Questions about what to expect with some of these deals

ekendra

Update: LetBox @key900 finally refunded my money.

Thanks for that. It doesn't replace the hours I spent configuring the server to my taste but at least I got my money back and can spend it with a more stable provider.

Thanks for everyone's comments and support.

willie

Wait, what? Person bought a YEAR of service and then 2 months in they were told to migrate in 14 days? No no no.

1. Don't ever expect anyone to do anything on less than 30 days unless it's an emergency.

2. Don't EOL a service if you can help it, while any plans are still active. That is, if you want to EOL that plan, it's preferable to just stop selling new ones and tell existing users that renewals won't be accepted. But if you can, let them use their existing plan until it expires. Exception: if person's plan expires in less than 30 days, allow a 30 day extension or renewal.

3. If you really do have to shut down a plan that hasn't expired, don't delete their data! They paid you to keep it for a year, so you have to keep it for a year, even if you backed out of the rest of your obligation which was to keep the plan running for that long.

AnthonySmith said: On the other hand, if your service has been down for 10 days and you only just notice, I have little sympathy

I don't agree with this. If I buy a 1 year plan it's partly so I can shut my eyes to it for a year instead of having to pay close attention to it. I have lots of cold archive storage (e.g. online.net C14) that I haven't accessed in months or maybe even years, and some VPS and dedis that I similarly use mostly for cold storage. If the service has been down for the past 10 days without them sending me an email, I will not have noticed.

And I might very easily go without checking email for 10 days while travelling. Unless someone is paying my salary they can't expect me to stay on top of their email. That's why I'd consider 30 days to be the reasonable minimum.

teamacc

@willie said:
Wait, what? Person bought a YEAR of service and then 2 months in they were told to migrate in 14 days? No no no.

It appears to have happened halfway through, right after the paypal 6 month chargeback period expired

Don't EOL a service if you can help it, while any plans are still active. That is, if you want to EOL that plan, it's preferable to just stop selling new ones and tell existing users that renewals won't be accepted. But if you can, let them use their existing plan until it expires. Exception: if person's plan expires in less than 30 days, allow a 30 day extension or renewal.

It was an LXC plan, it seems to me like @key900 was unable to fully secure LXC for production use (not sure on this, but seems likely), so some EOL-ing could even be preferred for the user.

3. If you really do have to shut down a plan that hasn't expired, don't delete their data! They paid you to keep it for a year, so you have to keep it for a year, even if you backed out of the rest of your obligation which was to keep the plan running for that long.

Yup, OP paid for a year worth of VPS. To have the provider AT LEAST keep a copy of his disk (he also paid for the storage after all) would be considered "good behavior".

Then again, OP has stated that he did not lose data, just configuration time.

IonSwitch_Stan

@ekendra Congratulations on getting your money back.

Since you are possibly looking at configuring a new server, can I suggest you take a look at Ansible? Ansible is one of the easiest/minimally invasive tools for Configuration Management. It lets you establish state for a server, such as installing Apache, copying configuration files into place, etc.

You then have the advantage of being able to migrate your server wherever you please without being concerned that there is a setup effort. You can quickly build test servers. You can be intentional about what files are configured how.

Every hypervisor and server IonSwitch operates uses Ansible (or a similar technology such as Puppet, Chef, etc that are a bit more complicated) to ensure state is maintained, and we are meaningful about the software we install, what versions, and how they are configured.