Well, I haven't been with ******* for very long, but I've seen so far, has been pretty impressing.

Setup of the Server
-------------------------
The promise of ******* is 24-72 hours, I believe for server setup. Within 2 hours of ordering my server, I was contacted by ******* that my server, was up and running. This itself, impressed me, because they bypassed their promise. The only problem they did experience in the setup, was CPanel.

"The CPanel Ordeal"
-------------------------
Well, needless to say, ******* purchases licenses from a CPanel provider (I have not asked where, yet). Right after I ordered my server at 4:45PM, the CPanel provider was sent a request for the license that I'd need for my server. Hours passed, and I contacted *******, requesting a time frame, if possible. They apologized for the extra time, and said that they ussually recieve a response in 2 hours, or less. Now, to be honest, I was getting worried because I needed to switch servers within 72 hours. They said they'd contact me when it began, and I went to sleep.

At 3AM, I woke up to see that I still had not recieved an email from ******* regarding the installation. Quite disgruntled, I went back to sleep.

At 6AM, I awoke to see that an email had been sent at 5:13AM, that basically said, the installation of CPanel on my server had begun, and I'd recieve information when it was done.

Within an hour, I recieved all of my server information, including the CPanel login. I quickly logged in, and changed all the settings.. Nothing happened, until later:

"The Other Incident"
--------------------------
Well, after playing with the functions of WHM, I decided to do a graceful reboot, to test it out (Don't ask me why.. I guess I was in a wierd mood). Anyway, needless to say, the server never came back. I called up *******, and within 5 minutes, recieved a response. They had found that somehow, a file that CPanel required, was deleted (I later traced this to a bug in WHM). Even though their unmanaged, they fixed the problem for me within minutes, and didn't charge me any additional fees, which of course, I was happy about.

Further CPanel Problems...
---------------------------------
After warnings not to click certain functions in WHM, I accidentally did. I checked my services, which were running fine, and then I did a reboot on the server. The server came back up, but now Apache, FTPd, and Bind was failing. Even after they later appeared to be up, I couldn't connect to FTP through my server. At this point, I was ripping my hair out, and I just called up ******* to order a reformat...

The Reformat Problem
--------------------------
Before you read this, understand that this was only one time where their support didn't answer promptly. I entered a call back ticket to ******* requesting a reformat. Almost 24 hours later, I still had no response. I called up their phone number, and spoke to Jimmy. I told him my concerns, and the fact that I required a reformat within hours. He apologized for the wait, and immidiately had the Staff begin a reformat. I was contacted within 2-3 hours with my CPanel login, and the notification that the server was back up, which again, impressed me.

Current Status
-------------------
Since the reformat, I've had no major server ordeals, or any other problems. ******* support have been very polite, and very patient in assisting me. For everything they have done, I'm suprized its unmanaged. Overall, I'd give ******* and 8-9/10.

I apologize for the length of the post, but I had a lot to write about. I will keep you updated on everything..

just out of curiosity, which link in cpanel fubar'ed the machine so badly that it needed to be reimaged?

paul

How much time have you been with them? pretty nice review.

Bahawolf:
How's their network? That's probably one of the most important things. Looking at their webpage (please note, I'm JUST judging from their webpage load time), it's a bit slow.

As far as the hardware problems, that sucks, bigtime. What caused that problem ?

just out of curiosity, which link in cpanel fubar'ed the machine so badly that it needed to be reimaged?I second that question. Probably could have been fixed and a reinstall avoided. Cpanel probably just had some fun playing foobar with one of the configuration files, which it likes doing every so often.

I had my server administrator look at it, and it seems that one of the "Update" features WHM has, which updates Apache, ect.. seemed to cause some errors. As for deleting files, for some reason, WHM thought several of my new folders had been trojan horses, and deleted them, which caused the problem with the reboot.

Originally posted by wolfstream
Bahawolf:
How's their network? That's probably one of the most important things. Looking at their webpage (please note, I'm JUST judging from their webpage load time), it's a bit slow.

As far as the hardware problems, that sucks, bigtime. What caused that problem ?

Their network seems pretty fast.. its not as fast as some networks, but it is good for the price you pay. I'll post more information in a minute..

root@unix1 [~]# wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
--19:11:12-- ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
=> `uumap.tar.Z.1'
Resolving ftp.uu.net... done.
Connecting to ftp.uu.net[192.48.96.9]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.
==> PORT ... done. ==> RETR uumap.tar.Z ... done.
Length: 8,520,221 (unauthoritative)

100%[====================================>] 8,520,221 481.71K/s ETA 00:00

19:11:30 (481.71 KB/s) - `uumap.tar.Z.1' saved [8520221]

Originally posted by Bahawolf
WHM thought several of my new folders had been trojan horses, and deleted them

Hmmm, that doesn't sound right. The only thing WHM will do is run /scripts/hackcheck and update the rpm's as necessary. It doesn't delete files.

Stick with the release builds of CPanel, not the edge if you're not familliar with it. Generally speaking this will prevent countless problems.

Hrmm 481kb seems slow to me..

from my S4Y server

# wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
--00:15:14-- ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
=> `uumap.tar.Z'
Resolving ftp.uu.net... done.
Connecting to ftp.uu.net[192.48.96.9]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.
==> PORT ... done. ==> RETR uumap.tar.Z ... done.
Length: 8,520,221 (unauthoritative)

100%[====================================>] 8,520,221 1.64M/s ETA 00:00

00:15:19 (1.64 MB/s) - `uumap.tar.Z' saved [8520221]

root@host [~]# wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
--00:25:45-- ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
=> `uumap.tar.Z.1'
Resolving ftp.uu.net... done.
Connecting to ftp.uu.net[192.48.96.9]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.
==> PORT ... done. ==> RETR uumap.tar.Z ... done.
Length: 8,520,221 (unauthoritative)

100%[====================================>] 8,520,221 3.32M/s ETA 00:00

00:25:47 (3.32 MB/s) - `uumap.tar.Z.1' saved [8520221]

hmm 381kn and 1.64mb seems to be slow...

Originally posted by RSM-Royi
root@host [~]# wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
--00:25:45-- ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap.tar.Z
=> `uumap.tar.Z.1'
Resolving ftp.uu.net... done.
Connecting to ftp.uu.net[192.48.96.9]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.
==> PORT ... done. ==> RETR uumap.tar.Z ... done.
Length: 8,520,221 (unauthoritative)

100%[====================================>] 8,520,221 3.32M/s ETA 00:00

00:25:47 (3.32 MB/s) - `uumap.tar.Z.1' saved [8520221]

hmm 381kn and 1.64mb seems to be slow...

481K. :p But, yes, it does seem a tad slower than average.

*******'s network is slow. I have a test server there, and I've never seen speeds reach more than 800Kbps from the server (And that was internally). After I told them about it, they said that switches were capped at 20Mbps, but they weren't overcrowded. They have also taken their speed test file offline now, so I cannot do a new comparison.

-Josh

I'd like to add something to this. My server has crashed for the second time in less than 30 days, a support ticket has been open for 20 minutes without an answer on this issue, it's still down. I'm going to call now and see what the deal is.

- Matt

I have not been able to get through by phone for the last 10 minutes, I'll keep trying. Server is still down.

- Matt

Just a little comparison - on my cable internet at HOME I can get over 400kb - whats that say about *******?

Update: At 10:55am EST, a support ticket was put in. A reply came at 11:50am EST, saying "We will reinstall your machine with another hardware. We will let you know when it is done. Thank you. ". It is now 1:10pm EST, and the server still has not been pulled off the rack, shut down, or rebooted.

- Matt

Another update: 2pm EST - server still not pulled offline for fixing, nobody answers the phone still. I'm going to try sending another email.

- Matt

They're going to look at the server now :)

- Matt

A little off topic, but how fast you can download a file is not a good indicator of the connectivity.

I'd much rather have a 20 megaBIT link to Level3 and only be able to download at 500Kbytes/sec than a 100 megaBIT link to cogent and be able to do 2 Mbytes/sec.

Throughput is important, however, testing it to one server is not fair. Cogent can host a speed test site that you can get 2mbyte/s from, while Level3 can only get 200kbyte/s from, this doesn't mean that when you test your Cogent connection, that cogent is faster. Also let's say Yipes and Cogent had peering...

You catch my drift :)

Roman - Why would you rather to do 500KB/s instead of 2MB/s? The bad thing is that if you have two servers at *******, you can't push much more than 700K/s between them, which is very slow. Internal networks shouldn't be capped - the most that should be done is capping invidual servers at 10Mbps - they shouldn't cap you at 10Mbps and then cap your switch at 20Mbps, so you can't push more than 5-6Mbps. ******* has more than 20Mbps of total connectivity, I believe. Out of the four providers that we're testing out right now, ******* is the slowest, Rackshack & Wholesale Internet are about the same (pretty good speeds), and Nocster is the fastest (at least to the East Coast speed tests, I haven't been able to get a west coast one).


- Matt

Well all I'm saying is that one speed test to UU.Net is not an accurate measurement. Maybe the speed tests posted here were right on the UU.net backbone, or in the same datacenter as ftp.uu.net. I'm sure I can find an ftp on the Level3 network where I could get 3 Mbyte/sec and your server will only get 500.

I think the important thing about good connectivity is its ability to maintain *multiple* transfers going at very fast speeds, I.E. you can have one download going at 200k/sec from one place, 600k/sec from another place, and 400k/sec from a third place. You also want to have redundancy.

I'm on a BGP4 5xTier 1 network. We have Level3, UUnet, ATT, Verio, and XO. The router I'm using in my cabinet is a Cisco 3620 which can only push 40 Mbit/sec. That's only 5 mbytes/sec. This doesn't mean I have bad connectivity. I can cap a port at 10 Mbit and you couldn't transfer at more than 1.2 Megabytes/sec, but does that really matter? If the server is only pushing 1 Megabit, it doesn't need to do that much.

Mainarea: I do agree with you, internal networks should be uncapped 100Mbit lines. Maybe you can ask them to setup a crossover cable for you between your servers instead? Unless of course they only have one NIC in which case some tricky VLAN'ing would have to be done, and the linux kernel patched for VLAN support... but its doable. Then u can use the same nic, and have 20 Mbits over the public IP/interface and 100mbit over the private ip/subinterface.

******* is good for the limited budget customers. ;) For me, this was my first server, and its certainly a learning experience.

Roman - If you can get a West Coast or Central US speed test using Verio bandwidth, I'd be more than happy to show you the results from *******... I can tell you right now that it won't be pretty if I could only pull 800KBps internally!. When you can't get over 800Kbps per second to a server 1 hop away from yours, in the same datacenter, something is wrong.

-Josh

You know whats sad?

I cant even get 40KB download from ******* on a 5MBPS residential line where I get ~400kb from other west coast providers.


---------

Little birdies tell me they have a problem paying providers of services ontime as well.

Well, they told thats It's slow ...

******* swapped the RAM, and upgraded it from 128MB to 256MB sometime after 4PM on the 27th. Matt may be able to fill everyone in with more details, as he dealt with the problem directly. If anybody has a test file on a ******* server, please email the address to sales@mainarea.com , as I'd want to test the internal speed again, and post the results here. For all I know, speeds may have improved.

-Josh

seems their support has some slow respond issues

Originally posted by Jori
seems their support has some slow respond issues

i think i'm passing trough one of them.

i was working in my box normally when it went down.
then i submited an ticket to ******* reporting it, and a tech asked me for the login information of the box. this was 4 hours ago.. now i am still waiting for a reply regarding the issue, but i noticed already that the box is up.

but i can't login as root and i also noticed that there is someone logged in as root.. locally i guess. :confused:

# who
root tty1 Nov 28 19:54
user pts/0 Nov 28 22:39 (81.193.xx.xx)

i've also noticed that they booted the OS's default kernel, what leaves me thinking that i've built an buggy kernel... :rolleyes:

I just called them now.. i left a message and i'm waiting for an call back. :eek3:

I'v been in contact with ******* and they seemed pretty nice. But i havent tried out any of their servers so i cant comment on their network.

they are very nice on sales

You do realize that this thread is from over a year ago, right? I might as well throw my 2 cents into this thread again - ******* recently upgraded their entire network (fiber capacity, bandwidth commits, routers, etc), and I am now very pleased with their connectivity.

Originally posted by Joshua
You do realize that this thread is from over a year ago, right?

I think it's never late to post my short experience with *******. And I think it is better to post it on an existing thread than creating a new one.

By the way,

Or I’m not having any luck with them, or then ******* sucks a lot.