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  1. #1

    Need quick replacement for SolarVPS?

    I apologize if this post comes off as angry, I tried to cool off a bit but I'm decidedly still quite upset at the moment. I need a replacement ASAP though so I wanted to post to ask.

    I currently have a windows cloud VPS with SolarVPS, I've been with them since January 2010. However, after the situation I experienced today and the lack of solid communication from them regarding their NY facility issues I have decided I need to seek a more reliable host that won't lose my data due to their own system issues and then hide behind their TOS rather then apologizing.

    I haven't been able to reliably RDP into my VPS since March, usually if I did connect it was horribly slow and would take my sites down while I was logged in. It meant I couldn't do any of my normal maintenance on the server. it was only after contacting support on April 8 that I was informed about the SAN/NetApp issue. At that time I decided to disable my own back ups due to disk space that was running low and overall server sluggishness. I was offered a chance to move my server to Dallas but I had a lot of personal obligations that meant I wouldn't have the spare time to ensure my domains and other items moved smoothly to the new IP.

    Fast forward to 5/15, my sites go offline entirely. I manage to RDP in long enough to reboot the machine. When the machine came back up, MySQL wouldn't start, spend some time going through the logs and its a weird error in one table about unmatched indexes. I remove the files and get MySQL to start only to find that my entire server has apparently rolled back a month and a half to March 26th.

    I lost a month and a half of data and content. Shocked I messaged Solar asking what was wrong and seeing if they could do a restore, assuming that with the SAN/NetApp issues they would have regular backups (my stupidity for assuming that I wasn't the only customer that couldn't get on their machine reliably).

    Cosmin, with web hosting support, first informed me that it was rolled back to their only backup because my VM had corrupted due to the SAN issues they had been experiencing.

    I replied and got the following response:

    https://i.imgur.com/BTVMMEy.png

    Which I can sum up as, sorry sucks to me you, but our TOS says I'm not responsible so I'm going to hide behind that even though we're obviously in the wrong. Oh and you should contact Billing to get a refund for the extra space we charged you for but can't actually give you.

    No apology. No help, nothing but finger pointing at me as if this is entirely my fault. And not even a real clear explanation of why my VPS worked perfectly fine and then corrupted so horribly on reboot that they had to restore a 1.5 month old back up. Guess its because I wouldn't pay $10 to get support.

    I'm looking for a reliable Windows VPS with the following specs:

    $50/60 ish a month,
    2-4 GB of ram
    40-80 GB disk space
    at least 1 TB bandwidth, none of my sites really do a lot of traffic anymore except in occasional spikes

    I would even consider cloud hosting if its reliable and not horribly expensive.

    I'm currently working on getting some backups of my sites and data, I'd like to try and make this move over the weekend once I manage to fix the sites. Thank you, and again, sorry for the tone, I'm just horribly stressed right now.

  2. #2
    Wow, sorry you have had a bad experience...I will wait until I read some more WHT members here that can help you because I am also here to check out which ones are the best ones out there.

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    Everywhere
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    772
    Quote Originally Posted by ransim View Post
    I apologize if this post comes off as angry, I tried to cool off a bit but I'm decidedly still quite upset at the moment. I need a replacement ASAP though so I wanted to post to ask.

    I currently have a windows cloud VPS with SolarVPS, I've been with them since January 2010. However, after the situation I experienced today and the lack of solid communication from them regarding their NY facility issues I have decided I need to seek a more reliable host that won't lose my data due to their own system issues and then hide behind their TOS rather then apologizing.

    I haven't been able to reliably RDP into my VPS since March, usually if I did connect it was horribly slow and would take my sites down while I was logged in. It meant I couldn't do any of my normal maintenance on the server. it was only after contacting support on April 8 that I was informed about the SAN/NetApp issue. At that time I decided to disable my own back ups due to disk space that was running low and overall server sluggishness. I was offered a chance to move my server to Dallas but I had a lot of personal obligations that meant I wouldn't have the spare time to ensure my domains and other items moved smoothly to the new IP.

    Fast forward to 5/15, my sites go offline entirely. I manage to RDP in long enough to reboot the machine. When the machine came back up, MySQL wouldn't start, spend some time going through the logs and its a weird error in one table about unmatched indexes. I remove the files and get MySQL to start only to find that my entire server has apparently rolled back a month and a half to March 26th.

    I lost a month and a half of data and content. Shocked I messaged Solar asking what was wrong and seeing if they could do a restore, assuming that with the SAN/NetApp issues they would have regular backups (my stupidity for assuming that I wasn't the only customer that couldn't get on their machine reliably).

    Cosmin, with web hosting support, first informed me that it was rolled back to their only backup because my VM had corrupted due to the SAN issues they had been experiencing.

    I replied and got the following response:

    https://i.imgur.com/BTVMMEy.png

    Which I can sum up as, sorry sucks to me you, but our TOS says I'm not responsible so I'm going to hide behind that even though we're obviously in the wrong. Oh and you should contact Billing to get a refund for the extra space we charged you for but can't actually give you.

    No apology. No help, nothing but finger pointing at me as if this is entirely my fault. And not even a real clear explanation of why my VPS worked perfectly fine and then corrupted so horribly on reboot that they had to restore a 1.5 month old back up. Guess its because I wouldn't pay $10 to get support.

    I'm looking for a reliable Windows VPS with the following specs:

    $50/60 ish a month,
    2-4 GB of ram
    40-80 GB disk space
    at least 1 TB bandwidth, none of my sites really do a lot of traffic anymore except in occasional spikes

    I would even consider cloud hosting if its reliable and not horribly expensive.

    I'm currently working on getting some backups of my sites and data, I'd like to try and make this move over the weekend once I manage to fix the sites. Thank you, and again, sorry for the tone, I'm just horribly stressed right now.
    If you have been with them from 2010 - maybe give them another chance after asking to contact a manager? Data loss can happen anywhere. Although I do agree that communication could be much better here and they should have apologized at least - but maybe it was a hard day for their support staff with a lot of requests coming on due to the same thing that happened to you.
    COO, HostHatch, LLC

    Edge Cloud Computing

  4. #4
    We have sent many emails about the situation and posted up on twitter and contacted customers about their data moving to local disks. We provided plenty of communication to our customers during this whole process. However, we do not take backups of the customers data, it is their responsibility to do so, and we provide options for such, as do 99.999% of other VPS/Cloud hosting companies.

    We are very sorry for your loss and Cosmin is correct, to keep the tickets clean and consistent it is best to open a new ticket with billing to request any credits/refunds that might be do.

    Any questions you can PM me here or email me at the below email.
    Jay

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by HostHatch_AR View Post
    If you have been with them from 2010 - maybe give them another chance after asking to contact a manager? Data loss can happen anywhere. Although I do agree that communication could be much better here and they should have apologized at least - but maybe it was a hard day for their support staff with a lot of requests coming on due to the same thing that happened to you.
    This is the just the last strike for me, and its not the first instance of receiving a reply from support that was lacking in details or accurate.

    While my server is mostly for fun stuff I enjoy I've referred several clients to SolarVPS for their hosting when I do development work for them. Many of them opted for Solar on my recommendation. I've had similar reports from several of my past clients of terseness from support staff or unwillingness to accept responsibility for issues created by Solar. A lot of them were incredibly unhappy with how the forced migrations off the old hosting platform were handled from lack of communication, clarity or even support for systems that were suppose to be managed.

    I understand things go wrong, when the data center was migrated and the downtime was vastly longer then anticipated I understood, I didn't even ask for a refund or compensation because I know that just happens sometimes. But when your system is broken, and customers are paying for those systems, you have a responsibility to ensure you own up to your end of the bargain.

    If the customer loses data because your hardware is failing and making it so they are unable to do their own work the host has to take some responsibility in that. And Jay's comment below only highlights again that issue.

    Quote Originally Posted by jayglate View Post
    We have sent many emails about the situation and posted up on twitter and contacted customers about their data moving to local disks. We provided plenty of communication to our customers during this whole process. However, we do not take backups of the customers data, it is their responsibility to do so, and we provide options for such, as do 99.999% of other VPS/Cloud hosting companies.

    We are very sorry for your loss and Cosmin is correct, to keep the tickets clean and consistent it is best to open a new ticket with billing to request any credits/refunds that might be do.

    Any questions you can PM me here or email me at the below email.
    I received zero emails from your company regarding the issue with your SAN/NetApp, I would happy prove you wrong but I apparently have some limitations here as a new user and I won't circumvent the rules just to post links as proof.

    After I requested an increase in disk space and put in a support ticket about connectivity issues in RDP I received this reply from Ramesh. This was the first and only time in March I received any notice from Solar about the NetApp/SAN problem:

    Dear Valued Solar VPS Customer,

    We are currently experiencing performance related issues with our NetApp SAN storage platform. We are working diligently with our vendor ( NetApp ) to resolve the issue based upon their specific recommendations. This is a process that may take several weeks to resolve, however, during that time you may likely see incremental performance improvements. Our engineering team is also working on standing up additional storage resources to continue to meet the demands of our customers. We will continue to keep you updated as new developments become available and any applicable ETAs related to resolution. As always, we sincerely appreciate your business and your support.

    Thank you,

    The Solar VPS Management




    Ticket Details
    ---------------------------------
    Ticket ID: PBE-530-69934
    Department: SolarSystem
    Type: Issue
    Status: Open
    Priority: Normal
    This email doesn't really indicate the true severity of the actual problem. It also indicated several weeks not months. This ticket was then put on hold. It left me to assume it would be something Solar would resolve in the next couple weeks and that it should start getting better.

    A bit over a week later my system starts to hang badly, I do a google search about the net app issue to see if I can find a status and come across a post from Ross Brouse, made back in March, that is not linked on the main website, the support page, or the control panel. I would link to it, but I can't so I recommend just googling SolarVPS NetApp Issue its the first result, at least for me.

    That post gave me some more concern, it sounded like a much bigger problem without any resolution anywhere in sight. I open up my ticket that was on hold and ask for information about migrating the pod to Dallas.

    Posted: 8 April 2014 08:32 PM
    I read over the message from Ross, I wish that had been sent to me via email or even appended to my ticket here. The situation right now for me an untenable, I cannot do ANY maintenance on my machine because of how poor the performance is with remote desktop and my websites are now beginning to suffer performance issues and unavailability.

    I have a MAJOR event starting in two days and the website tied to that event has been up and down, I now worry its not going to be able to withstand the traffic crush coming.

    I've lost a week that I would have otherwise had to prepare if the notification of the issue had been sent to me.

    I've been a customer of Solar for years, so I'm incredibly dismayed.

    Ross's message indicates that we can move our servers to another location, it did not indicate if I would be required to do the switch myself or it would be moved for me.
    The major event I mention here is a massive charity even I run every year at the Penny Arcade Expo East. I was now at less then one week before the event and worried because the site does get a significant jump in traffic during the event.

    Leo replied:

    Posted: 8 April 2014 08:59 PM
    Hello Mary,

    We do apologize for the inconvenience caused. We will do the POD move for you on the answers of the below question set.

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

    Hello,

    You have requested to move your POD to a new location. Please be aware that by doing so, the POD IP will change, and be prepared to make any changes needed because of this (DNS records, 3rd party applications, SSH or RDP information, etc).

    In order to move your POD, we need some information from you about it:

    What is the current location of the POD (New Jersey, Texas, Miami, Los Angeles)?
    What location would you like it moved to (New Jersey, Texas, Miami, Los Angeles)?
    Current main IP of your POD?
    Current hostname of your POD?
    Do you want the data on your POD to be migrated?
    When would you like us to move the POD (we can schedule the move anytime 24/7/365)?

    Any POD movement will require us to shutdown the POD during the move.

    If you choose to have your POD's data migrated, it will require several hours of downtime depending on the amount of data to be transferred.

    If no data is to be migrated, we can quickly redeploy a POD in the new location for you and terminate your old POD. Please note that once this is done, any data on the old POD will be permanently lost.

    Regards,
    Leo Simon
    Okay so fair enough, they'll move the data but I have to handle all of the DNS/IP updates and security changes for my external databases and other items. It's not an easy job, and not one I had time to deal with that close to the event and while in the process of baking over 2,000 cookies for charity ahead of driving to Boston.

    Mind you if Ramesh had actually told me to true severity of the issue I could have dealt with this a week ahead of this.

    The site is at least up now and working, so I decide that disabling as much as I can on the box, it should survive the week of the event. And it did, its had blips but its largely been available since then if a bit slow, I couldn't RDP to the machine but the sites were responsive.

    I had zero contact from Solar during April, no notices about the problem, status on the issue, if you want i'll happily post the screens of my inbox once I am able to add links.

    To be fair I probably should have checked in, I take the onus on that, but an email or update or ETA would have been nice. I also do get your emails, you can see the notifications of invoices and payments here. But the sites were basically working so I wasn't as concerned and just assumed that the fix Ramesh mentioned was being applied and things were incrementally getting better.

    Man was I wrong.

    I did get one email, two days ago, with the title "SolarSystem Local SSD Storage Migration Launch". Even that is light on details and doesn't indicate there is a likely hood I'll lose 1.5 months of data:

    Dear Valued Solar VPS Customer,

    We have some great news! The time has come to migrate your SolarSystem POD to our new local storage SSD platform!

    We understand the past several months may have been very difficult for you given the technical issues we've experienced. Rest assured that once you are moved, things will get much better. So, without further delay, here is how the process will work.

    The physical node you are on has been added to the migration queue. Once it comes time for your POD to be migrated, your POD will be shut down, migrated to the new platform and then brought back online. Unfortunately we are unable to give you an exact time your POD will be migrated, though the process will take place over the next couple of weeks. While this does seem like a very long time to wait once you've been added to the queue, please keep in mind that copying data from one Storage system to another is a lengthy process. Fortunately, as our migrations progress, this process will get faster.

    Please note that downtime per POD will vary depending on the amount of storage/data within that POD that has to be migrated to the new nodes.

    We sincerely thank you for your patience and continued support of Solar VPS!
    So tell me Jay, when exactly did Solar tell me exactly what was going on? When exactly did Solar really ensure I knew exactly how bad this NetApp/SAN problem was?

    When did Solar advise me to purchase your disaster recovery product as a just in case during this time period? Foolish of me, but I assumed that given this was your issue with your hardware that you might have provided me with some protection given I COULDN'T LOG INTO THE BOX TO DO A BACKUP. You had failed to uphold your end of the bargain, IE providing me with the service I was paying for, a windows server I could RDP into.

    I'm glad to see you at least apologize, if Cosmin had done that I'd probably be a lot less angered by this all. An apology, some sympathy, and a better explanation of why this happened and how you might avoid it in the future for me and others would have gone a lot further then just emailing me your TOS/backup policy of which I was already well aware.

    The fact of the matter is your company has utterly failed in accurately communicating this fiasco and utterly failed in assisting your affected customers in a way that isn't basically just saying "Sucks to be you.".

    I'm just glad I'm not a business with mission critical data or services on my machine.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    Cleveland, Ohio
    Posts
    171
    I feel you, I had the exact same issue with our one server there. We never received any notice neither. Things just went down hours at a time for a couple weeks. I was finally able to get enough time without things crashing to move data to another provider. We are going to try RamNode for a couple of our servers and see how they go. We had one server there for about month and not s single SMS message to me able down time which feels nice finally.
    SepCity.com - Content Management / Portal Software Solutions
    Host on our network or buy our software to host on your own server

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Dwagar View Post
    I feel you, I had the exact same issue with our one server there. We never received any notice neither. Things just went down hours at a time for a couple weeks. I was finally able to get enough time without things crashing to move data to another provider. We are going to try RamNode for a couple of our servers and see how they go. We had one server there for about month and not s single SMS message to me able down time which feels nice finally.
    I'm actually considering splitting some of the sites I was hosting off and moving them to a linux environment, so I'll definitely look at RamNode for those.

    I'm actually looking right now at Windows Azure websites to handle some of my .NET based apps instead.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    Cleveland, Ohio
    Posts
    171
    I have a couple Windows servers with RamNode, but you need to get their KVM and install your own windows license. We had a couple windows licenses available from pass servers that we colocated. If your sites can run on linux I would probably host them on a linux VPS since its cheaper on monthly fees usually, but all of our sites and customers are all .NET web sites.

    I did research the windows azure which seems good but never tried them yet. I may put up a couple sites there and give it a try in the near future.
    SepCity.com - Content Management / Portal Software Solutions
    Host on our network or buy our software to host on your own server

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Dwagar View Post
    I have a couple Windows servers with RamNode, but you need to get their KVM and install your own windows license. We had a couple windows licenses available from pass servers that we colocated. If your sites can run on linux I would probably host them on a linux VPS since its cheaper on monthly fees usually, but all of our sites and customers are all .NET web sites.

    I did research the windows azure which seems good but never tried them yet. I may put up a couple sites there and give it a try in the near future.
    I do some .NET development so while the sites I had running consistently there aren't .NET it made it easier then having too many servers and it was a good chance for me to get some hands on with a windows server for experimenting.

    The couple small forum sites and the huge old mediawiki sites I host could easily be moved off to a linux server and might likely run a bit nicer there as well.

    I just didn't realize Azure had easy deployment for even Open Source stuff, so I am honestly now intrigued.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Kepler 62f
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    I'd only consider two companies for Windows:
    - EuroVPS (Amsterdam)
    - LiquidWeb (Michigan)

    EuroVPS uses VMware.
    LW uses Xen.
    * Beware of Virtuozzo Windows -- the base OS is shared!

    I no longer recommend SolarVPS at all, for this plus other reasons. They'd been doing well for years, but have slowly imploded more and more throughout 2013. Thankfully, I'd already moved on from them before the real messes struck.

    The time for second chances is over. It's time to move to a better host.
    Last edited by kpmedia; 05-16-2014 at 09:13 PM.
    || Need a good host?
    || See my Suggested Hosts List || Editorial: EIG/Site5/Arvixe/Hostgator Alternatives
    ||

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
    Posts
    1,682
    At this point I only could recommend you these companies
    WiredTree
    Dediserve
    Servint
    Softsyshosting

  12. #12
    Nice and this would also help me when I come across people who have the same issues with the thread starter.

  13. #13
    I too have migrated away from solarVPS after they managed to loose ALL my data in their Miami SAN.

    Thankfully, I never trusted them and held my own offsite backups and I was able to provision a new VPS with another supplier in a matter of hours.

    I have used SolarVPS since 2010; and have always been happy with the service they provided, sadly things tools a turn for the worse after I was forced off a "legacy" platform to this new wrangled "solar system". I did have my doubts; but it was new, and cloud is the way forwards these day; but that is when all the issues started.

    Needless to say, I am no longer with SolarVPS and I would think they will be loosing may more customers, despite offering 3 months off a new system in the NJ datacenter.

  14. #14

    wise choice

    Quote Originally Posted by chrissifer View Post
    I too have migrated away from solarVPS after they managed to loose ALL my data in their Miami SAN.

    Thankfully, I never trusted them and held my own offsite backups and I was able to provision a new VPS with another supplier in a matter of hours.

    I have used SolarVPS since 2010; and have always been happy with the service they provided, sadly things tools a turn for the worse after I was forced off a "legacy" platform to this new wrangled "solar system". I did have my doubts; but it was new, and cloud is the way forwards these day; but that is when all the issues started.

    Needless to say, I am no longer with SolarVPS and I would think they will be loosing may more customers, despite offering 3 months off a new system in the NJ datacenter.
    Wise choice.

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    460
    Controversial maybe, but I have yet to see in my experience a 100% reliable cloud system, a honest good single dedicated device seems just as much reliable if not more so.

    In the past it was grid systems, but the excuse was the technology wasn't ready, 4 years into the future and there is still massive issues.

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
    Posts
    1,682
    Appart of Solarvps I also have VMs on dediserve and while they had to make some firmware upgrades during the first months of service they have been running for 2 years without dataloss and almost 100% uptime

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    460
    Forgive me, I wasn't speaking in absolutes.

    The problem is a lot of clouds are sold on High dependency promises and sometimes don't live upto that promise.

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