Very happy with Hivelocity

Hi,

I am looking for two unmanaged servers in Europe. Network uptime and responsiveness of tech support are of priority.

Shortlisted a few companies so far:

Simply Hosting
HiVelocity
ServerMania

Anyone has any recommendations or otherwise for these or other companies?

Thanks.

Yesterday it took Hivelocity several hours to respond and resolve a support issue their excuse was that they had a skeleton crew and lots of problems.

OK it was eventually solved and they said sorry...

But again today a similar support issue happened and several hours later no solution and only a brief message that they were working on it...

I have emailed a number of times over the past few hours with no response at all.

Is anyone else having support issues?

I wonder what I should do now...?

If they know that they are having problems you would think they would call in managers to help resolve it.

On my webhosting journey I started with free hosts (110mb.com) then graduated to Shared hosting ($1.99 oversold?) and then lowend vps to much more expensive vps and finally dedicated servers.

My clients/visitors are from Asia so I was searching for a host with good connectivity in Asia. Servers in asia are expensive so after a little bit of searching I found out that the next best thing is a server hosted in the west coast. That is when I found out about quadranet.com(This is back in 2011). They advertise their network before as the "Asia Optimized Network" so I gave them a try and it was indeed the best network that I tried. Quadranet had the lowest ping that I could get on all the servers that I tried.

My business grew bigger and bigger and I ordered more servers from quadranet. One of services I offer is VPN so it was really cool that they can even accommodate my IP needs. I got a lot of /24s back then (A lot).

5 years later on I started having issues with failing drives on my servers. I still like quadranet even with those hard drive issues but I moved some of my critical services to reliablesite.net because of the hard drive issues (And because their name says reliablesite nah just kidding ).

A bulk of my servers are still hosted at quadranet. I rarely had any issues and if I do need support they really respond fairly quick. When I say I rarely had any issues I mean really rare because most of my servers are running for years without downtime.

Fast forward a few years later, I moved my critical services back to quadranet because I love their service. business has slowed down so I need to cancel some servers because I just don't need them anymore.

And then here comes 2020 and the pandemic. This is the year that it really went bad maybe because of the pandemic and the support engineers are not allowed to visit the DC, I don't know.

But quadranet's network has been really bad. Frequent lost of connection. Q4 of 2020 they had an un-announced maintenance on their network which lasted for hours. They said it was announced but I never received any email so whatever. And then another maintenance. Despite the maintenance network is still.. well "Shi*ty.

I cancelled some servers and move my services to another provider. I still keep some server just because I still trust them.

And network is down again.

I cancelled a few servers again. They even offered me a free 1 month service just to keep the service. which I declined.

And now 2021 network is still spotty. frequent disconnections here and there.

I opened another ticket asking them if there are issues with their network again. And you know what the support did? He rebooted my server without any warning. WTF!!! I mean yeah when you have a problem with your PC and you call for support sometimes they would ask if you turned it on and off already?
But why wont you ask me first if its ok to reboot it.
I can SSH just fine to the server so the server is fine its just the network is having issues. rebooting the server wont fix your network.

And they said it was blah blah blah that their system noticed it is not responding.
I cant copy paste their response anymore because you know what they did?
They fluffing deleted my support ticket.
When I asked why? They said it was a mistake. Really? Their delete button has no confirmation that you want to delete a certain ticket?

I completely lost faith on quadranet now. So I moved some services again and requested a cancellation. And after reviewing my services. I found out that the server that I cancelled which they offered me a free month of which I CLEARLY declined is still there and I got billed this January.

I sent a ticket asking for a refund to a server that I am no longer using which I already asked to be cancelled which they did not. (They can clearly see that on the bandwidth logs)
I believe it is not my fault if they did not cancel it. I mean I asked for a cancellation. They offered a free month. I clearly declined. Now whose fault is it if the server was not cancelled?

Well now I am scared because I am still on the phase of moving my services to another host.
I am afraid because they might just delete my servers and say it was a mistake too. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

So my rating?

Support 2/10 - I am still generous here. because I know they are trying to do it right. Its just not enough
Service 4/10 - I believe I reviewed them before and gave them a 9/10 but it is down now.
Value 3/10 - Prices have stagnated. There are better offers now out there.

Will I recommend them? For non critical services I still might use them but if you want a better service just look elsewhere.

Its like 10 years of hosting and its sad that it must come to an end like this. Thanks to Dustin whose always been there to accommodate my requests at Quadranet before (https://www.webhostingtalk.com/member.php?u=252125) I dont know what happend but since Dustin was gone it was never been the same at quadranet. Lol maybe just a coincidence or maybe there is a story behind it.

We are renting some servers in hetzner fsn (about 40) in different dcs with 10g connectivity. About 1 or 2 times in month we have network problems. 30 or 40 % of packet loss for one or two minutes.
It always connected to one datacenter . For example we have that problem with 7 servers in dc14 from 13:39:00 till 13:40:30 cest. Contacting support always leads to big works like additional logs, mtr and etc. We are losing a lot of time.
Hetzner support always says that the problem is on our side. But sometimes they propose to free exchange of server or server migration. But they never confirm problem on their side. That's all. We are using very different server configuration from kubernetes on bare metal to hyper-v vms with sql server. Most of our servers are amd epyc ax161.

The problems was really serious in December. We have constant problems (once a day) with all new servers in dc15. We resolved it by relocating servers to dc16 and problem disappeared for some months.

Currently we really don't know what to do. In march we had it 3 times with dc4 and dc13(not sure). Does someone has the problem? Can you advice hosting with great support and not very high prices?

We're looking for a managed dedicated server in NL or DE DC,
We have read much praise in here for Hivelocity but we checked their managed plans and amazed to see that they do not offer any support in cases where FFMPEG or 3rd party scripts are involved.
We need support whenever anything happens where our tech/dev isn't capable enough to solve the issue. As an example of such tech challenge that we would need to have covered by the managed hosting is issues that relate to diagnosing network package losses that are noticed when using a custom Google Cloud Translation API. In such case we wouldn't want to get told 'We can't support you because you're using 3rd party CMS/Software'

We're used to managed dedi hosting in US and have never had any such issues where support aren't taking care of everything. We need to understand who in NL or DE does provide such services?
We do not need support often but when do we we want a sysadmin on the other end who isn't just trying to avoid supporting based on some weird T&C.
Usually over a year we may need 5 hours of support, so during these 5 hours we need just full support and dedication from the support staff as rest of the year the payment for the services has been more of an insurance payment.

Please could I ask you to name a few competitors who are around the level of liquidweb in terms of reliability, infrastructure, hardware&network support, and big enough to not disappear or have a 17 day outage

My vision goes something like this

IBM SoftLayer
Rackspace
.
.
Liquidweb
.
.
.
.
HiVelocity
ReliableSite
Webnx
.
OVH

Whether my vision is fair is another thing, but I'm looking for candidates just below rackspace and above the webnx kind of level, i.e. in liquidweb ballpark just so I can add them to a list and research them further

We're currently considering these two companies for a few managed dedicated servers. Can anyone chime into what we can expect from their managed services?
We have our own backend admin who can do basic tasks, but sometimes he needs extra assistance with things, and we're not really sure how flexible these companies are in terms of assisting in such situations. Basically, we need very little assistance, but when we do, we expect a competent person on the other end who actually wants to help/diagnose.
It's also important that the companies haven't outsourced their support to some 3rd party unknown entity. We need to be sure it's a proper employee with proper credentials.

Any info would be greatly appreciated

I'm a small business owner and developer since 2003. We have a few dedicated servers, each one with a different host. One of these hosts was sold and the new owner wants us to use a new server in a new location. We are considering switching to another host. This server runs some important client web sites, our own site, and web apps we're developing.

What we're looking for:
- unmanaged bare metal dedicated server, Intel Xeon 4c/8t minimum, 6 or 8 core preferred
- 16GB RAM, 32GB RAM preferred
- 1TB (or 960GB) SSD, 2 x SSD software RAID preferred
- FreeBSD 11 or 12 (our other servers are FreeBSD 11.4)
- $140/month or less (we're paying $130/month now for the current server, no SSD, 16GB)
- US data center, east coast preferred

Obviously we want a decent data center and good customer support but we also want a company who is going to be around for the next 10 years and isn't likely to be bought up by some Wall Street investment firm who doesn't care about the customers of the smaller hosting firms they're purchasing.

Hosts I'm researching:
- Vultr
- OVHcloud (the US branch)
- Linode
- Hivelocity

So far, OVH seems to have the exact hardware, price point, and data center but their billing system worries me.

If you have any experience with these hosts, good or bad, please share. If you work for one of these hosts, I'm open to offers.

thanks,

Robert

Hi Guys,

I guess they deserve to have this feedback, I've been using wholesaleinternet dedicated servers since 1st of January 2013 over 8 years damn! I am getting old

I used to have dedicated server with expensive providers before I met wholesaleinternet, believe or not I have less problem with wholesaleinternet after I changed from previous dedi provider. I have 0 problem last 5-6 years. These guys knows what they are doing from management to support, they have backup power, backup internet providers etc to maintain servers in good shape.

Price: I don't think you would find better pricing than wholesaleinternet I also have ovh budget dedicated servers close to wholesaleinternet prices they are also good after wholesaleinternet.

Support: When I had dedicated server with expensive service providers, response time of tickets around 2-12 hours. believe or not every time I create ticket with wholesaleinternet they response and make it happen solution nearly in an hour. My last interact was I need to have KVM and they installed within 30min. I have no words with these guys they are not only fast but also proactive.

Greetings WHT,

I wanted to issue a large dose of caution for fellow WHT users regarding our recent experience with PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers as their new policies run the possibility of breaking your integrations and create undue headache.

On May 7th, PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers sent an email to us asking us for feedback on a support ticket that had been opened, apparently on our behalf. We had no knowledge of this and our email filters actually flagged the message as SPAM. We found the email in the SPAM filter and it had a few obvious red flags. First, the ticket was titled "Password Rotations" and it came from their support at securedservers email, which is an email we typically do not get messages from. Obviously as soon as we read the message, we immediately reached out to them to find out who authorized the "password rotations" on a production, client facing server.

In speaking with their support agent via live chat, PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers has implemented a new company wide policy to start changing customer's root and user account passwords, without their permission, and without verifying with the customer. In the original email (which we did not get as it appears someone incorrectly opened the ticket in their system to show it was "us" that opened the ticket rather than the support agent), it states:

"Dear Customer,

We are notifying you that we have updated the root and user passwords for your
server in accordance with industry standard password maintenance
recommendations. We will continue to update the passwords on a regular schedule
that coincides with your patching schedule and the passwords will be posted to
your servers device page where you can view them in your portal. If you have any
questions please don't hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to answer
them.
Regards,"

The email is unsigned as to who sent it.

This server has their managed services on it at the client's request as they want a prompt response from the NOC should there be any issues, however the client did not, does not, and never asked for their passwords to be changed in this manner. As a result, our client experienced a broken integration for their custom environment, which we had to deal with their frustrations, (this is not the first time that PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers has broken this specific client's machine. They took the server offline for several hours back in December 2019, without permission, without a request to do so, and with no notice, because another customer of theirs opened a support request for a mem test. They also only gave us approximately a 10$ credit for their mistake.), and the best we get from them is, paraphrasing, "opps, sorry, but if you want this practice to stop, you need to drop the managed services."

We have less than 90 days left on the contract with them and have asked to be let out of that term so we can move our client to our primary datacenter vendor, with whom we know will not pull this kind of monkey poo with us. Thus far they are refusing to let us out per the "management team" so I have asked for a call directly with them. I'll update once that happens. This is the last machine we have with them and I am hoping our primary DC vendor can get us a deal to make this move happen as quickly as possible.

I'm not sure who in their right mind thinks its perfectly acceptable to randomly change a customer's root and user account passwords without their permission, knowledge, and without verifying with the customer if they even want this performed. Yes it's good practice to always change your passwords, however for a party who is once removed from the client, this should in no way be acceptable unless they have received, in writing, to do so. If this was one of our servers that housed our programs, I wouldn't be as upset about it, but when it starts affecting our client's and this is the second time you've done so, I am beyond upset. And the best you can do is offer us the 10$ credit in December and an empty apology this time around?

Word to the wise, if you're using PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers, watch your accounts closely, especially if you are using their managed services. They will monkey with your stuff without your permission.

James