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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Posts
    136

    Thumbs down VolumeDrive 1 Month Review

    Grade: D+

    Suggested Uses: Great for personal stuff, bad for commercial use.

    Summary:

    I've been using VolumeDrive for roughly 30 days now and had my service actually been live, it would have destroyed my business--thankfully I learned my lesson and ditched the budget market before going live. I have been plagued by downtime, at least three occasions this month alone, mediocre connection speeds, and packet loss. While VolumeDrive has been great for my wife's Wordpress blog (yes, I use a VPS to host it), you should steer clear of their services for any mission critical service you need to host.

    Full Review:

    Background:

    I am currently using VolumeDrive to host a control panel that gives my clients access to administer their accounts on our network of servers. We also use the same VPS account to host our website. When our VolumeDrive service goes down customers lose the ability to admin their accounts (obviously their services are still online running on separate networks, but they can no longer make changes to said services). Also, when the service goes down we lose our website, our doormat to the internet. Websites are to hosts what curb-appeal is to realtors--if its down or ugly, it aint sellin'.

    The good:

    A) I've actually found VolumeDrive's ticket response time to be pretty good, especially considering the price you pay for their service.

    B) Their pricing is incredible.

    The Bad:

    A) Downtime. As previously stated I can remember at least 3 occurrences when our service was either hard down, or the packet loss was so great that the service was effectively unusable. The last occurrence of downtime lasted at least 4.5 hours--here's my email exchange with support (I censored the names to be polite)

    ----------------------------------

    [ME]

    Good afternoon,

    Server ID: [censored]
    IP: [censored]

    My service is down. Here is the traceroute showing the points of failure. The problem areas are highlighted in bold.

    [traceroute removed for brevity, I can provide it if requested]

    -----------------------------------

    [VolumeDrive]

    Hello,

    We are currently doing emergency maintenance on the node due to a inbound DDoS attack. We are working to get services restored. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

    Thank you,

    -----------------------------------

    [ME]

    Support,


    Its been several hours and the services are still down. Is there a reason you can't just null-route the IP under attack and get the node back online?


    Respectfully,
    Phillip

    -----------------------------------

    [VolumeDrive]

    Phillip,

    It's more difficult then that. It's a heavily distributed attack going after the main vlan that this particular node operates on. We are most likely going to be blocking the service it is attacking for a while to get things back to normal.

    -----------------------------------

    [ME]

    Support,


    Understood, how long is awhile, and shouldn't you be notifying your clients that you've taken down their service? Can you migrate us to another node if its going to be offline for awhile?


    Respectfully,
    Phillip

    -----------------------------------

    [VolumeDrive]

    Philip,

    Everything should now be restored. Please let us know if you are still having trouble.

    -----------------------------------

    [ME]

    Service is still down...

    Respectfully,
    Phillip

    -----------------------------------

    [VolumeDrive]

    It's back now.

    Thanks,

    -----------------------------------

    Notable things to take away from this exchange:

    1) Perhaps most important is that VolumeDrive admitted that the node had to be taken offline for what they anticipated would be an unknown extended amount of time, but they never bothered to give their clients a courtesy heads up. Thats what bothers me the most, their lack of communication is completely unprofessional.

    2) Its pretty embarrassing for a provider to tell you that your service is back online, only for you to check and find yourself timing out on all your ssh login attempts. It was over 45 minutes after he told me that my service was back online before it was actually back online. It makes you wonder...

    B) Packet loss. There's not much to say on this one except that I've experienced it several times and for sometimes rather lengthy periods of time.

    C) And this one gets me, failure to actually provide services paid for. Apparently my package comes with 2GB of dedicated RAM, so its pretty laughable that I got a fail count after making a tar xzf typo on a 20ishMB bz2 file. I ran out of memory before the OS could even print the error message. Apparently VolumeDrive's policy is to increase your bean counters if you need them, but why on earth I have to ask someone after the fact, to give me the service I already paid for, is beyond me. And if your service does sour because of a failcount issue, it might as well be hard-down until they get around to updating your bean counters to whatever they are actually supposed to be. This policy is absurd--its a built-in point of failure. If I use all the resources I paid for there is a 100% chance my service will fail until they update me.

    D) Their pricing is incredible. This is both a positive and a negative. Because they have such great pricing I believe their service suffers. VolumeDrive has too much Volume to adequately host and keep up with. I think they've outsold themselves--its a salesman's wet dream, and a manager's nightmare.

    I can't reiterate enough that had my services been live, and had I had real clients, that hosting with VolumeDrive would have destroyed my company's reputation. The downtime alone would have caused enough headaches, discounting all the other problems.

    Final Grade: D+

    Rubric (on a 4.0 scale):

    Connectivity: F
    Price: A
    Support: C
    Provision of Services: D

    Avg Score: 1.6, or D+

    My final grade of VolumeDrive is based on what I perceive to be its viability for hosting commercial grade applications, not based on private usage, or for hosting non-mission critical applications.

    Respectfully,
    Phillip

    PS, IP address submitted to the mods.
    Last edited by phil29; 04-27-2011 at 07:21 AM. Reason: PS statement.
    Respectfully,
    Phillip

  2. #2
    Thanks for the review. I just submitted a request to cancel my VPS with them yesterday. They actually look quite promising but, at least for a VPS, I don't know if I want to host a production site with them yet.

    In my case, I noticed what I considered high failcnts on kmemsize (who knows, maybe my definition of "high" is off), submitted a ticket, was told it was fixed and, when I checked, they were still there. I am thinking they might be overwhelmed it terms of support.

    I agree about the provisioning part. If you pay for resources, you should have them available to you. One could argue about things like burst but, if you're told you have 2GB (or in my case 4GB) "dedicated" to you (their words, not mine), you shouldn't have to make an additional request to have it made available to you.

  3. #3
    Thank you for review, too bad they didn't work for you, it happens.

    It seems that you main issues was the abuse of the server node, heres is a month time log of 1 of the active VPS that we have. As you can see there has been a downtime of around an hour and half, but besides that no other downtime in a hole month time.

    http://www.whisperdale.net/uploads/s...edrivevps1.png
    http://www.whisperdale.net/uploads/s...edrivevps2.png

    Such downtime is totally acceptable for a budget market, maybe consider asking them for a node switch and see if they will honor it?
    Managed1.com - Affordable budget Fully Managed Hosting Services for individuals and business clients. Website Hosting. Domain Name management. High Availability Cloud servers - 99.9% Uptime, Self-Healing Failover, Load Balancing and Mirrored Backups.
    Whisperdale.net - Internet Service Provider since 2007!

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2008
    Location
    Michigan
    Posts
    2,443
    Thanks for the top notch review. It is honestly one of the better one's I have read here.
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Iasi
    Posts
    74
    I'm not saying that VolumeDrive is good or bad, I've never used them, but how could someone put his website and clients control panel (and probably the DB) on a really low-end VPS ???
    SlickWebHost::Quality Personal and Business Hosting Solutions
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Posts
    136
    Quote Originally Posted by SlickWebHost-Claudiu View Post
    I'm not saying that VolumeDrive is good or bad, I've never used them, but how could someone put his website and clients control panel (and probably the DB) on a really low-end VPS ???
    Good comment, really adds to the discussion... Try re-reading the first paragraph, "thankfully I learned my lesson and ditched the budget market before going live".
    Respectfully,
    Phillip

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    CA
    Posts
    9,350
    Sorry you faced these issues its quite sad you gave up on the budget market due to 1 providers network hiccups as this can happen anywhere you go.

    Anyhow all the best and I hope your happy with the next one.
    〓〓 RackNerd LLC - Introducing Infrastructure Stability
    〓〓 Dedicated Servers, Private Cloud, DRaaS, Colocation, VPS, DDoS Mitigation, Shared & Reseller Hosting
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  8. #8
    Hello Phillip,

    In regards to your review. It's based on a few important factors.

    - One being the issue we had with the node your account was on yesterday. That being that we had a very large distributed attack that was saturating an entire gig port. It took us sometime to ultimately block and resolve this attack, but nonetheless it was taken care of.


    - UBC counts. During your initial setup, by default we used to deploy all accounts with the standard OpenVZ defaults. While this works for most VPS hosting companies, we quickly found out that it wouldn't work for our accounts which come with such a high usage policy. This has since been changed and all default values are much higher.



    - Provisioning. Yes, we are fully aware of many wonderful and automated services that certainly do speed up the process. However, we have been in the industry now for well over 6 years. Quite frankly we are well know for our dedicated service. Our VPS service is something new and that we are pleased to offer. This being said, it's still in it's infancy and we are working extremely hard to automate and streamline a ton of features, functions, etc.. you'll see in the next month the release of our new ordering system, billing, automated provisioning, etc... so please don't be so quick to judge a book by its cover.

    We humbly accept your criticisms and look forward to delivering the best possible budget service in the future.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by jaypeesmith View Post
    In my case, I noticed what I considered high failcnts on kmemsize (who knows, maybe my definition of "high" is off), submitted a ticket, was told it was fixed and, when I checked, they were still there. I am thinking they might be overwhelmed it terms of support.
    These are not cleared until you reboot the account. While you wouldn't get any more fail counts, it will still show the old ones until a restart occurs.

  10. #10
    I have 4 GB Ram VPS since 1 month.
    Very very slow.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    305
    Quote Originally Posted by AKINCI View Post
    I have 4 GB Ram VPS since 1 month.
    Very very slow.
    In what way?
    AudioProbe.net - Playing the best music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and more...
    Commercial free, high quality 192kb/s, and firewall friendly port 80!
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  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Hostify Networks View Post
    In what way?
    We think you should be asking support this? Please open a inquiry with support and we'll gladly assist.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Dec 2003
    Posts
    507
    How long the setup time for VPS? I ordered yesterday still nothing until now.
    --- No signature for now ---

  14. #14
    Please wait for a reply from customer service if you've contacted us. Normally, its 24 - 48 hours. Within the next week, the provisioning will be automated.

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Dec 2003
    Posts
    507
    Quote Originally Posted by volumedrive View Post
    Please wait for a reply from customer service if you've contacted us. Normally, its 24 - 48 hours. Within the next week, the provisioning will be automated.
    Ok, I've sent email yesterday. I'll wait.
    --- No signature for now ---

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Posts
    659
    Quote Originally Posted by volumedrive View Post
    Please wait for a reply from customer service if you've contacted us. Normally, its 24 - 48 hours. Within the next week, the provisioning will be automated.
    Congrats to you guys for getting so close on that, I can tell it's been a struggle to balance working on that with the rest. You may finally get a nap.

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    938
    Phil, thanks for the review and the heads-up about the UBCs.

  18. #18
    Yeah I tried to use one of their VPS servers to host minecraft a couple of months ago. BIG MISTAKE!! It lagged so much that trying to just ssh to it lagged out. Yeah...

    Their dedicated servers may be okay but their VPS sucks balls!! I'm using a xen VPS with another provider now and it's working great.

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Posts
    3,816
    Quote Originally Posted by joe9439 View Post
    Yeah I tried to use one of their VPS servers to host minecraft a couple of months ago. BIG MISTAKE!! It lagged so much that trying to just ssh to it lagged out. Yeah...

    Their dedicated servers may be okay but their VPS sucks balls!! I'm using a xen VPS with another provider now and it's working great.
    You're trying to run minecraft/java with low beancounters on openvz?

  20. #20
    I ordered last week still nothing till now. no live support. no contact Ph.

  21. #21
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Posts
    659
    Quote Originally Posted by joe9439 View Post
    Yeah I tried to use one of their VPS servers to host minecraft a couple of months ago. BIG MISTAKE!! It lagged so much that trying to just ssh to it lagged out. Yeah...

    Their dedicated servers may be okay but their VPS sucks balls!! I'm using a xen VPS with another provider now and it's working great.
    Their disk I/O is too low for Minecraft. Honestly, you can't fault them that you're trying to run one of the most RAM/hard disk intensive processes on a budget VPS. I also tried a MC server on their VPS, it actually wasn't bad for the price.


    Quote Originally Posted by maxthon View Post
    I ordered last week still nothing till now. no live support. no contact Ph.
    Did you e-mail them? I got a quick response from them last night checking on the status of mine.

  22. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by volumedrive View Post
    Please wait for a reply from customer service if you've contacted us. Normally, its 24 - 48 hours. Within the next week, the provisioning will be automated.
    That sounds pretty cool. Have the new drives arrived yet? Still waiting for my VPS.

  23. #23

    Question

    Quote Originally Posted by jarland View Post
    Did you e-mail them? I got a quick response from them last night checking on the status of mine.
    I had sent emails. But nothing reply. waiting over 1 week for VPS set up.

  24. #24
    I emailed info@ on April 10 and still have no reply!

  25. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by maxthon View Post
    I had sent emails. But nothing reply. waiting over 1 week for VPS set up.
    That should not be the case. Please send a new request with your order ID so we can give you a quick resolution.

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