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  1. #1
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    Exclamation Avoid Voxel / Internap

    We've been doing business with Voxel (now 'Internap') for several years now and in many ways it pains me to even have to write this message. But it should be known that their service has gotten to a point where it is absolutely abysmal and not worth anywhere near the premium cost they are charging.

    For one, their handling of Hurricane Sandy was horrendous and showed clear lack of planning. Their billing/support system was located in the same facility which experienced extended outages during this period, making communication with them extremely difficult. When numerous other providers who offer service in a similar price range were online (NYI.Net, for example), Internap was down due to generator failure/lack of fuel. To add insult to injury, Internap was attempting to suggest that their competitors were ill-prepared for the hurricane and would experience downtime:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/new-y...tweets-2012-10

    Internap jabbed Amazon by tweeting, "Could 'Frankenstorm' Lead To Another
    AWS #Outage"
    Nice job, Internap. Might want to look after your own infrastructure before worrying about others.

    But just shortly after Hurricane Sandy, there's yet another outage lasting for about 90 minutes affecting their entire NYC metro network. The cause was a power failure in their LGA5 POP. Yes, a power failure in just one of their several POPs rendered their entire NYC metro network essentially useless. Surprise, their support portal was not accessible for most of this time either, and it took them a long time to even update their twitter page. A random power outage like this for network equipment just isn't justified, especially when I've been told that they simply tripped one of their breakers, which is something they could have probably avoided.

    Ever since the migration to using Internap transit for what appears to be large part of their bandwidth usage, we've noticed a decline in performance. On average, about 5-10ms extra latency on many routes. Even routes within NYC metro have become extremely inefficient in some cases. Example:

    1. 10.1.5.2 0.0% 5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.0
    2. xe-3-2-1.mpr1.ewr1.us.above. 0.0% 5 0.6 5.7 0.5 26.3 11.5
    3. xe-3-1-0.cr1.lga5.us.above.n 0.0% 5 1.0 7.7 1.0 34.0 14.7
    4. xe-2-2-0.cr1.dca2.us.above.n 0.0% 5 5.4 8.9 5.3 23.2 8.0
    5. xe-0-3-1.er1.iad10.us.above. 0.0% 5 5.9 5.9 5.9 6.0 0.0
    6. equinix-ix.iad1.us.voxel.net 0.0% 5 9.9 8.7 6.2 9.9 1.5
    7. 0.te1-1.tsr1.phl1.us.voxel.n 0.0% 5 9.6 10.9 9.5 16.0 2.9
    8. 0.te1-3.tsr1.ewr4.us.voxel.n 0.0% 5 11.6 11.3 11.2 11.6 0.1
    9. 0.te1-1.tsr1.lga5.us.voxel.n 0.0% 5 11.5 16.2 11.5 21.9 4.0
    10. 0.ae57.csr2.lga6.us.voxel.ne 0.0% 5 13.5 14.1 11.8 20.9 3.8

    We're just trying to get from Newark to NYC. Should take no more than 1-2ms.

    Yup, it takes 12-13ms due to an inefficient route that goes through WDC just to reach Voxel/Internap. And this isn't just inbound, but outbound as well that it takes this horrible path. If this was a value bandwidth offering, then I wouldn't care as much, but when you're charging so much for your data transfer, I'd really hope you've perfected your key NYC metro routes. This is a network that gamers supposedly depend on.

    Finally, the cloud offering is unimpressive at best. Not only is it plagued by constant storage failures and slow performance, but it doesn't seem like any improvements have been made in the last year or so. Their API is still extremely buggy, and it's often not possible to properly create a new VM or in some cases even reboot a VM and expect it to come back up. In numerous instances when a server blade has failed and the cloud server was meant to come back online on another blade, it simply didn't, causing an extending outage. Recently, they lost power to their storage system in Amsterdam, rendering ALL of their Amsterdam cloud servers offline. This happened about 3 days ago, and caused an outage of 2-3 hours.

    Just this morning, after the previous cloud failure 3 days ago, several VMs I have in Amsterdam showed file system errors and ended up in a read-only file system. Their support team claims nothing was wrong, and it must have been my VM that consumed too many resources. Yet, the problem happened to multiple VMs, one of which was entirely idle in usage the entire time in the first place.

    In conclusion, their network performs worse than most 'value' networks that are available at a much lesser cost. Their dedicated servers are extremely overpriced (even for the NYC market), and their support or reliability don't make up for it in any way. Their cloud servers will not deliver any better reliability (this is measured over a fairly long-term period of 2-3 years) over a single server setup.

    This company is a joke, and should be avoided.
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  2. #2
    Wow...nice detail on the review and sadly not what I would expect due to the outstanding reputation Voxel used to have prior to the purchase by Internap.
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  3. #3
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    And it was only 2 weeks ago i thought Internap were good.

    Thx for the review.
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by iwod View Post
    And it was only 2 weeks ago i thought Internap were good.

    Thx for the review.
    What it really comes down to is, if they positioned their offering as a more value oriented service and actually had a more competitive cost (i.e. quite a bit less than what they charge now), then it wouldn't be so bad. But at the price they charge, you can easily get better service elsewhere.

    Prior to Voxel being bought out, I still considered them on the pricier side, but they at least had a super reliable network and pretty good support. Now they've had so many outages, and it just seems that there's so many marketing facades involved - such as the twitter posts slamming other companies when their own infrastructure goes down during the storm anyways.

    A hurricane is a time when people should be helping out each other if anything. Posting messages trying to steal away business is just sleazy at best, and when you can't even back up what you're trying to sell it's even worse.
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  5. #5
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    layer0, have you actually tried sending them that and asking them about it? Did they give you an answer as to why it is such and etc?

    Would really be interested to know what they answered you.
    Aaron Ong
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  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by aodat2 View Post
    layer0, have you actually tried sending them that and asking them about it? Did they give you an answer as to why it is such and etc?

    Would really be interested to know what they answered you.
    I did for everything except the traceroute that was posted, which was really just a minor example of the larger issue that I feel their network has reduced in quality.

    But as for everything else, they really had no comment about my complaints regarding their twitter message, handling of hurricane sandy, or the fact that there were so many recent outages. They did provide an RFO in almost all cases so far (one is still pending), but that doesn't really shed light on the fact that there's a string of several outages for a company that once was*actually quite reliable. It generally appears that the Voxel 'agile hosting' brand just isn't a big concentration of Internap, who is technically a larger firm and has other products and services to concern themselves with. This is just my observation and opinion.
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  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by layer0 View Post
    I did for everything except the traceroute that was posted, which was really just a minor example of the larger issue that I feel their network has reduced in quality.

    But as for everything else, they really had no comment about my complaints regarding their twitter message, handling of hurricane sandy, or the fact that there were so many recent outages. They did provide an RFO in almost all cases so far (one is still pending), but that doesn't really shed light on the fact that there's a string of several outages for a company that once was*actually quite reliable. It generally appears that the Voxel 'agile hosting' brand just isn't a big concentration of Internap, who is technically a larger firm and has other products and services to concern themselves with. This is just my observation and opinion.
    If your major concern is their network, then you should really include the traceroute and etc to show them that their routing is getting poorer and etc.

    Do tell them that something is wrong and etc. That's the most important thing of all to show them that they are not on a good network anymore after Internap took over.

    Further to that they might have integrated their routes and etc with Internap's routing thus making this worse off.
    Aaron Ong
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  8. #8
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    There is actually currently a ticket open about that. I don't really have the time to sit and compile a list of bad routes (doesn't Internap design products that are supposed to be able to eliminate these anyways?!), but I can submit what I can I suppose.

    Anyway I am more concerned about all of the downtime. Performance is important too, but it doesn't matter if the infrastructure is not stable in the first place.
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  9. #9
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    Lets not worry about the downtime during the hurricane. It doesn't only happen to them but to a lot other hosts as well. So having a downtime during that time is not really a big issue coz most if not all the hosts that I know (friends) are down as well.

    As for the slamming on others, they have their right to do that as/per their liking. You can't say that they are bad or etc for doing that. There's still something called as "Freedom Of Speech" which is kinda fair for them to say it or do whatever they like.
    Aaron Ong
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  10. #10
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    I think you are missing the point. There are several other outages I've discussed that have nothing to do with the hurricane.

    Also, your freedom of speech argument is silly. Of course they can say what they want, but that doesn't make it a good business tactic. It is unprofessional in this case in my opinion.
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  11. #11
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    Response from Voxel / Internap

    Gurpreet,

    First off, thank you for being a customer for so many years – I very much appreciate your long term patronage and, having answered a decent number of your support tickets myself over the years, have always appreciated your loyalty.

    Regarding your post, I respect your frank assessment and honest approach in voicing your concerns. Although I may not agree with everything you mentioned, I have always believed in and supported transparency in our services, our challenges and, above all, our interaction with customers -- that was my approach when I led Operations at Voxel for ~8 years and continues that way today in my role as head of Hosting and Cloud services for Internap brand.

    In that spirit, I’d like to address some of your concerns directly.

    As you know, the past several weeks have been tremendously difficult for many hosting and data center companies based in NYC -- and Internap is no different. We operate a large number of facilities (both owned and leased) in NY metro and were heavily impacted by the storm and its aftermath. We also have the vast majority of our Agile Hosting (aka “Voxel”) operations team living and working in NYC, which contributed to some of our customer-facing response times.

    As our detailed RFO’s have stated, we suffered several service impacting issues the week following the storm. I trust that our communication during and after these incidences has been honest and forth coming and that the RFO’s you received have explained each outage and our response in detail. I have full faith in our DC ops, IP engineering and Hosting Operations teams in that they will learn from these outages and improve our capabilities going forward – we have a hard-working and talented group of engineers dedicated to improving everything from our billing/support platform redundancy to our data center footprints and network POP failure modes. This doesn’t excuse any of the issues that occurred, but I do want to underscore that we take all of these issues extremely seriously.

    I’ve requested our NOC to look into the traceroute you provided. There is definitely something wrong there and is most likely a function some remaining Voxel / Internap network integrations. We will get it resolved and see if there is something systemic going on -- please do not hesitate to forward our NOC any further reports or issues that you see.

    As for our cloud platform, we are aware of isolated instances of storage issues and have been working to address these at an architectural level. We have some pretty exciting stuff coming out in 2013 which I am positive will up the bar for our cloud and dedicated on-demand server platform in the industry.

    As for the tweet, that was simply bad form, is not representative of the culture at Internap and won’t be repeated. No excuses, it just won’t happen again.

    Gurpreet, I won’t tell you that this past year has been perfect for us. Merging Voxel into Internap has been, like any acquisition, full of excitement and its share of challenges. We’ve also seen some explosive growth and have, frankly, had a hard time keeping up with it at times. With that said, I feel confident about our ability to execute and provide our customers (hopefully including you!) the kind of service and value you expect from a top tier service provider. I speak on behalf of all the old-Voxel team and the larger Internap staff in saying that we value your business AND your feedback. Thank you for your support over the years and we’ll do our very best to rectify any issues that you have – you can expect a call from our operations management to discuss in more detail.

    Kind Regards,
    Zachary Smith
    VP, Hosting Services @ Internap

    Business Unit Manager of Hosting and Cloud for Internap's Agile Platform and Custom Hosting Solutions.
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  12. #12
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    Hello Zachary Smith,

    I've sent a PM to you. Hopefully you will read it and know how I feel as a customer of Voxel for quite a long time.
    Aaron Ong
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  13. #13
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    Thanks Aaron!

    Quote Originally Posted by aodat2 View Post
    Hello Zachary Smith,

    I've sent a PM to you. Hopefully you will read it and know how I feel as a customer of Voxel for quite a long time.
    Thanks Aaron, for reaching out. I am traveling currently but will reply to your PM this weekend.

    Best Regards,
    Zachary Smith
    VP, Hosting Services @ Internap

    Business Unit Manager of Hosting and Cloud for Internap's Agile Platform and Custom Hosting Solutions.
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  14. #14
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    I hate to bump threads, and especially did not want to comment while we're still in the process of migrating our infrastructure away - regardless, I can can say with absolute confidence that you should NEVER consider doing business Voxel / Internap. I've gotten better service from providers who offer price points about twice as lower. We're currently handling a network related situation with them, and their service is just so astonishingly bad I could not refrain from commenting.
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  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by layer0 View Post
    We're currently handling a network related situation with them, and their service is just so astonishingly bad I could not refrain from commenting.
    DDOS, outage, what? Your post is very ambiguous.
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by gordonrp View Post
    DDOS, outage, what? Your post is very ambiguous.
    They spent hours blaming a network problem on their side on our system's firewall, and ultimately had one of our systems down for several hours without resolution.

    Same issue occurred today, and they're asking us what recent changes we made to our system, when it is extremely obvious that there's a network side problem, preventing the IP from routing to the server correctly from the looks of it.
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  17. #17
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    More Voxel issues. Now they're having network problems affecting at least one of their NYC based facilities, staff doesn't appear to know what's going on either.

    Once upon a time, their network was incredibly stable, but it's now absolute crap.
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  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by layer0 View Post
    More Voxel issues. Now they're having network problems affecting at least one of their NYC based facilities, staff doesn't appear to know what's going on either.

    Once upon a time, their network was incredibly stable, but it's now absolute crap.
    Do you know what address they're located at in NYC? There was a reported fiber cut around near 111 8th Street about a week or so ago that effected a good number of providers in the area.
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  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by layer0 View Post
    I hate to bump threads, and especially did not want to comment while we're still in the process of migrating our infrastructure away - regardless, I can can say with absolute confidence that you should NEVER consider doing business Voxel / Internap. I've gotten better service from providers who offer price points about twice as lower. We're currently handling a network related situation with them, and their service is just so astonishingly bad I could not refrain from commenting.
    Where are you moving to, if you don't mind me asking.
    My personal blog -- rubiverse.net
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by flam316 View Post
    Where are you moving to, if you don't mind me asking.
    MediaLayer, I'd like to know too. Are you replacing your Voxel/Internap NYC datacenter with another nearby? Specifically, where are your east coast shared servers going to be hosted?
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  21. #21
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    New deployments for east coast have been going primarily to Ashburn, VA. We're not yet set on an NYC replacement however we are not deploying anything new at Voxel and have not been for a little while. If you are interested in further details please contact us directly.
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