Hosting debacle
May. 30th, 2015 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dennisgorelikCouple of months ago ASmallOrange marketer contacted me and offered free 2 months trial of their Virtual Private Server (VPS).
We wanted to try hosting ElasticSearch on Linux platform.
While hosting ElasticSearch on Linux was a positive experience, hosting on ASmallOrange was so-so and ended up badly.
It went like this:
1) Got 3GB 2-cores VPS with Linux CentOs ($45/month with 2 months free trial).
2) Configured firewall.
3) Installed ElasticSearch.
4) Added another VPS (2GB 2-cores for $30/month - this time that was real money) in order to form ElasticSearch cluster.
5) Started running ElasticSearch percolation on that cluster.
6) Our VPS-es were rebooted about once per week for different type of patches/maintenance.
7) Once our VPS did not get up after such maintenance done by ASmallOrange.
After seeing crashes in our logs we had to contact ASmallOrange in order to get it up. We got about 3 hours of downtime back then.
As a "bonus", ASmallOrange tech changed our firewall settings to make it more publicly available (to the contrary of our intention to keep our VPS private as much as possible).
8) At the end of the trial period I asked ASmallOrange to convert my server that was on trial into paid account.
Time of request: 3:20 pm EDT on Friday.
ASmallOrange ignored that request and terminated my first server (that was on trial).
Termination time: 1:30 am EDT on Saturday.
9) Now ASmallOrange is not able to restore it.
Cannot find backup, cannot really do anything.
10) Fortunately, we only moved ElasticSearch percolation to ASmallOrange, so it was not that hard to move it back to our main Windows server.
Conclusions time:
1)Don't go to England Do not use ASmallOrange for anything that requires reliable work.
2) In web hosting you get what you paid for.
We wanted to try hosting ElasticSearch on Linux platform.
While hosting ElasticSearch on Linux was a positive experience, hosting on ASmallOrange was so-so and ended up badly.
It went like this:
1) Got 3GB 2-cores VPS with Linux CentOs ($45/month with 2 months free trial).
2) Configured firewall.
3) Installed ElasticSearch.
4) Added another VPS (2GB 2-cores for $30/month - this time that was real money) in order to form ElasticSearch cluster.
5) Started running ElasticSearch percolation on that cluster.
6) Our VPS-es were rebooted about once per week for different type of patches/maintenance.
7) Once our VPS did not get up after such maintenance done by ASmallOrange.
After seeing crashes in our logs we had to contact ASmallOrange in order to get it up. We got about 3 hours of downtime back then.
As a "bonus", ASmallOrange tech changed our firewall settings to make it more publicly available (to the contrary of our intention to keep our VPS private as much as possible).
8) At the end of the trial period I asked ASmallOrange to convert my server that was on trial into paid account.
Time of request: 3:20 pm EDT on Friday.
ASmallOrange ignored that request and terminated my first server (that was on trial).
Termination time: 1:30 am EDT on Saturday.
9) Now ASmallOrange is not able to restore it.
Cannot find backup, cannot really do anything.
10) Fortunately, we only moved ElasticSearch percolation to ASmallOrange, so it was not that hard to move it back to our main Windows server.
Conclusions time:
1)
2) In web hosting you get what you paid for.
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no subject
Date: 2015-05-30 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-30 10:40 pm (UTC)What did happen with your employer?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-30 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-30 10:55 pm (UTC)Why are you selling Windows Azure now?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 12:56 am (UTC)Or just moonlighting selling Windows Azure?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 01:26 am (UTC)Did not find anything unusual.
https://www.google.com/search?q=asmallorange+hosting+problems
Did I miss any particular steps in our due diligence?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 01:54 am (UTC)https://www.google.com/maps/@35.996936,-78.900493,3a,75y,208.55h,81.95t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sB2ZO5QU8ofBSvZjacA91Hw!2e0!6m1!1e1
(that's what I do when I check out who the heck are all those people)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 04:10 am (UTC)https://www.google.com/search?q=A+Small+Orange,+131+W+Orange+St,+Durham,+NC+27701,+United+States&ludocid=13172171653240595032#lrd=0x89ace46e00e07805:0xb6ccf45457e02258,1
However:
1) My review is visible only to me and for some reason is not visible for anonymous users.
2) My review in the form that is visible to me has "
" inserted instead of text linebreaks.
Google Maps team: WTF?
no subject
Date: 2015-06-01 01:04 pm (UTC)- How long are they in business?
- How big is the company - number of employees, annual income, operations, how many locations?
- What is the company's core expertise?
- What is in SLA for you as a client and what is their contingency plan?
- How do they look in comparison with 3 close competitors?
no subject
Date: 2015-06-01 08:34 pm (UTC)Multiple years.
> - How big is the company - number of employees, annual income, operations?
I did not search for these numbers.
But I know that their web site is popular:
http://www.similarweb.com/website/asmallorange.com
> - Do they have more than one location?
Do you mean physical location?
Why would that be important?
> - What is the company's core expertise?
That seems to be web hosting.
> - What is in SLA for you as a client and what is their contingency plan?
I'm not sure how to evaluate it.
Does SLA actually matter?
They can claim in SLA whatever they want.
But only actual performance really matters.
> - How do they look in comparison with 3 close competitors?
How exactly to evaluate it?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 01:51 am (UTC)We had an interesting experience yesterday, the whole thing was down because of a data center power outage. For 6 hours. Amazon.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 03:45 am (UTC)http://status.aws.amazon.com/
What Amazon datacenter are you hosting with? East? West?
ASmallOrange actually hosts in a very reliable datacenter - SoftLayer Dallas (my Windows server is hosted in the same SoftLayer datacenter).
By ASmallOrange managed to screw up anyway.
---
I've very sorry to hear about the issues that you've experienced with this account. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
I've been looking at the chain of events that occurred in an attempt to piece together what might have been the cause for the termination of the VPS.
I know it will auto terminate via cron if not activated a paid subscription at the end of the 60 day period. I'm not sure if that is the issue here as it appears we might have gotten an email within the last 24 hours about making it a normal sub. We are going to continue to look into that.
Unfortunately, we do not make backups of trial server. This means we will have no way to recover any lost data for you. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
We will be happy to help you get your new VPS setup and running. Firstly it appears that the hostname it current has will need to be updated to valid hostname. I.E name.domain.com etc..
Please let us know what help you might need with that and we will be happy to lend a hand.
We're standing by to provide you additional assistance.
---
Polite BS.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-01 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-01 08:29 pm (UTC)Because it is expensive (from the time and development efforts involved) to recreate realistic test environment.
We picked not critical production functionality to test.
> no need to wait until last couple of days to convert it into a live setup
I assumed it will be converted automatically.
That's what other businesses do with trials.
> SLA kicks in
Why should I care about SLA?
If hosting does not work, then my losses would be at least 10x larger than what I pay for that service.
Is it typical for SLA to pay 10x+ of hosting costs in case of failure?
no subject
Date: 2015-06-01 12:54 pm (UTC)