I have been with RS for 7 months and due to the AMD heating problems that cause my server to hang once every 5-10 days, i finally decided to go for the more reliable compaq server. i do understand mistakes and errors do happen and i am lucky that there are many nice RS tech, websales and CSR to help me out in the chatroom, but i am really facing lots of problems since day 1 :-

Day 1:
I was told by the websales and rs-tech that the compaq package 1 is with RH7.2+Ensim3.1 for several times despite that the website stated RH7.1+Ensim3.0. just before i click the order button, i confirmed that with the websales again and got the same answer. 5 minutes after i signed-up, i found out that my compaq server comes with RH7.1+Ensim3.0. I went to websales, RS tech and CSR for help but ended up having to pay an innocent $29 for a restore to RH7.2+Ensim3.1!

Day 2:
I logged in to the member area and found out that i was billed TWICE ($489.36)! A friendly CRS did help me out, but i will have to wait for at least 10 days for the refund.(I thought refund can be made within 1 day)

Day 3:
I was setting the DNS for my server and after that i run /sbin/reboot(not the first time). the server didn't come up even after i submitted a ticket for reboot. well, i thought i might have massed up my server and requested another server restore. i am surprise to see the following response in my ticket :

7/4/02 12:15:25 PM
Server has been restored and is up and running. When setting up server's IP address, it returned and error stating another host was already using 64.246.**.*** which is this server's IP. Sending to Network for investigation. When done, please send to WebTech to setup this server's passwords.

It is clear that i have spent another innocent $29 for a server restore as the main reason i can't access my server is that my main ip address has been given to another customer!!! Currently my server is still down :(

Day 4:
After more than 30 hours (I paid $29 for 2-24 hours restore) my server is finally up. But i think they haven't settled the ip address issue yet, as after i change password, hostname and install bastille firewall(confirm all the open) and then i run /sbin/reboot again and my server doesn't come up even i submitted a reboot ticket! Still waiting for the response ... :(

I am trying my best to move from the AMD to compaq server before my next AMD server billing date, but with all these problems i just can't do anything.

really wish that RS will resolve all my problems as soon as possible so that i dont have to pay another innocent $99 for the AMD server.

Please PM me for my RS-number if you can help me out.

Pay a guilty $19 more and goto e-servers :)

As much as that probably isn't the reply you were looking for, I have to second that. Pay $19 more for no trouble with a box from eservers.biz. :)

That sounds pretty bad.... Now before you get a compaq are you sure your server is having heating issues? I don't believe those motherboards have any form of fail safe and nor do the processors (i don't think any durons or athlons shutdown back at 1 ghz correct?). With AMD one would expect some permanent damage by now.

At around that time (and time before and after that date) there was a lot of bad ram in those machines. Mines was one of them and behaved similarly... I asked them to test my memory and swap it out it if was bad. They did test it and found it was bad then replaced it. I never had any problems after that...

Thats true, when the AMD's overheat - they burn right thru the motherboard....and keep burning, whereas, the intels underclock

Rackshack - I dont know what it is about them, but I just dont trust them.

Originally posted by web_res
That sounds pretty bad.... Now before you get a compaq are you sure your server is having heating issues? I don't believe those motherboards have any form of fail safe and nor do the processors (i don't think any durons or athlons shutdown back at 1 ghz correct?). With AMD one would expect some permanent damage by now.

At around that time (and time before and after that date) there was a lot of bad ram in those machines. Mines was one of them and behaved similarly... I asked them to test my memory and swap it out it if was bad. They did test it and found it was bad then replaced it. I never had any problems after that...

well i think HeadSufer knows the heating problems as well and RS will not use AMD in the future.

i am sure its heating problems, as nothing unusual in all the logs before my server hang and the trend is obvious ... if my server hang for less than an hour, it will definitely go down in another 2-3 days ... and if it goes down for several hours, it will last for 5=10 days before it goes down again.

edited : i have my ram replaced as well(last month) but my server will still hang once every 5-10 days :(

He's also the guy who made the same mistake like 2-3x with amd. His machines apparently overheated not only for his durons (the one you have) but also his newer athlon xp's. Now, yes AMD's processors (pre 2200 athlons, possibly those too haven't paid much attection to 2200s so can't say for sure) do heat up much faster then intel's and don't have working fail-safes in the processors but there are numerous precautions to take.

So far RS has been extremely bad about that. There are numerous hosts running decent athlon machines with far less problems on smaller machines.

Also when heavily used it does not take more then 1 second of heatsink/fan removal to permanantly damage the processor. That much has been prettly well documented. Now if your server does overheat to the point that it hangs that says a lot about the fans being used on the machine.

EDIT: I'm sorry I said that the Headsurfer was the person who made those mistakes. It's a private company and I don't know the details of how the company is run so I cannot say it was he who may have made the errors.

BTW, this post was my somewhat critical remarks on RS's AMD lineup. Sorry for going offtopic, I think.... It's pretty late.

wow so many rackshack stories :rolleyes:

they should release a new book called the rackshack story on amazon.com :rolleyes:

lol
rackshack tales

Hehe

At least they don't have a 100% uptime SLA that covers everything but any kind of downtime (like eservers :D)

actually i prefer to stay with RS bcos they have so many friendly and helpful staff in the chatroom and moderators in their forum. moreover, they have 4 gigs pipe and more coming soon!

well, maybe i am just too unlucky to face all those problems :(

P/S: thanks to the RS-techs in the chatroom my server is running again :)

I dont know why anyone is complainging about AMD's. Sure we have a ton smaller environment then RS, but we have no problems with all of our AMD servers (Which is 95% of the servers in our facility right now). The long and the short of it i think comes down to this, if you want to properly cool an XP system (or half the other AMD's) you need to give it extra attention by installing 2-3 more case fans to properly circulate air around, and out of the case.

This is not a RS bash by any means, but i dont think they order that when they get servers as it drives the price up (even if just a little), and from what i've read, they obviously dont have the manpower to be bothered with that when they can just foot a little more capital and get a more reliable supplier.

OK,
I don't know what's up with these AMD CPUs but the backup server we had with RackShack could never stay up for more than 8 days without dying for no apparent reason.

What saddens me is that we never got word from support that "yes, we have some memory/CPU issues with these machines".

We would write long messages asking them to investigate and the support drone's only answer always was: "rebooting server".

Does eServers have Win2k dedicated servers?

Are they on cogentco ? or OC3 or some other network ?

KC.

I have heard that if you supply them the license, they will install windows for you.

Cogent is one of their links. Check out their site or threads about them in the archive.

Peter

Yeah, thanks. they just replied me and they said they might do it couple weeks later.

What about fastservers.net , anyone have any experience with them ? (their toll-free number list is quite impressive, and they're on OC3 too!)

Why don't you search the forum archive? I remember some discussion about them. (it will also keep the thread on-topic).

Peter