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Am I unreasonable, or is my provider handling this badly?
I’ve been with my VPS provider for 1.5+ years on a 2-year prepaid contract. The server is just a small mail server with very low resource usage (around 20 GB traffic per month, almost no CPU usage).
Recently I needed more disk space, so I contacted support. They pointed me to their upgrade interface. When I selected additional storage, the displayed price was €0.00. I clicked the “continue” button and the space was ordered. (No “Buy Now”, “Place Order”, or anything similar.)
Immediately afterwards, I replied to my support ticket to warn them that something seemed wrong with their ordering system.
About 20 minutes later, the upgrade was applied. Shortly after that, support informed me that the €0.00 price was a mistake and asked whether I still wanted the upgrade at the real price.
I declined because it is ridiculously expensive: more than 25 EUR / Month for 500 GB NVME storage.
So far, fair enough.
The issue is that they now want to remove the extra storage, but claim that doing so would require a complete server reinstall on my side. They blame me for clicking a button!
After i asked for compensation for my time when reinstalling the system,
their proposed solution is to leave the extra storage active until my contract ends in six months. After that, I can either pay for the upgrade or reinstall/migrate the server myself. They also refused any compensation for the time this will eventually cost me.
From my perspective, I reported a flaw in their ordering system in good faith and expected either:
- An immediate rollback on their side, or
- Some goodwill gesture instead of being blamed for the mistake.
Am I being unreasonable here, or does this feel like poor customer handling to others as well?
Comments
The 6 months of free storage space seems reasonable to me, it gives plenty of time to prepare for a reinstall or to move to a different server.
just cancel and move on
You shouldn't have said anything and just enjoyed your free 500GB @OP
In all seriousness i understand your frustration but while a forced reinstall sure is shitty 6 months free seems to be kinda reasonable. I doubt that you'll get much more out of this but as @cybertech said there's always the option to just cancel and move on.
I'd consider this getting lucky!
Use for 6 months and move on
Small pro tip for lazy people: You should be able to shrink your root partition (including the fs) to something that fits your new dedi/vps (do it from rescue) and then just copy the disk image (something like
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/stdout bs=1M | gzip -9 | ssh root@new-host 'gunzip | dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sda bs=1M'from the rescue system of old-host while new-host is also in rescue). Doing that all you'll have to do is mount the disk on new-host and adjust the network settings. Shouldn't really take much more than 15-20 minutes (considering the transfer is reasonable fast).They "gave" that to me, when i asked> @totally_not_banned said:
Thanks! I've not expanded the partition. So that should work. Thanks for the tipp!
yea id take the extra space for 6 months free and let it go. now you have 6 months to find/test new host since you needed more space and this host was too expensive anyway, right?
(i think you're justifiably annoyed AND being unresaonable.)
The 6 months is enough a compensation. If you require a more flawless experience where there isn’t bugs like this every now and then you really can’t use LET providers.
Thank you for not naming and shaming the provider though.
It's acutaly NOT an LET provider, they have an account here but don't post offers.
There is no "shame" they reply friendly and calm and in the end you guys are rigth, i go with the free storage and move to a new provider in 6 month.
@Homwer You cannot shrink a disk on a KVM machine.
If the upgrade was automatic and already applied the change on the VM, then that's why they are telling you to reinstall. It's not a policy decision, it's a technical limitation.
I'd say that keeping the plan as-is for you until termination of the contract was the sensible decision on their side to satisfy the customer, and is enough of a compensation (150€ worth of service) for any annoyance the reinstall process may cause to you.
Kudos to them, that's the way to handle this.
Well, i'm pretty sure you can. It just needs cooperation from the guest's side and is a little hairy (tbh i don't know if that would work on qcow2 backed disks but for anything using raw images it should be pretty straight forward). You just need to be sure that there is nothing occupying the space at the end of the disk so can run
truncateor shrink the backing partition. Admittedly i wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't supported out of the box (even if just due to the need of having the client cooperate).No, you actually cannot, most commercial hypervisors (even Proxmox) won't even show an option you can only upscale, and for a good reason.
You CAN shrink the partition, if you're careful enough about the boundaries (the risk of dataloss is still there have to be extremely careful), but you wouldn't be able to shrink the virtual disk itself anyway.
If they're using LVM or ZFS, you could eventually manually force it to be smaller after resizing the partition internally, and also editing the VM config, but you can understand yourself that this is already too much, me as a provider, I would NEVER even give this option, I'm never ever taking this big of a responsibility on customer data even if I tell you the big warning that dataloss may occur.
The only other option that I personally would give, other than the reinstall, is to attach another virtual disk of the proper size and then offer to transfer the data to it (we'd just use dd), let you check that everything is fine, and then remove the wrong size disk.
Yeah, that's what i meant with not being surprised if it wasn't supported out of the box. In the end Proxmox is basically just a fancy frontend for qemu though so it doesn't really dictate what's possible and what's not.
Well, you certainly shouldn't mess up but if you know what you are doing there really isn't much risk at all (unless you aren't really there mentally or whatever). Outside of qcow2, where i don't really know how the format is constructed, virtual disk is nothing but a fancy term for file, partition and so on, so i don't really see why it shouldn't be possible to shrink it. Just truncate the file, shrink the backing partition, ...
In case of qcow2 the possible lack of tooling could also be bridged by first converting to raw and just truncating the result. Disks are pretty simple things (a bunch of sectors with ranges allocated by a partition table) and virtual or not doesn't really change a whole lot. If GPT is used it might complicate things a bit but in the end it should fully suffice to leave some empty space at the end and then rebuild the secondary table from the primary one.
Edit: If by virtual disk you mean the actual filesystem i semi agree. I mean it would theoretically be possible to run resize2fs on the image (obviously assuming the fs used is ext) but that's where cooperation from the guest's side of things would be preferable in my opinion.
Off-topic but reminds me of something happened to me last week.
I bought a router on Taobao and the next day I saw it ¥20 cheaper on JD (Both are from their official store). I wasn't happy but thinking it was my own fault for not waiting for another day before decided to purchase it.
It is all good but guess what, when the parcel arrived there's 5 routers delivered instead of 1 that I had ordered, somehow they made a mistake and send me 5. I don't need 5 nor I feel like taking advantage hence I contacted the customer support to return 4 of them, it took them a few hours before confirming that they did made a mistake. At the same time, I also requested for a refund of ¥20 if possible since it is cheaper on another platform.
Guess what, they come and pick up the 4 additional routers within an hour of confirming and yet refused to provide me with the ¥20 price difference refund.
Am I being unreasonable here to ask for the ¥20 given that I save them thousands, or does this feels like poor customer service?
at a minimum you should start a thread on LET about it
Poor customer service. Tripping over a dollar to pick up a penny.
@Homwer if you decide to move, DM me. Would like to have you test something assuming location/specs work and in return you'll end up with free and then discounted services.