Here goes my bad review of VPS.net (owned by UK2 group). I use to be a shared hosting customer of ANhosting.com for several years — which I still am. They offered good service and good support which was far better than Dreamhost. ANhosting was my savior when one of my websites got popular and I matured to VPS.
Who better to trust than the company that offered me the best shared hosting I could find? And so I opened an account at VPS.net. I went with their un-managed VPS hosting (which was surprisingly affordable), purchasing 1 node at first and later upgraded to 3 nodes. After 18-20 months of terrible service, I decided to finally pull the plug and take my business elsewhere. Below is a series of events ultimately leading to total frustration.
- July 2010 – bought new VPS. Setting up everything was fairly simple. I knew nothing about the command line but was able to get by following guides on the web. The server was awfully slow and the support said it was because I was running cPanel and so I upgraded to 2 nodes by their recommendation.
- 2010 (constant issues) – The server would go down here and there without anybody telling me my site was down. Sometimes it would restart, other times it would be down for a whole day until I realized. Half of these times, I was able to restart the server and get it up and running. Other times it was completely unresponsive which they would explain to be issues with the server, or cloud, or SANS, or whatever other reason. Sometimes the support was fast and other times it took hours for a response. What I hated was that they never really explained anything, it was just, “Sorry for your trouble. It’s running now.” I figured it was a new service and they needed time but things would only get worse. I was a big fan of ANhosting and so I was loyal to the company.
- 2011 (MAJOR issues) – Every month, the server would go down for hours. During the most critical moments, it would go down for 5-20 hours. Late in 2011, I had instances where the server went down for 20-30 hours. There was nothing I could do and the support never replied. The best explanation I got was an update on my support ticket the next day saying “everything working now”. They never offered to reimburse or anything.
- 2011 (SHADY support) – there was a case where my server again went down. When I submitted a support ticket, they kept saying they were looking into it. But every support guy was simply rebooting the server and saying, “I just restarted the server, will keep you updated.” Next they said, I was running out of memory and needed to purchase more. I added more nodes and rebooted the server with no luck. Finally, the ticket escalated up to Level 3 support. The guy there said, “You have major problems with your server, you need to purchase on-demand ticket for instant support.” So I paid the $10 option, the guy there says “You need to buy the $50 option.” And so I did…with no refund for the $10 one. All I wanted was my site online, it was down for over 30 hours at that point with no end in sight. Keep in mind that I was never fooling around with anything; it just went down. Finally, my site comes back up. When I kept asking the support guys, they offered “Another customer on your server was hogging resources and took down the whole server. Your site is ok, no problem at all.” No refunds, no apologies, nothing.
- 2012 (FINAL STRAW) – constant outages. After being hit with 2 major outages (both over 20 hours of downtime), I asked a knowledgeable friend to look through my setup and he told me, “Your server is way too slow for the amount of resources you have. It’s underpowered, etc, etc, etc.”
Don’t use VPS.net. They gave me bad advice, told me to spend more money, didn’t really fix my problem, and offered no explanation. I’m not knowledgeable at managing servers so I delayed the move for this long but I can’t take it anymore. I can understand server issues due to unforeseen circumstances, but I don’t want to deal with a company that lies to its customers.
Here are more bad reviews of VPS.net:
- Why I can’t recommend VPS.net
- VPS.net sucks
- If you look on Google, you’ll find many more.
I found a new VPS host and never looked back. New article and review on them soon enough.
I was reading your complaint, but then realized you are an idiot.
“bought new VPS. Setting up everything was fairly simple. I knew nothing about the command line but was able to get by following guides on the web.”
“knew nothing about the command line”
Why are you getting an un-managed VPS if you do not know how to manage it yourself.
I purchased VPS hosting without prior experience because I’m smart enough to figure things out on my own (also smart enough to outsource to sys-admins to help me manage).
It’s too bad you’re not smart enough to understand the difference between bad hosting service and inexperienced user. 😉
FYI: my VPS runs just fine for 5 years now.