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Realtox Media: €30/year VPS, 16-hour Critical ticket, and a surprisingly spiritual relationship
I bought a Realtox Media VPS, Special 2 plan, for €30/year. At that price, I expected a cheap VPS. I did not expect a small German obstacle course.
Summary of the adventure:
- The VPS gets provisioned and I receive the setup emails.
- There are two different panels: the customer/billing area on one side, and the CCP on the other.
- The root password I initially received does not work over SSH.
- I try it several times, from different environments. It was not a typo.
- The CCP forces me to change the temporary password.
- I enter the current password and get:
invalid current password. - The available reset/change options do not fix the access problem either.
- After a few hours, the normal access path to the external CCP also stops working properly.
- I manually recover the direct CCP URL from emails/browser history.
- Result: no SSH, no panel, no reinstall, no root password change, no way to add an SSH key.
- The whole email and panel flow is also heavily German everywhere, except for the CCP, which does have an English option hidden somewhere in the archaeological layers. Sometimes I could switch to English; other times it was translator-in-hand mode. Very convenient when you're already trying to figure out why absolutely nothing lets you in.
- I open a ticket:
CRITICAL – New VPS unusable: root password and control panel password both rejected. - First human response: 15 hours and 53 minutes later.
- Support manually resets the CCP access and sends me a new password via Privnote.
- I get into the panel and find a root password different from the one I originally received.
- I try it over SSH.
- It works immediately.
- Support says they were able to log in using “the password provided in the panel”. Correct: that one worked. The one I originally received did not.
- Since then, the VPS has been working fine.
In the middle of all this, there was one rather perfect moment:
The VPS was online.
So was I.
Our relationship, however, was purely spiritual.
…
And now the important part:
For €30/year, this VPS can make perfect sense for a lab, testing, or non-critical services.
That is not the problem.
The problem is that a freshly provisioned VPS became completely inaccessible because of a credentials/panel issue, and a ticket marked Critical took almost 16 hours to get a human response.
If that happens with something genuinely critical, you do not have a server. You have a remote paperweight with an IPv4 address.
…
After the manual reset, everything worked, and Lemmy is still alive and happy.
And after that kind of birth, I have actually grown a bit fond of it.
That said, for anything that depends on fast support, my confidence is currently at roughly the same level as that first root password.
Comments
No need to spam multiple topics
Why not create another topic later where you tell us about the performance with a yabs report?
btw, how is that CRITICAL, when you literally just bought the VPS and have no data on it and didn't interact with?
are you high?
The only critical in OP’s post is about his lack of critical thinking skills
i dunno, my policy is if the provider trips over their own dick right from the start i probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the patience to walk them thru how to sell vps, so i'm just opting out and they can learn their new trade with someone else's time and money.
also realtox name didn't give me any good vibes so i wasn't buying anything from them anyway.
It's a german provider and their entire website is in German. What made you expect that anything would be in anything other than German?
If something is genuinely critical, you do not run it on a €30/year vps with a lowend provider.
Here's some behind the scenes advice, after doing support for a decade. If a customer puts a label of "Critical/Urgent/ASAP/etc" it's 10000% treated as lower priority than ANYTHING else.
Why? Because 9 out of 10 customers use that tag for attention or issues that are 110% non-critical/urgent/asap. I recall a customer tagging absolutely all of their tickets with URGENT. Their issues varied from a misspelled name on the invoice (their fault) to a server being down (their fault, they shut it down...). Not a single one of their tickets was truly urgent.
TL;DR: we get desensitized to "critical/urgent" tags.
But yeah, if a provider would gaslight me like that, I'd go for a refund.
I've had a couple of entry-level VPSes with them, one a couple of years ago (since canceled) and one now (not to be renewed)
Both of my VPSes sometimes exhibited odd behavior with respect to installation and updates, but I didn't really have the motivation to investigate further (nor do I recall the exact details)
That said, it seems that a number of users here have had a positive experience with them
Unfortunately, @RealtoxMedia is banned from the forum for having spammed in the past