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Is it common for providers to downgrade a server to a more expensive plan without disclosing it?
tl;dr the VPS was largely unusable because of hardware and connection issues; data was wiped at least twice because of provider issues; and then the service provider downgraded the VPS specs and switched me to another plan that was more expensive and on a different payment term without telling me until they were confronted about what they were doing.
I signed up for an VPS with annual term and recurring discount and have held off posting about this because I hoped the provider would make things right. However, after many issues with the service since early on and them sneakily rebuilding my VPS with fewer resources, they finally confirmed in writing that they are cancelling my annual prepaid plan, downgraded the specs I paid for, and changing me to a monthly plan that is much more expensive because it has better performance (i.e. apt-get upgrade doesn't take 30-90 minutes) and they can't give me the specs I paid for on the node they moved me to. They was only confirmed that they had downgraded me to a more expensive plan after I explicitly asked them if that was their intention because I saw a new invoice pop up for my already-prepaid server and the specs on my server had been downgraded for some time. Overall, I've had the server for just under 10 months (paid annually) and it was usable for a total of maybe 5 months.
To be clear, this had nothing to do with me overusing or abusing resources - I have not even used it for a large chunk of my prepaid term. It has been either unusable due to a variety of connection issues and hardware issues or empty because my VPS data was lost at least twice because of the service provider. It was lost at least once due to hardware failure and another time because the service provider apparently assumed my VPS was idle and didn't migrate it during their data center migration, even though it was actively running several of my services and was full of data up until they took their servers offline to move them.
I have not even used the VPS since their migration in June because the container was unusable and I was going back and forth waiting for them to fix it and hoping they'd make things right. It didn't make much sense to set everything up again if they might wipe it again when recreating my VPS container correctly. For example, after they wiped my VPS in June (they proudly advertised that migration here as being successful without any data loss), and later rebuilt an empty container because they didn't realize this had happened, the basic terminal was laggy with the VPS idling, apt-get upgrade took 30-90 minutes, and I discovered the disk speed was below 5MB/s in Geekbench.
So...is this common? Even considering who the provider is (if you're reading this and a name popped into your mind, you probably guessed right), I was disappointed at how poorly they handled this. Especially with sneakily unilaterally changing terms of service to short me on the resources that had been paid for without disclosing that they had done this. I was also disappointed because, despite all of the prior issues, the service had been usable enough for a few months prior to the most recent data loss in June and I would have been content to continue letting it chug along like that.
Comments
So.... who was the provider?
What the point of this post if you're not going to share the name
definite uncommon. You have the rights to publish their name for us to avoid. Losing Customer data when migrate is too bad
Scam artist?
Please disclose the provider so others can make informed decisions
Oh, sorry, I hadn't included the name because I was mainly interested in getting some external perspective on the frustrating situation.
The host is iHostArt.
hahaha It's Calin? Alright, there will be some joke then. Have fun with Calin
TBH, I was prepared for some speed bumps and had very low expectations, but this experience has really been special.
this shit too long
can someone sum for me without using AI tool
Lol didnt he recently scam someone on here?
chatgpt sum
(I signed up for an annual VPS plan, but the provider downgraded my server's specs without informing me and switched me to a more expensive monthly plan. The service was unusable for much of the 10 months due to data loss and poor performance. Despite my efforts to resolve it, the provider handled the situation poorly and changed the terms without proper notice.)
tl;dr the VPS was largely unusable because of hardware and connection issues; data was wiped at least twice because of provider issues; and then the service provider downgraded the VPS specs, switched me to another plan that was more expensive without telling me until they were confronted about what they were doing.
name and shame
scroll up
"downgrading" usually is used in a technical context, e.g. moving a VM to a less powerful host.
Re your question: something like that is less rare than one would like to think - but one should not be misguided by subjective perception. Increasing the price for a product after a while, for instance, is not that uncommon, nor is somewhat downgrading a product for some reason like e.g. raising costs of one or more elements.
If you really want answers to your question I suggest to complement you wall of text OP by one with clear and well visible facts.
im blind af thank you
Lol
He recently scammed someone out of $20k; compared to that, it’s nothing.
Multiple specs were downgraded - off the top of my head, disk space and bandwidth stand out.
Price increase is one thing, but that usually happens with some disclosure to the customer and without changing the specs (as above) or payment term (he changed annual to monthly).
Edit: thanks for the reminder, I added a tl;dr to the original post
tagging @Calin
I haven't followed the situation closely but from my glances the DDoS should have been resolved a couple weeks ago, no? Anyway no, a forced downgrade on a prepaid server is not normal.
$10 yearly plan ?
@Calin more drama?
DDoS is up to the attacker, they haven't attacked for a while now, but Calin did some mitigation with a third party provider in Frankfurt. Mitigation was a disaster at the start but eventually got quite good, to the point of barely noticing it (I had an SSH connection active, and it didn't drop even if the protection flipped multiple times)
Hello , possible please leave a email to PM? @user123
I thing I'm know who are you but I'm want investigate this , I know about a client who wrote quite a lot about I/O problems, so I moved him to another node, which unfortunately did not have that active annual plan, in order not to oversell I moved that VPS, and if you checked, I gave you extra months as well as the difference
Regards
It sounds like there might have been multiple users who had issues, because other than moving me to a different node, the response you describe is not the response I received.
You explicitly confirmed the date as not having changed and my account shows the original end date. (In the ticket, your last response actually stated the end/renewal date as being several days earlier than the originally listed one, but I think it was just an unintentional error in typing or recall, since your previous response specified the correct original date). Responses to my ticket tended to ignore my requests to correct the missing resources and certainly did not suggest you would provide anything like extra time to make up for the issues I encountered - data being lost, server being unusable, reduced specs, etc.
My account even had an additional monthly invoice created. It was only after I asked about that invoice - and reiterated which resources on the plan I had signed up for were still missing from my account after months - that you removed the invoice and told me (for the first time) you had changed my payment amount, term, and the resources on my plan.
I will DM you the relevant ticket number for the post-migration issues.
Edit: DMd you the ticket number.
There were times when the DDoS/connection issue was the problem, but I don't think it was the predominant driver of the issues overall.
No, it's not normal nor acceptable. Acceptable would be after the first year term is done and when you want to extend it provider says: we sorry, we can't, that was promo/our cost skyrocket/we need to feed one more children/shits unstable etc and we only have monthly plans now.
However if it's Calin you are out of luck and you can do nothing. Just be grateful it's like 20$ not 22.5k$.
Is it common? No. Oh wait, your hosting provider is Ihostart you say? Then yes, apparently.
Definitely uncommon, and completely unacceptable.