I am looking for a vps account, perferably managed. My price range is up to about $60 a month. I am looking at solarvps and they seem to have good reviews, I was just wondering if anyone could share there personal experiences with them. How is there uptime, speed, flexibility and support.
View 3 RepliesMy choice of VPS provider has come down to FutureHosting and SolarVPS... I like SolarVPS because Douglas has experience with hosting a high traffic SMF forum and therefore I hope he would be very useful and understanding if I encounter resource problems from my SMF forum.
I've looked at the VPS packages on the SolarVPS website and I can't seem to find a UK VPS with 1gig of RAM... am I going blind? Most VPS providers I have looked at always have that and more.
It is human nature that we more frequently post scathing critiques, but I would like to take the time to post a positive review.
I run a trading system that day trades in real-time. It is written in Java. However, the API that it connects to runs under Windows. Because I live in a remote place, the bandwidth here is "unreliable". Having your broadband die when you are fully leveraged and there are only 20 minutes to the close is a serious dose of adrenaline that I personally do not care for.
For this reason, I was looking to host the trading system where the power and bandwidth were more reliable. To save money, which is always foremost in a traders mind, I decided to try a VPS solution.
After searching the net for a while, and finally realizing that the majority of posts worth reading were posting in these forums, I came upon SolarVPS as the outfit I wanted to try. There was a post where a user was commending them on their support, and mentioned speaking with "Ross" and the posting gave me the impression that I could count on SolarVPS.
I purchased the Windows Server 2003 VPS.
The fact is, I am very happy with SolarVPS. I had initially not been able to login. Why? Because, as a longtime unix admin, when the instructions said to "login as root", I assumed the login name was "root". I posted a support case that I could not login. I received a response in less than 20 minutes indicating that I needed to login as Administrator. Duh. This is windows.
I had another question, which I posted as a case, and it was replied to within 4 hours, even though I had marked it as a low priority.
The process of setting up my account was painless. I was able to try the first month at 50% off, which I thought was fabulous. The installation was reasonably fast. Everything ran smoothly and I had no complaints whatsoever.
Would I recommend SolarVPS to you? If you want a VPS hosting solution, I would strongly recommend SolarVPS. They gave me a great service at a very good price with excellent support. I would recommend them to my mother.
You can find them, of course, at www solarvps com
I have to say. They are a pretty nice company. I was able to get everything setup under a couple of hours, thanks to Douglas with my clean neat install of CentOS 5.1 x64 with cPanel. I love the resource usage interface provided by the Virtuozzo control panel as well as the emotion and motivation their team has to provide quality service.
The VPS has been very stable, fast and reliable. Have not had any problems. This is my 3rd day. I will keep you guys updated as how it goes. Overall, it is great, their discount and increase of resources for their current promotion is also great. Looking forward on also getting a Windows VPS soon.
Other than that, cheers to SolarVPS.
solarVPS opinions?
I did a search, and found mostly good things about solarVPS here. I want a little more re-assurance and hope that others that had good or bad experience with them can chip in on their VPS service.
I'll tell you my story right now. I got the VPS and they charged me $60. The page didn't even look like a paypal page and I didn't know when I went through the order process that I have been charged. They accepted my payment even though they had the radio button that said first month a dollar. They even didn't have cpanel installed at first! They gave me the email and I had to contact them to install cpanel! They have this stupid contrat thing and they will take you to a collection agency for failure of the billing system that they have. It says DO NOT MAKE PAYMENT! but how can you tell? They are a complete total scam! The vps firewall was dropped for no reason during the morning. I asked why and they left the chat. They have good VPS if you got the extra $59 to cover the beginning.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI've been with SolarVPS now for about a year, and have absolutely no intention of leaving. They have simply given me no reason what so ever to consider going elsewhere. Support is lightning quick and the staff are quite knowledgeable and very polite. Also very important is that their prices are quite competitive with a wide range of VPS customizations available to get a package to suit you, and you can get some really good value for money if you commit to a large amount of time or happen to hit one of their many special offers.
It has not all been smooth sailing though, but in no way do I attribute all that solely to SolarVPS as I've caused myself a few headaches from using unstable app versions. In March this year my site had a 95.024% uptime, which simply put is not flash. However, this is much more of an exception rather than the norm as I had an uptime of 99.579% in April and a fairly amazing 99.921% in May. In this you have to consider this is not just VPS uptime, but everything on top of that which I use to deliver my site contents, i.e. web app, PHP, IIS 6 & MySQL. Overall I have a site uptime of 98.257% in the last year, and most of that downtime was cause by using the APC opcode accelerator with FastCGI on IIS which is not a reliable configuration. You can see my uptime stats here
I've narrowed down my VPS search to one of these providers.
SolarVPS.
JupiterLX
832MB Total SLM RAM
30gb storage
600gb bandwidth
with cpanel
100Mbit uplink
fully managed
not sure about the datacentre, the site says Euroconnex
around £45 per month
or
Clustered.net
512 RAM
512 swap RAM
Server has 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon "Clovertown" @ 2.33Ghz (18.64Ghz)
Max of 15 servers per node
25gb storage
300gb bandwidth
with cpanel
1Gbps uplink
1 hour replacement
fully managed
Looks like the datacentre is redbus interhouse in UK
£55 per month
Which is going to be the better quality provider? Clustered offer a 100% uptime guarantee, and for every hour a server is down they refund you a days hosting.
Clustered seem to offer tape backups? solarvps offer off-site hosting, which might come in handy as well.
I searched the forum for clustered.net, but didnt find many reviews.
From my first impressions I think clustered seem to be my best bet, although I will get less in the way of storage and bandwidth, I feel there website makes me think I'll get a better quality service. There website talks about how redundant everything is. Hopefully people can backup what I'm thinking.
Today, i will tell you the history of last 2 years which includes some good providers and what are their pros and cons, and if they can improve those things then everyone will benefited.
First i launch my website on shared hosting and I choose site5 for that, due to exciting pricing and features but actually features (rollback) doesn't work well and they have taken back by site5 but on my server there is some problem and that's get restarted in 10 days and downtime was around min 1 hour. But after various complaints they reduce the load on that server and then no looking back but site5 customer service is simply ok, get a response in 6-7 hours. But after 1 year load on my site increases and they asked me to please move on VPS because we can't handle so much load.. I paid them on yearly basis and they refund my whole money of the second year which i already paid in advance.
Then my second hosting service is PowerVPS, no doubt when you move from shared to VPS you will get better performance but actually I am getting the best server performance..? I have no idea because speed little bit improved and looks no other problem and i think i am getting the best after paying $120 per month when for shared service i am giving same amount for a year. But actually on PowerVPS i am hosted on lowest performance server when i am on the highest paying plan and that is revealed by the customer executive after 6 months stay. The problem with PowerVPS is the admin is very rude and can't listen to you but customer service is very helpful and gives you very prompt reply and help you in every matter. PowerVPS servers are also very prone to hacking and this can you check by searching on WHT, and they always replied server is hackable due to your script but no idea which script.. quite interesting :-) When server hacked and asked them to backup the server then they charge $85 per hour for backup your data which is too high and billing time was also not accurately logged. But in my plan 600GB bandwidth is allowed and 1-2 times i gone till 700 GB and they didn't charge anything, that's really good.
Now from last 2 months i am with SolarVPS and want to say this is one of the best i used till date and if they improve 1-2 things then probably i will be solarvps customer for long time. After transferring of data on solarVPS, many members of my site asked me what you have done on site... site is too fast now. Which is never said by anyone before when my site on powervps and my site is graphics heavy. The price is also half on solarvps in comparison to powervps. And like to mention admin is very very helpful. On some matters which i arise to check the customer service, they totally denied to do but after talking to admin the customer service done that task in a few minutes. Response from solarvps is also very prompt. But few things i didn't like about solarvps and hope they will do anything...
a) If server goes down for any reason then they must post in the forum about what's the problem but they didn't do, like few days before server goes down, even solarvps site is also not opening but actually don't know what is the problem... except some server problem.
b) They asked you to buy a extra bandwidth in advance @.25 per GB, but how anyone can calculate if they required more this month or not like on my website sometimes i used 400GB and sometimes 600GB without doing anything extra. Secondly they say otherwise we will charge $.50 per GB for overusage but customer service said when you touch 600GB then account will be blocked and have only limited access but admin said account will not be blocked and we will charge on overusage but actually don't know what going to happen because both giving different answers and also not have a bigger plan. So, why don't they give + 50GB on every account (or on client prompt payment records) and asked the user to take action within this 50GB otherwise we will blocked the access and if month finishes within that 50GB then don't charge anything. Hope they will do something soon because i am looking for a plan which gives me same service and price with better bandwidth, but i like to stay with them if they do something.
Currently i am also using hostgator.com for another website and no doubt customer service is very good and online availability at every time its awesome. If looking for shared hosting account then they are must look.
PowerVPS - 2.5 Star because of admin rude behaviour, charging high price and don't give the server as per their cost and inform the user that they are on the best config .
SolarVPs - 4 Star for nice behaviour by admin and wonderful performance by server. If bandwidth problem is solved then 5 Star.
What's the reviews like on SolarVPS?
Are they reliable?
i have an VPS account at SolarVPS. I have had some bad days lately. When i go to Virtuozzo on my Plesk cp. i see this
day - in - out
12 0.00 0.01 13 0.07 0.48 14 0.06 99.61
why is it like this? i don't used like 20GB last month (for all of my sites). but now it goes up to 100GB???? Why is this happening? how can i stop it?
In last three years I used five famous VPS providers and currently I have registering with Solar Vps. The service is excellent; Response to support tickets is very fast.
I suggest in anyone want to have 100% uptime server + good service, register with Solarvps.com Company.
Man, it seems just like yesterday that I initially signed up for a VPS from SolarVPS, but the truth is, I have been with them for just over 6 months now.
What can I say about SolarVPS besides that they completely rock! Not to mention Douglas, but we won't go there
The Network
The network at SolarVPS is nothing short of amazing. I get lightning fast speeds and rock solid performance no matter the time of day. I have not experienced even one network hiccup in the 6 months that I have been with SolarVPS. I constantly get compliments from people about how fast the network really is.
The Hardware
SolarVPS uses nothing less than the best hardware. The VPS node that my VPS is located on has Dual Quad Xeons and performance is amazing. They do not overload their servers and use SLM parameteres with Virtuozzo instead of the old school UBC. I know that I can use all of my resources without battling with other VPS instances on the node.
The Support
Solar's support is by far outstanding. I have never had to wait for extended periods of time to get an answer to even the most complex questions. I can rest assured that no matter the time of day, or night, there will always be a Solar rep there to answer even the stupidest of questions, in a very timely manner. Unlike some hosts that I have used, Solar's support understands my questions and gets them taken care of instead of giving nonsense responses to try and buy time to get the job done.
The Overall Experience
The overall experience at SolarVPS is awesome. I know that I can trust my online business in their hands. SolarVPS is highly recommended to anyone who needs rock solid performance with extreme reliability.
Support - 10/10
Network - 10/10
Hardware - 10/10
The Staff - 10/10
Just a warning... Watch out for that Douglas character that mans their live chat.
I am still looking for a good windows vps, i have solarvps on my list and i saw the jaguarpc specials:
STARTER PLAN
15GB Diskspace + 100% FREE = 30GB
256MB RAM Guaranteed + 50% FREE = 384MB
300GB Bandwidth + 50% FREE = 450GB
+ FREE PLESK Control Panel
+ 2 FREE MONTHS*
$49.97/month - 15% Discount = $42.47/month
So which one look better? Also is 384 MB of ram enough to run small servers applications such mysql, apache, a small vb game server, etc..
I have been with SolarVPS since the end of January and for the most part I have been very happy with them (even wrote a good review of them on here!), with very few issues with the server or support. In the last month I have been seeing a lot of problems with my server and have contacted support on a few occasions. First off I don't care for their new support SLA, they only offer phone or live chat for "emergenices" and have been quite rude to me in both occasions I have contacted them. It also seems like they have outsourced their help (I was told when I signed up in Jan that they didn't do that) which is frustrating. I was on the live chat help today and the operator was very cavalier and even "hung up" on me when I still had questions. I then got back on and finished asking my questions, he then "hung up" on me again without waiting to see if I was done asking questions. That is just rude and poor customer service. I am pretty disapointed at this point.
I am also annoyed with their little screw up with Parallels and how slow they have been to resolve it (over a month) so billing has been a pain in the butt.
Anyways that is just my two cents and I was wondering if anyone else had experienced the same issues, or if it is just me.
I have signed up today and i made some simple questions on their support ( how long does it take to configure the VPS etc. ). That was about 7 hours ago and i didn't got any replies yet.
Do they exist or are they slow?
I am currently deciding between these 3 companies for a vps solution. They all seem to be solid and provide good deals. I would just like to know everyone's experience in terms of speed, uptime, support handling and stablility.
Uptime & support matters the most to me.
Just thought I would post up a review on what I thought about SolarVPS, as I've had nothing but joy with them.
It was back in 2007 when I decided that shared hosting was getting to slow for my website, and I was advised to get a VPS plan. I was originally with Bluehost, who provided outstanding customer service and value for money, and I was very reluctant to move from them. My worry was that I would move to a service where I was pretty much neglected, and left with 0 support, and many server issues.
However I came across SolarVPS on these forums, and gave them a go. Well I used the lifetime discount voucher, so my package was pretty cheap as it was. My server was setup instantly after payment, and things have been going fine since.
I've recently started up a new project, and needed a new VPS hosting package. So I came along to these forums again today to look for some juicy VPS deals. Came across a fair few, some which did seem very good value for money, but the issue about customer service was bugging me. What if the CS was delayed, what if my support tickets were not addressed, and what if their live chat was only live a few hours in the day. After finding some good deals, I thought hell with it, I'l get another plan with SolarVPS.
So I found their nice 20% off coupon which I applied to my account, making the pan I bought again, pretty good value for money. Bought the plan, immediately received some emails regarding my purchase. I went to the live chat and was talking to one guy, Douglas, about setting my server up. It's the one time that I've felt I was talking to a human via live chat. Not only did this guy sort me out in a snap, but he had a great sense of humour to which is always a bonus.
So, within an hour, I now have a nice new plan setup with SolarVPS that I KNOW I will be pleased with.
Let me just gloss over the points about SolarVPS I think really stand out: ....
I'm creating a web app using ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005, with lots of AJAX. I want to use a VPS to improve performance (compared to shared hosting) and I've narrowed my choices down to SolarVPS (NeptuneX Unmanaged) and RackForce (DDS 200-W). I've been lurking for a while and have read every post regarding Windows VPS services from the last few months, but I have several questions I'm hoping people can help with.
1. I'd been considering shared hosting at CrystalTech.com, but I'm not impressed with their VPS offering. I was, however, very impressed with their ping results - about 40ms compared to 80ms for SolarVPS and RackForce. Since I'm using AJAX, I'm assuming response time is important. Am I reading this correctly, or should I not be too concerned about that?
2. RackForce allocates its bandwidth as unmetered shared 10Mbps. At 5 accounts per server, that's down to 2Mbps. I assume it can burst as needed up to the 10Mbps rate, but if I get a heavy period of use, am I going to be in trouble? Would it be better to have SolarVPS's burstable (up to 100Mbps) bandwidth, even though it's metered?
3. RackForce advertises that they only have 5 accounts per server, which seems really good. I'm awaiting a response from SolarVPS on the number of accounts per server they have. But RackForce seems to be a smoking deal for that performance. Am I missing something?
For the last 3 days i've been trying to select a VPS host, and it seems many of you have quite a few good things to say about SolarVPS...
- BUT -
For the last few days I've tried on numerous occaisions to have an online chat with them before creating an account, but no one is ever available to respond even though their "sales chat" and "emergency chat" shows as being available and online all the time! I've also trying phoning them, but no one answers the calls either.
This makes me question whether they're just trying to create the illusion support is readily available, but its not?
If you're being hosted by SolarVPS - Can you provide me with a "Real" review of their service and what I could expect in terms of support requests.
I've also been looking at GoDaddy's offerings and they seem pretty comparable, so if you presently have a windows VPS account with them, can you tell me if you're satisfied with their service? And how well do they handle support requests there?
Guys lots of reviews are there and after reading them many of them i finalized some of these good VPS. So, what your suggestions...
I am currently with PowerVPS and there service is really good except they are costly and if I like to add any Security service management then go out of the budget.
I regret to bring this to a public forum but having seen that solarvps has a presence here I am hoping that a resolve to this issue can be found, and any public opinions are welcomed.
Having been a customer with solarvps since 2006 without any cause for concerns it does not make me happy with some recent issues I have had with them. So I have had a vps server hosted with them since 2006. Sometime in February when attempting to login to my VPS I got an error, I left it as this happens sometimes, it happened for 4 days in a row so I thought this is a little strange logged in to my control panel, to see no VPS server was listed under the account. There was no invoice generated either. Ok this is strange but I just assumed it had been terminated, no invoice came through and that particular server was a backup server so I sought hosting elsewhere.
4 months pass I get an email from solarvps stating my account is overdue with charges applied. I contact them back straight away asking what they are billing me for I have explained the situation time and again to them, I have asked the questions why the server disappeared from my account, why I wasn’t able to access the vps remotely and why no invoices got generated at the time to which I have had no response, I have asked more than 5 times now. The only response I keep getting form them is threats if I do not pay to hand over to a collection agency and the possibility of legal action. To which I have replied each time that I will contest any such action and seek legal advice myself.
Granted I should probably have contacted them at the time but really they are at fault more than I am for not asking them what has happened, I truly believe I am not in the wrong here but nobody within solarvps is prepared is looking at the facts of what has happened here.
Well anyway I hope bringing this to a public forum will bring a resolve and maybe some answers. I am getting no response from anybody within solarvps and would be happy to take this away from the public if they are willing.
I am not unfair nor does it make sense that a customer for so long would just decide not to pay you one month and kick up a fuss over such a small amount of money but the fact that I am not in the wrong with this matter, I am not prepared to pay them no matter how much bullying tactics they wish to adopt in trying to make me.
I have been with SolarVPS for some months now, and I'm pretty happy with their services. But some months ago I have problems with very high CPU load on their server, every day for a week or so. Since then I have had little problems, before the last two days. Now they are back to the same problem as last time, almost 100% CPU load on their server, causing my sites to work VERY slow, and I’m getting timeouts on my MySQL database.
When sending tickets, they kill the process, but it’s only mather of time before the CPU skyrockets again. Yesterday they told me that it was a abusing client, and they was taking care of it. But today I got the same problem.
Are they hiding the fact that they have oversold the node I’m on? (the UK node), or do I only have bad luck? And how much can I take before I start looking for a new host? I think their service and support is very good, but not when I got problems with high CPU load. They reply fast on ticket, but I cannot monitor my server 24/7 to see if the CPU load is high.
What would you have done if it’s was you that had the same problem. Do I have to accept the fact that I only pay around $55/mo for a 384MB/25GB/150GB BW and 4 IP’s (with Windows 2003 and Plesk 30 domains) and cannot demand a VPS server that runs without problems?
Anyway, it’s my experience with SolarVPS after 3 months (and three days).
Since they had disaster with their billing system it seems their support is falling apart also. I submitted a support ticket 1 month ago and still no reply!?
View 9 Replies View RelatedIn a rush to purchase more vps servers, since my fiance and myself were building an IRC network, we decided to purchase a vps with SolarVPS. We figured things were going to take a week to start since she purchased it. A week later and the eCheck cleared, and we figured it'd take a day or two for setup. A week after that, we were starting to wonder why we hadn't received any of the information for the VPS. Starting to ponder where our service is, my fiance phoned their 800 number support and spoke with an associate. The support associate notified us that we slipped into the old billing system and purchased the vps before they switched over, and instead of disabling the billing system for a temporary amount of time, swapped to the new one and dumped the old one.
After a little prodding via the phone, they said they would push up our renewal date since they took longer than expected. He said within 15 minutes, we should receive an email with the vps information. 2 hours later we saw sight of the email.
Within the first and only month with SolarVPS, we experienced two network outages. Each time, we sufficed to use the online support system via the website, and notified them of the outage. They reiterated what we told them, which was the fact of the vps being offline network-wise. However, the agent each time told us there was nothing he could do about it, and failed to answer questions after the fact.
Towards the end of the month, we were quite dissatisfied with the service that SolarVPS has provided to us, and as such, we decided we were not going to renew the service. As we had not contracted into a year or otherwise, we moved everything off of the server. After the next payment was overdue, we received an invoice requiring us to pay them ASAP.
We emailed them directly back, asking them to cancel the vps, as in the TOS, it described that cancellation requests could be sent via email. We received an email back from them informing us that they would not cancel the vps unless a payment for the next month was received. Informing us that there was a 10 day period we had to have canceled in beforehand, we were fine with paying the next month, but wished to cancel either way. They also informed us that we were required to use the cancellation form provided via link, as they would ignore any other form of cancellation request, regardless of the statements in the TOS.
We asked for the information to login to the billing panel to pay the last outstanding bill, so we could cancel the vps. In return, they asked for full name, address, last paypal transaction id, and all ips assigned to reset the password. This is the point where we stand.
SolarVPS has been an absolute hair-tearing experience, and would give me receding hairline if I had actually torn my hair out. I would personally steer clear from them, and maybe look into a company like BuyAVPS. Always read the TOS, and make sure its loose enough to give you some movement room in case you don't like the service. Either way, We're still waiting for SolarVPS to help us cancel our VPS.
Short Ending: Steer clear.
I have very sad experience with solarvps and their support quality these days. I'm their user for over year now. Minor problems appeared rarely, but in those cases support reacting time and quality was simply excellent.
Now something wrong happened with them. To problem ticket, which priority is defined as emergency, they answer after 4 hours. Now i'm waiting for last answer already 11 hours.No answer till now. And server is not usable, our customers ar ready to eat us alive. It's going third day as we suffer from problem.
Ok, lets say their support staff is unable to solve this complex problem. But they should at least inform customer what is done to solve problem, what means are used and what's the current situation and problem solving progress. At first problem day they used to reply godaddy-style short zero-valuable comments, that have nothing to do with problem essence and solution. They simply don't try (or unable) to understand problem deeply enough.
This message to forum has mainly two targets. Primary is to get problem solution from all of you, who may have experienced same problem as me, since i already lost my hope to get problem solution from solarvps. Second - to kick *** solarVPS a bit for poor service quality.
And here is the problem.
VPS system: windows OS, 384mb of ram (venusX package).
As soon as i start apache server, or IIS server, or whatever server that is listening to port 80, same moment TCP connection count (measured by windows 'performance' tool) rises to more than 300, usually 600. Then all http requests are rejected, website is completely down. It is notable, that problem is clearly not caused by heavy http server loads. Problem appears on even low load. Stopping http server causes connections to fall to normal level, nearly 0. Starting again suddenly causes problem again. Connection count jumps rapidly to >300.
This problem appears about 30% of all time. There are periods problem does not appear, server functions normal. No problem regularity found.
It seems that connections are stuck at OS or physical level, they are not even handled by apache. Apache logs show no or little activity when problem happens, CPU usage is very low. Only very small part of requests are passed to apache. Others are just gone, although large amount of connections are shown by system. Seems they are somehow 'hung' and stay too long not disconnected.
When trying to reach website through browser, firefox says 'connection interrupted' at same moment. This again shows that requests are not even processed by apache. In case of heavy load 'time out' would appear after several seconds only.
At early stages of problem i suspected two causes: apache server software problem or DoS attack. Both of these were denied. Apache was reinstalled (and IIS, lighthttpd 'causes' the same problem too). DoS as cause was denied too, as traffic does not seem suspicious.
At this moment i do not know what to suspect, but its almost clear it's solarvps problem, not mine. As long as they did not deny it and got full understanding of problem. I could suspect virus, making DoS in their network, router physical disorder, what else? Anyway their problem, not mine. But his becomes my problem, as i have no service for third day.
I do not blame solarVPS for problem. Problem is realy mystical and interesting, it may happen to anyone. I just say that their support reacting time and quality is pathetic in this situation. And i miss adequate work to find problem cause.
Anyway they have work around to solve problem - move my whole VPS account to another physical server. But they don't answer about this.
I am a SolarVPS customer. So far, I have been really happy with their service - setup was very smooth, I had to contact support a couple of times at the start and they were really quick, and otherwise I've had simply no problems.
I was alerted yesterday to the fact that my site was down. I immediately logged into the box, and found that Apache and MySQL had stalled. I restarted them, and everything was ok. So then I started to look into the problem.
Then I noticed this in my logs:
Sep 3 23:07:26 myvps shutdown[26281]: shutting down for system halt
Sep 3 23:08:41 myvps exiting on signal 15
Sep 4 03:14:22 myvps syslogd 1.4.1#18: restart.
It seems that my VPS was shut down for 4 hours and then brought back up. My Apache and MySQL didn't come back up properly after the restart (ok, my fault here, a configuration issue), so I was down for about 17 hours.
Anyway, I didn't do this shutdown, and I don't think my box was hacked and someone else did it, because even if they did, by my reasoning, it wouldn't have been down for 4 hours.
So I wrote an email to SolarVPS. They got back to me really quickly, asking me to send my server ip's and my root password (I had initially only sent my customer number). I was not really happy sending my root password over email to them, so I just sent them the server IP's.
I then got an email back saying that it was standard procedure to send my root password to the over email, and that it was secure because their helpdesk is secure. I don't know how they are securing the email connection from me to their helpdesk though (of course, it isn't secure, because email is sent in plain text), so I still haven't sent them this. I don't need them to log into my server anyway, I can see that it went down, I just wanted to know if they had brought the machine down for a reason. The whole root password over email thing is not the problem anyway.
What concerned me is the rest of their response.
They told me that they had not brought the machine down on purpose. I sent them the log lines I pasted above, and their response was:
- shows that your VPS has been shut down, just like the owner of the VPS would have shut it down using "halt" command. This issue appears when the VPS is overloaded (RAM is almost 100% used, and CPU is upto 90-100%), and in this case Virtouzzo shuts the VPS down in order to avoid resources abuse on the entire node and not to affect the other VPS's.
This is the part that concerns me. As I understood it, the Virtualization software is there to keep you in a box, and restrict the amount of resources that a person can take up so it doesn't affect others. If my server is under heavy load, I can understand if it becomes slow, but I don't find it acceptable for it to be shut down for 4 hours!
Is this usual policy for VPS's? If this is the case, I guess I'm going to have to look for dedicated, because this is not acceptable to me. Although my server is rarely under high load, I don't want to have to worry that it might disappear for hours if it is.
It would be great to hear some opinions from people with more experience in this area than me. If true, this is definitely something people should mention as a disadvantage to VPS's.
After carefully choosing a VPS Host, I decided to go with SolarVPS. The VPS was created quickly. I needed a SQL server for small developemntal purposes; So I didn't want to shell out the $10/month extra just yet. I submitted I ticket to them with a copy of my CAL and Product Key:
http://www.nuerom.com/sqlcal.pdf
They sent me a e-mail back saying:
I'm sorry but the document you have attached does not reflect that the software is licensed to you so with this limited information you provided I cannot approve the use of SQL Server 2005 Standard on your VPS.
Well, I sent them the CAL and product key, so what more could they want? The copy of SQL server was recieved from a Microsoft Launch Event, Launch Tour 2005, so I didn't get a invoice. I sent them a copy of the items sent out with:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/61427015_af82ba821b_o.jpg
And opened a chat with them. The chat conversation is attatched:
http://www.nuerom.com/solarvpschat724.txt
In summary,
I asked what they needed to validate - they claimed they needed a invoice.
I didn't understand how a invoice would prove anything, since it is something that can be generated by anyone in a few minutes.
They claimed they get audited from time to time by Microsoft, so they have to make sure genuine software is running on their VPS.
I offered them my MSDNAA license, since I would be only using the server for developmental purposes. I send the a PDF of the MSDNAA order; only to have them deny it again. They claimed that it wasn't valid because I paid with a paypal business account. Even though the MSDNAA terms clearly state that it is a valid license for test and developmental purposes; and that the license is perpetual.
I offered to ship the DVD, CAL and BOX to them. They claimed that this wouldn't be enough to validate. (Implying, of course, that they had some reason to believe I might have stolen the DVD).
At a loss of what to do; I finally contacted Microsoft to have them validate the product; partner support was very nice and directed me to the appropiate departments. I sent solarvps a e-mail back:
I contacted Microsoft and recieved this information. They advised me that the only restriction on this software is that it is NOT FOR RESALE, and that I may put it in full production use. I was told that if you needed validation, you may call 800-426-9400 option 3, option 1. You may reference my name, or my phone number, which will validate my conversation with Microsoft.
See also,
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/SQL%20Server%20Standard_2005_English_9137cd88-ab33-48b7-ac2a-544f2ec58c4d.pdf
They have yet to reply. I am at a loss of what to do; as I have other promotional software I'd like to install on that VPS; but if its this much of a hassle, I might just go with another host. Unfortunately, solarvps canceled their refund program, so I am at a loss what to do there.
In particular - I feel that SolarVPS just doesn't want to authorize the SQL server because they want me to pay $10/month. This is way too much validation. Besides, as a MS partner, if they were afraid of the software failing auditing they could have called their MS Partner line to verify it was genuine software. Additionally, I felt that Bogdan Fetita, their "senior tech" had attitude that made me feel very unwelcomed.
Should I just move on and find another VPS server after days of trying to find the right one? Or should I hope solarVPS will lighten up?