Gnax/NetDepot Or Burst.net
Jan 12, 2009what better DC Gnax/NetDepot or Burst.net ?
View 12 Replieswhat better DC Gnax/NetDepot or Burst.net ?
View 12 RepliesLast night, server went down. I noticed, opened a ticket, and within 15 minutes had a response. By 20 minutes after the initial ticket, the server was back with a new power supply. While I was creating the ticket, I noticed it had been exactly 7 months since I had to open the last ticket.
15/20 minute response - not bad for after 11 at night on a Sunday night. 7 months without needing to open a ticket isn't bad either.
I finally decided to go with NetDepot! I'd like to record here my experiences, in case anyone interested. I hope that after setup is complete, this thread will be no-news and boring.
So just for the record, I chose this config:
AMD Athlon 64 3800
RAM: 1GB
HDD: 250GB SATA II + 250GB SATA II (raid 1)
OS: Debian Stable (They don't offer it at the web site, but Jordan@gnax was kind to offer it to me --
Control Panel: none
Backup: none
I used "whtfreehd" coupon to get the second drive for free. Also, a good thing that actual prices are lower than advertised! (70/mo vs. 75/mo) -- I hope that's not an error.
So at bottom line it costs $266 setup + $70/mo. In a year, this will total to $1,106, which is well within $100/mo budget.
I've paid late on Sunday, and now I'm waiting for the server setup. Let's see how long it will take.
A note to non-U.S. citizens: they seem to have strict policy on which credit cards are accepted. I'm Russian, and my Visa Business was not accepted, so I had to use PayPal.
GNAX/Netdepot 1 Year Review
I posted a review at six months and thought I'd update now that it's been a year. My dad ordered a server, which I run for him, after reading good reviews here at WHT. The site to verify that the server is at GNAX is [url]
My six month review can be found here:
[url]
That thread talks about the Pre-Sales and Upgrading process. Since I haven't had anymore Pre-Sales or Upgrading since then, there's nothing new to add.
Support: Their support has been excellent every time I've needed it. In that first six months I needed it quite a few times, and they were always quick to answer and professional. Since then, I haven't needed support as often. There haven't been any issues on their end at all, and I've learned a bit so I haven't messed up DNS, etc. as often, but when I have needed them, they've been quick to answer.
Uptime: As far as I can remember there haven't been any issues of downtime in the last six months. I could be wrong, or have missed something, but none that I've noticed.
Speed: Sites load quickly, uploading is fast.
Sometime in the next week or two, I plan to order a second server and definitely plan to order it from Netdepot.
It's been six months since signing up with Netdepot/GNAX, so I wanted to offer a review. I signed up with Netdepot after reading good reviews here. For the record, the server belongs to my dad, and I mostly run it. The site to verify that it's hosted with GNAX is [url]
Pre-Sales: My dad spoke with Jeff, who patiently walked through any questions he had about which server he would need, settling on the Q9300 with 2 gigs of ram.
Initial setup: The initial setup was completed in right around 24 hours. Everything was working well, and we had root.
Upgrading: We added a second hard drive, and two more gigs of ram. We requested a date for the upgrade to occur, and promptly at midnight on that date, they upgraded. Quick response to the request, quickly upgraded, no issues.
Support: GNAX/Netdepot support has been excellent, each time I've tested. Most of the time, there is a response within 15 minutes, and a solution soon after. In the first month, I messed up several times with the DNS, and had to open tickets to have someone fix the settings I messed up. There is a charge for Admin time, if it isn't an issue on their end, but I would expect that with an unmanaged server, and it was worth it since their techs were good about explaining what the issue was, so I learned a bit in that first month as well. I've been impressed and looking back through my tickets, I'm impressed all over again. It doesn't seem to matter if it's 3 in the morning, on the weekend, or during business hours, the response is quick, courteous and helpful.
Uptime: I think there were a couple of times that there were ddos attacks on one of their routers and so intermittent downtime, but for the most part, the server has been up and running well.
Speed: I'm editing to add this. I forgot to mention speed, because I take it for granted, but FTPing always seems to go quickly, the sites load quickly, and I have yet to notice any time of anything slowing down.
I'd like to thank the support at GNAX as well as Jeff, for six months of excellent service.
Setup 8/10
I purchased 2 servers on the 30th of May 2008. I took advantage of their 99% off first month sale. I received login info 3 days later although I was told it would be setup within 24 hours, I can understand they were busy due to their sale, so I waited patiently.
Sales 6/10
I need a new harddrive added which is critical for my website. 24th of June I requested for a SCSI harddrive to be added. 2 days later I got a reply saying if a SAS disk is fine, to which I replied yes and asked for the size. Another 24 hours past and a reply stated it would be 36GB for $50 a month and $50 setup. After some more inquiring and paying the bill I have no harddrive, its been 8 days since I opened the ticket and 8 days of slowness for my websites users because of this. If this were Softlayer it would be done and dusted within 48 hours at the most.
Also, their live chat has not been active for weeks, or at least whenever I visit their website its always offline. I have also tried their phone number a couple of times with no luck.
Support 6/10
On the 25th of June I requested a reboot at 8:33AM and at 10:22 AM I got a reply and they rebooted. This is 2 hours of downtime. Only later did they tell me they can setup a remote reboot for free, so luckily I don't have to use their slow support for any reboots.
Network 6/10
I did a basic speed test (the server is on a 100mbit port) for various file locations around the world, here is an example:
Quote:
#[root@localhost ~]# wget http://www.hivelocity.net/10meg.file
--14:48:19-- http://www.hivelocity.net/10meg.file
Resolving www.hivelocity.net... 69.46.24.178
Connecting to www.hivelocity.net|69.46.24.178|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 10547200 (10M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `10meg.file'
100%[=======================================>] 10,547,200 462K/s in 28s
14:48:47 (373 KB/s) - `10meg.file' saved [10547200/10547200]
Most results came back with around 500kbps in the USA, pretty poor but not complete crap. Certainly seen better networks.
Final comment - Nothing special
If they improved their support and sales response times, they would be a great company. I still await my harddrive upgrade after 8 days of waiting. I certainly won't be buying more servers with them.
I am new to VPS and am trying to get my head around it. What I am trying to figure out now are the pros and cons of Guaranteed and Burstable memory.
Assuming everything else is equal, and both options are in the budget, and that there is a requirement (at least at times) for more than 768mb of RAM, which option is better:
1152mb Guaranteed (SLM)
or
768mb Guaranteed / Burstable to 2048mb
Obviously, a big factor would be whether or not their is RAM available to burst to, and as I understand it, that is completely dependant on the server, other VPS's running, number of VPS's, etc.
However, what I am trying to figure out is which approach is typically better. If for the same money you can get 768mb w/2048mb burst or 1152mb SLM w/no burst which is the best option.
If my current requirements are important, then I listed them in a thread titled: "If I go with VPS would vB performance suffer greatly if I add multiple sites to VPS?"
I can't truely link to it, because I have less than five posts, but here is a quote of that thread, so you can hit the button in the quote to go there:
Quote:
Originally Posted by tnedator
I am leaning towards one of these three VPS accounts that all cost roughly the same:
A current project I'm working on has a need for several Dual 5520 servers.
At NetDepot, for a $491 setup fee, I can get these for $201 a month including 10TB bandwidth. Their service has been rock solid, but I'd like to diversify geographically a bit.
I've emailed around, no one has been able to match this offer. A few of the big names on this forum (with many posts to their names) have not followed up on my requests, or even quit replying to me!
How can NetDepot offer this if no one else can? It's like I'm insulting these providers to suggest that is what I want to pay them. Their offers either include a much smaller amount of bandwidth, or a price of double or more.
I have sign up for a dedicated server with netdepot in the beginning of the year.
After sign up i ordered an extra hard disk and a raid card.
It was not installed as i was expecting and i ordered a 3 rd hard disk.
The overall installation procedure took some days.
The nightmare is the billing.
I had used a special price with a special discount.
The first billing came without the special price.
The second billing came without the special price and without the special discount.
They forget to charge the 3rd hard disk. I had to remember them to be able to pay for it.
They have double charged the 2nd hard disk and the raid card.
They have refunded it.
2 months after the 3rd disk has been payed they are still asking for the money in spite of all the payments have been done from the same paypal account.
The first payments were not possible to be done by their billing interface which lead to a blank page.
Some of the first tickets opened came blank to me.
In some cases i had to clean the cookies to see something and in other cases that was not enough.
Beware of their billing department.
Diana in particular has asked me 3 times for the payment that was already done. The payment was done after i have remembered them that i have a 3rd hard disk and correct by email by 2 or 3 times the amount to be charged.
I pay after all is clear but 2 months later they were asking again for the same money.
I think that they don´t keep proper records of the received amounts.
They didn´t apologize for the mess.
Just one word of regard for Sailor with whom i have made the purchase agreement and that has at all the times helpfull on solving the things with his company.
The server is nice and the price was ok as well but in 4 years in hosting business i never found such a messy billing department.
I was going to go with acunett last night, then in a moment of stupidity reread my list and wondered why not netdepot. They offer buydown offers at a cheaper price than netdepot, and even though they don't offer management with it (outsourced) would be about the same price (+- 5$).
So I was between cheaper buydowns vs insource management
Here are my options, or at least what I've considered ....
I'm on a NetDepot 10 meg unmetered and just started migrating some accounts over from The Planet. I've been with them since... well the beginning. I wanted something a little less expensive with more bang for buck.
While the uptime has been good. The network speeds have not. I'm never getting more than sustained transfer speeds (scp, rsync) from my Planet server of 400KB/s... at this rate it's going to take 6 hours to transfer an account that's just 8 gigs in size.
NIC is set to 100 meg, full duplex. Both servers have just about no activity on them and firewalls clear.
3% 323MB 378.9KB/s 6:02:15 ETA
Is anyone else finding the network speeds with NetDepot sluggish? I submitted a support ticket about this.
This makes things like remote backups impossible.. hopefully it's just a issue with an overused switch or something. The worst part is I did the full buy-down package in hopes of being with them long term, now I'm not so sure.
i purchased a basic vps package for $1 at netdepot.com. So i can learn something and if all works perfectly i can transfer my site currently on shared host. After the payment i received a email saying that my account will activate with in 24 hours. After about 15hours i got email from the billing department saying i need to verify my payment info and i send my cc copies to them. But now its more than 26 hours passed and still they didnt activate my account. Is it a complex task..? Im familiar with vmwear and to my knowledge creating a vps is a small task..
View 14 Replies View RelatedCurrently we host with SoftLayer but are looking for other reliable providers also.
Which of the following do you recommend:
GNAX or DedNow
The glorified NetDepot (Gnax) has finally launched it's VPS services with a cool promo: only one buck for the first two months!! cPanel & all IPs you want for low prices, LxAdmin portal (you can install and reinstall a lot of OSs). Does anyone there tried this product? I'm interested in a honest report...
View 5 Replies View RelatedGNAX themselves have been great and they are still working on this problem with us. We are having a problem getting passive ftp to work correctly on all of our servers at this location. We do not have this problem with any of our other data centers using the same server configurations/images/settings and have multiple servers at GNAX all sharing the same problem, which seems to reasonably say there's something at the datacenter itself that's causing this problem. Ftp connections fail when trying to login using the password or fail when trying to enter passive mode. If the connection does not use passive ftp, then it works fine. Passive ftp will work sometimes at this location, but it’s rare and it doesn’t work for long. Has anyone had any similar experience or may know what the problem might be?
View 8 Replies View RelatedI am a client of GNAX since 2003, in 2004 I began with colocation with them.
The service has always been good.
Connectivity: Now they utilize 4 suppliers (Telia, GlobalCrossing, Savvis and BTN) by BGP and RouteScience by Avaya, never I have had serious problems of the conectivity with them, the maintenances that have had have always been notified and resolved with the maximum brevity, I can assure that the network is excellent.
Facilities: Before they were found in 55 Marietta st. , I am not an expert in facilities, but I know that all was correct, never I have seen none objection neither nobody that had it. At present they have their own building, in White St. here the things are a lot more large and fresh
Security: Great control security by professional cameras, registration check-in / check-out of personnel, and security guard the 24 hours, access by cards to colo area / tech rooms etc
Support OnSite: Fast support, pleasant and very attentive techs, and above all, well and efficient support. You can obtain the support attention to the 4PM or to the 4AM, they are there to every hour.
I do not put a scoring in each section by if does not seem real, but my judgment would be 9/10 or 10/10 in all. My business there is Atlantanap being at more than 20.000km of our offices, some motive should have
choosing atlantanap and you will choose well, you can test them with part of your business and soon will think the same as I.
Ok...posting this here to hopefully get someone's attention at gnax.net.
I've written their abuse@gnax.net and engineer@gnax.net multiple times and even called into their support line and spoke with Stephen (or Steven). No one there seems to care.
They have a group of Vietnamese hackers on their network that are launching attacks from several of their servers. They also have a google phising site on one of the servers.
Spoke with Stephen at Gnax support and his answer was that it wasn't his job and I needed to send a e-mail to abuse. After telling him that I'd done that multiple times he basically said oh well that he didn't know what to do.
Seems like the admins of gnax.net are either very irresponsible, stupid or just ignorant.
Here are the URL's.
[url]
[url]
Just replace the 1's with t's and you can see for yourself. The fwooshnet.com attempts to download a trojan to your system so if you don't know what your doing don't visit either URL.
Hopefully admins from Gnax watch this forum.
We need colo in 2 or 3 different locations within the USA.. we're going to be growing to over 3-4 cabinets in each location within the next 18 months.
We're looking for rates (including power and everything) for less than $800/rack.
We're also looking for a semi-small company who is willing to be quite flexible with our service (as we are a service provider) and we will need remote hands etc..
First question:
What do you think of GORACK, I was unable to find any reviews on them, which could either be a real good thing, or a real bad thing.
Second question:
What do you think of GNAX Dallas?
Third question:
Is there any other companies you would recommend to me?
Some of our client emails are being blocked and it appears that the whole GNAX range of more than 103680 IP addresses was blocked.
Quote:
As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got UCEPROTECT-Level 3 listed.
Your IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was NOT part of a spamrun, but you are the one that has freely chosen your provider.
By tolerating or ignoring that your provider doesn't care about spammers you are indirectly also supporting the global spam with your money.
Seen from this point of view, you really shouldn't wonder about the consequences.
What I want to know is how often do it happens that a datacenter have all it's IP addresses being blocked?
I contacted Gnax about this but their response was merely that they will take steps and the whole range will eventually be delisted. (Obviously the immediate removal fee of $200 something is too much for them)
Ironically merely a few hours AFTER I contacted them I got a "warning" about spam send from one of our clients.
The date of the email was a few weeks AGO and We already long ago warned our LEGIMATE client that such emails are not allowed and the account will be terminated if it happens again. (In other words WE immediately acted against potential spam while Gnax not and then have the nerve to warn US after WE informed them of the blacklisting)
On the one hand I understand that it can be difficult for a very large provider and uceprotect.net seems a bit harse to block ALL IP addresses due to 0.238 % spam ip addresses.
I have a site hosted with Imhosted.
6 days ago, three users, one from Denmark, one from the UK and one from California - all reported connectivity trouble. I asked for tracert's from all three.
Two of them fail at 209.51.131.250 ( the California and Denmark one ) and one fails at 209.51.131.234
Both are GNAX servers.
I contacted Imhosted - and for 6 days they have ducked, dived, denied, and given me totally inappropriate stock replies ( such as asking me to check my IP address - when the actual affected IP addresses have already been supplied numerous times). They tried to fob me off saying it was an ISP issue ( two continents, at exactly the same time - yeah, right )
Imhosted have SAID, on two occasions, that they've contacted GNAX to have them fix the issue. So far, the problem remains for all three users.
Fortunately, we have a dedicated server of our own already, and we will be moving to it in the next few weeks. But meanwhile - what the hell can I do to rattle some sense into Imhosted and/or GNAX to get these poor guys back onto the site?
I've had three years of hell with Imhosted. Useless support, dreadful performance, unusable email, PHP and SQL issues - all in all, a dreadful experience.
Thanks to rising costs of energy we have received notices from GNAX that they are raising costs of power and colo space. Has anyone else seen similar notices from other colo's already ?
I know we have seen power rates increase the last few months in our homes, we talked about that here in another thread. It was envitable that colo facilities followed suit. How does this affect the other colos and providers?
I want to get peoples opinions that HAVE USED or DO USE GNAX and their network.
What is the main difference between their networks, which one are you on, and have you tried the other, etc. I want to get some real feedback here. From what I can tell, the gold just appears to be bigger name connections that are charging alot more money for their backbone. The silver has nearly as many connections as the gold it appears.
Could someone explain in layman's terms a point on RAM for VPS? I always understood that you are allocated an amount of RAM with each plan. For example, 256MB on most lower packages. You are then allowed to reach some limit in case their is some spike and memory is required. That is called Burst RAM limit/amount. Like 1GB. I asked about this to my new host and they responded below. I'm not following it.
Quote:
SLM is a method of using dedicated physical RAM (RSS) versus a guaranteed (unknown) / burst (VSIZE). SLM is only accounting physical memory usage and you are silently swapping on the host (the VSIZE) -- in short, if you are running out of RAM it is because your VPS is physically trying to use more than your dedicated RAM limit.
SLM implements a 2nd-level out of memory (OOM) manager. In the event a VPS uses all of its physical RAM SLM will first delay the execution of processes to wait for more RAM to become available. After this it intelligently decides which processes to kill to maintain a running system.
On the kernel level it decides itself what should be preempted to swap in the system and which data is most rarely used. This is more efficient from overall performance point of view than having a separate swap space assigned to each VPS and used when VPS has exceeded their RAM limit which cause disk I/O bandwidth which is used for swapping is a scare resource, therefore it is not worth swapping out something when there is global RAM available still.
After being down for hours last weekend, my server with burst is presently timing out. Is it a general issue again?
View 10 Replies View RelatedA Xeon Quad Core 2.4 Ghz, 4 GB Ram and 2x250 GB HDD, cpanel/Fantastico and 10 MBPS shared Port,
With softlayer current promotion, I get it for 224$
With Burst.net reseller - I get it for $180
So is paying $44 more and going with softlayer worth? or is Burst network as good as softlayer?
It had an Abuse Incident over the last 24 hours and missed the deadline they gave to clean it up. Being in Australia the time differences can make it difficult to always catch an Abuse Incident. Anyway so the server is disconnected and we have to pay a reconnection fee, ok fair enough.
As soon as the server went offline I became aware of the issue and contacted their support.
They said I need to pay the Abuse Invoice, so I said ok and went to my Client Area and there was no Abuse Invoice. So I tell the technician that there is no invoice in my account, he says, oh ok there must be a billing problem and passes it over to "Customer Service".
Hours later there is still no response from customer service and my server is still offline.
I shouldn't have my server OFFLINE while waiting for them to sort out their billing problem. Them getting their Abuse Invoice paid is NOT A TIME CRITICAL matter.
A server outage is a TIME CRITICAL MATTER.
Here I am still waiting and nothing is being done, my server is still OFFLINE. I have no problem paying the Abuse Invoice, but the server outage just goes on and on because they can't seem to generate the Abuse Invoice that they require me to pay.
Is anyone else having trouble with name resolution at Nocster being really wonky? Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it times out, sometimes it takes a couple seconds.
My resolv.conf:
search hostnoc.net
nameserver 66.96.193.2
nameserver 64.191.0.2
is anyone else having trouble with burst.net at the moment? from two locations, i'm having problems where anything that will elicit a large response just hangs indefinitely. i can ping my server just fine, i can shell into it... if i do "top" or "dmesg" or anything else that might dump back more than a few lines of response at a time, the ssh session hangs. i can do "ps x" as a regular user, because i only have two processes running. "ps ax" will hang ssh.
none of my websites work, and i can't get on the burst.net website from either location. i tried calling but no matter what sequence i try for (even tried reboots) i can't get ahold of a live person, but then again it is almost midnight.
anyone else experiencing this?
I do alot of reading of select forums and contribute here and there, I am a huge contributor on Digital point. With lots of Itraders. I came here to try and find some info as to what was going on with burst.net when I stumbled across the merged thread here and started seeing what was going on.
I don't want to say it's typical but more often than not these days the server have been more miss than hit. Coupled with the fact that things like RAM upgrades carry a setup cost and a higher than avereage monthly fee. 512mb costs more than what 1GB does at most hosts.
On top of that, the upgrade time is 1-3 DAYS not hours, DAYS. My Ip address have to change for a bandwidth upgrade which caused 24 hours of downtime as the DNS propagated again.
Server was suspended 9 hours into an abuse report when it is promised 24 hours to solve the issue and I had agreed that the account needed to be suspended. We went back and forth with them about replying to the ticket that referenced the abuse issue. I was told that I needed to reply to the ticket. If they had bothered to look at the ticket themselves then they would have seen that I had a 3 to one ratio of my posts to theirs in trying to get this solved. $50 abuse fee talk about nickel and dimeing a guy. I know, I have heard it before, read the tos, aup, billing, and privacy policies. It's all in there somewhere but you just get to that point where if they charge you one more little BS fee then I'm going to go postal. Plus they can't keep their end of the bargain up when it comes to the network. Received a cpu / mobo upgrade expected upgrade time48-72 hours, after it was all said and done now the server sits still with 4GB or ram that it can not full recognize. On a happier note I did have other servers there (that's not the happy part) I knew in my gut that something had to be done. I've spent alot of time getting quotes with other providers, I even added one to my contact list from here on WHT, it was sales@hivelocity.net. I got several quotes from them and never pulled the trigger on a configuration on any of them, I tried out a few other smaller hosting companies with no luck and finally after a month or two of Dave asking how I was doing on a daily basis, I decided to go with a test server. Setup was decent, I had a problem with my ip when I first signed up, but the support staff is great, no hassles no fuss, no paying to upgrade, unless there is a price difference, NO DOWNTIME, NO ABUSE FEES (never had an abuse case yet) but it's not in any of their policies that I can read. All the chips seem to have fallen into place for me when I signed up with them.
I call Dave on a regular basis I get calls from him every so often. My server is up and better than ever. I get answers to my questions that are beyond the normal realm of technical support which I find odd because I see all over WHT that they are an unmanaged host. There are no per incident fees or nickle or dimeing. I was told by a tech that there would be a $65 per hour fee to install a 3rd party piece of software that they did not support but that to me is in the same realm of taking your car to the shop when you want a performance part installed. You want it done right and you want it quick. I still have a server with burst that I am almost finished with. I'm glad I had the courage to follow my instinct when it came time to switch or else I would be completely stuck. I ended up with burst because I was re-acuired through a reseller named Vagu. I am starting to see that there were problems between Vaguhost and Burst some time ago, about the time of that switch is when I started having second thoughts that I may need to add another provider. I am happy referring people to Hivelocity and I also resell their services. I am not too familiar with the other account representatives for Hivelocity, I believe that there are 4 total, but if you have been left high and dry by burst then give them a shout. I believe that one person even called themselves a "refugee."
I am planning to purchase a dedicated server (managed)from burst.net. Anybody having any experience with this company?
View 1 Replies View RelatedIf you have a vps, how long does the 'burst' actually last?
View 5 Replies View Related