FSCKVPS/VAServe Review + Reccomendation To Current VAServe Users

This is my review of a VPS i bought from the company FSCKVPS.com.

Product: openVZ - 1GB ram guaranteed

Duration: approx. 6mths.

When i first got the VPS, i was quite satisfied with the quality of the VPS, the ressources worked and while the bandwidth speed was less than the the dedicated server i came from, it was sufficient for what i needed. I was even impressed with the selection of different images that i could load onto the VPS with very little work.

Then came the hack.... i'm sure we've all heard a lot of what happened and so forth, so i'm not going to go into details about this here.

I decided early on that i would see what happened and most likely stick with them if my data was intact (which it was).

After the hack i frequently had issues with it suddenly becomming inaccessible, FSCKVPS was usually pretty quick in getting it back up and running, stating it was the firewall giving trouble, so they had disabled it and the second time flushed the firewall rules.

Now i'm going to have to admit i don't know enough to say that I myself wasn't the cause of this somehow, but i do doubt it since i hadn't done any major changes to my VPS after that other than regulary updating the Debian linux on it.

Now recently i chose to cancel the VPS primarily because i didn't need the VPS anymore, i was the only user of the sites it hosted, so i chose to host the site locally on my own LAN instead.

After this, i began to consider why had the VPS been behaving so poorly after the hack, and i remember a mail from VAServe just after the hack saying they would provision all customers with a standard profile and would later fix the actual products. I began to wonder what if they hadn't done what they promised? (i could not find the actual mail of this, so that's my interpretation of it, in a ticket rus said that they had reccomended that users check their ressource allocations)

Today another user here, posted a link to a script that could be used to check the ressources, it can be found on this forum in a thread named "Guarantied memory on OpenVZ" (sry can't link with low post count).

What i found was that i was only getting 256MB RAM guaranteed and 512MB RAM burst.

So my reccomendation to any VAServe user reading this, try this script or check the beancounter file yourself if you know how to understand it's output, so you make sure you get what you pay for.

To be fair to VAServe, i have always received quick response time for the tickets i opened and up until recently all tickets have been responded in a reasonably competent way(although i'm slightly dissapointed in the support people didn't check the ressources themselves at the same time).

The things i liked about FSCKVPS:

Decent prices for their plans

Quick response time on tickets, and reasonably good reply (from my needs atleast)

Before the hack: the product quality

Accountability, rus makes a point in keeping a positive profile on this forum, which is something i atleast think shows that they're willing to take on critique if there was any.

The fact that they have a plan to improve their product (KVM and solusVM for openVZ)

What i disliked about FSCKVPS(all related to post-hack issues):

The fact that they didn't check the ressources of each VPS themselves, rather trusting users to complaint about it (which is a somewhat difficult thing to do, since the OpenVZ beancounter file is not straighforward to interpret).

The high variation in the quality of response to your tickets and the fact that when you get a poor answer they tend to only answer one of your questions if you have more than one. (though from what i read in another thread here,this could be because VAServe recently took up new staff, so should hopefully get better. Althoughi would like to stress from my own experience working with tech support, people who take shortcuts in supporting customers tend to keep doing so after they've gotten a better knowledge of their jobs)

Their myriads of websites, for FSCKVPS hosted VPS' atleast you use two sites, a VAServ.com one for support and a fsckvps.com one for billing, that's confusing and far from being trust inspiring in my opinion.

The [url]website was not updated with the fact that the hyperVM/LXADMIN panel wasn't accessible after the hack, which one would assume is a natural thing.

My own thoughts about FSCKVPS/VAServ:

They where pretty good before the hack, i'm sure once they get their new support staff trained, their product & websites more streamlined it will get better.

But right now as it stands i can't reccomend getting a VPS from them, things are too much of a mess.

They mentioned that with the implementation of SolusVM panel(which has the potential to decrease the amount of tickets they get in(reboot VPS etc.) they hope to be able to improve the quality of their replies to their customers through having more time for each answer, i hope this is true and with the implementation of KVM virtualization later on, the future is looking good.

So if i ever happen to need a VPS again, i might give them a try again, but it will definitely not been within the next 6months or so, and atleast a reasonable time after they've deployed KVM.

VAServe users don't forget to check your ressources if you haven't already!