NYNOC Exit Review - Read Before Purchasing

As many of you may have already read my initial review or the New York NOC I wanted to leave an additional exit review of the company and share a personal recommendation.

It started a little over a month ago when I jumped VPS providers and initially purchase 2 VPS plans . Initially the boxes were rock solid. I could get to my websites, admin area, and have support tickets responded to in a timely manner. Roughly a week later I ended up moving another site to it’s own VPS . This is when I noticied my first issues. CONSTANT ERROR MESSAGES stating the backend was down and to please restart it.

I would launch a support ticket, roughly 2 hours later the backend would be rebooted and I could once again access the admin panel and do what I needed to. Like clockwork when I would try to login again later to my admin panel I would be hit again with the backend was down (hypervm would be in a constant refresh). Sometimes my sites would remain online and sometimes they would go down too. This got frustrating but was bearable (I thought). Within a few days I see a BIGGER problem arise. I woke up one morning to find error alerts coming in and realizing 2 VPS’s had been offline for hours on end. I again launch another support ticket for the backend to be rebooted. I get a response everything is ok so I go about my day. I later receive an e-mail stating all of my sites were showing a mysql connect error and panic. Come to find out they had corrupted this time when the backend went down, I repair and optimize and everything is ok. VERY next day I wake up and check my nightly logs to make sure the nightly backup was loaded onto my home server. I don’t see it and find I received an e-mail from lxadmin stating it could not backup the database. Once again…..corrupted. This has been going on since that time frame on almost a daily basis. The backups are iffy if they will come in since when the backend gets overloaded and crashes in the middle of the night, it immediately corrupts all db’s on the VPS. I could understand 1 VPS doing this…..but 3? Come on….

Now comes Thanksgiving, my boxes go down for roughly 5 hours before reboot and once again I have to repair them on a blackberry with ssh since I am away (never fun to type that on a bb). I am back online and go about my day…….then…..Friday. My box goes down at 5pm…..I send in a support ticket to have it rebooted. The next morning at 11am it finally gets turned back on and I get a response that it must have been on my end since everything looks ok from there (granted 3 monitoring services were all showing it down). Once again…..corrupted. I rebuild and think the SLA was 99.9% so I send in a nice message to ask about it. Here is the response:

Posted: 11/29/2008 12:33
Hey Guys.
Since one of the VPS accounts was down for 17 hours do I qualify for the 99.9% SLA?
(3 Monitoring Services show the outage happened at 5:34PM last night and I have recovery notifications for this morning at 11:16AM)
Thanks
----------------------------
IP Address: 71.76.239.xx Andy
StaffPosted: 11/30/2008 20:49 Hi Ryan,
Unfortunately our SLA applies to network uptime and not power or hardware related.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
-------------------------------
The New York NOC Inc.
www.thenynoc.com
Visit our new forums! [url]

So……99.9% SLA does not cover if no one is in the datacenter to reboot the box because it is off-line…..I thought SLA’s covered your box being on-line, am I wrong?

So now after too many corruptions to count, support taking longer and longer in between responses I am left looking over my books. Last year alone between Thanksgiving and the following Sunday I brought in roughly $2300 dollars in sales. This year for the past 4 days I have brought in $10…… I have had some longtime recurring customers so I asked them for any feedback on what we could do to earn there business again. Out of 40+ people all but one stated that if I could fix the sites downtime they would return (the other responses was of course to lower prices). Second suggestion they had was to fix my e-mails from ending up in their spam box. Yes I was sold ALL dirty ip’s which had all been blacklisted. Some major isp’s worked with me and allowed me in…(some)

Before I get flammed for choosing these guys, they truly were great up front so obviously I got fooled. I have no doubt they are great for some people but I simply can not drive my business into the ground because I went cheap and in the end got what I deserved. I moved to futurehost today and almost **** myself when a response ticket was answered in under a minute (kinda scary for a low priority ticket).

With this said, before you consider NewYorkNoc simply ask yourself if your business or site is important to you, if you can afford to lose business, and if you want constant downtime along with mysql corruptions daily. I am not saying they are the worst as they were helpful at first. Just EXPECT that when the deal is that good, you are being oversold. There is no other explanation in my books.

To sum this up:

Uptime: 3 out of 10 (there were up sometimes)
Customer Service: 2 out of 10 (would have given higher I did not have to repeatedly e-mail over the backend issues)
Price: 10 out of 10 (admit it, the price point these guys have is good)
Value: 1 out of 10 (I made a bad choice, I lost a ton of money in business and now have to work hard to recover my losses and rebuild relationships)
Recommend to others: 2 out of 10 (why 2? This place might be good for offsite backup maybe?)

This review is NOT out of spite due to my recent downtime. This review is merely my opinion and personal experiences and not written to bash NYNOC. If your happy with them then you are doing well. If you are considering them…….I urge you to think elsewhere. All my data is off the VPS and I am running before the backend crashes again corrupted my DB’s.