Well almost a year ago I came here and read lots of posts, asked lots of questions and settled on getting my two servers from LayeredTech.
When I bought both my servers, they were from their clearance rack because although my sites were pushing terabyte level traffic at the time, their CPU/etc needs were fairly low. Of course how these things tend to go, I am looking at needing a third server this summer. Time to look at raising prices I guess
One thing that people seemed to complain about with Layeredtech at that time was the "lack of support". I personally have not seen that over this time I have been with them. For example...
Last Monday SMARTD reports an hard drive error. I submit a ticket and with in 30 mins we were scheduling a down time with them so they could test the drive. They ran the test and it came back with "one or more errors" so they offered to replace the drive and reload. I decided to take advantage of a forced down time to remove that horrid piece of junk called PLESK and asked for a fresh install of the OS, with nothing (I have see the grass on the control panel side, and its not greener!) and while we are at it toss more ram in the machine.
So they offered to bring up a complete new server and run them parallel for a few days!
Which is exactly the choice I opt'd for. I am happy to say we completed that move last Saturday and my users are much happier with the server speed increase (from doubling the RAM and removing PLESK as the rest of the hardware was basically the same)
I would and do happily recommend them to anyone that needs a unmanaged server. Their ticket response time has always been top notch, and other then this drive failure, we have had no hardware issues. Both our servers are in teh Savvis data center, if that means anything.
I can remember not so long ago, Layered Tech and Soft Layer were pitched as being pretty much equal in pricing. When it comes to high-end VPS nodes, I've seen it so far to be more feesable to lease them, maybe on RTO, rather than buy hardware and rack it up so when I came to request a quote from the two providers, it seems to be that Layered Tech charge some what $800 more for the same configuration as Soft Layer. Who is actually worth the money in your opinion?
The quote:
Quote:
Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5335 2.00GHz (Clovertown) - 2 x 8MB cache 2 x 1.00TB SATA II 24 GB FB-DIMM Registered 533/667 100 Mbps Public & Private Ports Public Bandwidth 2000 GB Bandwidth Monitoring Host Ping Notification Email and Ticket Response Automated Notification Operating System CentOS 5 (64 bit) Primary IP Addresses: 1 IP Address Secondary IP Addresses: 4 IP Addresses Lockbox 1 GB Network IDS/IPS Protection Unlimited SSL VPN Users & 1 PPTP VPN User per account Nessus Vulnerability Assessment & Reporting Quantity: 1 Discounted Total: $599/month, $0 setup
For exactly the same quote, Layered Tech wanted $1,400 per month. Although I have no plans to go with either right now, who is actually worth the money?
So we have a single Layered Tech box hitting our server with around 90 MBit/s for almost 12 hours straight now, resulting in over 400 GB excess traffic so far. An abuse report was sent about 4 hours ago (Ticket-ID: XZP-97559-339) with evidence included, but so far there was 0 reaction besides the auto-reply.
A phone call to the number listed on their website resulted only in a message that there is no one available at extension XYZ. I didn't try repeat calls since playing international phone tag is not quite my idea of fun.
I realise that it was/still is early in the morning at their location, but nonetheless, I'd expect a company their size to respond a lot faster to reports such as this.
We would just like to take a minute to say how impressed and satisfied we are with one of our primary colo providers, G3 Technologies [url]. Brendan at G3 is a absolute pleasure to deal with. The facility is secure, well maintained and the BGP network Brendan has created is powerful and reliable.
I wouldn't trust anyone but Brendan and G3 when you need premium colocation.
Mods, you can PM us for proof that we use G3 or you can just trace hostvault.net ;-).
Is anyone else having issues with Layered Technologies. For the past 18+ hours they've been 'down' from the Global Crossing network. Does anyone know anyone at Savvis and/or Global Crossing that can check and see what's wrong with their routing?
I am trying to get a hold of the abuse department of Layered Technologies. They host a splog which is continually ripping my content - takes the content down after a complaint - just to publish it again after a few hours.
I only have sales@layeredtech.com - and even so they promise to forward the request - the latest rip is from yesterday evening and still on the other site.
I came here about three days ago asking for a good managed dedicated server. WiredTree was mentioned by several people so I checked them out and managed to get a Q6600, 8GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD's and 4000GB bandwidth for $215.20 per month. Not sure if the deal is still going on or not...anyway! This is my first server so I will try to keep everyone updated as I go through the process.
I ordered the server at about 4AM in the morning and got an e-mail telling me that they'd make a verification call at 9AM-11PM which is when those calls are normally made. I got the call at 9:05AM which is great because i'm used to always being held up by companies making promises then breaking them. The guy on the other end was friendly and asked if I had any questions. I didn't at the time so he told me the server should be up in 12 hours.
13 hours later the server is up and I get my welcome e-mail with all the important login info but I got something else I didn't expect. Actual instructions. Now I know this is a managed server but it still blows my mind that I got a starters guide which explained some of the stuff I had no clue how to do. It saves both my time and the tech supports time. So I dove in and set everything up today when I had some free time. Now i'm just waiting for the DNS to propagate.
In the meantime I decided to upload a file (which it uploaded at maximum speed) and then download that file. It never skipped a beat and I was once again maxing out my cable modem service at 700kbps. Now we will have to see how it holds up once I start having viewers all trying to grab stuff at once but it's nice to know the server is at least performing good right now since i've read some horror stories about people getting super slow download speeds even on dedicated servers with barely any hits.
Well, that's it for now. I'll make new posts when stuff worth mentioning happens. So far i'm satisfied.
I didn't even know about this company until I saw one of their PDU in somebody's cabinet in the datacenter.
They don't list any prices or vendors, I emailed them waiting for reply.
One thing that caught my eye was the number of additional outlets per strip. We never daisy chain out PDUs so even though we have the power to put more servers per circuit we never could. It has at least 3-4 more outlets than Raritan PX and APC, which means we can put 3-4 more servers per circuit.
How are their products? The look pretty robust from what I saw in the cabinet.
I've found an interesting offer from this provider. After doing some research I found one topic which didn't really describe the quality of their service.
For people looking for a vps, I thought it's important to get a feel for their technical support team. So for the first time, I've had to use it. . .
My problem is that MySQL CPU utilization is around 25% at all times and it is lagging the box like crazy. All of my sites hosted only get around 200k uniques per month. <<snipped>> The lag seemed to start around the same time I added multiple cronjobs at various times and frequencies to grab RSS feed data and check to see if it should add a new entry into the DB.
I am not a linux guru, so I opened a ticket and asked for help and suggestions on what to do. . .
Response:
Quote:
I could try tweaking the mysql configuration so the service uses less resources, but this usually just helps with the memory use.
I was looking for him to either say yes the cronjobs are doing it or I have poorly coded queries. . something useful and related to CPU usage. But no.
So then I say sure, tweak. I ask if he agrees that the cronjobs are the problem and what options I have to remedy the situation.
Response:
I have tweaked the mysql configuration for you. Yes, most likely those cronjobs are causing the big CPU usage in mysql.
Basically he completely ignored my question on what other options I have or recommendations on what to do next. Needless to say I am furious. I ask for advice and get absolutely nothing useful in return. Not to mention his short answers make it seem like I'm lucky he even reads my entire question.
I've been with Zoom for 2 years now, and I'm leaving as soon as I find another host. Here's why: once a month, for the last 3 months, emails I send to a Yahoo.com address are bounced because Yahoo is blocking all email from my mail server. When this is finally dealt with, it turns out Yahoo blocks everything coming from Zoom (or my shared server -- sorry I'm not technical) because of spam originating there. Now, *I'm* not sending spam, and spam is annoying enough to deal with in my in box, but now other people sending spam are stopping me from sending my little 20-30 emails a day!
Here's how tech support has worked for me when this problem comes up:
1. I go on and open a chat with support.
2. Someone In India eventually says hello to me.
3. I state my problem.
4. Long wait.
5. Someone In India eventually comes back and says "hello" again.
6. Now I'm pissed. I tell Someone In India what the problem is and give her email headers and tell her to pay attention.
7. Another long wait.
8. This Someone In India gives me an email address at zoom to email directly about this problem.
9. I email TheAddressIWasGiven @ zoom explaining my problem...and THAT EMAIL BOUNCES! Despite the irony of having an email begging for help with bounces get bounced itself, I am not amused.
10. I go to call Tech Support... DOH! They no longer have phone support.
11. I fill out an online support and send it in. I wait No reply. Emails to Yahoo still bouncing.
12. I fill out another one. I wait.
13. I get an email telling me my second support request is being closed since they are working on the first one. Really? First I've heard of them working on it.
14. 20 minutes later I get an email saying they're working on the first request.
15. A day or so later, I get an email telling me it will all be fine in a day.
16. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes I get another email telling me to go to Yahoo and fill out a form to get them to unblock it.
17. I fill out a form at Yahoo and it gets unblocked within hours. I am currently suffering from the latest email bouncing and am at step # 14. Which is what drove me here to find a real host. Something about getting lumped in with spammers is just....icky. Yucky.
Also, they spontaneously took my little web site off line several times because they messed with directories. It took days to get right. My business is not web-based, but it was still annoying.
Anyway, there's my cautionary tale about Zoom . A few mistakes are forgivable, but this is too much.
I was a happy client of Ruby Ring tech, but few days ago my Shared server Cpenl got missing in action... It showed some issue on listens... i submit a ticket to Ruby Ring tech and they said they will fix it soon... but for about 3 days nothing happen... suddenly today my shared server is also gone missing... cant connect to any of my websites and page cannot be displayed on cpanel also.. I submitted tickets.. but still no answer, now about 12 + hours downtime....
I was a happy client of Ruby Ring tech, but few days ago my Shared server Cpenl got missing in action... It showed some issue on listens... i submit a ticket to Ruby Ring tech and they said they will fix it soon... but for about 3 days nothing happen... suddenly today my shared server is also gone missing... cant connect to any of my websites and page cannot be displayed on cpanel also.. I submitted tickets.. but still no answer, now about 5 -6 hours downtime....
I'm wonder whats happening.....? hope that they will fix the things soon.... plzz if any 1 of Ruby Ring tech see this reply to this thread.... i like to know whats going and how soon you can give the server back
I had purchased an SSL certificate from Go-Daddy. The Tech support people at GigaPros were more than willing to give me the advice I needed and to get the certificate installed for me in very short order.
Polite courteous professional service, excellent response times and top notch support. This company offers excellent value for the money! I highly recommend GigaPros!
I'd like to start an ongoing thread here listing the 'Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support'. In other words, out of the 1,000s of host companies, this may cut it down to less than a dozen.
( And for all you Hosters out there who really want your company to grow, and want to know how, - it's easy: just read here.)
Good telephone support is the #1 ultimate requirement, because:
-It's a lot faster and easier for both the user and the host company, because you can state and answer all questions and clarifications on the spot, you don't need to continually pass new emails with new questions and clarifications, back and forth for days on end, until the issue is solved. It saves tech time and user's time. And saves a lot of nerves.
- It's the best way to sort the good guys from the bad. A bad company isn't going to bother to answer the phone, - or will make you wait way too long, - because they are likely getting endless complaints. The good guys are always ready to answer the phones, with a friendly voice, - because they really WANT to please the customer.
- If a company can't be bothered to pick up the phone, we can't be bothered to even consider them. They're a joke, and so won't be listed here on this thread. (So, before adding or listing any Hosters here, please verfify that they do have Good, quick, friendly, telephone support,; ideally 24/7, but 9am to 10pm might be acceptable, if it was supplemented by some emergency contact. AND:
- Hoster ALSO needs good EMAIL support (and preferably, Chat online, extended hour availability). (I spend a lot of time overseas). It sems all emails should get a non-automated response within about an hour, - and then support should jump on fixing any problem.
I only need support a few times a year. To answer some questions, or fix a problem, or do an install. That's lesss than 1 hour total, so any company paying maybe $18/hour tech support should be able to handle this. It IS reasonable to charge a custm for extended calls, beyond say, 90minutes a year, IF you don't count the 80%? Of times an issue is the Hoster;s fault of stmg gone wrong, and don't count the 'hold' times.
ALSO IMPORTANT: - Uptime - site Speeds - Monthly plans, no contract (Only a dishonest host will try to force you into a contract, where they can then ignore you.) - Reasonable price. (? Maybe $12 to $18/month for a basic business site. We don't need massive bandwitdths, - we all know that's an overselling scam, and can't ever be delivered.) - a good upgrade plan of bigger options. Maybe even VPS. - Dedicated IP, and availbility of SSL -PHP 5, mysql, phpMyAdmin, etc - cPanel ( Some Hosts are using problematic panels, like Hsphere, which are slow to load, slow in operation, require many more clicks, have too many options, spread apart on many separate pages. Time is money, and this really slows down the ability of a small business to manage his own site in effective time. For example, one WHT user wrote somewhere: "I don't feel that HSphere's interface is nice at all, although I have worked with cPanel and DA all my life... I just found it to include un-necessary features or split features up in to different hard to find pages, such as backups - mysql backups you had to find on a completely different page than file backups, and then there were options to have it in the home directory or server-end backup, in which then you had to wait a good 10 minutes before it was ready. cPanel, just hit backup and hit download and instantly it does everything you need...".
I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone support, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far: - Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes! - NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest. - MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere. - Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere. - JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work..... - Hostgator. Yes, it's a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support. - ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered... - Can anyone add to this list? Please list only hosts that meet the above minimum requirements of phone support, etc. Especially useful is hosters you've tried. TO AVOID: - Avoid Arvixe. I had a horrid experience with them, here: [WHT forum]:/showthread.php?p=5097822#post5097822 - Avoid WebHostingBuzz. This company never returned my phone msessage inquiries.
if our host is experiencing technical problems, or if they're in financial collapse. Since 5 PM Sat., many sites hosted by powerfulhosting.com of Santa Monica have gone dead, mostly on NS01.POWERFULHOSTING.COM and some on NS1.IOCUS.COM They include:
and many more. Over the weekend, tech help claimed the problems were assocaited with an "upgrade" to a new server. As the site owners started talking to each other, and the outage grew into the work week, Powerful Hosting stopped responding to inquiries, even from longtime clients. Their phone mailboxes are full and silent.
Now, I'm not an administrator or even a very quick FTPer, but these stores have burned to the ground and there are are livelihoods on the line. Can anyone in this community find any evidence suggesting a geniune technical glitch on their servers? A couple of people in our group think maybe they can't pay a server bill, in which case we all need to bail out immediately.
I've been hosting my personal sites with MonkeyWrench Hosting for around three years now (coming up in January I believe), and I figured I'd share my experiences with them!
I've gone through a few hosts in my time, and some of them have been pretty rough. After using paid hosts, a niche free host started up that I stayed with for around a year before they eventually closed down.
I switched to MonkeyWrench Hosting at that point as a place to host my sites and store my files, and I have to say that I've been impressed throughout the time I've been with them.
Uptime/speed: Fantastic! The sites have been perfectly reliable and speedy whenever I've gone to access them, and I haven't had any complaints from users. I did come across MySQL going down on one of the servers (I have two accounts for different purposes that are on seperate servers) in the past, but it was resolved quickly before I even needed to get help.
Support: I've used the support a few times, but not for anything critical since there's not been the need. However, everything that I have asked was answered promptly in a professional manner.
Pricing: Again, no complaints here. The pricing is pretty cheap, especially for the quality of service receieved. They aren't the cheapest on the Internet by any means, but you generally get what you pay for. I'm aware of what my realistic space/bandwidth needs are anyway, and I'd rather pick a host that clearly advertises what you'll receive over an 'unlimited' host.
All in all, MWH have been a fantastic choice and I couldn't have hoped for anything better.
So, thumbs up to Jonathan, and keep up the good work!
I'll report my domains for the moderators to check them out. =)
I get the following error, when I run 'yum update':
Quote:
[root@moloko ~]# yum update Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * atomic: www2.atomicorp.com * base: mirrors.usc.edu * updates: mirrors.serveraxis.net * addons: styx.biochem.wfubmc.edu * extras: mirrors.gigenet.com Setting up Update Process Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package file.i386 0:4.17-15.el5_3.1 set to be updated Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in ? yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True) File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 229, in user_main errcode = main(args) File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 145, in main (result, resultmsgs) = base.buildTransaction() File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 647, in buildTransaction (rescode, restring) = self.resolveDeps() File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 704, in resolveDeps for po, dep in self._checkFileRequires(): File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 939, in _checkFileRequires if not self.tsInfo.getOldProvides(filename) and not self.tsInfo.getNewProvides(filename): File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/transactioninfo.py", line 414, in getNewProvides for pkg, hits in self.pkgSack.getProvides(name, flag, version).iteritems(): File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packageSack.py", line 300, in getProvides return self._computeAggregateDictResult("getProvides", name, flags, version) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packageSack.py", line 470, in _computeAggregateDictResult sackResult = apply(method, args) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 861, in getProvides return self._search("provides", name, flags, version) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 43, in newFunc return func(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 837, in _search for pkg in self.searchFiles(name, strict=True): File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 43, in newFunc return func(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 586, in searchFiles self._sql_pkgKey2po(rep, cur, pkgs) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 470, in _sql_pkgKey2po pkg = self._packageByKey(repo, ob['pkgKey']) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 413, in _packageByKey po = self.pc(repo, cur.fetchone()) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 68, in __init__ self._read_db_obj(db_obj) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 94, in _read_db_obj setattr(self, item, _share_data(db_obj[item])) TypeError: unsubscriptable object
The error code returned is: error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/bin/find: cpio: rename error: unpacking of archive failed on file /bin/ls: cpio: rename
I checked that the files are not immutable via chattr and that I am logged in as root. The directory is also writeable.
I can't remove them or change their permissions.
Any idea on how to force an upgrade? I checked with the support at Cpanel but they had no idea how to fix it and were less than helpful.
root@server[~]# yum install fileutils Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * extras: mirror.fdcservers.net * updates: mirror.fdcservers.net * base: pubmirrors.reflected.net * addons: chi-10g-1-mirror.fastsoft.net Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Setting up Install Process Parsing package install arguments Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package coreutils.i386 0:5.97-19.el5 set to be updated --> Processing Dependency: findutils for package: coreutils --> Running transaction check ---> Package findutils.i386 1:4.2.27-5.el5 set to be updated --> Finished Dependency Resolution
I am researching how to upgrade my server, I have already tested #yum update and seen all the patches and upgrades that could be made for my server. My question is that by upgrading all these (mysql, php, etc) do i need to backup all my mysql databases or should the upgrade not affect my databases?
