My Experience With VPSland -- 3.5 Months

Just wanted to share here my experience with VPSland.

I've registered to the provider 3.5 months ago. I was in a hurry to find a fully administrated windows-based hosting service, and so I finally chose VPSland. At the time I wasn't aware of this forum, BTW.

The server was available for my use about 6.5 hours from the submission of my order, a reasonable time IMO. Unfortunately my good impressions with this provider end at this point.

The server seemed nice and responsive, so within a few hours I proceeded to request VPSland for some DNS records in their DNS servers, before I set my domain to use their name servers.

Although my request for the DNS records was simple IMO (I could do it in 2 minutes), it took them over 2 days to fully comply with my requirements. At first, it seemed like they do not take the time to carefully read what I write them. Then, it seemed like they just have no idea of what they are doing. At some point they even told me I should "allow sometime for DNS propagation", although the nslookup outputs I've provided them showed clearly that I was querying their own servers, so propagation isn't an issue.

My first support ticket therefore left me concerned with their support team's ability, but I just hoped for the best and continued on. Another request for DNS changes a month later, followed also the same pattern, though this time, I was able to wrap it up within just over a day.

Shortly after I finished this first issue, the VPS crashed while I was working on it. I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, and the connection simply fell, with the control panel for the VPS being inaccessible as well. So I submitted another ticket saying there is no communication, and the control panel is down. To this I received the reply "try restarting the VPS from the control panel" (which, as I clearly said, was down). So again, it seems they don't read what I write them. To their merit, I should say that their initial reply (though unhelpful) was quite rapid -- within 6 minutes. I took them, however, another 3/4 hour to actually fix the problem.

The VPS kept crashing later quite often, with a total of 4 crashes during the first month, 2 crashes during the 2nd month, and another 2 crashes during the 3rd month. The treatment for each of these crashes took 30-60 minutes, so none of these were horrible, but I was pissed off of not having a peace of mind, obliged to constantly monitor the site to assure it is online.

But what really took the cake was what happened a week ago. My VPS crashed, and was down for a whopping 18 hours -- during this entire time I had no web or mail services. This left me shocked. I couldn't understand how can any serious company allow a service to be down for 18 hours. They said that there were some problem with the node running my VPS, and the whole time I was thinking, if there is a problem with a single node (since other VPSs were up at the time), why not just move the VPS to a different node? I actually said that to them, and begged them to get the VPS running, but as I said, this only happened after an 18 hours failure, when they finally fixed the node.

You'd think they'd compensate me for something like that, but first they offered me only one buck (something which I perceived as an insult, really). I complained again, but all they offered was, in accordance with their SLA, a measly 10% credit, which is 2.9 bucks.

The last 18 hours long crash finally shook me from my stagnancy, and I begun to do some serious research for a new, dependable provider. I'm hoping to move from this provider by the end of the month.

The main advantage of VPSland is their low prices. They also usually offer reasonable response times for "normal" support requests.

However, anything beyond the scope of the very standard support request takes a very long time to complete. They are highly independable, and from what I perceived, most of their staff is unskilled.

I'd post our site's address here, so you can see that VPSland really hosts it, but being a new user I'm prohibited from posting the URL here.