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Let's STOP provider's bad habit of changing your VPS location
Just yesterday I was browsing the thread about URPad migrating their Iceland (more expensive) location to USA (less expensive)... This is yet another painful migration for those who thought they are lucky to get an Iceland server for less. Well don't be mad to URPad, everybody is doing it! The list is long, really httpzoom, dotvps, vpscorner, versatileau, urpad... roughly about 50% of providers would eventually migrate their server either because of DDoS attacks, expensive bandwidth, merger or like in VPSCorner case, they would just disappear. Some would even advertise great yearly plans just so that they can get more customers and sell their company to someone who would then migrate their clients to a less expensive, useless to us location.
Well I opened this thread to ask what can be done against all that? What can be done here in LET? Thinking about it, few things come in mind:
1) Create disappearance fund (No!Not a fund that will disappear), which compensates customers of companies like VPSCorner or others when they close doors. Who will deposit into that fund? Every company that wants to post here. The way I see it in our community the only one who loses is the customer, so those who always win - the providers should split that losses. You may say some providers go bankrupt and they lose too, well that still depends on them, meaning they made the decisions that led to a loss. When a VPS provider stops working, it was not customer's fault, we did nothing to lead to that, so we should not be responsible.
2) Obviously most companies don't disappear, they just migrate your server to a better suiting location for them. In that case the rule should be - you want to post to LET? Then an obligatory refund should be offered to anybody for the remaining of their subscription if you migrate to a location that does not suit the customer.
3) Have more ideas? I'll be glad to hear it. I'm sure there are tons of reasons why 1) and 2) won't work, but hey, I think it's worth thinking about it, because it's an existing problem in continuously growing community.
Comments
Im sorry this is silly. You cant prevent this. And its not the legit providers fault either.
Its small money here. Perhaps if talking about dedi providers or racks etc
Do more research and buy from quality providers.
I'm sorry when have we ever force moved our VPS from one location to another? We've taken over other company's client bases and migrated them to our locations, but we've never (at least not in my memory) forced our VPS users to migrate more than 50 miles.
Secondly there's no way to prevent providers from doing a migration legally... I say that it's better that companies migrate their clients from unprofitable datacenters to more profitable ones than to outright close up shop...
I'm a satisfied client of @BlueVM, I even bought 2 new servers from them today. In no way I'm suggesting that they or the other companies did not offer quality service, quite the contrary (Except VPSCorner). I'm only addressing the change-location issue in general with all companies. Thank you for your opinions on the matter.
Sound like we need:
Risk management and
Insurance company
These services always make LEB no more LEB.
Let LEB always stay as LEB. Don't push it to premium, then it will lose it market as well.
Haha!
Please remove bluevm from that list. I was a happy client before and they never did anything like that.
@vpnarea unless I've missed something major and I need to do something major HTTPZoom has always had the same DC's.
I think the best part is where URPad migrated KVM to OpenVZ without telling people hoping they won't notice
My advice?
Before you pick a host and settle in, do your research. And guess what? Do more research.
Don't just rely on your host - some know the sense of ethics and value your data; while others will out-right leave you banging your head on your own keyboard.
Creating a fund is useless, sorry, but I am not going to "donate" money because a competitor leaves the market. We barely make profit as it is.
Regards
WOW!
From what I understand there was very good reasoning behind this, and it wasn't migrating KVM customers from another provider to a OpenVZ VPS at URPad.
Yes, that happens when you use rented IP space.... or a provider with rented hardware at all.
Someone remembers our Italy (Intra city, in Milan) migration? It was perfectly timed, stop BGP, sync, CDLAN starts announce, total downtime not even 2 hours (which is already very bad, but for a long planned maintenance with the intention to provide way better service not bad).
Same in HK, seamless migration from SunnyVision to HV, they picked up the box in the old DC, i called the Tier1s and withdrew the SunnyVision LOA and a few* hours later back online.
You know that I am a mostly happy customer of yours, but my experience differs. I think it was when you moved to ColoCrossing, I had KVM VPSes in Los Angeles and Atlanta that were moved to Buffalo, and I was more than a little grumpy about that at the time.
@william, he's talking about providers moving DC's etc. and therefore you would be a provider included in his complaint.
Moves are to be avoided in any case, yes, we had a total of 3 (and an IP migration in Austria) but they are not really any comparsion to an overnight, renumbered move from one part of the world, from a country where you buy a VPS for a reason to the USA...
Italy was first with an Austrian company that lacked any local peering and backhauled to Vienna mainly. We moved in a 4 week time window without renumbering (some 16 VPS excluded with ISP IPs) to provide a better network. Same city, move was done in some hours (i am not sure where CDLAN actually colocates right on the spot, but we moved out of the KPN Milano DC).
Yes, SunnyVision was a deep failure, i regret it much - The move was done after a lot of issues with useless BW (even local!), seriously strange tactics to gain money (10Mbit dedicated HE for $800, USD!) and the "DDoS Protection" nullrouting even 20kPPS to a much better DC coordinated with them to pick up the server and place it in the new DC.
Migration was planned and done in 2 weeks, no renumbering was needed (but some calls to upstreams because SV did not remove the announce), downtime was a few hours.
We moved our internal hardware from our DC in Graz to Vienna to benefit of lower latency (no backhaul) and to have webhosting and other very critical services directly connected at the core.
This move was planned very long (months) and then done on a night with 5-7hours downtime in total.
Owned IP space and owned hardware reduce the amount of pain end users experience during migrations, but the end user can still experience significant downtime if the provider is forced to move DCs on short notice (example: when Ginernet got booted from their DC in Alicante earlier this year due to a massive DDoS attack and was forced to move all of their equipment to a DC in Barcelona, timeline of the DC move https://ginernet.com/announcements.php?id=43)
The smoothest migration I've experienced was when Jack moved to Maidenhead. The migration was handled over LET PM and there was no downtime because he kept the old VPS up during the move...entire process took a few minutes from start to finish.
@william, again you are missing the point. The point of the thread is the starter is annoyed with any changes of location no matter how good the reason is.
If you are really worried about providers moving out of a location that is important to you then choose more carefully.
Pick providers who are actually based in the location you want. More often than not the more successful providers who can offer stability are those who have access to the equipment they have over those who are doing everything remotely.
Of course that will come at a price higher than $7 for the likes of Iceland. There is EDIS who have offered a discount on their Iceland plans recently but again those come at a cost which escalates out of sync with the resource. But in terms of stability and availability they are likely to be your next best choice.
Been is this position as a provider, I understand where this thread is coming from and the base thoughts were the same, I tried my best to put myself in customers shoes to make the best decision.
In the end I offered a choice of more premium location that actually lost revenue (DE ->NL/UK) or a refund which I thought was fair, I fully support the fact that sometimes this just has to happen as it is the right decision for the company but it should never come at the material loss of any customer.
I bought a KVM from you in Illinois that got migrated to Atlanta, then later ended up in Buffalo.
Have VPS, Will Travel
Migrations were not my choice. I bought in Illinois specifically for the location. I seem to recall that one of the migrations was done as a solution to a long downtime.
I always buy for location, and have never requested a provider to move a functioning VPS to a different city.
But to be clear, overall I'm happy with the service provided by BlueVM for the LEB price.
P.S. I wouldn't mind if it got moved back to Illinois
@sleddog We don't have KVM in Illinois right now, only Buffalo and LA, but we may add KVM in IL once we have the KVM module for Feathur ready.
More like, let's stop throwing unfeasible tantrums on public forums!
Migrations are a hassle for everyone involved. I'm fairly confident that no host will ever do them unless it's absolutely necessary. If you absolutely do not want your service moved, then it might be a better idea to look for a low-end server rather than a virtual service.
Just had a vps location change.
Not complaining with a memory increase from 128MB to 1024MB
and a disk space increase from 2GB to 100GB.
Waiting to see what the next invoice will be.
The universal answer to every complaint ever made. might get this put on a t-shirt.
Is it mostly providers moving client's vps from offshore to the US in a bait and switch tactic?
What?!
Yes they are a hassle. Yes 90% of the time hosts do it because they want to reduce costs to them selves (this does not mean it was absolutely necessary, it only means they are no longer willing to bear the cost of their own business decision). I am going to take a guess and say you meant that people should not buy a low end server if they have expectations of the server not to (ever) move just because the host admits to them self the price they sold it as isn't realistic. This however, is the hosts fault for not having better budget practices and planning for slow times to begin with. I have no idea how "low-end" and "virtual" are two different types of service or where you came up with that. However, I do agree that if you want a better chance of staying where you first purchase that finding a provider that sets realistic prices on their services will provide a better chance of not going out of business or changing locations. I think recently this idea is starting to hit home with the growing list of providers which have been selling off or withdrawing from different locations. In reality, those companies should have made better business decisions to start instead of making their customer take a hit because they planned poorly when creating their budget for services. But I digress.
TL; DR:
Low end hosts need to stop racing to the bottom with their too good to be true offers and realize they will do better to offer more sustainable and realistic offers. Just because someone CAN sell 4Gb or 8gb of ram or whatever for $7.00 doesn't mean its a good (or sustainable) business practice. People need to start realizing that the hosts making these too good to be true offers are often already established and can afford to take the loss, as well as use it to eliminate some of their competition and those who are not established are likely not going to succeed in the long run with such unrealistically priced services.
The biggest reason location changes anger me is because they are dishonest to the consumer, its just like bait and switch, "Hey come get this awesome service in the location you want it", "Ohh, you liked that location? Well sorry it is to expensive to sustain so now we are moving you to a location you didn't pick on different hardware than we originally sold you on, in an entirely different country."
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Didn't BuyVM move too ?
Apples and Oranges.
If you are talking their move from EGI to Fiber Hub, I think this is a little different. It was an upgrade for customers all around and the hardware wasn't changed. This is a little different than say taking a customer in a European location and putting them in a super cheap US location that is 100ms from your previous audience. BuyVM moved maybe 6-10ms from their original location, increased their bandwidth availability, improved their overall bandwidth mix and all of the customers were kept on the same hardware they were on previously (they were not "migrated" the whole server was physically moved).
Cheers!