OK. This is not gonna be soft if I assume. But I am not writing this post in a rude manner either. It is just to inform DMEHosting users and to-be users about the way they handle VPS hosting business.
If you read my blog post 123Systems, you may know that I changed my host. And that was DMEHosting.
The reasons for choosing DMEHosting over some other competitors were,
- Cheap price for a nice performed server.(3.95$/month for a 256MB server)
- I have good ping times to their network. So I had assumed that Asia has good speeds to them
- Their representative at WebHostingTalk looked to have good knowledge about what they are doing.
And also few other reasons as well. So I chose DMEHosting for hosting my website and ordered their OpenVZ server OVZ 1 on 18th of October 2011.
VPS setup was instant after paying the invoice. I logged into my VPS and installed my Apache, MySQL, PHP and some other useful stuff with my
All was going fine.
With few configurations with Apache and MySQL, I was able to limit the memory usage of the server to 120MB! And that was the best performance I had with tweaking. So I bet they had good hardware on the node and did not oversell at that time.
Everything was going soft and perfectly before 22nd of October(4 days from the day I ordered the VPS). VPS was completely down and I couldn’t even ping it. So it said that VPS was completely down(Not a overload).
After 4 hours of waiting for my server to be online, I sent them a support ticket asking why my server is down. And no response from them!
I tried to look for an announcement from their Announcement page(because serious hosting providers do report downtimes to their clients) and they did not had any announcements for server downtime or maintenance.
I was so upset and but still, I wanted my server to back online because I did not took a backup and also they have a nonrefundable policy here: http://www.dmehosting.com/VirtualPrivateServerTOS.php
I tried to reach their online chat also. And this is the experience I had.
After 25 hours of creating my support ticket, I sent them another reply to it because I didn’t hear from them.
Hello,
Please let me have my backup and turn into another host which is
serious about their business. Or at least tell me if I can *still*
count on you to be online and give me an ETA so I can hold up things a
little bit more.
However I expect a respond from you within next few hours so I can
continue my business.Thank you very much.
And 2 minutes later, they made a response!(The same company who couldn’t write to a serious client who was upset about the downtime of his server)
Your VPS is up and responding to ping.
Please get back to us with a traceroute to the server if you are still facing the issue.
Wow! They are saying that they are innocent and I was the one who had routing issues to the server. But I am not an idiot!
Hello,
I can see it is functioning *now*. But it was not functional for 18 hour(s)
27 min(s) which is not only reported by me, but also by Host-Tracker(yeah. I
use it)
So am I at least authenticated to request the reason for the downtime? And
not responded back?I think I am able to request for SLA credits as well. And also, I would
prefer to know if such kind of downtimes occur in your network from time to
time and then you ignore emails from clients like you did to me. So I can
easily get my data out of your node and continue with a serious business. If
these words are too *harsh* for you, please forgive me. But I am really
serious with my business and I can’t let such things happen again.Thank you very much.
And they are writing back.
We only provide an SLA for Dedicated Servers, and that would be related to network downtime. This issue was a kernel crash that caused very long FSCK to be performed in order to get this server back up and running. Unfortunately it took a good 10-12 hours to get the server back up and running due to a crash. Even with an SLA, that doesn’t cover anything other than Networking since software/hardware is unpredictable.
And that is false. VPS was down for 25 hours.
And how dumb I was! I didn’t took time to read about their SLA to VPS servers. And I blamed myself for not noticing that.
However I wanted to make myself clear about the situation. So I wrote them this.
Hello,
I see. I can understand that such things happen on *any* network. But it is
your responsibility to inform your clients under any circumstances. And I
hope you *will* do that in the future.Thank you.
I am a fair client by all meanings. I know that we can’t control some incidents. But still, they had a responsibility to report the situation to the clients. And we could face into the issues with knowing what is happening on provider’s side.
However, they didn’t bother to reply me after that. And the server is back to normal.
On 26th of October, server was offline again. But knowing the way they respond to their clients, I didn’t want to just open a ticket and wait for days to hear from them. So I waited till 27th and it was still down. WTH! I am losing lots of visitors and money. So I made another ticket.
Hello,
My server is down again for the *second time* in my *first* month of service. And it is 20+ hours of downtime just for this month.
I am very serious at this point. Can you please migrate me to a node which has *less* downtime or let me have an explanation for this downtime. So I can move out my data to another provider to avoid further damages to my business.
Thank you very much.
No reply from them. Not on 27th, 28th or on 29th! I waited more than enough!
Days of downtime.
Is this a joke for you?
They made a response.
This server you are on has experienced hardware failure and we are currently copying your data over now. Please do not use the “rebuild” or “Recover Corrupt Vps” functions in HyperVM as it will ruin the restoration process of your VPS. Your VPS will be completed in 2-4 hours and you should be able to boot it normally from HyperVM. If it does not boot up, this means it isn’t fully restored yet and will be momentarily.
There is a lot of data involved with all the VM’s and we had to spend extra time on this issue to ensure we didn’t lose everyone’s data and carefully restore everything how it was right before the crash.
I waited just not only 2-4 hours, but 4 days!
Hello,
I am still waiting for my VPS to back up and it still isn’t.
I am requesting a backup of my VPS. I don’t need this *always down*
service anymore.Please provide me the backup and I will pack my things and will
restore them in a place where they don’t have hardware failures for 5
days a month.Thanks.
Here comes the response.
We are currently moving your VPS now to a different server so you don’t have to deal with this anymore.
I didn’t want to lose my money and visitors hearing their lies! I was almost done and just wanted to take out the backups.
Please don’t. I don’t want this server after I take my backup out of
it. So just leave it as it is and let me *just* backup the data.
After this response, VPS was still unstable and was going down time to time. But I was tricky enough to buy another VPS and take my data into it with great effort(network outages, speed issues, bla bla blah!)
And now I am with this new provider and I had downtime right after I moved into them. But I am happy with them. They inform their clients about the outages through emails and also announcements in their Announcements page.
These are the downside of having hosted with DMEHosting.
- You will *never* be informed about maintenance or outages.
- Tickets are responded when they realize we are pretty angry and when they realize we are wise enough to find out that they are completely responsible for the outage.
- You will not get a refund nor SLA credits for even days of outages.
- You will not be able to use their Live Chat for support under any condition
- Tickets are responded by a staff member named DME Staff. So I guess they are hiding their privacy behind their company name or this is a one-man show.
If you are thinking of buying a VPS from DMEHosting or you already is a customer, think of that twice. These issues might have been resolved by now, I don’t know. But I will have the same frightened feeling about them for a long time and that would not be erased easily.