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finalhosting.nl: chasing pavements
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finalhosting.nl: chasing pavements

In August, I subscribed to 4 Premium VPSes with FinalHosting.nl, run by @jordynegen11 who had a promo for I9-9900K.

I progressively took on:

4 units (Normal price: €42.50 each) of:
4 vCPU i9-9900K at 3.6GHz
8 GB Ram
300GB NVMe SSD

1 unit (Normal price: €15.00 each) of:
1vCPU i9-9900K at 3.6GHz
2 GB Ram
50GB NVMe SSD

Totalling about €185 in retail value (promo is roughly half), I was thrilled to see highly specc'ed virtual machines that I could run machine learning tasks on. This is equivalent to video encoding tasks some users run on their machines for work.

Btw, I anticipate people asking why not just get a dedicated or baremetal with that kind of a budget. I run on a docker swarm based computing framework which allows me to tag on additional nodes to suit the needs of the task.

The benchmarks via subscribers from the same promo thread faired similarly to my own, and I was quite excited to see that a fresh newcomer is ambitious enough to build his own panel, i.e. innovate against tried and true methods. This meant to me that at least at face value, this was an outfit that wanted to do well. In my book, anybody want wants to do well, I want to do business with.

Unfortunately, my experiences have been not just less than stellar.

1. Frequent (and silent) downtimes

I liked that finalhosting.nl has a network status page. That as well as a few posts from social media and here showed a major outage some time in May. With nothing much else, I thought uptime would be relatively reliable.

Screenie

Unfortunately, Since my subscription in August, I have counted at least 3-4 network disruptions/issues. The worst being in November where there was >24 hour outage. The network status page, as well as their discord bot showed that "everything was fine" during this period. It was obviously not.

By this point, I had given up on writing a support ticket. It was one of those silent "monthly interruptions of service" that I'm sure @jordynegen11 hoped no one would notice, and I had to consistently try and catch. In contrast ExtraVM, who had a 61 minute downtime in November gave everyone (affected?) the month off even without an SLA.

2. Silent downgrading of Premium VPSes

In spite of the above, I was still rather tolerant of FinalHosting. The most I've done was request to shift all my VPSes into different nodes on their network so if one node goes down all my VPSes don't go along with it.

Even with the downtime, it could still suit some of my needs (just not all, including hosting websites) and I was still evaluating FinalHosting as a service provider.

But then a few days ago I found that all my Premium VPSes had been throttled. I thought maybe I had run my processes too heavily, though that had not been a problem before- and I am paying a premium for premium quality VPSes after all.

This new event infuriated me. Downtimes depreciate the money I spend paying FinalHosting and make it more expensive to continue with them, and now they are going to throttle me from 3.6Ghz to 2.2Ghz?! Even one VPS which I left idle for a long time was also throttled!

So I shot a hard (but not harsh) ticket to Jordy:

Screenie

I realized later that the website had changed. The i9-9900K advertising at been mostly scrubbed from the main pages and the list of offerings no longer describe the i9-9900Ks. Looking into the control panel, it turns out I wasn't throttled. My VPSes were moved from the I9-9900K nodes to BLADE# nodes, where they run their lower tier offerings of who-knows-what. These ones don't even show the CPU model in terminal. Just some virtualized allocation. This would explain why the throttling was seemingly "account-wide", Jordy had downgraded me, without any communication, and keeping the same plan prices intact. I am now paying more, for far, far less.

After 2 days, Jordy still has not responded to my ticket. And I am left with assumptions about what he is doing with FinalHosting. If anyone is on the same Premium plan as me, please check your stats now.

I try to be respectful as far as I can be without being pushed around, and not once have I requested for compensation or credit. But this has clearly gone too far and I don't want to be paying to chase downtimes and now a new game- chasing the hardware that I rented.

Like I wrote in the support ticket. No one is telling you that the customer is always right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do right by your customers. They are the ones that keep your lights on.

«134567

Comments

  • As I was writing the above, and taking screenshots Jordy provided a response.

  • Well I have automatic PayPal refunds too

    Thanked by 2Janevski puerklint
  • @cybertech said:
    Well I have automatic PayPal refunds too

    I laughed at this, even though as a provider, I shouldn't but that was a funny comment.

    @OP If they actually have a system that does that, that is indeed amazing. But that also means that a new node should go live and the provider will be able to put you back to the correct hardware again. Finalhosting does have a stellar reputation. Let's wait for their response :)

    Thanked by 2dahartigan Janevski
  • K4Y5K4Y5 Member
    edited December 2019

    @lowending said:
    As I was writing the above, and taking screenshots Jordy provided a response.

    Bullshit. Ask them for a refund, and scram.

    @lowending For the price that you're paying, you're better off moving all your VPS to a 'Game server' from OVH. They come with high clockspeed CPUs, dual NVMe drives and a HDD that you could probably use for data sets or backups. Not to mention the fact that they are quite reliable in terms of performance, network quality and uptime.

    @seriesn said:

    @cybertech said:
    Well I have automatic PayPal refunds too

    I laughed at this, even though as a provider, I shouldn't but that was a funny comment.

    @OP If they actually have a system that does that, that is indeed amazing. But that also means that a new node should go live and the provider will be able to put you back to the correct hardware again. Finalhosting does have a stellar reputation. Let's wait for their response :)

    I highly doubt they have such a 'system' in place, as they would then have to ensure availability of current (Down to the last second) backups of client data.

    Thanked by 1Janevski
  • Give @jordynegen11 a chance to respond, there are always 2 sides to every story. I have an idea where this is heading. ML isn't exactly VPS friendly from a CPU perspective..

    Thanked by 2seriesn skorous
  • @dahartigan said:
    Give @jordynegen11 a chance to respond, there are always 2 sides to every story. I have an idea where this is heading. ML isn't exactly VPS friendly from a CPU perspective..

    Agreed with regards to ML being CPU heavy. But, that still doesn't give the service provider the right to 'bait and switch', right?

    Thanked by 2dahartigan malek
  • lowendinglowending Member
    edited December 2019

    Looking further via htop/atop it looks like 2 of my VPSes were downgraded to lower tiers 15 days ago, which explains why I was experiencing noticably slower performance- which is even worse news for me from a cost perspective.

    (I only started looking in 2 days ago when the main VPS I usually interact with was interrupted)

  • @K4Y5 said:

    @dahartigan said:
    Give @jordynegen11 a chance to respond, there are always 2 sides to every story. I have an idea where this is heading. ML isn't exactly VPS friendly from a CPU perspective..

    Agreed with regards to ML being CPU heavy. But, that still doesn't give the service provider the right to 'bait and switch', right?

    Indeed if that's what has happened, it would be wrong. Best to wait for the provider to respond, as much as we all crave drama here :-)

  • K4Y5 said: @lowending For the price that you're paying, you're better off moving all your VPS to a 'Game server' from OVH. They come with high clockspeed CPUs, dual NVMe drives and a HDD that you could probably use for data sets or backups. Not to mention the fact that they are quite reliable in terms of performance, network quality and uptime.

    Besides FinalHosting, I also useExtraVm and Clouvider as well as the occassional Vultr and DO. I count myself slightly lucky to have caught wind of this on Cyber Monday and made arrangements for a few more machines to compensate.

    dahartigan said: Give @jordynegen11 a chance to respond, there are always 2 sides to every story. I have an idea where this is heading. ML isn't exactly VPS friendly from a CPU perspective..

    Fully agree that some service providers may frown upon high CPU usage. So I chose an appropriate hardware plan and from a provider that has either no policy for CPU usage, or are friendly towards CPU heavy purposes (some LET providers are). In fact my first thought was that maybe this was a reaction to my usage of resources hence the ticket indicating such.

    Thanked by 1dahartigan
  • I can't believe how much patience you have for the amount you've payed them. I would be long gone to another provider lol.

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited December 2019

    Probly all your VPS's are in same machine/node/physical server anyway lol, so you have 16 vCPU's spread to actual 8 cores that are also used by other customers in addition to yourself.

    Get a dedicated server for half of that price, and you should see increase in performance without anyone throttling you without you even knowing.

    Thanked by 2Janevski Bafly
  • My compliments for the way you approached this problem. Yes, your mail was hard, but it was the truth and very respectful. I would fully agree with the words ‘it doesn’t spark joy’.

    To be fair, I found @jordynegen11 a smart user at this forum. So I actually expect him to solve this problem. But I do not believe the ‘we move automatically to different nodes’-thing. And if he really had such a feature, he should build a new feature that would send you a mail that it indeed was moved.

    I truly think they should improve there communication. I am a self-employed business myself, so I strongly wish one of these businesses to succeed. But until now, facts have shown these businesses are performing poorly.

    So, @jordynegen11. Solve the problem and make us proud. Show us a self-employed hosting business can succeed. This is not some lecture, but more of some encouragement.

    Thanked by 1lowending
  • I have never used his service, but from my lurking here - he is a good guy and will probably do you right. I would give him the benefit of the doubt, and let him respond.
    Kudos on the tone and manner that you, as a customer, have handled that.
    This is what all LET complaints should look like, not "durrr my sh@t dont work durrr scam scam chargeback" as they unfortunately usually are.

  • @t0ny0 said:
    I have never used his service, but from my lurking here - he is a good guy and will probably do you right. I would give him the benefit of the doubt, and let him respond.
    Kudos on the tone and manner that you, as a customer, have handled that.
    This is what all LET complaints should look like, not "durrr my sh@t dont work durrr scam scam chargeback" as they unfortunately usually are.

    Well you could give him the benefit of the doubt if there was any doubt but I don't see it lol

    If you first degrade someone's service without letting them know and then don't respond to tickets for days you lost all doubt anyway, you're just a bad provider, maybe even a bad person.

    He might be a good guy for sure but what good is that when you have a poor experience like this?

  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited December 2019

    K4Y5 said: I highly doubt they have such a 'system' in place, as they would then have to ensure availability of current (Down to the last second) backups of client data.

    Not to say that Finalhosting is using such a platform, however, there are a lot of providers who do use OnApp / OpenStack and not SolusVM for their products. If setup correctly, OnApp / OpenStack will automatically move your VM to another hypervisor should their be a failure of the originating server. The way this works is disk allocation is actually done in duplicate, while you have a server with, for example, 20GB of SSD space, it effectively uses 2 x 20GB by using 2 different volumes streams in raid1 from two different hypervisors. This allows one HV to fail and the VM to move to another and still work without an issue as the second volume will be available and then once the server is moved, will be rebuilt again on another HV to again provide a raid1 type situation. If this was in fact a 'Premium' platform of the provider, it is possible they are using one of these systems and are able to hot-migrate the Linux servers between hypervisors or cold-migrate them (turn them off and move and then turn it back on), most specifically if they are Windows based servers.

    Now, that said, I can't say Finalhosting is using such an infrastructure, however, I did want to respond because your reply seemed somewhat uninformed.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    Thanked by 2AlwaysSkint uptime
  • K4Y5K4Y5 Member
    edited December 2019

    @TheLinuxBug said:

    K4Y5 said: I highly doubt they have such a 'system' in place, as they would then have to ensure availability of current (Down to the last second) backups of client data.

    Not to say that Finalhosting is using such a platform, however, there are a lot of providers who do use OnApp / OpenStack and not SolusVM for their products. If setup correctly, OnApp / OpenStack will automatically move your VM to another hypervisor should their be a failure of the originating server. The way this works is disk allocation is actually done in duplicate, while you have a server with, for example 20GB of SSD space, it effectively uses 2 x 20GB by using 2 different volumes streams in raid1 from two different hypervisors. This allows one HV to fail and the VM to move to another and still work without an issue as the second volume will be available and then once the server is moved, will be rebuilt again on another HV to again provide a raid1 type situation. If this was in fact a 'Premium' platform of the provider, it is possible they are using one of these systems and are able to hot-migrate the Linux servers between hypervisors or cold-migrate them (turn them off and move and the back on), most specifically if they are Windows based servers.

    Now, that said, I can't say Finalhosting is using such an infrastructure, however, I did want to respond because your reply seemed somewhat uninformed.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    That is essentially a HA setup, which seemed rather unlikely in context of the product and the provider in question. Hence, my assertion.

    Regardless, thanks for the explanation.

  • His Response:

    My Response:

  • K4Y5 said: That is essentially a HA setup

    Just FYI, for those using OnApp or OpenStack this is usually a default setup for the platform. OnApp for example specifically highly suggests the use of it.

    Had he not mentioned the part about 'Premium' services, I may have been more with you on the idea that this host probably isn't using that. However, there are a lot of hosts out there that specifically tier products, though usually name them differently, such as a 'Cloud Server' vs 'VPS server' to indicate that they are using HA. Though if you got in early enough or have a good business relationship, in large roll outs you can accomplish roughly the same licensing costs as used for VPS type services with SolusVM with OnApp / CloudStack (or at least something that is reasonable enough to provide lower tiered servers at the price point you are seeing here). So, it wouldn't surprise me to find they are using one of those system, at least for their 'Premium' products.

    That said, now I am actually interested to know what platform they are actually using. Maybe if they decide to reply here they could fill us in.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    Thanked by 1K4Y5
  • tgltgl Member
    edited December 2019

    there are systems that move instances if a node fails (https://docs.openstack.org/ha-guide/compute-node-ha.html), its 2019, so it could be true, but he did say this was not the case

    why they got moved to a slower node, thats another story, it can also be a configuration issue

    lets first hear from Jordy La Forge also

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited December 2019

    Lowendtalk host doing HA setup all of sudden? sounds like hastily made bullshit to explain unannounced node transfer to a cheaper machine for max profits especially as you didin't pay for a Always on VPS nor was it listed on the product description.

    As for that "Its good you have acknowledged that" message.. If you actually will keep paying this price to the host like nothing happened, it only shows one can rip off as much as they want and not even lose a customer as long as they come up with some "This is not the service we expect from ourselves" message.

    I used to work on a billing support and thats exactly what I told every time our company had scammed some old person and his relatives called.

    In short you would be a fool.

  • @stefeman If you only read the headers, you'll get never the body. And everyone knows the body is what you want in a request.

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited December 2019

    if you want to do machine learning grab hetzner GTX 1080 server for 116€/m it would be way faster. If its CPU only, then get Ryzen dedi.

    im being honest with you, If I were a host and saw as guilible person as you paying me 180€+/m for 30% of an 9900k machine, I would probly do the same and move you hoping you wouldn't notice.

    its almost cringy how much you pay for so little unless its the support you want from the ticket systems. Its about time someone said this..

  • tgltgl Member
    edited December 2019

    lets wait for the rooster to tell us how they got moved

  • @K4Y5 said:

    @TheLinuxBug said:

    K4Y5 said: I highly doubt they have such a 'system' in place, as they would then have to ensure availability of current (Down to the last second) backups of client data.

    Not to say that Finalhosting is using such a platform, however, there are a lot of providers who do use OnApp / OpenStack and not SolusVM for their products. If setup correctly, OnApp / OpenStack will automatically move your VM to another hypervisor should their be a failure of the originating server. The way this works is disk allocation is actually done in duplicate, while you have a server with, for example 20GB of SSD space, it effectively uses 2 x 20GB by using 2 different volumes streams in raid1 from two different hypervisors. This allows one HV to fail and the VM to move to another and still work without an issue as the second volume will be available and then once the server is moved, will be rebuilt again on another HV to again provide a raid1 type situation. If this was in fact a 'Premium' platform of the provider, it is possible they are using one of these systems and are able to hot-migrate the Linux servers between hypervisors or cold-migrate them (turn them off and move and the back on), most specifically if they are Windows based servers.

    Now, that said, I can't say Finalhosting is using such an infrastructure, however, I did want to respond because your reply seemed somewhat uninformed.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    That is essentially a HA setup, which seemed rather unlikely in context of the product and the provider in question. Hence, my assertion.

    Regardless, thanks for the explanation.

    you? overreacting? never...

  • lowendinglowending Member
    edited December 2019

    @stefeman said:
    if you want to do machine learning grab hetzner GTX 1080 server for 116€/m it would be way faster. If its CPU only, then get Ryzen dedi.

    im being honest with you, If I were a host and saw as guilible person as you paying me 180€+/m for 30% of an 9900k machine, I would probly do the same and move you hoping you wouldn't notice.

    its almost cringy how much you pay for so little unless its the support you want from the ticket systems. Its about time someone said this..

    If you didn't get the hint:

    1. I did not pay 180€. I paid roughly half (lesser of the half) that as per the promo thread I linked, as well as the the literal sentence in the first post that said I paid roughly half the normal price. That puts it just about dedi price/spec ratios. Slightly higher to be frank, but the trade-off was for flexibility in scaling which was what I sought. I also have (and have said) I have ExtraVMs, and Clouviders.

    2. This thread isn't about what I do and how to optimize ML processes. We can go at it at length in a different cafe but I probably wouldn't show up. No one likes a one-sided conversation.

    3. You have strong opinions, I get it. But if you haven't been responded to several times, explore the possibility that you are not absorbing the context before doubling down on a tangent.

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited December 2019

    Sure, 90€ then.

    Given how you laid the facts on the original post, these are exactly the opinions you will most likely get.

    if you suddenly want to take the side of the host after calling him out, nothing would be better. case closed? All good, untill you get moved to another node "accidently" again. That's why I and others above told you to think about a dedicated instead. And that's why I called you naive.

    That puts it just about dedi price/spec ratios. Slightly higher to be frank

    If you really think so, you are beyond salvation. You can get scalability though. except if they are in the same node which is likely the case.

    Thanked by 1webclouddev
  • @lowending said:

    @stefeman said:
    if you want to do machine learning grab hetzner GTX 1080 server for 116€/m it would be way faster. If its CPU only, then get Ryzen dedi.

    im being honest with you, If I were a host and saw as guilible person as you paying me 180€+/m for 30% of an 9900k machine, I would probly do the same and move you hoping you wouldn't notice.

    its almost cringy how much you pay for so little unless its the support you want from the ticket systems. Its about time someone said this..

    If you didn't get the hint:

    1. I did not pay 180€. I paid roughly half (lesser of the half) that as per the promo thread I linked, as well as the the literal sentence in the first post that said I paid roughly half the normal price. That puts it just about dedi price/spec ratios. Slightly higher to be frank, but the trade-off was for flexibility in scaling which was what I sought. I also have (and have said) I have ExtraVMs, and Clouviders.

    2. This thread isn't about what I do and how to optimize ML processes. We can go at it at length in a different cafe but I probably wouldn't show up. No one likes a one-sided conversation.

    3. You have strong opinions, I get it. But if you haven't been responded to several times, explore the possibility that you are not absorbing the context before doubling down on a tangent.

    So lesson learned for next time, if something looks to good to be true it probably is.

  • They can migrate your vps to a lower node without changing ip addresses and now, in order to migrate them back, they need to change the ip addresses?

  • @Father_Michael said:
    They can migrate your vps to a lower node without changing ip addresses and now, in order to migrate them back, they need to change the ip addresses?

    Keeps getting better lol

  • @Father_Michael said:
    They can migrate your vps to a lower node without changing ip addresses and now, in order to migrate them back, they need to change the ip addresses?

    Yes, that's what I wanted to know too but I declined to raise it pending the other discrepancy in the story.

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