Sangat Pedas

VPS.Net Cloud Hosting - Why I canceled my account after 2 days

| 11 Comments

Everyone knows “Cloud Hosting” is extremely cool so of course as a tech savvy guy it’s something I want to have, just because I can. This post is about how things went wrong with my current host, how I moved to VPS.Net cloud hosting and why I moved back to Webfaction after only 3 days.

As I said, a week ago I experienced some serious problems with my webhost Webfaction, the site became immensely slow and very regularly my site showed “Error establishing database connection”. Though support was pretty responsive it seems that for days they weren’t able to really solve the problem. I was pretty much pissed because I just made a post about boosting WordPress performance and now my site was the joke of the Internet. So talking with Joost (Yoast) I decided to move to the same webhost he uses: VPS.net. They offer cloud hosting for only $20 per month and seemed to me like a very professional organization.

Personally I’m not so interested in panels but I must say I’m not a big fan of Cpanel as used by VPS.net. It was buggy in terms of adding domains and subdomains and thus I started with all kinds of problems with basic things. But I read on the site VPS.net does FREE incoming migrations so I decided to make use of that service. As this would be a fairly simple WordPress migration I expected everything to be working just fine the next day. This expectation was encouraged by this tweet (mirror) of vps.net, working 24×7. However, after communicating with several techie guys my hope and trust in this company slowly but surely faded. Having tweeted some frustrated messages to VPS.net an Italian guy called Matteo contacted me telling me he just lost his years old entire blog (great blog title btw: BestYouNeverHad) thanks to VPS.net.

I’m know you always have to be careful jumping to conclusions so I asked Matteo a screenshot of his ticket communication. I instantly so two parallels with my communication with VPS.net:

  1. Not managing customers expectations
  2. At times extreme slow response resulting in even bigger customer frustration.

Of course I got worried and questioned myself again whether this would work and in fact be an improvement. I was still sure the infrastructure of VPS.net Cloud Hosting outperforms most other webhosts but hey, for $ 68 per month they better be. Yes people $68 per month because I had to upgrade my disk space from 5GB to 25GB (using less than 6GB) and all of a sudden the price jumped to $68 per month.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the techie guys of VPS.net weren’t able to do a fairly simple migration in an acceptable time window and my confidence dropped rock bottom so I decided to cancel my account. This also because I noticed that response times of the websites that were up were not as good as hoped for and quite frankly not an improvement. And during a WordPress to Dropbox backup the site became completely unreachable indicating a lack of processor capacity or an extremely slow database. Whatever it was I decided to keep my word to VPS.net and cancel my account.

Since Joost (Yoast.com) referred me to VPS.net I told him what happened and it seemed he wasn’t too pleased at the moment as well since he had to find out his website had been hacked.

Now this post can easily be interpreted as a bash post of VPS.net but it’s not intended like that. I still believe they have a great setup and many have great experiences with them. This is a post about sharing my experiences and it’s up to the reader to make up their mind. Personally I think this was on one hand a classic situation of Murphy’s Law, when things go wrong everything goes wrong and it just so happened to be that exactly at that time I opened an account.

But I do think that the level of the techie guys was below the limit. Questions like “what’s ur IP” when they’re the one assigning an IP or saying nothing is wrong with the site but neglecting to check if the hostname is in fact resolving to the right IP, are clear signals the level is not up to standards. It might be that VPS.net has a hard time keeping up with their success, if that’s so they are in a dangerous place. Many companies in the past died because of their success and I surely hope this won’t happen to VPS.net. For all customers of VPS.net, there was one techie guy that definitely knows his business, his name is Manzoor and he should get a salary raise.

In the end I received an email from the management which shows understanding and good intentions but too bad they didn’t respond to my 2 messages to them earlier but waited till it was too late.

Unfortunately the problems with my long-time host keep re-occurring but that’s nice material for a next post which promises to be a spicy one.

UPDATE: Check the post by Alessandro Manfredi showing VPS.NET has some serious structural problems.

  • Happy Hotelier

    Well written
    I’m using their services for 10 months now, also following an advice of Yoast, but must say the product is below of the jinned up expectations. You may have induce me to share my own experiences.

  • Ross

    We had 5 VPS’s with VPS.net - they are constantly dogged with downtime and errors and are not quick enough to come back to us (We host over 600 websites) . We are currently in the process of moving our entire server requirements to Linode (100% uptime in the last 10 months)

    We weren’t even offered a refund, only store credit and we spend over $200 per month with VPS

    • Patty

      Appreciation for this information is over 9000-thank you!

  • David Gibbons

    As the owner of a VPS hosting company, I’m really sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience in the industry.

    I’d like to offer up our services if you’re still interested. Full disclosure: our customer control panel is not fully complete — at this time only reboots and invoice management is in there. If you’re looking for a stable, fast VPS at a great price with tech-savvy support ready to go when you need us, we can’t be beaten.

    I don’t want to spam your blog with our URL so drop me an email if you’d like further info.

    Best,
    Dave

  • Panah Rad

    I have been using VPS.net for 2 months now. I am this close to axing my account. The tech guys are simply incompetent. The support is not there at times. They keep blaming everything under the sun but their servers. I was told it was their RAID once. Then it was multiple servers dying. Then they said my sites were getting more traffic and that was the issue :)

    If VPS.net is not a scam, it is close to it. I respect Joost but he is dead wrong on these guys. I have talked to so many angry VPS.net customers in the past two weeks. I pay over $200 a month to these guys. Yet that is never enough. To make things worse, my sites are down everyday. :)

    Too bad. I thought VPS.net was it. They are just lousy and should not be trusted by any serious business owner. That’s my take at this point. It could change but it’d take a miracle by VPS.net for that to happen.

  • http://www.vps.net Terry Myers

    Hi Remco,

    I appreciate the candid review. We’re working on a lot of things you have discussed to improve our service offerings.

    Terry

  • Pingback: To VPS or Not to VPS? — Happy Hotelier

  • Ben Hall

    Hi
    Crazy situation
    We lost the credit card that was paying our $85 USD per month host with VPS. Due the being very busy at end of year we didnt get around to changing the direct debit card number that VPS were using. 3 weeks after the due date they closed the account and deleted the entire site as well as our back ups which we had been paying for over a year.
    They state they have no copies anywhere
    Its a distatser and has cost us thousands and thousands of $.
    They dont speak good english when you ask for assistance
    They are slow to respond and everything seems to be difficult/ no flexibility. Most inportantly with not keeping any back up they have stuffed our buisness with also NO APOLOGY. NEVER WORK WITH VPS.NET. HAPPY TO TALK ABOUT THEM ANY TIME TO ANYONE. Ben Hall

    • GDK

      “Didn’t get around to changing the direct debit card number that VPS were using.” That’s your problem, bud. I’d shut you off too. Stop blaming, you deserved it.

  • Dana Nourie

    I really appreciate this review as I was considering VPS.net. I’m so frustrated with hosting. I’ve been a lunarpages customer for about 8 years, maintained many sites with them, without problem. But this last site I built using WP was sluggish, had intermittent server errors, and lunar was no help tracking it down.

    I finally gave up, moved the site to wpengine, only to discover they don’t have their own nameserver, so we’ve been through hell trying to get all our domain names to work, and two still are not, and wpengine doesn’t provide email. WTF!

    So, now I’m looking for another hosting solution.

    Can anyone recommend a good reliable host? They seem to run from the crappy, cheap shared hosting, to ridiculously expensive dedicated. Is there no middle ground?

    I don’t mind paying $20 a month, but this is donating money I’m using and don’t wan to have to pay more. I want a host that is reliable. Sigh. Thank you!!!!!

  • Luc

    You need help setting up cPanel (not to mention you even use it…) and you write about WordPress performance? Is there something I’m missing?