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My 48 hours with CHVPS
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My 48 hours with CHVPS

swsnyderswsnyder Member
edited December 2011 in Providers

My 48 hours with CHVPS:

  1. Their website said setup would be within 12 hours. After I placed my order (paid via 2checkout.com) and 12 hours had elapsed with no contact I asked them about the status, and was told that it was on track. Oh, well, it's not so urgent. After another 6 hours I checked the status and saw that the service was marked Active, with my account having an Unpaid balance and an active invoice. I opened a ticket saying I was concerned about what looked like my account being unpaid. The next day I got an e-mail saying they had "found" my payment.

  2. With the VPS now accessible, I went to the SolusVM control panel and saw: "Operating System CentOS 5 32bit." That's not right, but it wouldn't be the first time I've seen the description of the VPS be out of sync with reality. I logged into my newly-accessible VPS and saw 2 things immediately. First, it actually was the 32-bit version of Centos v5, not the 64-bit version that was both recommended by chvps.com and which I had ordered. Second, /proc/cpuinfo showed a single 800Mhz processor (I subsequently saw it vary between 800MHz and 1200MHz).

  3. Opened a ticket entitled "Requesting 64-bit OS" in which I asked for what I ordered: the 64-bit version of CentOS v5. Six hours later, I got a response: a tech notifying me that he had re-installed my VPS and that I could do that myself in future. I checked and saw it was still 32-bit. God Dammit! I hate it when the tech doesn't actually read the ticket! I spend a lot of time and effort to communicate clearly, can't they spend a little time to read what was written? I replied back to repeat the requested action. Still waiting for a response.

  4. The VPS seems slow, with unexpected pauses in use. But what's bottlenecked? I'm fine with poor disk I/O, but being regularly choked on network and/or CPU use will be a problem. Will require some use to determine where the problem is.

  5. This VPS is said to be in Switzerland, yet GeoIP (www.geoip.co.uk) says it's in the Russian Federation. The system is configured for the MSK timezone, which is apparently short for "Moscow Standard Time." Hmmmm. I have no preference between Russia/Switzerland, but the discrepancy further undermines my confidence in chvps.com.

  6. The installed OS is CentOS v5.3, which means it's 2+ years behind in security and bug fixes. Not a problem, but re-installing the VPS will also mean re-upgrading 135 packages (85MB). Download of the updates is fast but installation is slow, which suggests that the slowness isn't in the networking. That's good.

  7. The 2 configured name server appear not to support DNSSEC. The first one is fast, with responses below 10 milliseconds. The second one is is slow, taking 680ms for the initial query of "isc.org" and 314ms for the 2nd (cached) query.

  8. The VPS just rebooted. Not crashed, but a controlled reboot. Could it be that they are finally replacing the 32-bit OS with the 64-bit version I ordered? Uh, no. I log back in to find the virgin 32-bit CentOS v5.3. My VPS has been reinstalled. I expect I will soon get an e-mail reporting the completion of the tech support ticket. Morons.

  9. Just got this:

I have re installed your VPS with Centos 5, please note that we have two centos 5 templates, one which is 32 bits, and other which is architechture independent, basically it can handle 32-64 bits applications. The only difference with the 32 and 64 Bits architechture, is the amount of ram that the server can handle, in this case your VPS will hold a max os 1GB of RAM.

I have re installed your server all over again from scratch with the 64-Bit version of Centos.
Please let us know if there anything else we can help you set up from here, we will gladly assist you.

This would be the output your would get however, IT IS 64-Bits, not 32

#uname -a
Linux XXXXXXXXXXXXAFW.privatelayer.ch 2.6.32-042stab037.1 #1 SMP Fri Sep 16 22:18:06 MSD 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

"architechture independent"? The filesystem in this container has neither /lib64/ nor /usr/lib64/ directories. When I update the CentOS v5.3 packages they are all i386/i686, not a hint of anything that would suggest x86_64. How can it run 64-bit binaries without 64-bit system libraries? This VPS has a new IP address and root password, but other than that I see no differences from the original VPS I was given. Amazing.

Comments

  • Interesting.

    @swsnyder said: Morons.

    I have to admit that if I got to that level, I'd be heading out and canceling. But that's just me.

  • bretonbreton Member
    edited December 2011

    @swsnyder said: This VPS is said to be in Switzerland, yet GeoIP (www.geoip.co.uk) says it's in the Russian Federation. The system is configured for the MSK timezone, which is apparently short for "Moscow Standard Time." Hmmmm. I have no preference between Russia/Switzerland, but the discrepancy further undermines my confidence in chvps.com.

    Mind posting the IP or sending it with PM?

    @swsnyder said: The VPS seems slow, with unexpected pauses in use. But what's bottlenecked? I'm fine with poor disk I/O, but being regularly choked on network and/or CPU use will be a problem. Will require some use to determine where the problem is.

    So benchmark it.

    dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
    wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
    

    The only difference with the 32 and 64 Bits architechture, is the amount of ram that the server can handle

    Hahaha, oh wow.

  • Mind posting the IP or sending it with PM?

    81.17.21.242

  • @swsnyder said:

    81.17.21.242

    Nope, it's in Zurich.

  • @breton said: The system is configured for the MSK timezone, which is apparently short for "Moscow Standard Time."

    OpenVZ, right? The OVZ guys are Russian, and many of their released templates are MSK by default.

  • @swsnyder said: The only difference with the 32 and 64 Bits architechture, is the amount of ram that the server can handle, in this case your VPS will hold a max os 1GB of RAM.

    My god, seems they didnt even bother to ask google the difference between 32 and 64 bit.

    I would be asking for another person for tech support from the company, if their answer its similar, then run, run as fast as you can.

  • Doesn't look good :) I would quick get a refund and move away as quick as you can... :)

  • Signed up for them this week. VPS at first didn't work, then was down quite a bit. Logging in via ssh takes 15-60 seconds to connect and accept the password. Weird.

    My advice: Avoid.

  • My experience with them was bad as well. I had a 'stratos' vps with 10tb bw, and it was physically impossible to reach that because of the slow asfck network

  • My experience with them was bad as well. I had a 'stratos' vps with 10tb bw, and it was physically impossible to reach that because of the slow asfck network

    I too have a Stratos VPS. I pretty much regard the 10TB/month allotment as being unmetered bandwidth since there is no way that limit can ever be reached. To reach 10TB you'd have to push 3,768KB every second of the day, every day of the month. Between the downtime and the single 800MHz - 1200MHz CPU, there is no way that can be achieved.

    I've never seen the acronym "asfck" before. What does it mean?

  • asfck is not an acronym, it's 2 words joined together with u being dropped.

  • Is it a managed server? I'm surprised they installed OS for you if you can do it yourself. It's sad they don't know the difference between 32 and 64-bit tho.

    Default VPS timezone has nothing to do with server location.

    Slowness is "normal", it really depends on how much you're paying and for what.

    Try to load your CPU and see what /proc/cpuinfo says. Although a single core and 1GB RAM is a strange combination.

    All in all, it looks like a crappy host, but you're blaming them for everything which makes this "review" a bit biased. No offense, it's still a nice read.

  • Well i can confirm some of this things. My VPS is now 2 days unusable slow. The disc I/O (is this stil I/O?) is under 10kb/s... and tickets are closed without a comment. The mailservers from privatelayer are ... let me say... funny configured. HELO are localhost.localdomain or a very long not existing DNS name in the HELO and so on... i'm not going longer with that company, there are to much problems.

  • jenokjenok Member, Host Rep

    10kbs ? are you sure ? That even worse than my synology nas.

  • LOL, 10kbs? That's worse than IPAP!

  • I have the Cirrus 2 VPS with these guy's and I haven't had any major issues. Every now and then the Node restarts on it's own, but only lasts for seconds. It has been more stabilized for the past few days.. When I first went with them, I was on one of their Virtuizzo Nodes which was very terrible! The node was stable, but the control panel was not great. I then later told them they should switch to SolusVM and about 2 weeks later after suggesting SolusVM, they wanted to move my VPS to the new node. The migration only took about 30 minutes. I requested them to not loose any of my data but I did take backups just in case. The VPS was up within 30 minutes, but my data was lost. Glad I took those backups! Chvps's technical support has been great to me. The Node I am on is currently blocked by Spamhaus and they sent me a request for a new IP address that is not blocked.

  • The disc I/O (is this stil I/O?) is under 10kb/s...

    On Stratos VPS:

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
    1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 112.998 seconds, 9.5 MB/s

    $ dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=64k count=16k
    1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 70.5635 seconds, 15.2 MB/s

    Sad by contemporary standards, but disk I/O is a low priority for me.

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