Anyone have experience with servers from him, please post a review.

I've dealt with rastoma quite a bit.

He's online quite often, easy to contact, and a overall nice guy. He's never done me wrong, and i personally trust him, so i would give him a thumbs up, he's a good guy and would do what can be done to make sure your needs are accomodated.

Not much more i can say then that as i've never bought servers from him, but he's a great guy and thats enough for most people as it's an assurance that they'll work with you through thick and thin :).

Well ive gotten my choices down to fastservers or rastoma.

The only thing about fastservers is they are all the way in cali and provide me with a 80-90ms ping time.

Rastoma on the other hand is 20-30ms from me.

decisions...decisions.

You can't go wrong with rastoma

MyVirtualNet = in Global Compass = good :)

No offense, but that dosent sound good coming from serverhost b/c in searching the forums i found nothing but unsatisfied customers from them. I personally almost signed up with one of their plans (dedicated server) but upon doing searchs i found they had instances where hardware was broken many many times and serverhost gave the old "i dont know, it worked a minute ago". I didnt find any good reviews.

Originally posted by neonlexx
No offense, but that dosent sound good coming from serverhost b/c in searching the forums i found nothing but unsatisfied customers from them. I personally almost signed up with one of their plans (dedicated server) but upon doing searchs i found they had instances where hardware was broken many many times and serverhost gave the old "i dont know, it worked a minute ago". I didnt find any good reviews.

Keep in mind that while we do our best, we can't please everyone. We have many happy clients, and add many new clients every day. I personally go out of my way to help clients in any way I can. I welcome you to try our services and post comments here, good or bad. I have nothing to hide.

This thread is about MyVirtualNet, not Serverhost. I was only commenting about how good the Global Compass data center is. I know nothing of Robin's services, only that I see his racks in the data center filling up with more servers every time I go down to Atlanta.

Have a great day everyone.

Regards,

Jeffrey Kehe

Im not trying to bash your service or rep, just an observation.

Thank you all..... I'm grateful for your support.

If I do remember right, Eryxma did have a server with MyVirtualNet, as I had personally a nightmare on the situation.

I am not trying to bash these people. Just stating the facts that has been brought from Shiekron to me.

1) We got Cpanel server, worked fine.
2) Week later, found out server had bad memory, had to be replaced, took a while. All I do know it was started in a Saturday, solved by a Wed.
3) Months went ok, mail problems for a while, were solved, but still some mail problems occured.
4) Turned out to be a bad hard drive, asked them to backup and replace.
5) Backup was "supposively" done, and transfered to another "new" hard drive, new hard drive couldn't boot up, had to undergo intensive downtime, until they or Darknorb look at the problem. What I was told.
6) Couldn't transfer data, Shiekron demanded he got the old hard drive booted back in, so let clients backup all their data before anything else happens.
7) Fan died, had to be replaced.
8) Old hard drive was in, wasn't enough time before 8 days later hard drive died, R.I.P. . This is when problems started, and well me myself I was fed up from them.
9) Shiekron, couldn't take any more, he just wanted to leave and put all data in EV1 servers, but the new hard drive he did a backup of, didn't made a backup of the "var" dir, in CPanel is where mySQL data is kept, this data is very important.
10) Demanded for them to try any way as possible to get data back, or at least as I was told send it to a data restoration company to recover this data.
11) Nothing happened, server died.

I do remember there was a ALOT of network downtime, reboots took 4 hours to 24-28 hours, and only one time it was done in 5 minutes.

Network problems was a great issue, but as always it turned out to be something about Cogent...but I was just wondering why doesn't one of the 17+ providers in Global Compass took over.

http://globalcompass.com/network.htm

What I do not know, is what is going on right now, so far I haven't recieved any information about the procedures this guy has done with restoring the server. So far I have had no news from Shiekron.

Well now back at EV1, CPanel server is all good.

But what I think the decision Shiekron made on getting a server from this person/people was a big mistake, as far as I see it, too much bad hardware, way way too much. From the fan to the memory to the hard drive. *sigh*

That has been the experience from these people. Hopefully they can improve, but one time I was IMed by someone that hosted with them, and had the same problems, almost.

But offering CPanel servers from these people, brought nothing but bad reviews and complaints to Eryxma. That Eryxma itself had to stop offering CPanel to new clients.

Thanks.

I think im just gonna colo with a DC in Va near me.

Yes Joe has had some problems with his machine. It's unfortunate and I did what I could every time something happened. But if you think any company has had 100% error free operations you are very mistaken and if you think RS is perfect you're mistaken even more.

Also, how many other bad experiences have you heard about me on here? Problems happen but I think I can do a little self bragging here that I think I have an above average business as far as customer appreciation and loyalty goes. I have other things that I need to improve in my business.. one being faster ticket responses and I've had some problems when I've RESOLD servers from OTHER data centers since I was not in control of the machines myself. But the colo I do in GC has been very good.

Let's look at some of the points you mentioned below.

There never was any bad ram in his machine. It was suspected at one time but turned out not to be and the ram that's in there today is the ram that was in there since the day Joe took control of the server.

The mail problems I FINALLY figured out were simple... other than minor bugs in Cpanel the main domain on that server, ERYXMA.COM was in Rackshack's DNS and setup on this server too. Once that was resolved the mail problems that I KNOW about were resolved. Was this our fault?

Hard drive issue - the hard drive did develop some bad sectors and was causing some segmentation fault errors but was not affecting existing clients. I copied the contents to another drive but some system files and user files that had not seemed to have caused a problem before were apparantly corrupted so the new drive would not boot correctly. I tried reloading and also upgrading Redhat and could not get the drive to boot. All the time I was online at the data center talking with Joe and informing him everything that was going on. So I offered to do a clean install of RH on the new drive and Joe could load his backups.... well he didn't have backups. I do NOT provide backups and do NOT advertise backup services... which is a common thing with lower priced hosting deals. I always go out of my way to help a customer when I can and rarely charge for tech support. I COULD have acted like most providers do and that is provide what was advertised... which is providing a SERVER... and could have replaced the drive, loaded RH and went home. Since you think RS is so grand, tell me when you've heard of RS spending hours trying to save someone's files. Are backups which is not a service I ever offered or implied my fault? Refer to your point #5 that backups were SUPPOSEDLY done and then tell me who told you backups were done and whose responsibility were backups done.

After explaining I felt I had reasonably tried to save his data to a new drive and get it up and running, he said he didn't want a new drive with a fresh install of RH loaded, so we hooked up his old drive so that his users could at least get their sites back online since it was down 3-4 hours while I working on it. So this gave Joe at least a month and half... close to 2 months of extra time until something else happened.... and during this time I would have thought the user would have deemed it critical to backup sql and other /var files. But after being forced to replace the drive because if it going downhill we see that no backups were done during that time. Is this our fault?

In the middle of the hard drive problem the system did flake out because of a fan... what I thought was a CPU fan but turned out to be a power supply fan. This was approximately 10pm or so central time that Joe had contacted me about the problem. By 11 pm central time I was in my car making a 2 1/2 drive (one way) to Atlanta to replace the fan ( the techs at the data center perform reboots 24/7 and they did not have the correct fan onsite and of course not possibly to run out and get one at that time of night). So I made it to the DC and replaced the fan and got the machine back up. So we have TWO problems that this server has had... a hard drive and a cooling fan... it's common but I'd like to know if that is something that is unheard before? I don't think so. So... Is a bad fan (and hard drive) our fault? YES... I take responsibility on the hardware of the machine. Does a hard drive or fan exist that's guaranteed not to have problems? I just am sorry that both of them happened to be on one machine.

Back to the hard drive issue... I was at the data center over 6 hours working on getting his info from the old drive and managed to get most of /home files moved over... basically Joe needed to create named entries to resolve the domains at that point. I could not get /var because of too much corruption. And yes Joe DEMANDED I fix it but unfortunately I have yet to learn to cause something to be that can't. I then took the drive home and spent LITERALLY over 18 hours in a 2 day period on the drive trying to rescue /var (using various methods and utilities such as explore2fs and others). It's unfortunate I couldn't get /var from the drive but I think I put more effort than most would have and technically could have charged for that but it never entered my mind to do that. It's not my preference to have an unhappy customer.

Server did not die... it's up and running and has been since the drive was replaced.

Did Joe tell you what I did for his trouble (even though as I must say a 3rd time backups are not my responsibility)? You're up and running on a RS server now with a license provided for FREE for the first month as a token to help Joe out.

A LOT of network downtime? I think other people that colo in GC can testify whether there is a LOT of network downtime. Yes there has been some and it was not all Cogent. GC took responsibility of a lot of it with a router issue they had internally. They have since upgraded to a second Riverstone router and the network on Cogent only is running at least at 99.7-99.8% if not more. The providers on GC's site are available only on the high end multihomed connection we can offer there. Also in just the last week we have implemented a new connection that has Cogent AND Verio running BGP.

I have TWO times that in the last 6 months that a reboot was was not done in a timely manner. I don't remember if Joe's machine was one of those times, but we average a 30 min. reboot time. One thing I can note is that Joe has and has had my cell phone # for emergencies and have only received one call from him. I can't fix problems I don't know about.

Joe is a great customer and I don't know at this point if he is going to keep his server with us or not. He hasn't contacted me to tell me he's cancelling it and it's still up and running right this second I just checked. I am sorry for the troubles he's had and I will take blame where it's due. Just this past week I got so busy that my support tickets have gotten behind.. I've never advertised 24x7 phone support but I am working on providing that soon. I am receiving applications looking for a couple of more people to staff ICQ/AIM 24x7 so that we are available even more easily. I have things to work on.... but I think I'm not classified as some of the dirt cheap providers that have popped up lately that are considered 'you get what you pay for' types of hosts. People get a LOT more from me than they pay for.

I m using his services not server though for almost 3 months. and so far any time i had any problem he fixes it in matter of minutes. Even at some point he even did EXTRA services which is not included as part of ouor services. I get cpanel licese from him and he install it. Technically his job is to just have cpanel updates or any critical fix. I had 3 times a problem which was not really hist problem . Once one of my reseller screwed up whole DNS ( dont wanna tell how or u guys will be crashing servers left and right ):angry: . He helped me out. Even the last server i bought from some one else later he told me he could ve match the price but i ve already paid some one :( In any case he loaded cpanel on that and the NIC was loosing packet left and right. He started at 1AM told me about the problems with the machine i got with DC and ask them to look into it. In any case he left me a msg at 10AM that the installation of cpanel is done even though it was only at 21KB/sec thats how the connection was originaially.
The point is if i m just one of the customer who got cpanel license from him and i dont think he is making that much money on those , I dont have any reason to believe that he will just ignore his own dedicated server customer. I use to assemble PCs and believe me problem do happen. We use to get brand new sealed stuff and still they go bad after 1 month or so. So i will not blame him for hardware problems. Not really. And reason is he atleast try.
For HOSTINSPECT Having a server in RS is great. Wait till u get a problem in your servers and when u ask them to fix it all u will get we cant fix has to do RESTORE. and u will say cant u do anything they will simply say NO they cannot.
ATleast he tried to help you out in there and spend 10 hrs. Honestly if i would be at his place i would rather say my time by saying backup aint my responsibility. Customer should ve a copy of there own backup. And get away with that. I had nothing to loose except i may loose a client. And if the client didnt know about that much he would say if there is no choice go ahead and do fresh reboot. Data recovery well he did his best. If u still want your data why dont u pay for that drive and ask him to ship it to u then sent it to Ontrack and pay them cpuple of thousand dollars to recover the data Partially or fully. which u ve to pay.

I didnt mean to say all that but i dont feel right if some one give blame or bash some one who didnt do it intentionally. I m sorry if i offended any one in this post. Its just when u have hardware trouble u cant blame them. They dont MANUFACTURE the part and yes if u need some real good part why not pay thrice the setup fee and get name brand servers

I have a cpanel/whm P4 server with rastoma, and have to say that I have have had nothing but positive experiences with his company and the level of support that he provides.

We were looking for a cheap option as an off network server (for office related backup/junk/) and Marty recommended Robin's services to me. I had a few e-mail chats and found him to be forthright and offering a good deal, coupled with Marty's own experiences.

We never went ahead with the deal due to circumstances, but still have Robin's services bookmarked well ahead of competing providers in that price range. (such as rackshack and Nocster) The network seems one of the better ones on offer given the fees involved, and a bit of research here and there shows a good rate of satisfaction with that datacenter.

I don't for a moment think that datacenter holds a candle to NAC, Verio or Rackspace, but given the costing range you're looking at I think it would be a very viable solution.

Greg Moore