I am using Servint and I am looking for another provider with similar reputation/reliability. I have heard many good things about Zone.net on this forum, but they don't have any reviews older than a few months. Have they been around long, if so, why no early posts?
First of all, before I comment on Zone.net's support, I want to say that their servers are top-notch, fast, and extremely reliable. I have absolutely no issues with Zone.net's servers, but I am a little disappointed with their support.
On their website they tote "superior 24x7 support and service" but I can't say that I've experienced "superior" support. It may have just been a fluke with the three times I've had to use their support in the past month that I've had a VPS with them, but I certainly was not impressed with their support and service.
Let me start from the beginning.
I was doing some research for a new VPS that I needed and I read tons of reviews and recommendations and found that Zone.net came highly recommended. I checked out their website and found out that they offered fully-managed VPS options and the price and specs seemed right. So at 18:28 Pacific time on July 8, I placed my order.
Now, I know that it can take a while to provision a VPS. This was not my first VPS, but all of my providers, current and past, provisioned my VPS anywhere from 4-8 hours. I was not ordering a custom VPS, I ordered the VM100 that was offered on their site and I ordered it as is.
In their knowledgebase they state how long it should take to set up a VPS account with them. I'm quoting here:
Once an order is verified through our billing department with the billing agent, we are able to process and activate your order in under 30 minutes. The verification process can be instant, or take up to 24 hours depending on various factors.
When I hadn't heard anything after waiting about 4 hours or so (I honestly can't remember the time when I contacted live support), I contacted support via their live support. The agent was very pleasant and said that it could take up to 24 hours and that if I had placed my order in the morning, it would have been done now.
So I waited until 23 1/2 hours and I submitted a ticket at 18:01 on July 9th requesting an update as to my order. I also asked if there was a problem with verifying me for fraud purposes and if I could offer anything to speed this along, to let me know. I didn't hear anything back on the ticket.
I later that evening placed a call to their support line. The agent again was very pleasant and said that he couldn't access anything from sales but that he would give a message to Jeffrey and he would call me first thing the next day.
Just wondering... When I set my A-name records in my Domain-provider control panel, it takes almost 24hours to take effect sometimes, yet other times it can be almost instant...
I was just wondering, from a technical point of view, why this is. Does anyone know?
Recently however it seems they're getting some bad press, most people are blaming growing pains.
As someone who's seen the before and after picture, i thought i'd chime in and actually put some positive notes on these boards, as I know these guys deserve more credit than this! It's one of those situations where if something goes wrong, people complain, if everything is right, not enough people speak up!
Server speed / specs: one word: fantastic. i now have 2 VPSs with them - one in their new data center. I had moved the 2nd VPS from another host (also very well known on these boards, who I won't mention) where I had been having loads of issues regarding load and IO wait times. Load would spike up to 20+, server would crash, reboot, and this would happen 20+ times a day. Nothing critical on that server. Post-migration, using very very similar specs on futurehosting, and the load has been <0.10 since I started her up 3 days ago.
My current server sees load going up once in a while - during a large scale DOS attack last month the load only went up to 4, with over 1000 TCP connections. I only realized there was an issue as I checked one of my status scripts and noticed the enormous tcp count. I've recently moved to a new VPS on a new node, and load has been incredible, along with responsiveness.
No complaints at all on that front.
Network performance Their old data center, softlayer, has much to be desired. There has been at least one outage every month so far which lasts in the hours duration. However, FH has made the very wise option of expanding out to a new datacenter and will hopefully slowly phase out softlayer, which has become quite pathetic. Connectivity wise though (speed/bandwidth) - no complaints.
Support I remember getting a response within minutes months ago. However, that being said, months ago the customer service could only deal with the most basic of problems, and would escalate the issue if it was complicated, which would take time for a response.
FH did go through a growing pains phase a little while ago with regards to customer service - you wouldn't get a response too quick.
However now it seems they have begun improving. They are expanding their support base, and if you deal with the support guys you'll definitely be impressed by how dedicated and "hardcore" they are. Very recently I had a major issue with my server - it got compromised via root and someone wreaked havoc. Some script was installed that basically self-DOS'ed the server and basically killed it.
FH support instantly shut down the server and put me back up on my old server which I had migrated from only a week ago. They thoroughly went through and wiped clean my current server, fully bullet-proofed it and cleaned up the security of it all (something that was not a problem when they set it up - but rather my fault over time as I had disabled some very silly things I shouldn't have...) The guy working on the server, Jim, worked his *** off, pulled an all nighter (he was still responding to my tickets at 9am GMT, which was 4am his time - and I know he's not a night shift guy!). By the end of it all, he put me back onto my current newly-secured server, and was still revving to go, asking me what I wanted and to give him another challenge!
So, to sum this section-- good attitude: check know-how: check laziness: none.
I guarantee one thing - the vps company I just moved my 2nd vps from in this situation would not have spent an entire night rebuilding my server the way it was, but would've simply put me back on my old one week image, said "oh well, sorry, bad luck" and moved on.
All in all, my experience with these guys over the past couple of weeks (since the new data center opened) has been nothing short of positive, and I know they're rising out of the slight slump they had gotten themselves into.
I'll submit my URL to the mod to verify this post. And no, I don't work with FH
I am having an issue where it appears an incorrect time zone may be on my account. I am in Mountain Daylight Time and it appears that it's putting me as being in Eastern Daylight Time.
I was told that you can put a line such as:SetEnv TZ America/Denver in your htaccess.txt file.
I wasn't sure where to put it so I put it at the end of the hdaccess.txt file.
The issue is it appears it still did not fix it. Is there another way to set the time zone or did I do something incorrectly?
When i try setting time zone to GMT, it do not worked.
# date Thu Jun 26 10:05:20 UTC 2008 # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime # /usr/sbin/ntpdate time.nist.gov 26 Jun 06:05:27 ntpdate[29806]: step time server 192.43.244.18 offset 1.429150 sec # date Thu Jun 26 06:05:27 EDT 2008
It still shows time in EDT.
I have the same problem in other server also, both servers are CentOS 5.2
When i set to UTC, it works
# date Thu Jun 26 06:10:16 EDT 2008 # rm -f /etc/localtime # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime # date Thu Jun 26 10:10:16 UTC 2008 #
I have a linux server running websites without any control panels. The problem is that the scripts run by cron daemons are showing up a wrong time and time zone on emails.
This happens when they are run as automated scripts by cron daemon. Recently I have changed the time from EST to CST. The command date and hwclock --show gives the correct CST, even the scripts run from the shell showsup the correct CST time.
We had many backups stored on our Plesk 12 server about 51 GB in total.
After reducing the backups back to 10 GB by removing old backups through the Backup Manager.
The issue is that Health Monitor still reported that there was low diskspace displayed by color yellow. And it look Health Monitor over 16 minutes to change the alarm level from Yellow to Green
However the statistics at the specific subscription still present the Backup usage of 51 GB's whilest they are no longer there.
What can i do about this in order to speed up the synchronization?
I have a server in USA which I have leased to a customer. The customer is running an application in the server and for that he needs the timezone to be set IST in the server. If he does the same, then will it affect the working of the server. What can be the ill-effects of the same. The customer is running Windows 2003 server.
I can't get access to a certain site. I always get the page with:
network time out - server at *** takes to long to respons. More people have noticed this and apparently it only happens to people with certain specific providers. And not all the time. Some times they DO get access eventy to they belong to the same ISP. So I guess an ISP isn't blocking access to it otherwise it would be permenantly/The site administrator insists that certain ISP's are blocking his site. He's hosting it on his own server. The domain belongs is registered at namecheap.com.
If an ISP is blocking this site (if that's possible?), that would lead to that 'network timeout' page wouldn't it?
What is the most likely reason for getting a timeout page anyway?
I have a dedicated server specs: AMD 3500+ 64 Bit CPU, 1 GB Ram, 160 GB Sata Drive. For 1 month, CPU load average reaches 40-50 value. This happens about 5-6 times in a day. When I stop httpd service for 30 seconds everything goes normal. I think this is not a DoS attack because it comes systematic, I dont believe no one makes this regularly except bots.
Maybe its a system service or a cronjob but it stops when I turn off httpd service? How can I be sure about what's making this regularly load?
I also did set up a script which mail me when load average of system goes crazy and restart httpd service. But instant restart is not working to stop load increase.
The server is going down from time to time, every 12 days or so the site hosted there is no longer accesible, everything starts with the site slowing don and down and then is not longer reachable, what we do is to request a power cycle, and with this we start all over again till next power cycle, so on so on, of course, here are my server details and more info on this:
- MySQL - 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.10 - Apache - 2.2.14-5ubuntu8.4 - PHP - 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.9 - operating system: Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS
After some time emailing the support guys to barely check about what's going on, we received an email with a few things:
1.- found a few errors that likely would cause issues with Apache. The first error is: [Mon Feb 04 05:03:10 2013] [error] mod_fcgid: fcgid process manager died, restarting the server and the next error is: [Mon Feb 04 14:32:34 2013] [error] server reached MaxClients setting, consider raising the MaxClients setting ...
Both these errors seem to indicate that you have a process that is running out of control on your server. We were unable to determine what script on your site is running caused your connections to be maxed out however it does appear that before these errors were generated there was a WordPress plugin referenced in your access logs...
2.- Additionally during our review we did find that your error log for mercadodedinerousa.com is 45 GB's which is excessively large and can cause problems when Apache is trying to write a such a large file.
3.- The majority of the errors being logged are: [Wed Feb 06 12:12:31 2013] [error] [client 200.76.90.5] Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: /var/www/vhosts/mercadodedinerousa.com/httpdocs/index.pl, referer: [URL]
Signed up and paid the first month for a 'Linux Entry' + 1 GB mySQL around 4:45PM today. It's now 11:21PM and I have not heard anything or received any Emails for remote access. Does it usually take this long?
Reading thru this site they seemed to be one of the best if your on a $30/month budget.
Maybe setting up the Linux stuff takes longer for them than Windows?
How long does it normally take to get a shared account setup with a hosting provider? I am now in my 5th day and still have not had the account setup. I have made my DNS changes and I just keep getting email responses that it is coming. Should I be worried or is a week the normal response time in a shared environment?
I recently read around here and people had their VPS setup within 5 minutes in some cases. I've ordered a VPS from VirPus and I'm not sure how long it usually takes to setup. I'm nearing the 24 hour mark so I'm not sure. How long on average is an acceptable waiting time? or how long would you say it should take?