Choice of two VPSs

[Tim Tisdall]

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 7:39 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>wrote:

>  On 02/03/2014 09:38 AM, Tim Tisdall wrote:
>
>  On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:15 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>  I've been a long-term customer of VPS.NET for about 3 years now.  I hate
> them.  :)  But I also still use them.  In the past I had a lot of issues
> with downtime and just a few weeks ago I had two instances be down for over
> 12 hrs.  I'm not hosting any critical applications with them  (where I did
> in the past and lost a lot of money).  They have a SLA that basically says
> if they're down long enough (and you reported it quick enough), you can get
> your money back.  But getting back $20 isn't much of a comfort if your
> mission critical site is down for 20hrs.
>
>
> If your site is really "mission critical", you should be prepared to spend
> the money that it takes to increase reliability and durability. $20/month
> gets you cheap and cheerful hosting with no fault tolerance and minimal
> support. You get what you pay for and don't get what you don't pay for. To
> get increasingly higher levels of reliability, expect your costs to
> increase exponentially. Like almost anything you look at, the last tenth
> can be exorbitantly expensive so you have to decide how much down time you
> can actually tolerate. Clearly, tolerating outages of 20 hours is fine for
> you because you're still there.
>

Yes, my needs changed.  While the down time is still annoying, my websites
are more hobby sites than "mission critical" (okay, not mission critical at
all).  When I did need more reliability we had multiple instances across
different clouds and a load balancer to try to mitigate the downtimes.
 However, what annoyed me was that the marketing on their site claimed
things like "100% Uptime - Auto-healing and auto-scaling for your website
or VPS ensures 100% availability." (
https://web.archive.org/web/20110923152239/http://www.vps.net/?). Why I'm
still with them is I'm only paying $10/month for my one instance (a Black
Friday deal in 2012).

Looking back at support tickets, another big issue was finding my server
off several times.  They'd have to do some emergency restart of a cloud and
for some reason the instances weren't automatically restarted.  So, it
wasn't until I discovered myself that it was down and started it that it
was actually back and running.

Regardless, I've found http://uptimerobot.com/ very useful for keeping an
eye on my servers.
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