ModVPS Impression

I started hosting with ModVPS on March 14, 2007. My VPS was setup quickly and had everything I needed to transfer my clients over pretty seamlessly. They did a swell job there. This is a VPS we were using primarily for some shared hosting clients and a reseller or two.

Over the past 5+ months I've submitted numerous support inquiries, all of which I feel were tended to in an acceptable amount of time. Their personnel were always friendly and seemed knowledgeable.

Apropos the performance of the server, well, in the beginning it was great. Over time however, the speed and reliability progressively deteriorated. It has recently come to a point that the VPS is almost unusable. I attribute some of this to our growth. Currently, we only have about 10% of our disk allowance available. Obviously it's time to move on. This is where things start getting pretty sketchy.

For the past 3 months I've been receiving automatic notification emails of services failing. I'm not talking about 2 or 3, or even 5 to 10, I'm talking more like 15-20 per day. Granted, there are couple of notifications regarding a suspended account or disk space warnings but the lion's share of these (~90%+) are failed services emails. I submitted several tickets on this to no avail. Take a look at the attachments to see only some of the emails.

I started off having a positive opinion of modVPS. I quickly learned however that once you make them aware of your interest in leaving, regardless of how legitimate or impersonal the reason, you suddenly become a second-class customer. Their ability to make prompt responses suddenly ceases to be. Huh? That's odd.

As it is, all of my data is being held hostage by the sub-par VPS it's hosted on. The VPS has become so unresponsive that it's impossible to migrate any of the data. My new provider sent me this message:

Quote:

I have some bad news. We have been working on your source server for the last hour or so, and it has been extremely unresponsive. We tried shutting down various services such as Apache, etc but your load won't go below 3 or 4 -- which is really bad. All disk operations are taking a very long time. For example, to edit a file 'vi' requires 60-seconds just for the file to load up and be viewable.

We cannot continue migrating your account, you need to contact your provider and have them double your disk space. Right now you are using 90% of your disk space, so 10% of free space is not enough for us to backup all of your accounts and then transfer them over. We already tried doing a cPanel -> cPanel migration and that failed a few times because the accounts are just too large and the source server is too slow.

Theres not much here we can do I'm afraid, you'll have to contact your provider and ask them to double the disk space and also ask if they can move you on a less crowded node, because it's apparent that your server is extremely slow yet major services are not even running.

So I contacted modVPS with the request to temporarily increase my disk space to allow me to transfer my data.

The excuse was:

Quote:

please note that the main node is now performing a raid intialization which is a resource intensive process and will be affecting the server's and there by VPS' performance. Once it is over, every thing will function fine. Also it is not possible to double the disk space of you VPS. You can go for a plan upgradation, if needed.

Quote:

RAID initialization is being run in the server for the last 3 days. Also it is not possible for us to increase the VPS quota. Any way I am forwarding this ticket to our CS department and they will confirm this.

To sum this up, modVPS made a very good first impression and managed to keep me in their good graces for most of my time hosting with them. The failed services emails weren't a huge deal and we didn't notice much of a performance/uptime hit because of them. The services must've rebooted pretty quickly. It does go to show there was definitely a problem the modVPS SAs were ignoring. It's when they decided I was no longer worth the trouble that my perspective on them changed. It was a noticeable change in tone and responsiveness and what's worse, they've been of very little help with my transition to my new provider.

This post isn't me dragging modVPS through the mud. This is me sharing my experience with them as a host and hoping for 2 things: 1) they decide to facilitate this transfer and salvage the good impression they once had and 2.) to enlighten any potential customers considering them. I don't think this is an unfair review but then again, I'm the one writing it so I'm not impartial enough to make that assessment.