Why I moved my servers from ServerMania

Its true that Servermania had a very cheap VPS deal in which i had to pay only 88$ for a 4GB VPS for an year. But their policies are not transparent, and the support really really sucks!

[the_ad id=”11935″]

I started with them around two years ago, when I found their advertisement in one of the social media and signed up with them, their servers were fast and I had 5 usable IPs and it was perfect for me to host the few websites that I administer.

The first hiccup started around mid June 2015 that they suspended my server stating that ” I am saving backups in my server” and it is against their TOS. I was like eh! and here is the transcript. ( Ticket 92737 )

 
[the_ad id=”11935″]

Hello,

We have checked your VPS and you are storing backups which is against our fair
usage policies.  Data stored should be for website usage only.

You'll need to remove the backups and find a suitable external option for them.
-- 
Mike P.
Server Mania


Hello,

Its just cPanel backups, and its of 22Gb only. 

1. When you sold me cPanel license it was not told that I cannot use the feature
of cPanel which is used to take the backups here. Is it not evident that when
you sell the license for a service you support all the features of that software
? 

2. I am not seeing any such clause in your website that prohibits me from taking
the backups and saving in the server. If I am looking at the wrong page (
http://www.servermania.com/aup.htm and http://www.servermania.com/tos.htm )
Please guide me to the correct page where it is stated.

They have sold the server with cPanel and I was not told anything at that time and I was using the backup feature of cPanel which was perfectly fine.

Next happened when they have decided to take my server offline because of the ” SMTP connections ” . I had always set my cPanel so that the hourly emails sent by any domain in my server will be 100, and any other mails will be marked as frozen.  They have some primitive tool which counts the outbound connections towards port 25 to their gateway server / IP and blocks the server if it is beyond a threshold, which was always untrue.

They use to simply shutdown the server without any notice for ‘spamming’ and when asked for an evidence, they will never have any.

The last and final issue was when they suspended my server for ‘load’. and this was the evidence sent by them.  ( ticket 163256 )

It has come to our attention that your VPS server is using more than your fair
share of CPU resources. In order to prevent this from impacting your
neighbouring customers on the same node, we need you to investigate this as soon
as possible. 

In the meantime, we have unfortunately been forced to temporarily suspend your
VPS until we hear back from you. 

top - 03:38:45 up 28 days,  3:58,  0 users,  load average: 1.56, 1.42, 1.35

For my repeated questions, their tech Tylor responded to me like this

The load should not go above 1. However, I agree that the server was not in
significant enough violation to disable the server. Moving forward I will advise
the other technicians to not disable services under these circumstances.

Your services were running above the 1 load requirement allotted for your container

When I asked them this

My server have two procesors.  So a load of 1 means that the server is only at
the 50% of utilisation, as far as I understand linux. 

If your server cannot handle that much load, why you are selling it ?

[the_ad id=”11935″]
Tylor replied

As previously advised, I would not have personally suspended this container and
I apologize that it was. We can process an SLA credit for you for the 5 hours
downtime. Please advise if you would like to proceed with this.

My response

Now you are making it personal. 

I am not talking to Tylor or Mohammed  or Jared , but to Servermania. I dont
care who is doing it. When you are representing a company, they have to have
policies which everyone should follow before taking the server down - it should
not be a personal choice! Or you could send me a notice or make a phone call to
tell me that my server is overloading before taking the server down. That I what
I call professionalism.  

5 hours of down time for your staff's ignorance is not some thing that I can
accept. 

Yes, Please process the SLA credit. 

And please revoke your statement about the load averages and tell me a fair
estimate on how much load my server could handle.

Tylor’s response

I will forward this to billing. Your server should not surpass 2 load average.

Then I moved my servers away from them in a week.