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Up-Network.CH (UP-NETWORK Sàrl) Review, or How I Left After 97% Uptime and Their Abuse Handling
Up-Network.CH (UP-NETWORK Sàrl) Review, or How I Left After 97% Uptime and Their Abuse Handling
I think it is time to share my experience with UP-NETWORK.
About six months ago, I was looking for a Swiss provider, and UP-NETWORK caught my attention as a company presenting itself as relatively supportive of the concept of free speech. I did not want to rely solely on other people's reviews, so before ordering I contacted them directly to clarify their position. The answer I received gave me the clear impression that, broadly speaking, they were comfortable with lawful but potentially controversial content, and that actual court decisions were the meaningful red line. That sounded reasonable to me, so I ordered.
As it turned out, that was far from the first serious problem. The first problem was infrastructure reliability.
Their network went down, VPS hosts went down, guest machines went down, and the public status page did not give an accurate picture of the real availability I was seeing from external monitoring. This distinction matters because a provider can have a green network monitor while an individual hypervisor or VPS guest is completely unreachable. In my experience, that is exactly why their public status page looked materially better than the service I was actually receiving.
There were several outages around the end of August and during September. One of them was especially impressive: a major power-related outage that my external monitoring recorded as lasting more than 6 hours. The provider later published a bulletin describing the incident as affecting only part of the infrastructure and presenting the effective downtime as much shorter than what my own UptimeRobot data recorded. My monitor does not care about PR wording. It simply checks whether the server answers, and according to that independent monitoring, the outage lasted more than 6 hours.
There was another issue that gradually became almost as irritating as the outages themselves: the way incidents were described afterwards. In my experience, some support responses and customer bulletins were not merely vague. They presented a materially better version of reality than what my own monitoring showed, and they did it with complete confidence. You can be looking at more than six hours of downtime in UptimeRobot while the provider tells you a much softer story about what happened, how many systems were affected, and for how long. At some point this stops feeling like normal corporate PR and starts feeling insulting. The implicit message seems to be: don't trust your monitoring, don't trust what you actually observed, trust our bulletin, everything was much better than it looked, now smile and keep paying.
That is a terrible way to communicate with technically competent customers. I run infrastructure. I understand the difference between a network outage, a routing problem, a host failure, a guest failure, and a total loss of service. If my monitoring says a machine was unreachable for more than six hours, I am not going to pretend it was a two-hour incident because the provider's bulletin uses nicer wording. This was probably one of the most irritating parts of the entire experience: the feeling that the customer is being treated as if he is too stupid to understand what is actually happening. You are apparently expected to eat the official explanation with a big spoon, smile, and continue paying the invoice.
Eventually the relationship started to remind me a little of the human batteries in The Matrix. You are useful primarily because you keep supplying energy. Except here, the energy is your monthly payment. Your job is apparently to remain connected to the billing system, consume whatever explanation is provided, and not ask too many uncomfortable questions. It is a funny analogy, but that is genuinely what the customer relationship started to feel like.
My independently measured uptime during the relevant period was approximately 97%. Ninety-seven percent. In 2026. For a VPS provider in Switzerland.
I have seen $2-$4 VPS services in Eastern Europe with dramatically better availability. I have seen machines in far less prestigious infrastructure environments stay online more reliably than this.
At some point I asked a very simple question: what Tier is the datacenter? The answer was essentially: none that they could state. I also asked about SLA. There was no meaningful standard SLA included with the normal service. Stronger SLA arrangements were available separately and at a much higher price.
After a multi-hour blackout, being told that the serious SLA is a premium product does not exactly inspire confidence. An SLA does not generate electricity, it does not magically create redundancy, and it does not prevent a datacenter from going dark. So by that point I was already seriously questioning why I was paying for the service.
Then came the issue that finally made me leave: the way their abuse procedure actually works in practice.
A private company sent UP-NETWORK a legal complaint concerning my project. It was not a court judgment, not an injunction, and not an order from a Swiss authority. It was a letter written by lawyers representing a private company.
I did not ignore it. Our lawyer submitted a detailed written response addressing both the technical and legal claims. Among other things, he explained that the website itself was hosted elsewhere, that the files being complained about were not physically stored on the UP-NETWORK VPS, and that the IP involved was functioning as a network endpoint rather than as the physical file repository alleged in the complaint.
What happened next is, in my opinion, much more serious than simply "a provider disagreed with a customer."
UP-NETWORK did not meaningfully rebut our arguments. They did not identify which technical statements they believed were false. They did not explain why our technical explanation was wrong. They did not show how they had independently verified the complainant's allegations. They did not provide a court order. They did not provide any meaningful analysis showing why our objections had been rejected.
Instead, the complaint was effectively accepted as sufficient, and the process moved directly toward suspension.
That is not a transparent abuse procedure.
A legitimate abuse process should not consist of receiving an allegation from one private party, forwarding it to the customer, receiving a detailed rebuttal, ignoring the substance of that rebuttal, and then simply announcing the outcome.
If the provider believes the customer is wrong, fine. Explain why.
If a specific clause of the ToS has been violated, identify the conduct and explain how it violates that clause.
If the provider believes a particular piece of content is unlawful, identify it and explain the legal and factual basis for that conclusion.
If the provider is acting solely because it does not want the commercial or legal risk, say so directly.
What we received instead was essentially a conclusion without a meaningful examination of the defense.
In my view, that process is opaque, procedurally improper, and legally questionable. It also appears inconsistent with the kind of notice-and-response process a hosting provider claims to operate and with the provider's own published contractual framework.
The important point here is not whether UP-NETWORK has the contractual ability to terminate a service. Of course a private provider has contractual rights. The issue is how they reach the conclusion that a customer has engaged in "unlawful" or "abusive" activity when the underlying facts are disputed and the customer has submitted a substantive rebuttal.
Simply repeating article numbers from a ToS does not magically turn a private allegation into a proven violation.
And a letter from a lawyer does not become a judgment just because it is printed on expensive letterhead.
The complainant in my case even specified deadlines and expected the provider to report back on the actions taken. From the customer's point of view, that creates a very uncomfortable impression: a private third party can send a sufficiently authoritative-looking PDF, define what it wants done and by when, and the infrastructure provider may effectively enforce that demand before any independent authority has determined whether the underlying allegations are correct.
That is a serious procedural problem.
The most troubling part was not that UP-NETWORK disagreed with us. They are perfectly entitled to disagree.
The problem was that they never actually explained why.
Our detailed response was left substantially unanswered while the complainant's assertions were treated as sufficient grounds for action. There was no visible balancing of the two positions and no meaningful reasoning provided to the customer.
If there is a genuine copyright or other legal dispute, there is a well-established institution designed to determine which party is right: a court.
The rights holder is entirely free to sue us. I have absolutely no problem with that. Both parties can submit evidence, technical experts can explain the architecture, lawyers can argue the law, and an independent judge can reach a decision.
That is very different from an infrastructure provider effectively producing the practical result first while leaving the underlying dispute unresolved.
At that point I was done. I deleted the VPS myself. I am not asking them to restore it.
Between approximately 97% measured uptime, repeated outages, a status page that did not reflect my real-world availability, support communications that repeatedly presented a more favorable picture than my independent monitoring, no meaningful standard SLA, no stated Tier classification, and an abuse procedure that I found opaque, one-sided, and unsupported by any meaningful explanation of why our objections had been rejected, there was simply no reason left for me to stay.
So this is my six-month UP-NETWORK review: I became a customer expecting reliable Swiss infrastructure and a professional approach. I left because the infrastructure reliability was poor, the communication around outages undermined my confidence in the provider, and the abuse-handling procedure ultimately destroyed what trust remained.
A provider can have technical failures. Hardware fails, power fails, networks fail. That happens. What is much harder to forgive is when the customer can see one reality in his own monitoring while support confidently presents another, and when a serious legal dispute is handled through an opaque process where one side's allegations appear to be accepted while the other side's detailed objections remain substantially unanswered.
At that point, you no longer have only an uptime problem.
You have a credibility problem.
For me, the "Swiss" label ultimately added neither the reliability, transparency, nor procedural safeguards I expected.
Even if the VPS itself were free, I would not use this service again for anything important.
Comments
A company being swiss means nothing.
tldr please
Network failed and abuse handling was not great
P.S. from rpqu: OP is rich and can afford lawyers answering a complaint from lawyers
Don't forget the lawyer-layer.
No, that’s not it. Low uptime, worse than some non-DMCA hosts in Africa, and abuse handling based on street rules rather than their own ToS or the laws they keep citing.
They don't owe you any explanation, if they believe you are a problematic customer they
have the right to terminate your services.
No. They say they are not a court and do not make any decisions. But in practice, they do make decisions without providing any justification, and they keep the money. If the second part is consistent with their ToS, the first one directly contradicts it. They are not following their own ToS.
I left them of my own accord.
You said you got suspended:
The file they sent, which came from a private company rather than any government authority or court, required them to take certain action against me by September 9 and report back on the steps they had taken.
I left earlier, on September 8, and deleted the entire server, because it became clear that they simply comply with any PDF sent by any company. They treat those demands as if they were orders, which is completely absurd.
Most providers, unless specifically advertised as DMCA-friendly, will treat any abuse complaint as valid and will ask you to resolve it. I don't think they are different than other
"standard" EU providers in this case. They don't care if the file is physically hosted on their
servers or not, when you set it up as a reverse proxy it essentially means the same.
The DMCA does not apply in Switzerland. All claims submitted against us were rejected in full, with detailed legal and factual reasoning.
We submitted a comprehensive and reasoned response addressing the relevant provisions of UP-NETWORK’s Terms of Use and Terms of Sale, the Swiss Federal Copyright Act, the applicable DMCA notice-and-takedown framework, including 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), § 512(d), and § 512(f), as well as the Swico Hosting Code of Conduct. It specifically addressed the applicable notice requirements, the customer’s right to respond, the legal threshold for blocking or suspending services, and the provider’s obligation to explain the factual and legal grounds for its decision.
Their actions have no proper legal basis. Our position was prepared by our lawyer, who works for a Swiss company. As others have correctly pointed out above, UP-NETWORK appears to be getting rid of an inconvenient customer simply because they are afraid of a situation where one Swiss company may end up in a legal dispute with another.
For us, however, there is little point in taking legal action against them. Their uptime is poor, they provide no SLA, and they mislead customers about downtime and other service issues. A hosting provider like this is simply not worth using, even for free. I only want other people to know what they may encounter with this provider, what they can realistically expect from them, and what they cannot.
I’ve been using their cheapest VPS for 4 months now.
Since I don’t host anything truly critical on the server, the current situation suits me just fine for now.
Especially since it’s hard to find a purely Swiss hosting provider that:
1. isn’t a reseller;
2. doesn’t require KYC;
3. accepts Bitcoin Lightning;
4. costs less than $4/month for 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM.
Plus, they’ve been in business for just over a year; I think every hosting provider faces various issues in the beginning - the main thing is that they learn from them afterward.
In my case, everything was fine for the first 3 months, then they botched an update to the virtualization software (30 minutes of downtime), then there was some issue with the weather (the server was actually down for 1 hour and 10 minutes, not 6 hours like the OP mentioned), and the most recent downtime was related to disk storage (35 minutes of downtime).
UptimeRobot stats:
However, about 6 hours after their last incident, the Linux kernel started reporting disk write errors, and shortly thereafter switched the ext4 filesystem to read-only mode. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, the hosting provider managed to reboot the VPS before I could (lol).
So the last incident actually lasted much longer.
My data seems to be fine (in any case, I have daily backups).
Tomorrow they’ll be performing maintenance and will shut down the servers for 4 hours. They also wrote:
As for the OP’s problem with abuse, I can’t say anything about it - I just hope I don’t run into that situation myself
Here is the information about their Tier level and SLA, directly from the source. I’m providing it as a screenshot so there is no doubt that the wording has not been altered or manipulated.
Well, I agree that a provider should be evaluated in the context of its pricing. So let’s talk about that and take a closer look.
Suppose someone is looking for hosting for a simple homepage or a chatbot. Let’s also assume that 97% uptime is acceptable to them. After all, the VPS Basic S costs only $2.80 per month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, and 20 GB of storage. Cheap? At first glance, it certainly looks cheap and attractive. But let’s look a little closer.
Their data center has no disclosed Tier certification, or more precisely, they simply do not disclose its Tier. If you want your server to be down for only two hours during a power outage instead of six, you need to pay an additional $12.40 per month for the HA option.
That immediately moves your VPS into the roughly $16/month price range, or around $17/month during the first year once the setup fee is taken into account. And at $17 per month, there is a HUGE selection of excellent VPS providers whose uptime does not routinely fall below 99.97%. And for that kind of money, there are providers you may never need to contact support at all, for years. That is much better than opening three tickets in ten days and then getting answers that are only half true.
There is also an $11 setup fee. That means a VPS advertised at $2.80 per month effectively costs about $3.90 per month during the first year.
And if you also have to pay European VAT, around 19% in many cases, even the cheapest VPS ends up costing closer to $5 per month, while that $17 option turns into roughly $20.50.
All of these plans come without backups and without any additional storage where you could even store them. If you need backups, that is at least another $6.20 per month. Meanwhile, there are providers that include a small backup disk at no extra charge.
So overall, there is really nothing exceptionally cheap here. The pricing is fairly normal. It is neither unusually expensive nor particularly cheap.