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Ineptitude and Unprofessional Behavior at VortexNode
Update: I was offered a full refund.
See below for a response from Linovus.
Hello fellow cheapsk-- budget-conscious hosters!
This is my story of trying out a dedicated server offer from VortexNode (a Linovus company) which I found on LowEndBox.com back in February.
It's a story of frustration and annoyance with an ever growing litany of questionable behavior on their part, until my patience eventually runs out (after ~6 weeks) and I ask for a refund.
Here's a quick bucket list:
- emails they send have invalid DKIM (nitpick)
- took 3 weeks to actually provision the server
- root password set to "chgpass123!"
- they adjusted the billing date, but not the invoices (would have paid double)
- the provisioned server only uploads at speeds of 100-500KB/s (~30Mbps max) on a supposed 1Gbps "dedicated guaranteed" (according to their order page) port
- looks like the test server in their offering is not even in the same datacenter as the provisioned server (based on 15ms ping)
- after 2 weeks of prodding, speeds sometimes increased to ~300Mbps max
- complete unwillingness to admit any fault whatsoever, nor to fix their behavior
- probably intentional rate-limiting in violation of their service guarantees, and repeated lying about the fact
The following is a (much much) longer version of the above. I figure it makes sense to write it all up, because I'm making some serious accusations here. Unfortunately I apparently cant make such long posts here (it shows some cloudflare captcha which never loads), so I put it on pastebin:
The story: http://pastebin.com/raw/US3Jbv85
Here is the network-problem ticket, if you want to confirm what I'm saying (I've blacked out any names and IPs):
The ticket: http://imgur.com/a/8sK6R
I do have to say that they stayed mostly polite, up until the near the end anyway.
I asked for a refund, but I haven't heard back so far. I'm not optimistic.
Thoughts?
Comments
Nice root password.
You get some providers like that, acting like they know everything and every customer is an idiot.
Well, everything you have is put together well, hopefully you get your refund.
There's a lot of them.
For what it's worth, VN resells CC- and this:
time I switched the MAC address of the gateway. 300Mbps one moment,
50Mbps the next, and then again 300Mbps.
Pretty much conclusive evidence of traffic shaping to me. You'd get better information being upstream from VN, though- not that you're their client, so you likely won't get anywhere.
I like the folks at VN, and I've never had a problem with them being rude. If you "tested" by sending a shitload of ICMP at me, I doubt I'd be too happy either.
I've never found VN to be rude. They've been friendly and responsive to me, and the VPS that I have with them (KVM SSD Tier 1 xmas special) is very snappy. That said, they've had various technical glitches like non-working links on their web site, fitting the the general picture of a new provider still getting their operation up to speed. I don't hold that against them since they don't pretend to be something different.
They also had some kind of SSD failure on the node where my VPS with them was, so they had to clobber the VPS and replace it with an empty one, losing some data I had on it (not a lot). It's not real clear from the RFO quite what happened. I had two other VPS from two other providers fail the same week, so it seemed like a bad run of luck.
Yeah, it was kind of a desperate move. But I ran out of options, and I figured it's not that much traffic for a DC router.
Colo Crossing does that 300Mbps rate limiting when it sees X Mbps going out for Y seconds.
X and Y are definable with a ticket with a proof that you are not sending attacks, etc.
I find that feature useful since less UDP attacks = more happy internet.
The 300mbit limit seems to match the 100TB/month limit, although you'd have to use that pipe 100% 24/7 to reach that. And it's advertised as 1gbit, so that's another no-no.
I read about 70% of your interactions, seems fair enough.
@jbiloh your network seems to be letting your customers and customers customers down?
why do you have to register a new account for this thread?
show some balls and post it with your real account.
Btt: I can confirm the slow network speed, I asked for a refund the next day. And I received it a few days later.
Sorry, I didn't yet have an account here. I normally just browse the blog. I hope to post more in the future though.
Vortex really overadvertised on LET on previous months
I am actually surprised by the information you provided. I was just expecting another shitty drama thread.
Maybe @VortexMagnus can shed some light.
As for the ICMP traffic, it was a last resort @sirius tried to convince them. It's not like he DDOSed the infrastructure for the entire time, however the tier-2-guy acted like that was the case.
I just found their support pretty slow. They were all friendly though once they replied. I ended up just letting my server expire.
Please do - your writeup was excellent.
I went over the tickets out of curiosity. Can someone better versed in networking than me please explain how it was concluded that the shaping doesn't happen on one of the upstreams during the tests?
If you mean the MAC ID by upstream, they do the rate limiting by the MAC ID. Or if you not, I don't see a specific upstream is performing as it should (US test doing better is just the result of the single thread and latency).
Hey there.
First of all my apologies if you found the tech to be rude or the network to be a problem. I haven't heard of that particularly in Toronto but ok.. I own the parent company Linovus.
If you request a refund after a few days we wouldn't ever deny it. Requesting it after 6 weeks we normally would never would approve it but.. while I didn't read the entire pasted content it seems from the time you originally got the server you tried to tell us there was a problem.
So.. lets do this. We obviously want a problem free network. We also don't rate limit ad we don't use CC or in either Toronto location. If it looks like rate limiting, its not us. I don't know who you are so if you don't mind, open a new ticket starting with "Andre said to open this ticket and refer to this post... " and I will get your refund processed quickly (day or two - the techs cant do it billing has to). In that two days if your schedule permits help us to trouble shoot the issue if it is server, switch, gateway as much as you can if you have the time.
P.S. use of Andre said.. by some other chaps on here without me actually saying so would be a very unhelpful thing.
Thanks I'll open the ticket asap.
Andre's not very good at this it seems. Andre can take a look at the ticket image that was posted to learn the ticket number, wherein Andre can then learn who the client is.
@coolraul , can you get VortexMagnus to add super offers soon! haven't seen anything from him since a while. He does his best and we like that.
Ya hes a dolt. Too busy to wade through and check. Bad Andre.
But thanks Damian! You are super cool and I like you.
We are cooking something up..
Top of screenshot: VN-530321
He has already opened a ticket as suggested and been responded to or its being drafted now. I just spoke to one of the managers.
I rarely log into the support desk and action tickets myself so ticket numbers don't really help me. The team knows to reach me.
You have an awesome team. I hope to give you more of my money some day!
@coolraul Why does it take all this tooth pulling to get you'll to act. IF the managers knew how to get hold of you they should of escalated it if it beyond their control.
Hey, I have one of those and several of the other!
I can confirm all of those bullet points, and I'll have to check the speed.
Good to know they're reusing root passwords, and good to know that password can never be used again.