Your expectations and experience so far?

[Teej]

I was looking at liquidcourage's comments (http://forum.gate.com/showpost.php?p=1382&postcount=4) about the feelings of frustation over quality of service/support. I wondered how many other Customers there are and are they 'lurking' here but not commenting, or are we really just a handful?

I get the feeling we're the first VPS customers and effectively the guineau-pigs for the service.

If you look you'll see the first ever post into this VPS forum was by me at 9am on October 27th. I wonder when the first VPS Customers signed up, and if we're amongst them or just the most vocal?

I would hope that the Affinity/Gate VPS managers and staff would have the honesty to tell us the state of play and let us help them to develop the service so it meets Customer expectations.

My main concerns are:
lack of information on how the system is configured (some aspects of Plesk are non-functional but there's no effort to tell us)
lack of automated tools for such things as DNS additions to the *.primarydns.com servers (should be a part of the Plesk or Customer Account interface) which would save vast amounts of engineers time, and Customer frustations.
haphazard response to detailed technical questions or issues posted here in the forums where the cost to Gate/Affinity of supporting us is minimal, and once done hopefully other Customers can use that information without needing to call Support or feel frustated
lack of automated monitoring tools that allow us (and Gate support) to receive immediate notification if something has failed
inaccurate information given out or applied by some Gate/Affinity staff
All theses issues are easily addressed by providing clear open documentation on the configuration of the servers, Plesk, and customer VPS along with timely, accurate and detailed responses to questions - especially when the questions are obviously from technically-aware and literate engineers that just might know more about some of this stuff than Gate/Affinity seem to.

Personally I want to help make the service feel great, but it feels like I'm talking to myself most of the time.

What do you think?

[epb]

Yeah, I'm really kinda annoyed by the lack of notification of when (and why would be nice) things break. Oh, and of course, the DNS issue. Not that I mind using FreeDNS for my name services, but adding it is still an extra step to take.

I've only called support once: To get my password reset. (hehe, pesky /etc/shadow file)

Ever since, I've tried to go it alone (with what I'd consider success) and avoiding their Plesk setup, similarly, as much as possible. I was expecting my only client account to be able to create domain on his account? Nope, he couldn't. I made him his domain, and then he tried to make a subdomain... couldn't. Heh, even if he could, there's no way to automate the DNS changes needed to point that subdomain the right way.

[richkneece]

Hi, yes. I'd have to agree that my experience thus far has been less than satisfactory. The downtime has been ridiculous (sometimes up to an entire day), and often requires a reboot of the entire VPS server (not just our session).

I've heard about the DNS problems, but these seem to be more than the DNS. We can't even access our sites from the IP address and are receiving timeouts constantly. Pinging to the IP is successful, though we cannot access Plesk, Virtuouzzo or anything else related. For some reason, we are able to access the SQL Server port however.

Today, our VPS has been down since noon, with at least four calls to technical support to try to get someone to listen us, understand the critical nature of getting this up, and to solve it. Their only response is, "We're aware of it and are working on it." When asked "what's the ETA," I can't get an answer.

Over Thankgiving (a day I really didn't want to be spending on the phone with an ISP), they were down for at least 18 hours...and it took forever to actually get someone to listen to me.

This is happening way too often, and though downtime happens, these long periods of downtime, and the fact that I have to contstantly keep an eye on the server to see if/when it's down is really annoying and a waste of my time.

Very frustating, and even more frustrating is it doesn't seem like anyone is listening or keeping us in the loop as resolutions to ensure this doesn't keep happening.

[epb]

Today, our VPS has been down since noon, with at least four calls to technical support to try to get someone to listen us, understand the critical nature of getting this up, and to solve it. Their only response is, "We're aware of it and are working on it." When asked "what's the ETA," I can't get an answer.

Oh.. my... god that would piss me off. I want to use my VPS for business purposes, but it's been terribly unreliable, and too my knowledge, I'm not putting it through much stress. (Though, it's improved a little lately in terms of reliability.)

Right now, I'm kinda regretting choosing the VPS u100 plan instead of shelling out $75 a month for the SwiftCo dedicated server I was comparing it to. I guess I've learned the hard way, cheap is not always better. Oh, and for some reason, I suddenly cannot renew my backup.

[Edit: and another gripe: Why was I not told of the 200000 inode limit on the account before I signed up? I'm already using half of it, mostly in OS and program files. The zipread apache module is probably going to come in handy for any site that has a lot of statis resources like pictures and such.]

[jayyers]

ive been trying to reinstall my vps to a clean state for the past week now everytime i call it takes atleast 20 mins before i even talk to anyone, and then it takes another 10 mins to actualy understand what i am trying to accomplish. to reply to Teej question i signed up on november 4th and it does seem like we are the guineau-pigs for the service. But in all fareness i think alot of it has to do with the training of the staff by SwSoft, i also believe that much of the problems lie within their software. to be honest i wish i did not pay for 3 months at a time. If the Plesk/virtuozzo software actually worked like it was supose to i would love this service, but it has been a let down

[emanuel]

I found a very good VPS for 29.99 at Virpus.com.

I was trying to choose between Gate.com, Virpus.com and a few others VPS's when I ordered a Virpus trial account and then it became clear which one was the best.

Virpus has a great support with nice, fast and knowledgeable technicians while Gate has a terrible support according to their awful reputation (have a look the WebHostingTalk.com).

My Virpus VPS is a 12GB(non-oversold)x256MBx5IPXFullyManaged.

I've ran a benchmark test on my Virpus and it scored 120 while most VPS's out there are scoring only 20/30 because they're highly oversold just like Gate.com's (look for "VPS x Dedicated" on WebHostingTalk).

In conclusion, so far I'm really happy with Virpus and I'd really recommend them.

If you're interested, go to Virpus.com and ask for a 7-day free trial account and see for yourself. Also, have a look at this url to get a good discount:

http://www.virpus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21

[KB71]

I ventured into the VPS as a freshman from the Shared world :)

I guess i chose the wrong place, I came here cause my site was too big/resource heavy for the Shared world(over populated servers :) ).

Have gotten used to the common phrase of "please hold" from the live chat and after a while, you have to give them a reminder that you are on hold. When they finally say something they tell you too send an email to support.

After i got the DNS set to a test site about 2 weeks ago, I lost contact the first weekend, called on sunday and they said they had DNS problems and they was going to fix it asap.On monday i called them asking why it wasnt fixed yet they said it was "forgotten" will be done asap. On tuesday i called them up again and they said it should be OK when the next update is done maybe in another 6hrs. It came later that evening.

This weekend it was down aswell and i call them again, waited 20minutes to get through and was told they was fixing it but didnt know the ETA. Is working now but for how long is my thoughts :)

I have not seen any reports/news showing the customers that they have had these problems.

Another thing i saw wa the resource useage on the server, on plesk you have the resource statistics. When i started it was continously over 99%. Showing 10-40MB free memory, Having one test site with no active members and was going "slow". Called them and told them about it, took some screen shots but the last couple of days it looks like something has happened cause its showing 2-3gb free memory, maybe its cause the DNS went down and several sites lost their activity.

I never got an answer from them if they have a 30 day money back guarantee. I should have waited until i got it. Now i understand why.

If they get DNS probs or that the resources drop as low as it was and the test site slows down, within the next week ill be out of here.

[register865]

This is the wrong place to have any type of hosting. Gate has to be one of the worst of not "THE WORST.

I will be moving my accounts else where and placing a new page on all my websites and explaining the horror that I have experienced with Gate.

And they just don't see it or understand. Maybe they also don't care.

[raymonddu]

Gate is not ready.

[zeusenergy]

Well, I tried, and tried, to get Gate support personnel to help out with a simple DNS problem. It looks like our time and money was wasted here, except for the VPS and Plesk experience that we got out of the deal. We are a small network and telephony company that provides service to SMBs. We wanted a VPS to resell as individual client websites and webmail accounts. The Plesk interface is splendid. However Gate distributes the domains too thickly, probably owing to the speed issue some of us have noticed. I am not sure if the DNS issue was explained the same way to others, but here is what I was told. "The northern states are experiencing DNS issues due to a device such as a router that is out of our control. We don't know when the service and DNS resolution will come back." I had ping on my IP for the VPS no problem. Tracert gave all of the proper naming all the way to *.primarydns.com. And the really strange thing is that it was inconsistant across our privately owned domain names, as some were redirected from other primary name servers. This service outage was last week, end of November. I overlooked the problem, expecting it to be a rogue glitch. Next, our company wanted to change over from Hostway to the new VPS for our own email and website, to attempt a first-time guinea pig transfer of a domain. We lost all email recieving capability, although the client programs nor the webmail would error our. Our customers had everything bounce back to them. We called support yet again, and were told that we set everything up right. I asked if there was anything else we could check, or any other suggestions to get us up and running, and the attitude was "You're on your own." Needless to say, we are using that option #3 in the Gate phone system, to cancel our account!!! On to another VPS provider.....

[mlawrence]

My control panel has been down for a month as of today. :(

All my sites still work, but I can't log in to do anything. Support doesn't seem to care - their last email was answered as "Please be advised that the following incident reported by 'Martin' could not
be resolved"

[emanuel]

My control panel has been down for a month as of today. :(

All my sites still work, but I can't log in to do anything. Support doesn't seem to care - their last email was answered as "Please be advised that the following incident reported by 'Martin' could not
be resolved"

Don't expect Gate.com to change any time soon or maybe ever.

The best thing you can do is find yourself a new provider, transfer your stuff to them and cancel Gate.

The next step is cotacting your credit card administrator (visa, mastercard, amex...) and ask for your money back. They'll ask you to explain what happened in detail and eventually apply the charge back against Gate.

[register865]

To answer your question about experiences at Gate?

This is the wrong place to have any type of hosting. Gate has to be one of the worst of not "THE WORST.

I will be moving my accounts else where and placing a new page on all my websites and explaining the horror that I have experienced with Gate.

And they just don't see it or understand. Maybe they also don't care.

In a nut shell...

[gouhayashi]

well, tend for applying gate vps plan, but comments in this thread seem unsatisfying more than satisfying...

[Teej]

I'm quite surprised and quite shocked by the negative experiences reported here, but its helped me decide to leave Gate and move to a VPS provider I can trust.

I had been intending to move a bunch of hosted services to the VPS that I currently host locally and are served over an ADSL line.

Not needing a fully dedicated server, VPS seemed the best option. After researching the various offerings and comparing claims I thought the apparent size of Affinity, and their claims to having the best engineers, was a good indication that the service would be reasonable (Quality and depth of support knowledge are the things I look for).

The problems and lack of communications by Gate technical support, both directly and via these forums, seems to indicate a worrying lack of commitment on Gate's part, especially in view of their marketing claims up-front.

My experience in finding the number of problems with the VPS service that are a result of bad configuration and management on the part of Gate, and the lack of response to them despite documenting them here in the forums, has made me look around for alternatives where there is some real understanding and respect for Customers.

Luckily I only signed up for 3 months in case it wasn't good enough, so moving is relatively easy. Its very annoying and frustrating that the hours and days I spent working around the problems with the VPS configuration and lack of documentation have been wasted.

[JCR]

Hi Teej,
I can understand your reasons. Thank you to you for the answers you gave me on many of my rather beginner questions.
JCR

[Teej]

Thanks JCR.

I shall hang about for a while longer whilst I get the move underway and will doubtless keep an eye on the forums.

I spent a few hours reading the WebHostingTalk VPS Forum (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103) and reviewing the many providers in a related benchmarks thread.

I finally decided on VirPlus, for four reasons:

Good customer feedback (excellent benchmark results too)
Evidence of good technical support and communications
5 IP addresses (/29 subnet)
50% discount ([b]on 1st month's subs until end of year)
I used the discount coupon EOYSPECIAL referred to in emanuel's post (http://forum.gate.com/showpost.php?p=1439&postcount=6) earlier in this thread.

[patsalko]

I am you on this. GATE is probably one of the worst hosts along with Webhostplus

[Teej]

On my new VPS host I've got Fedora Core 5 on Virtuozzo. I'm discovering that it is much better configured than my experience here - the only common issue I've found is they're not(yet) running an NTP time daemon on the host to sync times.

For example, there is actually useful output from cat /proc/user_beancounters

[Teej]

I've been with my new VPS supplier Virpus (http://virpus.com/) a couple of weeks now and its like a breath of fresh air.

Their support is fast, responsive and clued-up. They have a control panel that tracks all support tickets and every email or action performed on each.

They have fixed relatively complex issues I've presented them with in a confident manner and communicated the steps required back to me - its refreshing as a techie being able to see what they're doing because it gives me confidence they know what they're about.

Compare that to my ongoing issues here trying to get the VPN sorted out (http://forum.gate.com/showpost.php?p=1572&postcount=5)! I hope people read these forums before buying Gate services.

[ranchuc]

I have to say that the VPS support I have received was very poor. Also there is alot of down time and the control panel will randomly fail or certain parts will not work (ie the maintenance section).

In gates defense I am on the basic linux VPS and the performance is great WHEN its going.

[Teej]

I think this illustrates why you shouldn't choose gate.com if you want a reliable VPS hosting service. This is the Virtuozzo Status Changes page from the last week showing how many times the service has been down - none of this was done by me.

It looks as if they've reset the host and lost customer settings too, because they've managed to remove a bunch of corrective settings I had to have them do so now things like VPN and permissions on some key files (like security certificates) are broken - again!

Sun Feb 4 22:22:11 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Sun Feb 4 22:22:05 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,mounted)
Sun Feb 4 22:21:50 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Sun Feb 4 17:54:25 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Sun Feb 4 17:54:19 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,mounted)
Sun Feb 4 17:54:01 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Sun Feb 4 07:00:33 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Sun Feb 4 07:00:27 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,mounted)
Sun Feb 4 07:00:00 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Fri Feb 2 19:08:31 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Fri Feb 2 19:08:25 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,mounted)
Fri Feb 2 19:08:10 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Wed Jan 31 02:05:00 2007 VPS is mounted now. It is not running and some operations are not available.mounted VPS is up and running now.running
Wed Jan 31 02:04:54 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is mounted now. It is not running and some operations are not available.mounted
Wed Jan 31 02:04:24 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Tue Jan 30 14:00:09 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Tue Jan 30 14:00:06 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,mounted)
Tue Jan 30 13:59:30 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)
Tue Jan 30 02:49:32 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting) VPS is up and running now.running
Tue Jan 30 02:49:29 2007 VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,down) VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting,running)
Tue Jan 30 02:48:59 2007 VPS is stopped now.down VPS is starting up at the moment. It may take some time.(starting)

[SouthernCharm]

Honestly, I haven't had any major problems with my VPS U100 hosting *except* when it comes to installing some applications and modules. I was absolutely stunned to find out my VPS didn't have the most-used UNIX feature (like gcc) and that it was running Fedora Core 4.

Thankfully, I haven't had any downtime or problems other than that. I'm hosting six domains/customers right now on my VPS, and so far it's been okay. When I do have a question and submit a support ticket, they have gotten back to me in the 24-hour window.

Are all of you on UNIX or Windows VPS?