2014 – MY STORY
On June 28th, my VPS started to experience major packet loss. So I did what anyone would do and opened a support ticket with my service provider.
A few days, I still recieved no replies. All while my server was experiencing anywhere from between 5% to 95% packet loss.
Finally on July 3rd, I receive a friendly update advising me that my issue has been corrected. To my surprise I was not able to SSH into my machine. After seeing a weird error message on my console regarding CPU LOCKS and read-only file systems, I rebooted my VM per my providers posted recommendations.
Packet Loss Graph
Upon reboot, my server was dead and it’s been that since then. Over the next few days, I will add to my story so everyone can understand how important it is to host your own things. Luckily for me , this is just a personal server used by my friends and family.
Currently, I’ve been waiting 7 days for support to pick up and/or answer my ticket. I’ve made multiple attempts to contact the company over the phone, using social media and event via their own ticketing support process. So far, I’ve yet to get any reply beyond “your ticket is in the queue”. I know I’m only one of many. So I’ve created this page in the hopes that others may share their story and be forewarned of that kind of outages to expect.
I encourage you to scan social media websites if you need any extra confirmation.
UPDATE: 07/11/2014 @ 6:00PM
I’ve been experiencing full system outages for many days now. One system for 8 full days and the other 4 full days. It’s very discouraging that no one from either Fibernetics or Cloud At Cost seems to want to fix my issue. I guess I’m just a low guy on the totem pole. In fact Cloud At Cost has banned me from messaging them on Facebook.
Load Averages
Luckily, I found some screenshots from the console of one of my servers. Before I rebooted it was responding to ICMP. However after a reboot, I started getting the same console connect error message.
I know it’s basically pointless to even try to expect an update over a weekend, when they couldn’t bother to update me all week long. However I’ve got my fingers crossed that someone somewhere would put out a public update. I’m starting to think there are thousands of VMs down. It’s funny that the $35 dollar VM isn’t having the trouble. Just my higher end ones. Oh and in case your wondering, those NAGIOS graphs you’re seeing are coming from Cloud At Costs (CloudAtCost) own network. Funny how things work!
I’ve also started to get some fan art. So I’m created a new section to showcase it. If you create something or are interested in getting in touch with me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or email me at xphox (at) xphox (dot) net.
UPDATE: 07/13/2014 @ 7:30PM
One of my VMs came back online late Friday. Sorry I wasn’t able to update this page sooner. It came up one hour after my last update. The “good?” news at this point in time, is that I only have 1 more VM down. It’s a DEV2 package. I’m assuming they are working the servers by order from higher spec to lower spec. I still have not received any update in my actual support ticket, however the company has finally send out an official email. It’s a shame they waited over a week to send out a communication to their customers. It’s a little too late in my opinion, but I’m glad they are starting to talk to us customers. Let’s hope this isn’t the last email they send out and get the drift that we’d like to be keep in the loop.
For those interested, here is the update they sent out earlier this afternoon.
They are stating that they had 2000 VMs impacted. Restore time can take up to 20 minutes to migrate the server onto their new disk array. Basically confirming everyone’s assumptions that they completely oversold what their support staff could handle. They have a lot of work cut ahead of themselves. I’m hoping my last VM doesn’t take as long to come back online.
By the way… we’ve got over 10,000 unique visitors to this webpage in the last 48 hours. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions and comments down below. Please keep your hosting provider suggestions coming. Once I get some extra time, I’ll compile a list of my top few and post them on a different page.
UPDATE: 07/14/2014 @ 5:30PM
My server that was back online has crashed two times since 4:45PM today so far. So now I’m back to 2 of 3 of my VMs being down. The good news is today, I received an update into my actual ticket. Though, it was just the bulletin they posted publicly. I also received a direct twitter message from Fibernetics pointing me to the same webpage. An a for effort!
So they are starting to answer people, good! However something tells me we are still going to be a few days or a week away until we get some system stabilities. My system load average is spiking though the roof and I’m not even running anything on the box.
We should start a pool to take bets on when this will actually get resolved.
UPDATE: 07/15/2014 @ 7:30PM
So far after two reboots, my server has remained stable. I even got another update into my support ticket. This time it wasn’t from the same guy Antonio and instead from James (L3 Support Engineer). James is suggesting I might be impacted by a known bug (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979901). I’ll have to investigate this a bit more. I just know that this has never happened prior to the outages.
All in all, ticket updates seem to be coming in anywhere between 12 to 15 hours on average for me now.
For those still following, here are some updated graphs. The 1st one shows the stability of my VM which was been recovered. The 2nd shows my VM which is still currently impacted.
RECOVERED VM:
IMPACTED VM:
My 1st VM recovery time took almost 8 full days. Let’s see how long this 2nd VM takes. I’m betting the difference is that this one is a DEV2 server whereas the other one is a DEV3.
UPDATE: 07/15/2014 @ 7:30PM
My last VM came back online yesterday. I was alerted by the technician closing my ticket. Call me crazy but you’d think that after a support ticket’s age reaches 14 days old, that they might actually let you confirm the issue was properly resolved first.
Regardless the total outage duration for 2 of my 3 VMs are as follows:
VM1 (DEV3): Approximately 8 Days, 6 Hours
VM2 (DEV2): Approximately 10 Days, 14 Hours
** VMs crashed days apart.
Not to mention that this company has unfortunately caused a bit of more drama with claims that they have ripped off Digital Ocean’s help articles. Adding to the continued outage that is happening, it’s a surprise users are still signing up for new service.
Hopefully this is the last you’ll hear from me on this subject.
Lucky you have backups though right? And you’re able to move your important stuff to another hosting provider. Right? And your domains are with a different place so that they are not hostage to your hosting provider, right?
Don’t worry, be happy. And demand your money back for the full pay period.
Yes of course I have backups. You know the saying.. there are two types of people in the world. Those whom have lost data and those whom haven’t. I’m happy to move my services back to http://www.a2hosting.com/. I was using them for a year with no issues and fantastic support! Considering maybe trying Digital Ocean now.
Hehe, great homepage! Best you can do: Take your backups and move your site to a proper cloud hoster. I’m using Digital Ocean for a long time and the best thing about them is their support. Super fast and those guys know what they’re talking about. Good luck, man!
Thanks for the positive feedback.
where do i sign up? i see no signup button/link.
This is a public warning page. I am not actually selling service. Despite my warnings if you feel you really want to sign up you can head over to their actual webpage.
Go to digital ocean.
I will have to check you guys out then. I don’t mind paying for good service that works. Thank you for reaching out to me. Perhaps I should build a recommended hosts section. Would you guys be interested in letting me put your link and logo on my website? I know various people using your service and they seem to love it so far. 🙂
Great write up, it took me careful reading and googling to realise Cloud at Cost isn’t a made up name you used, but the actual business name. I guess the poor quality logo made me think it was a 2 min MS paint job.
Yeah unfortunately, I’m not really a graphics designer and more of a tech guy. This webpage was made in about an hour tops. Just a place for me and others to share their story. Not all my VMs were impacted, just my high end ones. Funny enough my $35 dollar VM has stayed up with no issues.
Wow! $1/mo!! Thanks for the tip, buddy! I’ll go order one (or two :-).
Jan as long as you don’t mind being down for weeks at a time. It’s fine. Don’t expect much. Please be cautious.
this is likely due to a known issue in vmware. I have experienced it professionally multiple times. Here is a vmware KB regarding the likely issue.
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=51306
Anyone confirm this?
Wow that’s crazy I would expect better service if you’re paying $35 a month. I would say switch providers, there are better ones out there for a fraction of the cost with much better support.
Dave, I have 3 VMs. $35 one time ($1 per month) , $70 one time ($10 per month) , and $140 one time ($20 per month). It was my two higher end ones that died. I didn’t get the BIG DOGS because I was soaking this new provider.
If I was paying the monthly vs. the one time, I’d still expect the same support. They never advertised a support difference in their flash sales to sell. I will probably be moving back to Digital Ocean or A2 Hosting.
I’m over my 30 days for a refund with Cloud At Cost.
Switch to Digital Ocean!
Had the exact same thing happen to me!
Thanks for sharing your story!
Hey, I’m in the same boat as you unfortunately. I’ve been down since June 30th. Luckily I only had one of the $35 vps that I paid a year in advance. I didnt bother to use it for anything important after the first week, after seeing their shoddy network connectivity and crappy disk i/o. They have high latency and the network drops out regularly for hours at a time.
It took them 5 days to reply to my first support ticket about this issue. (Sent on July 5, reply on July 10). I opened a second high priority ticket that only took 8 hours to reply (July 9). Its still open, that was almost 4 days ago.
I tried to re-image (July 8th) because their support was taking so long to respond. Maybe I could fix it myself? The only thing I knew was that they had some disk problem over a week ago… Surely it would be fixed by now. What company in their right mind would be down for 8 days with only a two sentence explanation posted to their blog? Maybe they forgot to post the update saying it was fixed? Nope. Its still broken and I’m still down and offline two weeks later.
Stay away from Cloud At Cost
It’s a shame they couldn’t just give us some public thread to follow with any kind of updates… It shouldn’t have been too hard to provide daily updates on 1 main thread for all of us whom are impacted.
I re-imaged again (2nd time) and was finally able to get a login prompt. Still no word or explanation from Cloudatcost since my ticket on July 9th. I requested they give me a free month of service for the 23 days outage. Lets see if they even reply. Not amused.
I saw their ad a while ago on some “bargain” hosting web site. The “developer” packaged looked too good to be true, but I took the bait anyway, my fault.
My monitoring service told me they will close my account unless I removed my vps from their monitoring because of disruption caused by their terrible uptimes.
Server gets rebooted for no reason.
Like others, I cannot connect to the console, their response in the ticket “Hi, we are working on fixing this” and then the next day or so the ticket is closed.
Everytime I see packet loss or server not reachable, they blame “abusive” users.
On a scale of 1 to 10
Reliability: 3
Uptime: 7 (and I am being real generous here)
Response speed to inquiries: 1
Professionalism of the staff: 5
Knowledge of their support: 5
Value for money: Started with 10, now at 2.
Conclusion, possible some idiot running this renting a rack from some terrible hosting company, and the employees are his friends, volunteers or who knows, it could be all himself using different names.
To the Digital Ocean person who is promoting their service. I know your website looks good, but how affordable are you?
Can you match a 1 time pay offer?
I doubt it. That was what suckered us all to this pathetic service.
I’ve been with Digital Ocean now for 3 months and the only downtimes registered by external services have been when I’ve taken them down for updates etc. Highly recommended and the support is excellent.
Don’t use Digital Ocean for anything commercial. First of all DO is not a cloud host, not even HA and second they reserve the right to suspend your VPS and even shut down your account without consulting you first (if you have bad luck and get recycled IP that has been involved in illegal activities). If you want stability and security go with WiredTree, LiquidWeb, Rackspace… Always remember you get what you pay for.
Daniel,
I will check those hosts out. It seems my old provider A2 Hosting has increased their prices a bit. It might be comparable for me to use Rackspace now.
I’ve been with Cloudatcost for 5 months now, I have 2 vps with them.
I’ve never experienced a major issue, this is simple truth.
Yes, they suck on support … ‘d give ’em 1 on 10 but a part from that I have no complaints.
One of the vps is running asterisk and the other one is a webserver/mail server.
And you know what, I was even looking to buy another vps from them but ‘m waiting for their famous 50% promo.
Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback! I know the parent company has been around for a long time. I know their child company is newerish. One of my VMs has had no issues, however the other two…. yikes! I was going to upgrade all my servers to Dev3 or Big Dog on their next sale. Now for sure I won’t be able to. If they’d like to offer me some free upgrades I’ll take them for my inconvenience, but no further money will be going to this company. They just cannot be trusted for support or uptime. I’ll keep the VMs in the hopes that ONE DAY they will be usable… My server is back down again today. 🙁
I have several servers with no issues.
Their network seems great now.
I am buying another one now for DEV… you all realize these are for development right!!! haha funny I see people trying to use it for business hosting.
G,
I agree about it not being for business hosting. However, I’m not sure you could even use it for business dev. Imagine if your dev platform crashed on you and didn’t come back up for over a week? That would mean you’d have to spend time setting up new servers on a new hosts instead of doing the work you actually wanted. So now you’re paying a second provider and someone’s wages for a few hours. At that point, you mind as well just run your own servers using VirtualBox. I wouldn’t recommend this host for anything personal you can’t afford to be without for a few weeks.
I’m just come out from my last downtime at cloudAtCost , it lasted 12 hours, not 72 like the one before, but too much anyway.
Using pingdom I’ve discovered that they are far away from 99% uptime: last month they made on my highend VPS 92% .
BTW I’m happy now, I’ve moved in less than a day all my data and domain to a new VPS on ThirdEye . They saved my life. Professional people, with no ticketing system but real human email address.
Just a quick uncomplete list of the bug I’ve experienced
Web panel (that is changing now) rarely behaves correctly
Ping time goes crazy sometimes, like ping get lost in their network
I/O is often a bottleneck for all the infrastructure, making also easy task impossible
Ticket answer time is colossal
So if you’re not a script-kiddie playing with the willing to play with a cheap server, cloudAtCost is not the place for you.
Professionals needs a different hosting provider. IMHO thirdeye.it seems a great deal actually.
Had the same ordeal with CloudAtCost… it was fine for the first few months when I signed up (Oct-2013). Then earlier this year, (Apr-2014) they screwed my server, file system was mounting RO, They simply told me to re-image. (WTF?) There was nothing I can do, they do not have backups either so as compensation, they upgraded me to BigDog. My server was working fine again… but unfortunately, it did not last long. Around Jun-28, I started to have problems again. Same thing with the disks. Filed a ticket. They replied 7 days later saying they had problem with their network and disks keeps locking up they had to migrate. Keep replying to the ticket for updates and keep getting the same bullshit (automated) replies. Finally had my server up and running again sometime round July 15. Overall, cheap hosting, cheap services too. There really nothing much I can do about it since they clearly state in their AUP that they can screw you over and over and they are not liable for it. 😀
14. NO WARRANTY
14.1 CLOUDATCOST DOES NOT GUARANTEE ERROR-FREE OR UNINTERRUPTED OPERATION OF THE SERVICES NOR SHALL IT BE LIABLE FOR ANY FAILURE, BREAKDOWN, INTERRUPTION OR DEGRADATION IN A SERVICE OR IN THE NETWORK OR ANY OTHER NETWORK OR CONNECTION INVOLVED IN THE PROVISION OR USE OF SERVICES WHATEVER THE CAUSE OF SUCH FAILURE, BREAKDOWN, DEGRADATION OR INTERRUPTION AND HOWEVER LONG IT LASTS. NEITHER CLOUDATCOST NOR ANY OF ITS AFFILIATES, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS OR REPRESENTATIVES MAKES ANY WARRANTIES, REPRESENTATIONS ,CONDITIONS OR GUARANTEES OF ANY NATURE WHATSOEVER REGARDING ANY SERVICE, PRODUCT EQUIPMENT OR CLOUDATCOST FACILITIES PROVIDED BY CLOUDATCOST TO THE CUSTOMER, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THOSE RELATING TO: (I) FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES; (II) NETWORK TRANSMISSION CAPACITY; (III) THE SECURITY OF ANY TRANSACTION; (IV) THE FAULT TOLERANCE OF THE SERVICES OR THE SUITABILITY OF SAME FOR HIGH RISK ACTIVITIES; OR (V) THE RELIABILITY OR COMPATIBILITY OF THE CLOUDATCOST FACILITIES AND EQUIPMENT OR SOFTWARE OF THIRD PARTIES WHICH MAY BE UTILIZED BY CLOUDATCOST IN PROVIDING, OR BY THE CUSTOMER IN USING, THE SERVICES, AND ALL WARRANTIES, REPRESENTATIONS AND CONDITIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, HEREBY EXCLUDED. THE CUSTOMER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT IS HAS NOT RELIED UPON ANY REPRESENTATION, WARRANTY, CONDITION OR GUARANTEE MADE BY CLOUDATCOST.
This clause is not business, but fraud mascarading as business
Digital ocean is great for things that don’t matter. Just had a nightmare of a time with them as well when they deleted one of my servers with no explanation. Back ups man. All you can count on. Not hosting providers.
I haven’t used my server in a little while, but the HD has been steadily filling up. Nothing is running except SSH, so it’s definitely not some run-away process. I’m not even running a webserver, and no logs are being generated…
Anyway, AVOID CLOUDATCOST.COM! I use AWS and DigitalOcean and they’re great.
AWS pricing is very unpredictable, I was hoping to see some competition in this space with CAC – that will make these guys pull their socks up
I am so glad someone more technical like you was able to articulate problems we’ve all been having. So, *** I whole heatedly thank you!!!!! ***
Have you seen how slimy they’ve gotten with the new terms and conditions!!! They slipped those in!!
Can you also share how you manage multiple VM’s, and trying SSH in, I cant get any access on Debian on Ubuntu, any suggestions!
I see my tweets among your screenshots. I wrote up a similar article here:
http://ingy.ca/cloudatcost-review-how-not-to-do-customer-service/
I think I’m going to update it soon with a link here as you have done a very nice job explaining things.
After spending thousands, I wish there was a way to file a BBB report in the US against cloudatcost – these servers are heavily overcrowded.
, I am so glad you put up stats. When I create tickets, they say this is normal !!! I get 30kbps now after 3 months of service, some VM’s do not even connect
Thanks for this review I will stay with digitalocean
i wish i had taken your advise before proceeding with them! i thought it’s a couple personnel sites, but still the amount of downtime…unexpectedly….it really was at a cost.
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I haven’t been able to log into my cloudatcost account for over a month and haven’t gotten a response after endless support tickets. They truly don’t care about their customers at all.
The pricing model is ” too good to be true” its basically a free service nothing wrong with what they are doing the company is legit just has no support and lots of downtime expect about 70 to 80% uptime which is not terrible for a test VPS
Do NOT buy from those CROOK, be warned!
CloudatCost runs servers with vulnerabilities, as such, many servers were compromised during the October attack. See, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30141582-PBX-Forget-about-using-Cloudatcost-as-virtual-PBX-or-any-other-server
Instead of assuming the responsibilty, those crook at CloudatCost took the hacking incidence as golden opportunity to unilaterally terminate the paid “lifetime” subscriptions.
Your server was hacked, and couple days later, CloudatCost terminated your “lifetime” account because you “willfully participated in the hacking of your own account”, LOL!
Click on the links below for the communications between me and the CloudatCost.
https://goo.gl/r6nvQv
https://goo.gl/Bqxp3N
https://goo.gl/O45Wpw
I am considering bring a class action lawsuit against those Cloudatcost crook. If your account is terminated by those crook using the same or similar excuses, please let me know.
Lawsuit? Really?
Absolute shittiest service. Figured it was kinda sketchy when it was only $35 for a small VPS for life and 50% off that.
I can’t even login to my account there at all and when I email them they DON’T reply at ALL!
I invested around $500 on servers and got a receipt and 3 servers I cant login to
They can’t do that. I’ll phone my lawyer. This is not in the Terms of Service I did nothing wrong. They are supposed to provide the security from their side I printed out their Terms of Service. That is fraud.
They are pretty good now:
https://i.gyazo.com/e12853118cc8169083e7ed47243fcfc2.png
Number 2 was down for 25 hours because I forgot to power it on that’s why the uptime is a bit lower.
Those are 30 day averages. I get similar results with VPS from OVH and AWS.
Do not use, they will continually close your ticket automatically without resolving it. My server has been down for over a month, stay away.
I’m having problems creating a server at all. I’ve opened 2 tickets regarding the problem error messages I was seeing during the creation of the servers, and they responded saying that they had resolved the issue, and they closed the ticket. After seeing that they resolved the issue, I went to create a server, and received a completely different error message. In all, this has wasted two weeks and I have nothing to show for it. At the moment, the open ticket has no response and I can’t create any servers. I bought a higher price package on the suggestion from a friend, but judging from the activity on this site, it seems I’ve made a mistake.
Just to let you know:
I paid and they simply ignored me, I did not receive anything in return. And they ignored BBB, and now I am going to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs. So as people say “your mileage may vary” with them.
I took a punt on the $35 with 50% off years ago. I paid for shitty service, expected shitty service, and got it.
I set up backups on day 1, expecting it to go away at any time. It’s still there, I still use it when I need it, I know better than to depend on it.
I had the “blank console”, raised a ticket, nothing for a week. Then they gave me commands to run (at the console!?) to fix it, and closed the ticket immediately. When I checked, the issue had gone away (booted into single user mode, disk repair, ok).
If you have zero expectations from a vps at $1/month, you’ll be ok.
I deleted a server, and did not get my resources back. I created a ticket on it, and they REMOVED it (not closed, they removed it).
I’ve opened about 7 tickets after that – still not getting anything back.
The service has been pretty reliable for me, especially considering you get the VPS for a lifetime for $35 or even cheaper during their sales. I don’t know what you expected from a relatively new company with dirt cheap pricing.
I had a VERY similar experience but didn’t document it like you did. My hosted site wasn’t that critical so I just move to digital ocean.
Cloud at cost are definitely fraudsters.