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Hurricane Electric
Hi All,
This is more of a general question related to VPS and Web hosting.
In New Zealand we seem to get great speeds if things are hosted on Hurricane Electric but i have heard some horrific stories about there uptime and problems with there network
Can anyone elaborate on this at all?
Comments
Hurricane Electric has lots of dowtime and has some rounting issues to some parts of Asia etc.
Ugh.
We were with HE for about a year and really really tried to give them the benefit of a doubt but had nothing but issues. In the year we were with them we had 4 power outages causing major FSCK's and issues as well as another dozen or so major routing issues cutting most of our customers offline. Other times the network was just dog slow to Asia, especially China.
Since we left HE we've dodged another 3 power outages and a few big routing burps.
We like HE and if we were serving nothing but high bandwidth usage for huge savings customers we'd probably not worry about it. In the end, though, that's not the case as our customer base has changed drastically in the past year since we started with BuyVM. If I was running a cheap/budget CDN then I'd likely throw some boxes on HE since you really can't beat their BW pricing.
All in all, when HE isn't broken, they're great. The problem is that you know something is going to break and it's going to hurt. Every time HE had power outages/network outages our cancellations would be double/triple in size.
If you're needing a dedicated or some colocation you can checkout egihosting. We use them in Coresite and have nothing but praise for them. We used them in HE as well but there was nothing they could do to help with HE's quirks.
Francisco
I gather they don't have battery backups, back up generators or are they broken?
I know in the data center we're in, they get spun up once a month and we actually run on their power for an hour. Some silly requirement when certain guys and gals in suits and glasses show up.
They have both which is the sad part. They are blaming the vendor at this point and are promising a full replacement within the next few months.
What that means ,though, is that there is going to be a full DC power down required so they can cut over to this new system. Then there is going to be the blips/burps/etc as the new system is put in place.
Of the power outages we had, 2 of them were short (< 1 minute) so if we had localized UPS' it would have helped. The thing is that us adding our own UPS' in a datacenter that already claims to have UPS' just adds another point of failure to everything.
Coresite actually does full load testing of the whole building every month or so as far as I know as well as weekly testing/maintenance. The nice thing with being in 55 S. Market St. is that because they have so many Govt. contracts in there, they're going to be far more picky about tinkering with what's working nicely.
Francisco
Francisco thanks for your in depth explanation, and DrMike, anyone experienced the hosting side of things, shared hosting?
Also what would be good connectivity to NZ as in speed and network, i have heard Softlayer is good but don't know any VPS providers that offer in their data center
QuickWeb has plans on Softlayer, but you will need to wait for a special from them if you are looking for LEB price.
I used hurricane's shared hosting for two months. It was amazingly fast, even being simultaneously dugg+slashdotted+reddited with well over 2m hits in a day (for a week or two) to a dynamic page. (this was on their lowest plan - i wasn't asked to "upgrade" or anything)
No issues. Support treats you as a nerd, not an idiot. All sites hosted have native IPv6 by default, NO FTP ACCESS - SECURE SCP/SSH ONLY.
SSL is done automatically - you click once and get a self signed cert online until you get your csr/etc from wherever you bought a "real" cert from.
I've heard a lot of horror stories a few years ago about HE but I'd still rather have HE over Cogent.
That being said, I would never restrict my network to one provider and from what I understand HE is the leader when it comes to IPv6.
GoRACK will be getting HE within the next month so I'm interested to see how that turns out for us.
There isn't many major problems with HE's transit. I had them when we were in Porthell and it was decent enough minus the fact the reseller they were using was heavily overcommited and didn't have a clue how to apply nullroutes & SWIP entries.
Whenever HE blew up in FMT it didn't really affect their routing that much since they have multiple links between SJ/PAIX and LAX. Fremont doesn't actually act as a backhaul for anything other than the DC's. When they went down the worst that went down was their phone, corporate website and, well, all of the locally hosted customers.
HE has very limited capacity to China directly, I've heard < 2Gbit be said a few times in the past few months.
I should add some good to the bad. HE has some great techs that were always very helpful to us with drive swaps, FSCK's and KVM movement at all hours of the day. If it wasn't for the issues I listed we wouldn't have left I don't think.
Francisco
so i guess all said and done, Hurricane Electric for a basic web host is not too bad regarding worldwide speed, minus china.
Reason for HE as i think they also have a data centre in hawaii which explains why it's quick to NZ
Nordicvps used hurricane electric too. The hurricane electric routing was great when it worked and offered nice connection to both asia and europe compared with other california transit routes.
However nordic left HE too after buyvm did as it was pretty jealous and knew buyvm were doing it for a pretty good reason.
@Francisco What data center does Buy-VM co located now?
@davidnz We're still with Egi, at the Coresite datacentre in San Jose, CA.