Caution: PhoenixNAP/Secured Servers

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


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You will lose money if you rent a server at OVH

Hello,

I am a customer of OVH since Apr 2016, previously, I only rented OVH 3-4 servers at the same time, so really using quality is fine, no problem arises. But 2 months ago, in 1 month I hired more than 30 servers at OVH to serve my clients, and I found many pressing problems, the quality of support at OVH was very poor.

1. The support time of OVH Sing since creating a crash ticket to check the server is very long, each system has more than 6 servers with 1 or 2 faulty servers that must stop all to wait for technical OVH testing takes more than 2-3 days, there are problems that take more than 10 days for OVH to find the cause.

2. Never trust OVH's hardware testing system, because before that I completely trusted OVH's hardware testing system, so the time I waited to solve the server problem took a long time. , because I thought it was my own problem.

3. And when the problem is due to the server error of OVH, we will still have to bear the loss of those faulty servers without a refund of reasonable usage date, as well as forcing to change the usage date to Other servers that do not support refunds.

Details you can see the attached picture.


My ticket :

These server problem when

1.
server ns569036.ip-139-99-125.net (server installed : 22:02, 16/11/2020 ; server return : 22/11/2020)
server ns544549.ip-139-99-124.net (server installed : 13:32, 15/11/2020 ; server return : 24/11/2020)
ticket id: 1141571, 1143377

Because this is a server system connected to each other, after receiving the server it takes 2 days to set up the system. That means around November 19, 2020, the system started to work. From the moment the server started to work, it started having connection problems (ticket: 1141571 - 21/11/2020 09:22), started to experience worse problems when the connection was dropped continuously and the machine server was not accessible around 21/11/2020 23:00 (this happened 4 times before on servers: ns544549.ip-139-99-124.net, ns569036.ip-139- 99-125.net, ns568999.ip-139-99-125.net), after about 2 hours of testing I created a ticket: 1143377 - 22/11/2020 01:18, speculating that the HDD is faulty so I asked to be replaced, but your technician has to wait until 08:00 23/11/2020 GMT + 8 before you can start testing the server. This means that the whole system of 10 servers has to wait more than 48 hours. I asked Belveder about the problem of not being able to wait long so I will buy another server instead and ask for a refund later, and Belveder agreed.


2.
server ns5002501.ip-51-79-162.net (server installed : 22:37, 19/11/2020 ; server return : 30/11/2020)
ticket id: 5805542655, 1158210, 1158130

This server was installed at 22:37 11/19/2020, it took me about 2 days to set up the system. And starting 11/23/2020, the system started to work, after about 1 day of operation, at 20:05 11/24/2020 there was a connection failure and inaccessible. I have to fix it by restarting this server in order for it to work properly again.

The situation continued on 11/26/2020 17:56 and 11/29/2020 20:28, at these 2 times I had to use reboot function in the OVH control panel to reboot the server (can check email let's see ).

Since I can't let the situation continue, my client has to report game server maintenance to wait for you to check the hardware. And because before that, you did not accept any refunds but forced to change the usage date, so I had to let customers wait for you to check and fix.

I created ticket 5805542655 - 11/30/2020 01:04 to request to check and replace the HDD, but until 11/30/2020 07:41 you have just started to check the HDD and do not agree to replace HDD, go to the extended test but still cannot find the cause of the error.

Continue with ticket 1158130 - 11/30/2020 10:00, because unable to find a solution, you agree to replace another server, and I continue to wait until 11/30/2020 16: 25 of you again informed me that the server could not be replaced and asked me to cancel my current server and order a replacement server.

Thus, my server had to be halted for almost 2 days from: 11/29/2020 20:28 until I bought a new server and installed it again on December 1, 2020.


3.
server ns563910.ip-139-99-125.net (server installed : 01:01, 20/11/2020 ; server return : 19/12/2020 ; problem report: 08/12/2020)
ticket id: 1262908, 1243789

This server problem when install first time, can check email: Hardware error during the re-installation of your dedicated server 19/11/2020 22:24

During the time of using this server, there were several times of connection failure, unable to access the server.

Until about December 5, 2020, it started to be automatically restarted, ticket id: 1243789, spent many days of testing, extensive testing, ... you still can't find it. The reason, until I had to take time to record the video to prove it, you guys can check and find out the cause on 12/16/2020 18:10, so more than 10 days the server is down, the system is idle for waiting

4.
server ns5004359.ip-51-79-177.net (server installed : 13:29, 24/11/2020 ; server return : 25/11/2020 )
ticket id: 1147496, 1148254, 1148617, 9905645348, 1148779

server problem with auto reboot, at this time i dont know problem, and your team also not know how to fix, so i buy other server for replace.

5.
server ns563916.ip-139-99-125.net (server installed : 00:50, 06/12/2020 ; server return : 19/11/2020 ; problem report: 08/12/2020)
ticket id: 1243789

After receiving the server, installing to use within 1 day, you will encounter the status of automatically restarting the server. The client temporarily turns off the server for you to check, but more than 10 days later you find out the problem, and the client has left the server not in use.


Thanks.

What solution(s) do you want OVH to offer you?
I want a full refund. Because of the server damage and delay in support time. I do not accept to change the usage date to another server, because the customer is no longer renting the server.

I have lost clients, and money in these incidents.

Very happy with Hivelocity

I have some servers at Hivelocity, since 2017.

No network problems, 100% uptime, excellent hardware and support.

Yesterday, after 2 or 3 years, one of the backup disks on one of my servers, failed.

I opened a ticket asking how to change to a new HDD. To my surprise, the support offered the possibility to clone the disk to try to recover the data. Despite being a backup disk, it would be good to recover, as I had left some old accounts there.

Then they removed the HDD and cloned it in 3 hours, for a new HDD. And it worked! all recovered data. Of course, it will not always be possible to recover, it will depend on the problem that the HDD presents.

And during the whole process, the Hivelocity support team was very active, I scheduled to shut down the server after 7PM (so they can insert the new drive) and minutes before they wrote saying "we are ready to install the new HDD, you just have to shutdown the server". Never, but never, have I seen this type of concern with the customer, in the datacenters where I have been. I'm in this market this 2004, I had servers at The Planet, Layered Tech, Host Dime, LiquidWeb, and so many others that don't even exist anymore.

I've had servers in other companies, which were managed, and I didn't have support like that. My servers at Hivelocity have no management, but they go beyond what was expected, gave me all the support from beginning to end of the process, offered the data recovery service for free and even warned that they will save the old HDD for a week, for any emergency.

Thanks Hivelocity, I only have one thing to ask: keep it up, "this is the way".

W3space terrible support. Borderline scammers

Just wanted to post my terrible experience with W3Space.

They offer absolute ZERO customer support and ignore all tickets.
They claim 24 hour server delivery on their website. So, I ordered a dedicated server from them for $150 on May 18th (over 3 weeks ago).
After a few days of nothing happening, I opened a ticket asking if there's any ETA on delivery. Silence. No response. No, sorry we're out of stock and expect new servers soon. Absolutely NOTHING.
So, after just over a week of no answers I did the only thing I could and opened a Paypal claim.
I also opened a ticket telling them I no longer need the server and to cancel my order. This ticket of course was also ignored.

They still didn't bother to answer. As we all know Paypal claims take some time. After escalating, they had until today to respond.

So, today, last day to respond to the claim, I magically receive server details. No apology. No sorry for being late. Just an email with server details and ticket closed.

Needless to say after 3 weeks of waiting I've already ordered the server elsewhere don't need it anymore. So I have to wait to see what Paypal decides, as I'm out $150 and 3 weeks late received a server that I no longer need and requested multiple time to cancel after failure to deliver or respond to any tickets.

Surprise surprise... they're not answering those tickets either. The only thing they bother to answer is the Paypal claim.

If you want to waste money and get zero customer service. These guys are the place to go.
Otherwise, steer clear. Still waiting to see what Paypal decides now that they've provided them with server information 3 weeks too late.

Hetzner is not appropriate for big and social network websites, as they said

Hey

I have a social network website with over 100 milion clients (not now but in about 4-5 months) ...
I want to buy a SX server from Hetzner so i asked them about the abuse terms ...

I got this response:

Dear client,

Thank you for your email.

If we receive an abuse report for a site hosted by you, we will forward the abuse report to you. The deadline to solve the problem is in most cases 24 hours.
If the problem is not be solved within the given time the IP address could be blocked by our side.

IF there will be a lot of abuse reports for one customer server or account, it could lead to a cancellation of the server.


Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards

for 100 million clients, we really can't check their contents uploaded to our server (files and ...) so we 100% will get tooooooo many abuse reports and from what support dep said:
IF there will be a lot of abuse reports for one customer server or account, it could lead to a cancellation of the server.

It shows that Hetzner is not Appropriate for social network or even big websites (as they said (IF there will be a lot of abuse reports for one customer server or account, it could lead to a cancellation of the server)) !!!

Question:
How some websites servers like discord located in germany, frankfort (i think it's hetzner !!!)) ?? and why they not get banned !!!!? is it because they hide their ip in cloudflare?
How even the abuse report works !!? how people submits abuse report ? and abuse report is for which contents?

Quadranet.com Review - All good things must come to an end.

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.

oneprovider - Extremely Crappy Service - A MUST AVOID

oneprovider.com

This is based on my experience buying & using dedicated server at oneprovider.com

Following points make this host a perfect AVOID case:

1. No proper communication - you will not get answer when your server will be ready, just keep waiting

2. No Phone support at all - this is the worst thing to face as a client. No Telephonic support at all. Even for the greatest issue like server down, you have to raise ticket and start praying almighty.

3. Chargeable support - They have 2 paid support categories and to promote them, regular customers are treated in the worst manner.

4. Unreasonably Longer time to respond tickets - For server outage, network failure, their support took more than 8 hours to respond and again, they simply asked some choices and once you make one, another 8-10 hours.

5. IP issue - If for any reason, your server is to be replaced, they are unable to provide you same IPs even for same location ! Hence, DNS propagation and all will be the headache for clients.

6. Unfriendly Refund Policy - I have NOT received refund yet. For their own faults as well, they are not willing to refund customers. Rather, they want to make proportionate refund. They considered Time wasted on their support tickets as services used by customer!.

In nutshell, at oneprovider - Dissatisfaction Guaranteed!

I can also provide tickets' snaps in support of my views above.

You are advised in your own interest to AVOID crappy host oneprovider for any serious work.

ServerComplete not responding to tickets.

Been a customer of ServerComplete since mid 2017, service was great until a few months ago when I started to have issues sending emails due to their SMTP filtering simply not working or never delivering the email to the mailbox of the recipient. Lately I've also been having issues with them expiring the cPanel license that's ordered through their customer portal and taking longer and longer to active it once again so that cPanel can continue working. Currently have 2 unanswered tickets that have been open for over 15 hours at this point and their ticket page in said customer portal states the following "Our Technical Support department should be utilized for all issues outside of emergency and server outage issues. Our Technical Support team is available 24/7 and on average, you should see a response to your issue within 12 hours.", the lack of communication and action is quite disheartening and frustrating.

Possible scam by PhoenixNAP

I attempted to sign up with PhoenixNAP at the very beginning of July, at the urging of a friend who was having trouble signing us up at OVH. Boy, was that a mistake.

I set up our account, and attempted to register for a 12 month reservation of a server configuration. It signed me up for 12 months... of a completely different server configuration. So I cancelled that.

Then friend attempted to use the account to sign up for the originally intended server configuration. It signed us up for 12 months of yet a different unwanted server configuration. So we cancelled that as well.

At this point, I decided we should not do business with PhoenixNAP, and went with OVH instead, paying with my Privacy.com virtual card allocated specifically for OVH. PhoenixNAP attempted to swing me back to working with them, but made no mention of the two reservations.

I removed my card information from CCBill, a business that Google searches would seem to indicate is a questionable billing service. They managed to bill my card regardless, so I reported them to my bank and cancelled the card and got a replacement. PhoenixNAP returned the money and my bank eventually removed the temporary credit they gave me.

I refuse to give any further details to either PhoenixNAP or CCBill now. They continue to email me multiple times per week with my "late payment" notices for these reservations for server configurations that were not only wrong, but that I have yet to use, and no longer want anyway.

Is Serveria.com a scam?

I came across the company serveria.com from seeing multiple adverts on this forum offering discounted dedciated servers, so I decided to order a server as they were in the EU and offered a fair server at a fair price.

Several days later I am still waiting for the server, the order has been paid in full and is just 'Pending' so I opened a ticket which has yet to be answered. I have even sent an email but heard nothing. With a company offering dedciated servers on this forum and have a long history I'm not sure what to do, is there an admin to report this too? Has anyone had issues with this company? Are there no checks made on companies offering dedicated servers on this forum? Its put me off now looking for any other servers via this forum.

Reliablesite review

I used Reliablesite once a few years ago for a long since dead project, this review focuses on my most recent experience, starting in June this year (a 6 month review). We had a few servers with Reliablesite, that have since been moved to another provider who were able to offer better hardware at this price point.

Sales: 8/10
I've only used their sales livechat, which was quick and concise with their replies to most of my questions, more in depth questions I was directed to email sales (although I never followed this up).

Setup: 3/10
I'll preface this by saying that this was during a large sale event, so I imagine they were under heavier than normal demand.

The first problem was "specials" ordered with customisation (eg ports or bandwidth) are provisioned without their upgrades. This means you have to open a ticket and request the installation of a NIC, or chase up bandwidth upgrades so they are properly applied to the account. We encountered problems spanning multiple servers with NICs not working, IPMI not working, OS installs via the panel not working, these issues were mostly resolved quickly, although a couple took longer than I'd have liked.

I would have preferred if the setup of a customised server was delayed and everything delivered working as ordered, but I understand some customers may want everything ASAP even if it's partial (and in some cases, unusable).

The second issue we encountered was with our second order, where we had accidentally used the same hostname as the first during the ordering process. This resulted in confusion on RS' side during the setup process, as it seems they use hostnames to track servers within accounts rather than a numerical ID system, or possibly just human error on their side as well as ours.

The third issue was when we ordered a couple of "Intel special (5000+ score)" servers. One of the servers that was delivered had an 11 year old i7 860 with a score of 2891. Another was an 8 year old i5 3550 scoring 4805.

We explained that the i5 was fine and we didn't care too much about the score, the main issue is the i7 was so old that it lacked AES-NI, which was needed for our use case. One of the techs said they'd look into installing AES-NI (which obviously isn't possible). We requested an exchange with a server that had a CPU with AES-NI, or met the advertised 5000 score.

We were told that the Passmark algorithm was updated a few months ago meaning the i7 860 no longer met the advertised score, a swap wasn't possible so they'd refund the server and update the site. I'm not sure why they couldn't do a swap, as we just turned around and ordered a special with identical RAM/SSD but with a newer Xeon which was the same price. All in all, a lot of hassle, a needless refund and reorder, and they still haven't corrected their site with the correct score.

Support: ??/10
After the turbulent setup experience, we didn't need to contact support once. Obviously this is a very good sign, but as the only actual interaction we had with support was during the above setup period, I don't feel comfortable giving a rating here.

Network: 10/10
No complaints at all, speeds to Europe and across US have been very good. I'd seen no signs of packet loss, no drops, excellent.

Control Panel: 7/10
There's 3 separate control panels, 1 for billing, 1 for tickets, and 1 for managing servers. There is little integration between them visible from the client's side, making it a bit awkward to use. For example, you can't select a service the issue is about on the ticket control panel. The server management panel looks a bit dated but everything is there and functional that I could see, the only missing thing was the ability to edit the server names (which could lead to the confusion seen in the Setup section of the review).

One annoying thing is that RS blocks a lot of ASNs from accessing their site, I assume to block orders from proxies, however these blocks also cover their customer panels, meaning if you're on a VPN (be it a private or public) then you might not be able to manage your services. I understand wanting to block orders from anonymising services, however blocking entire ASNs from even accessing the management panels is a bit of an over reach in my opinion.

Pricing/Value: 7/10
Their specials are good value, although you do have to take into account the aging hardware on their cheaper specials. Their configurable hardware options are a bit pricey and I think could do with revisiting, eg $60/m for a 1TB SSD is a bit much for todays pricing. I'm sure they could work out a better deal if I were to contact their sales though. Their network upgrades are very good value, with cheap 10Gbps ports and bandwidth upgrades, especially during sales events.

Overall, despite the poor setup experience at the start, I'd say our experience was very good overall. I'd certainly use Reliablesite again for other projects in the future, and would recommend them if your use case matches their offerings.