[freshwire]

Ask pretty much all members of this forum... they would not recommend offering any sort of service from the RPS.. playing .. yes I would agree.

[dansgalaxy]

I agree with everything said above

And this is the funny thing now, they seem to give the impression that RPS is just for playing... and yet now you have a £49 setup fee on a £9.99 (exc Tax) RPS!

[unnamed_crewman]

Hi,

I think this case sums up the rps service.

At the bottom end you have shared hosting - clearly slow for anything other than static sites, as you are in a massive cluster with millions of other sites (ovh claim to host 7.6m sites!) and fairly average powered servers.

If you want to grow your business you can go for the upgraded shared hosting offers but you are not going to see much improvement for database intensive sites as you are effectively using the same clusters.

The big benefit is that the system is fairly stable and because a lot will be affected they fix problems quickly.

If you want more performance you can go for rps but reliability becomes an issue and you are in a catch-22 situation - You are paying more for performance improvement, but getting a more risky service as they think you are not paying enough to warrant reliability.

Kimsufi seems to be a bit better, but their argument is still that you should pay for a full dedicated server in order to have reliability which is fine if you have deep pockets.

Everyone understands that 99% is the common level for reliability unless you spend a lot of money, but for a managed system like the rps surely you should expect to be up and running in less than 6 days! It is not as if you can do much to fix it yourself.

I think if you are selling on, you should have a backup - but that begs the question how to do it at this price point? Another rps? - could be on the same node. Shared hosting? As far as I can tell you can't IP failover to shared hosting so you would have to copy everything and reset the DNS, but for how long? As you don't know the extent of the problem. VPS with another host (you can't IP failover so the same applies as for shared). Kimsufi or Dedicated? Why bother then with rps in the first place?

I think OVH seem to think that the rps set up is just for customers who want to play on the internet - it is virtually impossible to quantify loss from downtime unless you are a reseller or run an sales site.

Also, let us know why this fault in the RPS caused you a loss of money or such a big problem. we will first tell you that if you want guarantees on your server, and to host a proper 24x7 business application, get a pro server, not an RPS.

[dansgalaxy]

As I said, I am small and I simply dont have the finance to spend money I dont have... growing slowly.

Currently I have servers setup as a sort of chain backup.. Hosting server backs up to the shoutcast server and the shoutcast server backs up the the backup space i get with it.. (was backing up to my desktop pc)

[lukus001]

And I would point out that yes I was getting more than the server cost... but isnt that the point of business? Also I was running at pretty damn close to break even and all the additionally money gets sucked up by software licenses! So while the server costs £20 it actually costs me more like £40 to run at the end of the day.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're not allowed to run a service /make money /run a business...

What I am saying is, everyone knows there is a possibility of a hardware fault. Hosts can only offer 99% uptime because it is impossible to truely offer 100%. When you buy a server /dedicated server there is always that risk, 'a worse case scenario' where the server will go down.

For you, this happened sooner rather than later and technologies, such as IP failover help prevent this from becoming an issue.

Im unaware of the service you provide /how, but it could have been possible to have started with the lowest RPS package i.e. rps1 and have a second one to act as a backup.

You may have to charge a little more for increased reliablity but it will stop things like this happening. If you need more power you can upgrade the primar server, the backup server, providng it isnt a VPS service wouldnt necessairly need to be upgraded, it may run slow but the service will still be there.

By the time you upgraded to dedicated servers, you would only need a small number of servers to act as backorders /backups and a few storage units to keep users data backed up which is something you ideally need to do if you are offering a content hosting /streaming media service since you are being paid to ensure content delivery - unlike hosting /dedicated servers which can be abstracted as more of a raw service where they can charge for backups incase of attacks /hacking /curropted hard disks (which isnt anyone fualt and just nature) essentially a : "price without backups, prices with".

[dansgalaxy]

I was not expecting OVH to take on any liability for loss of clients...

And I would point out that yes I was getting more than the server cost... but isnt that the point of business? Also I was running at pretty damn close to break even and all the additionally money gets sucked up by software licenses! So while the server costs £20 it actually costs me more like £40 to run at the end of the day.

Also I was running the RPS as streaming only, I actually have another server I use for web hosting with another company, because I dare not host it with OVH because of problems like this.
I simply can't afford a pro server, and defiantly not with the setup fees, only reason i can just about scrape a Kimsufi is because i got heads up that the setup fees were going on so I ordered it about 12 hours before the setup fees went live and even no I have no clue how I am going to pay for everything in a month or so when my paypal starts running low.

[lukus001]

I was spending £20/m on this RPS it went offline for 6 days lost me 2 customers which were paying me 250% of the server cost and which were keeping my business out of the negative figures, im not making a loose and I brought a Kimsufi server to move everything over, so now I have a server which is costing me £5 more than before, I have lost almost £50/m in business and your telling me even if i did get compensation it could only be applied to the RPS... which is now on its 6th day of suspension because I now have the Kimsufi!

Is it really that hard to apologies and give me a free week on my Kimsufi as an apology for raping my business for a week?

Christ you guys are bloody hardwork.

ARGH!! *Storms off ranting about crappy service and customer support*

Not to sound like a ****, but you are complaining to OVH about downtime and yet, what have you done as a service provider to ensure reliability to your customers?

You just claimed you had two users paying £25 each (£50 total) for a box you pay £20 for? Not to mention any other possible users using the same box too.

I understand it is a small business, but you did not set yourself up with any backup plan /disaster recovery. You played the risk game of owning only one server to host services to which I hope, you did not also run your own website from.

Now OVH took 6 days to fix a problem that was at their end, which is a bit excessive, however it doesnt appear RPS offer an SLA? (even though it appears you might be getting compensation) Servers do go down and since you have no direct control over fixing those sort of problems, even if OVH are unable to fix it within a timely manner resulting in the SLA coming into play, that does not stop loss of clients /damage to business.

You need to put you own safe guards in place and, while 6days is debatable, I don't think you can argue your loss of clients /business as OVH fualt.

[dansgalaxy]

Sent.

[marks]

you can send it to customersupport@ovh.co.uk attention to me

[dansgalaxy]

This is the problem though.

Currently I don't think the Tech's have officially acknowledged my RPS was affected.

Even though it is by far no coincidence that when the iSCSI is offline (along with all the other affected RPS) so was mine.

It's caused some big problems for me, and while yes I know that the "pro" servers are better for business, but as I have barely any money in the business they simply cost too much and as I am only running a small streaming server the RPS was more than enough spec wise so no sense spending twice as much and paying a massive setup fee when RPS should be able to cope.

The problem with RPS is why I got the Kimsufi to avoid it because of the poor hard drive problems with RPS systems.

Its simply a matter of cost (and since the setup fees have come in there is now no chance of me getting any more servers from OVH)

What email is best to email everything to then and at least attempt to scrape something back?

[marks]

of course you can request a compensation, only the response time for RPS is not guaranteed and there are no written compensations. But we are ready to listen to your case.

Basically, once the ticket is closed, send an email requesting the compensation, and pointing out in the ticket when the error was reported, what the problem turned up to be and when it was finally sorted. It's important to have all the steps detailed by email (on the phone, I had a quick look at the ticket and it didn't look very clear where the problem started, lasted for and ended).

Also, let us know why this fault in the RPS caused you a loss of money or such a big problem. we will first tell you that if you want guarantees on your server, and to host a proper 24x7 business application, get a pro server, not an RPS.

but if there was a really flagrant mistake in our side and that caused you such big trouble, we could consider the compensation. It's not very common in RPSes, but it's not impossible.

[dansgalaxy]

ARGH!

My RPS II went offline for almost 6 days loosing me 2 customers and putting my business from a small profit into a loss again, it took 4 days for bloody phone support to tell me "actually yea it probably is the iSCSI node" which had an incident.

The iSCSI node goes down on the friday... so does my server... my server wont boot and was in a reboot loop when i try to boot to the drive and suddenly when the iSCSI comes back online 6 days after it went down my server works fine!

And on the phone i got told i would be given compensation once the incident was closed, its been closed for a good few days now. call them up and basically got told o no you cant RPS is cheap

GRRR! It may be cheap to you but im a bloody tiny business and its a good amount of my out goings.

I was spending £20/m on this RPS it went offline for 6 days lost me 2 customers which were paying me 250% of the server cost and which were keeping my business out of the negative figures, im not making a loose and I brought a Kimsufi server to move everything over, so now I have a server which is costing me £5 more than before, I have lost almost £50/m in business and your telling me even if i did get compensation it could only be applied to the RPS... which is now on its 6th day of suspension because I now have the Kimsufi!

Is it really that hard to apologies and give me a free week on my Kimsufi as an apology for raping my business for a week?

Christ you guys are bloody hardwork.

ARGH!! *Storms off ranting about crappy service and customer support*