great :)

@TheWiseOne

Sure i just registered, so what!

It must be nice to have a 72 hour money back guarantee and keep new users in the dark for a couple of days until it's to late to get a refund.

When i signed up with your hosting company I was able to connect to my IP about 2 times out of 10, sure no big deal everyone has problems now and then, just wish you where that quick to respond then as you are now in these forums.

I just called TekTonic and found that they have no service level agreement - if their network is saturated, you're screwed, apparently. The best the rep could do was to say, "Well, we guarantee 99.9% server uptime." When I asked him if that applied to a heavily used network and huge ping times he said something along the lines of, "Oh, no, I guess that doesn't cover it..." I, for one, would like to see SOME sort of guarantee.

I also found out that if you choose 'custom vds' and build your own package including daily backups - usually $10/mo extra - and a three or six month billing cycle, the backups are free. The rep said this was an error. Apparently they can't even get their own forms correct.

They sound good on the surface, but I'm so NOT convinced. And given everything said here, too, about their support level - nah. Guess I'll wait for Dinix or VPSColo to get more servers.


-j

I have had a totally different experience with these guy's when I stopped offering VDS's I searched high and low for a company to recommend my existing clients to.

I talked to the rep and he was very knowledgable and the same for the owner, I had about 20 clients move over to him and they had no problems. Heck they even migrated the clients from my setup to their's for free.

All in all I would recommend these guys any day of the week.

My 2 cents.

@dmistry - How long ago did they move over, and have to spoken to any of them recently? I'd be interested to hear what they say.

The rep I spoke to did sound bright enough, so I'm not knocking them there. I'm just amazed that a company that offers hosting services would have no formal SLA covering their network. Then again, I'm finding that only a handful of them do (Dinix, notably) so maybe I shouldn't put such a huge emphasis on this.

Including an SLA seems to be the norm for dedicated hosting and colo. I'd like to have one for VDS.


-j

joemadeus,

The moved happened between Feb and March of 2004 I still keep in contact with many of the clients mainly because they still have reseller plans with me, non have expressed and concerns.

As for SLA's I am guessing that tektonic can simply extend there backbone provider's network SLA over to the end-user I mean thats a no brainer *shrug*

It looks like they have a 99.9% System SLA, I would not focus so much on SLA's because heck you ever read all the fine print in SLA's there actually there to cover the providers *** not the end-users (food for thought).

This is some good insight into what the customer wants (Thanks!). I'll have to talk with the lawyer people to make sure the wording is correct, but i'll have our TOS updated soon.

Our goal for uptime is to guarantee the uptime for every point up to the customers server. With normal dedicated servers and colocation this point is the network. With VDS accounts this is the host server that the VDS's are hosted on.

Our goal is to provide 99.9% uptime for the host (physical) servers. Just like with dedicated servers, we can't guarantee a VDS's uptime itself. The network would be counted in with this as if the network is down, the host is not accessable. The packet loss isn't something we've ever thought about as we don't run our own network (yes, I said it). We colocate and have no shame in it, we feel it provides better service and is much more cost effective. I assume we could pass along our upstreams network SLA, but that will have to be thought about before becoming official. :)

Thank you for helping us to be a better hosting provider for our customers.

Originally posted by dmistry As for SLA's I am guessing that tektonic can simply extend there backbone provider's network SLA over to the end-user I mean thats a no brainer *shrug*

Not a no-brainer at all. The backbone provider's SLA covers TekTonic's business, not mine. It's up to TekTonic to decide that they'd like to extend that SLA to their end users.

Originally posted by TheWiseOneThe packet loss isn't something we've ever thought about as we don't run our own network (yes, I said it)

Well, still digging around, I found that VPSColo, who gets a lot of praise around these forums, doesn't run their own network, either. They're a "child company of JVDS" (their words), who run their services from some half-dozen data centers in the US, none of which they run. ServInt doesn't say who they have for providers at all, except that they keep mentioning "their own NOC." The only folks I know that definitely have their own data center that they run themselves is Dinix. Apparently not running your own NOC isn's such a huge deal.

Come to think of it, it never was that much of a huge deal to me, either, except that I want to make sure everyone who needs to has timely network access ;)

Ideally I want to see that network and server outages (and you can include support outages, too - in other words, counting four day wait times for trouble tickets) have some sort of penalty for TekTonic (or any other VDS/colo/dedicated hosting/etc). "Guarantees" are hollow and not usually binding; if there's an outage I want to see the company take responsibility in some meaningful way. But, once again, how many have this? Not many.


-j