I must say I am not a negative reviewer by any meaning. And I can barely remember anything I’ve said bad things about. That’s why my blog had qualified for many “sponsored reviews”. Even though that is going to be changed after this blog post is written, I am going through it. I think it worth the cost.
I will start from the beginning of the story.
123Systems are advertising on WHT a lot. (well, that’s allowed:) ) And their packages are very cheap and I since I wanted to host my own website only, I ignored those lots of bad reviews about them on WHT and bought the Lin-256MB package.
Setup was instant and I got my VPS instantly after I paid my invoice through PayPal.
First few days with 123Systems was going ok.
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync was giving me 140MB/s at average. wget to CacheFly got about 2MB/s. I even commented on 123Systems bad reviews saying that I am fine with them.
It didn’t go in the same way after 20 days. Server crashed and I had my server was down for hours.
PingdomAlert UP:
PerfectZ.iNfo (perfectz.info) is UP again at 09/29/2011 08:42:24PM,
after 6h 10m of downtime.
I sent them a email right away asking why my server is down. And believe me. They didn’t bother to give me an update. I tried posting on their Twitter page and the result was the same.
However, I was not serious with them because my website was not officially launched in the time frame. After about 2 days of submitting that support ticket about the downtime, I tried to see if they had updated the ticket.
And guess what? It is not there!!!
I was so upset. For the whole time being I used web hosting services, I never had one of my support tickets deleted. And with this incident, I found the nature of their hosting. Maybe I can understand this if they are a free host. But they aren’t!
From then, I didn’t ever counted on their support(can I?). But my request for SLA credits were updated by them and they added credits to my account right after that.
After 2-3 days, my site was going offline over and over again. I tried to understand the issue. But there were none.
At the start, my server was using only 150MB-170MB out of 256MB their recommended memory. And when I run free -m now, it was using 470MB of memory including the burstable memory.
Apache didn’t run smoothly and it went down over and over again. And when I tried to SSH, this message came up.
I wasn’t been able to SSH to the server at least. I tried my best to fix the issue. Rebooted the server hundreds of time. But when the VPS boots up, memory usage was the same. And even without running Apache and MySQL, it was using the same memory on the server. WTH!
uptime, free -m and top commands returned me a error saying,
Can’t allocate RAM
If the server can’t even run a simple command like free -m even without no programs running on background, what would that be? Overselling! That’s for certain. And that’s the bad side of OpenVZ. 123Systems were using the ability to oversell resources although they claim Servers with extreme lead way (No Over Loading) (souce: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1089660&highlight=123systems).
Here are some results of commands which I got just before server went completely down.
# top -c
top – 07:54:06 up 15 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 11 total, 2 running, 9 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 524288k total, 448512k used, 75776k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cachedPID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1 root 16 0 2604 1496 1240 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.65 init
1181 root 18 0 5600 2180 1756 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
1212 syslog 15 0 2020 712 568 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 /sbin/syslogd -u sy
1227 root 23 0 1860 600 508 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 /bin/sh /usr/local/
1429 root 18 0 4680 1768 1368 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /
1462 root 15 0 8528 2840 2252 R 0.0 0.5 0:00.19 sshd: root@pts/0
1474 root 15 0 3160 1816 1404 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 -bash
1499 mysql 18 0 433m 52m 3104 S 0.0 10.2 0:00.20 /usr/local/mysql/li
1512 root 16 0 3812 1016 784 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/vsftpd
1520 root 18 0 2216 868 688 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 cron
1522 root 15 0 2448 1132 940 R 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 top -c
# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.2797 s, 75.2 MB/s
As you can see, server is getting worse and worse. I was very lucky to pull up my data to my backup server and then I got a new VPS from another company to host my website. Even though my website is getting much more visits and hits, it doesn’t use more than 170MB of RAM now.
This is my experience with them. And this experience taught me a lots of things including that people don’t post negative reviews about products unless there is a downside of them at all.
I would love to advice 123Systems to “Stop false advertising and stop overselling!”. But I am very confident that that ticket will be deleted as well.
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