PowerVPS - Review 2+ Years

The Beginning

I moved over to Power VPS after having been on shared hosting at my first provider for 4 years. Basically, they were overcharging me like crazy. Then I had a very brief false start with a big name hosting company. They didn't answer my very first ticket "My SSI includes are not working" for 2 days. By that time I had already been spooked and signed up with PowerVPS.

I got a 256 mb "Managed" VPS with CPanel plus a few extra IPs; and the signup process was painless. With one or 2 exceptions everything seemed okay. I heard a few comments about my sites being slow, but no other problems.

The Middle

Things went well for the first year or more. Tickets were answered promptly, and because I was serving just my own sites (not reselling), I encountered very few problems. One that did arise and perhaps should have been a signal of what was to come. I honestly can't remember the issue, but when support told me that if I wanted such-and-such to work I should log in as root and modify some obscure (to me) *.ini file. I didn't want a dummy like me poking around in the nether regions of my server. After voicing my concerns, a tech went ahead and edited the file.

As time went on I noticed that more and more I had to explain my problem issues more than once. It appears that when an email ticket is escalated, the details from the previous email do not go along for the ride. I occasionally had to explain and/or clarify the problem a number of times. In fairness, some of the problems may have arisen from my non-tech descriptions .. but! .. what should PowerVPS expect from folks who rent a "Managed" VPS?

The End

I had a problem with my site email not working, so I submitted a ticket. The answer I got back was from a tech informing me that email was working no .. and had tested it. The problem was he had turned on and tested "Squirrel Mail".

Getting the regular email working took several more tickets with occasional shards of information/advice coming from different techs. There was no 1 definitive answer.

On 2 occasions, someone changed the password on my WHM.

A couple of months back I got an email telling me that PowerVPS would be doing a kernel upgrade on the server. (I honestly believe that, at that time, management already knew about the <iframe problem with a number of servers). Okay, so we were down for an hour .. fair enough.

Then I noticed some malicious (iframe) code in on a page. I alerted support. They told me the entire server was infected and would have to be rebuilt. According the the info I got, Fedora 2 had a vulnerability.

Now begins the insanity.

Removing all that malicious code from all my sites (and Apache man pages), ten uploading again took more than 8 hours. Rebuilding the server took almost 7 hours. I was glued to the forum reading, "We're working on it," messages until I couldn't stay awake any longer. Next morning I woke up to find all my sites still off line. A support ticket informed me that all was well with my server .. and had been for 8 hours.

"No it ain't!" It turns out that an Apache module had been installed wrong.

Come on folks .. check your work!

Then I started reading about more servers on PowerVPS being infected ans asked support what was going on. They still had the infection.

They had rebuilt the servers with Fedora 2 yet again!

A long frustrating email to management resulted in an admission that my server had been rebuilt wrong. The only recourse I had was to backup my files (not a CPanel backup), let them rebuild the server, then reload everything .. including setting up and loading a number of mySQL databases.

So about that ime PowerVPS had a sale going. The only way existing customers could benefit from more ram, more space, more bandwidth was to upgrade to a bigger new server.

So I asked about upgrading but to a DirectAdmin Control Panel and they said fine .. but I either had to backup and upload, or pay for 1 months backup space. They pointed me to a script that "might" work for a CPanel to DA restore.

C'mon guys .. I've been here 2 years, had all sorts of problems that were your fault .. twice .. and you want me to pay for what most hosts would do for free?

"Our 10GB of ftp backup space runs $7.99 per month."

Summary

PowerVPS was a good company when I started with them. They offered good services and seemed to be good folks. IMO, somewhere along the way, they seemed to have lost or changed their focus from "good service" to "strictly bu$ine$$". I have moved to another provider. Would I ever consider going back to them? I don't think so.

... the end