Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPSville impressions after 4 days

[John Lee]

We moved our hosting from Knownhost to VPSville approximately over the weekend and here are the initial impressions of VPSville. By the way, Knownhost support is great, the best, and we had no problems with them, just wanted to get the server out of the US.

We decided to try out VPSville based on the few reviews on this site and taking on their supposedly 'Stellar 24/7' support and 'Satisfaction guarantee' as promised on their website.

The few support tickets initiated so far were either answered very late (up to several days) to one ticket not having been answered at all.

The answers themselves were not very satisfactory and very incomplete, and kept recommending irrelevant 'upgrades', instead of trying to tackle the problem. I solved one ticket issue on my own, but got the reply that basically a tiny server (HIB 1 - 128MB guaranteed RAM with 4x Xeon processor) is 'too tiny' to even support attaching e-mail attachments larger than 2MB via Roundcube, so that I should 'upgrade' to HIB2 (256MB RAM guaranteed). Now, having used Roundcube on a VPS with 128MB RAM and having researched the issue with Roundcube, I know that it has to do with modifying configuration files to reset the maximum upload limit, etc. All I asked was for was the easiest way to go about doing it, since they are the 'experts' and this is the first time using an HIB LXAdmin for me.

Regarding the servers themselves, the setup was instant and I have no problems with the servers, very satisfied.

It's just the support that makes me quite skeptical. I really think that either the VPSville support are manned by nameless non-technicians or their priority is to have their customers upgrade over every issue, instead of helping to tackle the problem.

Hope this review is of some help to those considering VPSville.

[iHubNet-Matt]

I don't know if I am mistaken or not but I could not find much reviews regarding them. As you said known host is renowned here for their support. Hope the shift of host won't hurt you and they will come up regarding their support. Any way thanka for the initial review. Keep us posted.

[RossMAN]

Originally Posted by John Lee

just wanted to get the server out of the US.

If you're looking for other options outside of the US, check out EuroVPS.com and a2b2.com/www.cheapvps.co.uk

Don't forget to check the VPS Hosting Offers for a sale or coupon to save even more

[seanst3r]

You picked a bad time for a review

VPSVille has a major outage going on right now. I was using them for a few months now and was just beginning to trust them. Now they have some presumably catastrophic event and can't be bothered to inform their customers about what's going on.

[cowtown]

anyone got any news on this

i went with them as they have a 100% uptime 'guarantee' - currently been offline for over 12 hours.

if anyone from vpsville is reading this, please let us know what is happening, if we need to move servers to a different host i'd like to know sooner rather than later..

i've already started commissioning temporary servers at different places but need to know when vpsville will be back...

[nielsenj]

Originally Posted by cowtown

anyone got any news on this

i went with them as they have a 100% uptime 'guarantee' - currently been offline for over 12 hours.

if anyone from vpsville is reading this, please let us know what is happening, if we need to move servers to a different host i'd like to know sooner rather than later..

i've already started commissioning temporary servers at different places but need to know when vpsville will be back...

They basically have said they've had a power issue causing some nodes to go down. They do not have backup nodes at this time so they are transfering sites to remaining nodes.

Unfortunatly they've given a time frame of possibly "days" of downtime.

On the plus side, if this doesn't matter to you they are offering customers suffering downtime an entire free month of credit.

The worst part of the the entire thing is not just that it went down but there was no communication until over 12 hours after the initial downtime.

An email to affected customers would have been nice atleast giving them information on what is going on.

[cowtown]

hi

yes thanks for that information.. how did you get it?

'days'!!!! oh no

[nielsenj]

It was posted on their forums but the forums are randomly going down so i didn't bother linking.

[cowtown]

oh what a disaster

do you know of any other Canadian VPS' that you could recommend?

(don't get me wrong, up until now VPSVille has been *fantastic* but i do need my sites up - atm i think i'll move to another host temporarily and move back to vpsville when they get back)

[nielsenj]

I've only run into one other Canadian VPS host here but i wasn't overly impressed with a lot of the threads and their response to complaints so i prefer not to mention them by name.

Unfortunatly i was waiting for VPSVille specifically because it is Canadian and it's nice not to deal with USD/CAD exchange and with a local company but given the level of support and the "days" answer and lack of hardware replacement guarantee i'm looking at WiredTree or Liquidweb.

I do know of some local companies in Vancouver such as Radiant Communications (radiant.net) that offer VPS (but not advertised) at a premium. I've seen their facility and it's impressive, just a little high of a price for what i need it for.

[cowtown]

yer, as I said, prior to this VPSVille has been great.. the interface is great the features are great.. it just sucks that it's down! (and they should definitely post what is going on - on a server that is up!)

[drumman24]

Originally Posted by John Lee

We moved our hosting from Knownhost to VPSville approximately over the weekend and here are the initial impressions of VPSville. By the way, Knownhost support is great, the best, and we had no problems with them, just wanted to get the server out of the US.

We decided to try out VPSville based on the few reviews on this site and taking on their supposedly 'Stellar 24/7' support and 'Satisfaction guarantee' as promised on their website.

The few support tickets initiated so far were either answered very late (up to several days) to one ticket not having been answered at all.

The answers themselves were not very satisfactory and very incomplete, and kept recommending irrelevant 'upgrades', instead of trying to tackle the problem. I solved one ticket issue on my own, but got the reply that basically a tiny server (HIB 1 - 128MB guaranteed RAM with 4x Xeon processor) is 'too tiny' to even support attaching e-mail attachments larger than 2MB via Roundcube, so that I should 'upgrade' to HIB2 (256MB RAM guaranteed). Now, having used Roundcube on a VPS with 128MB RAM and having researched the issue with Roundcube, I know that it has to do with modifying configuration files to reset the maximum upload limit, etc. All I asked was for was the easiest way to go about doing it, since they are the 'experts' and this is the first time using an HIB LXAdmin for me.

Regarding the servers themselves, the setup was instant and I have no problems with the servers, very satisfied.

It's just the support that makes me quite skeptical. I really think that either the VPSville support are manned by nameless non-technicians or their priority is to have their customers upgrade over every issue, instead of helping to tackle the problem.

Hope this review is of some help to those considering VPSville.

A few days seems a little strange. I thought they did have a good rep for their support too.

[seanst3r]

No mention of a power issue on the forum. My IRC bot is still up and my shell is connected but the filesystem has been yanked out from under it. I'd say it's a storage problem.

Here's a copy of the forum posting:

Early today we experienced a problem which has resulted in several servers being brought down. Unfortunately we do not have the extra node space to migrate users to working servers.

This means that if your server is down, it will stay down for several hours to come while we bring new nodes online. It may be the case that some servers will be down for a period of days.

We will be giving anyone on a shut down server a full credit for the month.

We understand that this is little comfort to those who are living without their server this morning, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

We are working hard to restore data and will be in touch when we have more to say.

And here's the less than helpful email they sent to me at 04:40 am EDT:

The VPSVille site is experiencing some technical difficulties at this time and we would appreciate your patience while we work on the problem.

All downtime will be credited.

Conveniently for them, registration for their user forums isn't working. I see 13 users registering today waiting for a confirmation email.

[jeevesbond]

Another VPSVille refugee here. We've been building up webmaster-forums.net for a while now, following a five year near-hiatus. Just when we thought we were getting somewhere VPSVille pulls the rug from under us.

A downtime measured in days is a mortal blow for a forum. Sorry, am preaching to the converted, but it's good to have a whinge, particularly when I'm as helpless as we all are in this situation.

> I'd say it's a storage problem.
(would have used quote here, but am not allowed to use vbcode yet)
Sounds right, that would explain why some of their own infrastructure is down, they probably cannibalised their own stuff to get servers working. Do you think they're having to ship in some new equipment, and that's probably why we're looking at days instead of hours downtime?

So it looks like some of their hardware died and they had no backup in place. I agree that it couldn't be a power issue, as they're at this datacentre: 151frontstreet.com which has three redundant supplies, and could not afford to lose power for days on end. It just wouldn't happen.

I was starting to come to the conclusion that they had gone out of business, but that didn't explain why their Web site is still up. seanst3r's explanation makes a lot more sense. Thank you very much for posting the information you had seanst3r!

[kevinsan]

http://vpsville.ca/ Looks like they are gone. Moving and doing the charge back.