Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : WiredTree 8 Month Review

[ncis]

I've been with WiredTree for 8 months and I have to say it's been incredibly reliable host up until.... a week and a half ago.

First impressions of WiredTree were that it's solid, reliable, with very fast support responses. I couldn't find any negative reviews at the time of looking for a new host so we went with them mainly looking to save some bucks vs our previous vps supplier which was LiquidWeb (yes I know we shouldn't have switched but their vps' are pretty slow but upgrades are way too expensive). I found a good coupon for more ram etc so we switched over to WiredTree.

7 months into hosting with WiredTree my impressions were fantastic, we found it so reliable we actually moved our own internal business websites (and email accounts) over to the VPS primarily for reliability as they were on an unmanaged dedicated server previously (I'm fluent with centos servers). 1 week after we moved our internal sites to the vps the inevitable happened, server failure.

I was told a raid array failed, so they had to reboot the raid array and it had to run literally dozens of fsck passes on the server which I can live with. 6 hours later when the fsck scan completed the server booted up and then the raid failed again. At this time they say they are going to restore a backup copy of my vps on a brand new node which again I can live with, we might lose a few support tickets on our own helpdesk as the backup was from the previous night (server crashed at 11am) but it's manageable.

Restoring the backup took another whopping 4-5 hours from them to do. And when it was done I immediately logged in to view everything and realized the backup was 3 days old... I was beyond PISSED as I've lost literally 3 days of support tickets, emails, and same with the clients we have on the same vps who rely on webmail.

In my opinion a company is only as good as their SLA's and disaster recovery procedures. It was beyond clear WiredTree does not have clear backup methods in place in order to do a simple process as restoring an archived backup.

While we have been impressed with WiredTree's support and reliability over the past 7 months we simply can't afford to stay with them in the event another server fails down the road. 12 hours of downtime and restoring 3 day old backup is a risk we can't undertake. The support team did work hard and that was appreciated.

We're with servint now, and wow am I impressed with their service. They have a much more corporate feel with sales / support which is very nice and the VPS we have is literally 3x faster than the comparable one at WiredTree or LiquidWeb.

But who knows where we'll be tomorrow, 6 months, or a year from now. If only there was a vps provider who could guarantee 100% uptime. I'm waiting for the day Google offers hosting

[httpEasy]

Thanks for the interesting review and best of luck with your current choice.

[garmanonline]

Not sure how much diskspace you are currently using, but I've seen some pretty cheap offers for backup space around the hosting offers forums... could always spend the money you initially are saving on your own backup solution.

also, if you want more space... you could always get a cheap dedicated server maybe with a P4 or older Xeon CPU(s) with plenty of disk space. It would be a bit more but would be more reliable than a VPS if you get the right host.

you've probably already considered all these but just throwing ideas around. At the very least if you've got an old box laying around home or the office you could setup a backup solution locally for yourself? backup to your local server nightly and maybe from there to a external hard drive every day too (cheap and that extra layer of redundancy)

[ubservers]

This is not fun to hear, but you should always do a backup on your side no matter who is your provider. To me, backups are a personal task unless host clearly specifies he ensure daily backup on real-time backups.

[superprogram]

Originally Posted by ubservers

To me, backups are a personal task unless host clearly specifies he ensure daily backup on real-time backups.

couldn't agree more!

[Richard-BCS]

Originally Posted by ubservers

This is not fun to hear, but you should always do a backup on your side no matter who is your provider. To me, backups are a personal task unless host clearly specifies he ensure daily backup on real-time backups.

+1

@OP Learn from your mistake and do backups yourself, this will save you the hassle

[teck]

What happened to the nightly backups WT claims they do for VPS's?

[Hsunami]

^ Wondering the same thing. Weren't they suppose to be nightly?

[ubservers]

Originally Posted by teck

What happened to the nightly backups WT claims they do for VPS's?

As I said, I always recommand personnal backups unless host clearly specifies he does it. But even in this case I always recommand you do your own backups since you never know what can happen

[teck]

Originally Posted by ubservers

As I said, I always recommand personnal backups unless host clearly specifies he does it. But even in this case I always recommand you do your own backups since you never know what can happen

I agree with you. I didn't disagree with anything you said. WT claims nightly backups and since they are a reputable provider, I'm wondering what happened to this data? Perhaps they should follow the path of other VPS hosts and do R1Soft backups of all their nodes.

It's one thing a company claims they do X and X but when they're caught with their pants down, then that's another story.

[ubservers]

Originally Posted by teck

I agree with you. I didn't disagree with anything you said. WT claims nightly backups and since they are a reputable provider, I'm wondering what happened to this data? Perhaps they should follow the path of other VPS hosts and do R1Soft backups of all their nodes.

It's one thing a company claims they do X and X but when they're caught with their pants down, then that's another story.

I agree. Can you open a ticket and ask why they can't acheive their nightly backup promise? We'll see what's the reason

[WiredTree Zac]

I'm glad to hear you were happy with our service until the unfortunate hardware failure. We do our best to strive for 100% uptime, but sometimes hardware components fail out of our control, but this is true for any hosting - dedicated, VPS, or cloud and even if the provider uses high end hardware like we do. I'm not sure why you would have missing data as the backups completed were from the night before from Virtuozzo and they reported as successful. I understand that you think we may not have good procedures in place, however, when you are restoring hundreds of GB to TBs of data, and you need to stream the data from a backup node, go over the network, recombine multi-part multi-GB archives, restore the files onto a new node, etc. It takes time, that is just the physics of it, and I can assure you there is no "dead time" in our process. In fact, I'm sure you would have been down longer at many providers. Having said that, we'll take the criticism and look for ways to see if we can improve more on it. Good luck with your new host!

[Nnyan]

I'm going to beat the dead horse here but you should NEVER EVER rely on a vendor's backups for your vacation videos let alone corporate files, never. Ever.

Having said that WT is not the only top tier vendor that has had some unusual problems that caused an extended downtime. Believe it or not it can happen to anyone including the best. No knock on ServInt (I love their service) but this type of outage could happen to them too. This is a fact of life in the VPS world and you should take some precautions.

[techjr]

Sorry to find out about the hardware failure. Does servint do the same thing as wiredtree upon server setup? Like securing the server and everything else?


What you might want to do is grab two vps servers instead of one and ask them if they could setup some form of fail-over solution. More then likely you will have a hardware failure with servint also. It happens with all companys, even with cloud hosting.

[UNIXy]

Originally Posted by ncis

I'm waiting for the day Google offers hosting

Google has its fair share of snafus (http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gma...ail-deletions/). Although they never promised 100% data safety in the first place. Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about your data loss.

Regards
Joe / UNIXY