Cloud hosting for shared/reseller hosting customers

[akpcep]

Thought I'd chuck my 2p in!

I've been continually disappointed with the uptime of my VPS since I started with Eukhost. I've had tons of problems, that have ended up with me being moved at least once and being granted a free RAM upgrade, which was appreciated, but I've had nothing like 99.5% uptime.

Support is always very polite and they try to be helpful, but more often than not the root cause of downtime isn't really investigated. Having my VPS restarted, then "There you go, it's back up now" isn't really the kind of support I wanted - I'd rather the cause of the downtime was investigated and fixed. Instead, support seem to default to blaming the customer (it must be a script on your server - which one? We don't know) which isn't terribly helpful.

I've not come on here to bash Eukhost, by the way - I've had loads of webhosts over the years, and they've all, to a man, been absolutely rubbish. Eukhost is slightly less rubbish than all the others I've tried so I don't see the point in moving.

Anyway, I digress. Obviously Eukhost are NOT guaranteeing 100% uptime, otherwise it would be in their SLA and they'd be held accountable for it. BUT! If paying £25 to get closer to the 99.5% uptime I'm supposed to already have is what it takes, I'll pay it.

Keep me posted!

[sihost]

agree

""There you go, it's back up now" isn't really the kind of support I wanted - I'd rather the cause of the downtime was investigated and fixed. Instead, support seem to default to blaming the customer (it must be a script on your server - which one? We don't know) which isn't terribly helpful."

I completely agree with this.
Once my vps went down because it updated itself with some kind of script and they blamed me for corrupting my own vps. They even went on to say that there was proof of me logging in with the root password and emailed me with the login time.
The point they missed was 1. The login time was after my vps had corrupted, and I was trying to log in continuously to see if it was back up, it then finally logged in.
Secondly I went through the cron logs and found the so called script which had corrupted it and proved that it wasn't me, I shouldn't have had to do this and I find it insulting that on a number of ocassions I've been blamed for problems which caused downtime.

I also agree with the root cause thing, Two nights ago, my vps was down for 6 hours and I asked why, I was told that it was because of the licensing at sw soft, for virtuozzo. The support team liased with Sw soft and resolved the issue....permanently. (I was told this a few weeks ago when there was a licensing issue)

I asked why it took 6 hours and that my clients wished to know if they worked continuously on the problem for 6 hours or whether it went 5 hours un-noticed.
I get a reply telling me the problem again but no answer. I find it frustrating sometimes that its the "its sorted now" response, but thats not the kind of response I can give to my clients! They want to know WHY it happened.

Eukhost seem to be taking onboard all the complaints so I hope the cloud hosting is a new lease of life and brings us all what we have been asking for.
Suport though should NEVER blame the customer by default without strong factual evidence....not "we saw you log in, it was your fault".

[sihost]

we will put 12 semi-dedicated servers on each node and a total of 48 semi-dedicated servers per cloud.

As of now we will launch 2 clouds, one for VPS's and other for semi-dedicated servers.

Out of interest how many customers in total do EUKHost have?

On your website you say "Since then, eUKhost.com has witnessed unprecedented growth and now hosts over 100 000 websites"

JUst one cloud for VPS and 1 for semi-dedicated (48 semi-dedi vps's)? Am I right in thinking the vps/semi dedicated side of your business is quite small at the moment and you are hoping the cloud hosting will expand this?

If you can guarantee the 100% uptime, and back this with substance, AND actually GIVE 100% uptime, then this area of your business WILL grow.

[PudzPud]

I've been continually disappointed with the uptime of my VPS since I started with Eukhost. I've had tons of problems, that have ended up with me being moved at least once and being granted a free RAM upgrade, which was appreciated, but I've had nothing like 99.5% uptime.

Support is always very polite and they try to be helpful, but more often than not the root cause of downtime isn't really investigated. Having my VPS restarted, then "There you go, it's back up now" isn't really the kind of support I wanted - I'd rather the cause of the downtime was investigated and fixed. Instead, support seem to default to blaming the customer (it must be a script on your server - which one? We don't know) which isn't terribly helpful.

I've not come on here to bash Eukhost, by the way - I've had loads of webhosts over the years, and they've all, to a man, been absolutely rubbish. Eukhost is slightly less rubbish than all the others I've tried so I don't see the point in moving.

Anyway, I digress. Obviously Eukhost are NOT guaranteeing 100% uptime, otherwise it would be in their SLA and they'd be held accountable for it. BUT! If paying £25 to get closer to the 99.5% uptime I'm supposed to already have is what it takes, I'll pay it.

Keep me posted!

I more or less agree - if EUK had been giving the 99.5% uptime i am already paying for then paying an extra one-off £25 for 100% guarantee would be ok, however as the 99.5% uptime is in no way near to being met at present I am afraid I will need proof of the 100% uptime before I would commit and pay any extra. Basically if i'm not getting what i'm already paying for I would be stupid to pay more for another service I may not get, and like the poster quoted above if I hear the ''i've re-started your vps" once more I may scream - stop restarting it, just stop breaking it in the first place!

I do like EUK support in general although I think I have to go ott to prove beyond doubt there is a problem before they will believe me, but once proved beyond a doubt they do work hard and sort things out. Like just now, I dont get the 99.5% uptime and despite being on VPS I get very poor speeds at time but no longer bother even telling euk as they say "its working fine just now" and nothing I can do proves to them that it goes slow (i'm now looking at paying for a website monitoring set-up with another company so I will have proof of the slow speeds, an expense I should not have to incur in order to get EUK to sit up and take notice). Basically what I am saying is, give me good speeds and my 99.5% uptime for a while THEN come back to me asking for extra money for the better service and you are more likely to get it once I am receiving what I am currently paying for!

Yes euk are better than my previous hosts, yes they will happily restart the vps whenever there is a problem, yes live chat is good most of the time etc - just work on the speeds, consistent service and current uptime before trying to sell the new product.

[sihost]

well said

well said
and offer a trial on the new cloud for those who have had previous problems on vps so we can put a low risk website on there and see for ourselves the 100% uptime over the next 1-3 months then commit ourselves completely.
I'm still here because I'm prepared to give Eukhost 1 more chance to prove themselves with the cloud system.

[eUKhost.com]

On the current vps/semi dedi is there a 10% kick off point on them?

Ans :- Current VPS / Semi-dedicated servers have memory limits and some other technical parameters like No. of processes in case of Windows VPSs. These parameters are used to automatically suspend a VPS / semi-dedicated server if a particular Memory limit or No. of processes are crossed.

On the plus side... with high resources on the new servers I don't see the 10% being a massive problem, but the balance between a whole VPS being booted vs just one site being booted on reseller needs looking at.

Ans :- We will work out a balanced solution in next few months, but as of now 10% CPU resource limit is the only solution we can think of.

I also agree with the root cause thing, Two nights ago, my vps was down for 6 hours and I asked why, I was told that it was because of the licensing at sw soft, for virtuozzo. The support team liased with Sw soft and resolved the issue....permanently. (I was told this a few weeks ago when there was a licensing issue)

I asked why it took 6 hours and that my clients wished to know if they worked continuously on the problem for 6 hours or whether it went 5 hours un-noticed.
I get a reply telling me the problem again but no answer. I find it frustrating sometimes that its the "its sorted now" response, but thats not the kind of response I can give to my clients! They want to know WHY it happened.

Eukhost seem to be taking onboard all the complaints so I hope the cloud hosting is a new lease of life and brings us all what we have been asking for.
Suport though should NEVER blame the customer by default without strong factual evidence....not "we saw you log in, it was your fault".

Ans :- We started VPS / Semi-dedicated server hosting in the year 2007 on OpenVZ platform and that didn't work out well for us. We migrated all OpenVZ VPS's on Virtuozzo platform and it helped us to give some what better Virtualization solution to our customers, but Virtuozzo has its own limitations and customers running resource intensive applications or websites on their VPSs always face problems due to the limited availability of resources. Disk Read / Write is not carried in a normal way on a VPS node, some VPSs use the disk intensively and some VPSs never use any resources. Such uneven Read / Write process results in fast degradation of drives on VPS nodes. more than 50% of our problems have been due to such uneven read / write processes on Virtuozzo nodes. This problem will be sorted once we upgrade to Cloud computing solution. Read / Write is carried out in a better way on Applogic cloud and we are using the 15k rpm highly redundant drives for the first time on VPS / semi-dedicated server nodes.

Out of interest how many customers in total do EUKHost have?

Ans :- We have more than 15k customers and the approximate number of websites hosted on our 2000 servers is somewhere close to 500k.

JUst one cloud for VPS and 1 for semi-dedicated (48 semi-dedi vps's)? Am I right in thinking the vps/semi dedicated side of your business is quite small at the moment and you are hoping the cloud hosting will expand this?

Ans :- We have stock of 15 x5550 servers which will help us to make 3 Clouds for VPS / semi-dedicated servers and 22 E5520's which will be deployed if the first 3 clouds get filled up in short span of time. We won't be migrating all our existing VPS / semi-dedicated server customers immediately. We will see the response received from our customers in next week and then order new stock of servers. We will need close to 200 servers to move all customers on Cloud and this involves huge investment. eUKhost has never considered mortgage of even a single penny and we will invest in new servers only from what we earn.

Yes euk are better than my previous hosts, yes they will happily restart the vps whenever there is a problem, yes live chat is good most of the time etc - just work on the speeds, consistent service and current uptime before trying to sell the new product.

Ans :- We are equally disappointed with Parallels as they didn't manage to bring any improvement in their Virtuozzo software from last 2 years. Parallels went on to buy H-Sphere, Alabanza, Ensim, Modernbill and many more companies and paid all their money in things which they should have never done. We pay them huge amount every month and one feels really sad to see the service provider investing our money in such foolish things.

[sihost]

very true
"Parallels went on to buy H-Sphere, Alabanza, Ensim, Modernbill and many more companies and paid all their money in things which they should have never done. We pay them huge amount every month and one feels really sad to see the service provider investing our money in such foolish things."

I had a go at them last week for bring out a parallels mac 5 upgrade only 2 weeks after I upgraded all our macs to parallels 4 which was the suggested upgrade for snow leopard.

parallels 4 was supposed to be 30% faster....hmmm... parallels 5 supposed to be faster still. hmm...no difference, seems like exactly the same software with a few ui tweaks.

Balancing
On this note "We will work out a balanced solution in next few months, but as of now 10% CPU resource limit is the only solution we can think of."

I think I used the word 'balance' in a different context. Its great that you will be looking at load balancing in the future. Right now though my query was more:

1 Reseller account / 30 websites / 1 uses 10% = 1 account disconnected

1 VPS / 30 websites / The whole VPS uses 10% = whole vps (all 30 websites) disconnected.

So the limit on reseller at just £15/month is 10% PER SITE but the limit on semi dedicated at £55/month is 10% for the whole VPS and the whole VPS gets booted.

So doesn't that mean the whole vps has to use less resources than the limit for 1 site on reseller? Or am I reading the figures wrong?

Currently when vps's are allocated so much ram and cpu each, surely they can't use anymore than their allocation on the main node? So at high load it would just crash that one vps?

I was reading on vps.net, each vps within the cloud has a dedicated cpu limit and dedicated ram limit, so they don't get booted as the limits of each vps protect other users on the main servers. The 10% isn't a 'soft limit' which can be breached. The worst that can happen is your own vps overloads and crashes. And with monitoring load would be flagged up as it is in software such as whm.

The load can then be dealt with, and the administrator of that vps can suspend the offending user (often their own website or client) and save their whole vps from being 'booted', therefore in turn saving all their other clients from downtime.

Just some thoughts on the set up...

[eUKhost.com]

1 Reseller account / 30 websites / 1 uses 10% = 1 account disconnected

1 VPS / 30 websites / The whole VPS uses 10% = whole vps (all 30 websites) disconnected.

So the limit on reseller at just £15/month is 10% PER SITE but the limit on semi dedicated at £55/month is 10% for the whole VPS and the whole VPS gets booted.

So doesn't that mean the whole vps has to use less resources than the limit for 1 site on reseller? Or am I reading the figures wrong?

Ans :- The 10% CPU resource limit doesn't work in the way you are assuming. If a particular process starts using more than 10% CPU resources on a shared / reseller hosting server then there is something wrong with that process. Same thing is applicable with a VPS. I will explain this to you in much better way if we can talk on phone next week.

Currently when vps's are allocated so much ram and cpu each, surely they can't use anymore than their allocation on the main node? So at high load it would just crash that one vps?

Ans :- Virtuozzo will simply shutdown the overloading VPS to calm down things. Applogic has few more options and our Engineers will deploy the best possible option.

I was reading on vps.net, each vps within the cloud has a dedicated cpu limit and dedicated ram limit, so they don't get booted as the limits of each vps protect other users on the main servers. The 10% isn't a 'soft limit' which can be breached. The worst that can happen is your own vps overloads and crashes. And with monitoring load would be flagged up as it is in software such as whm.

The load can then be dealt with, and the administrator of that vps can suspend the offending user (often their own website or client) and save their whole vps from being 'booted', therefore in turn saving all their other clients from downtime.

Just some thoughts on the set up...

Ans :- We have same option in Applogic where we can assign a specific CPU speed to a VPS. We will need to set a threshold level to suspend a VPS if it uses resources beyond a specific limit. Architecture of these new Intel Nehalem I7 CPU's is completely different. There's no such concept of limited CPU speed with these new CPU's. If you take a CPU of 2.4GHz, it can give you speed of 2.8 GHz depending on the process you run. I can explain these to you on phone once we talk on phone.

[steppen]

We are coming up with 2 different solutions for Cloud Hosting. One would be based on VMWare which will be expensive and other would be Applogic. Our first cloud will be based on Applogic as VMWare will be very expensive as of now.

Applogic VPSs will replace the existing Virtuozzo offerings and we won't increase cost of the existing VPS plans. VMWare is a superior technology and we will implement as there's a rise in demand for it.

Just for my curiosity: What difference in price would one see for a WMWare-based cloud setup (I'm on a semi-dedicated server)?

[Brian]

I would have no problem paying 10GBP one time fee for cloud hosting. Not sure what I would gain right now as you have given 100% up-time for the last year but the guarantee would help me sleep better. Either way I am happy.

[Merrick]

I would prefer paying 10 GBP per month for 100% Uptime Guarantee. Sometimes, even if the server goes down, I would never object, as the guarantee itself keeps me satisfied

[Jack]

Just for my curiosity: What difference in price would one see for a WMWare-based cloud setup (I'm on a semi-dedicated server)?

Hello Stein,

Our first cloud will be based on Applogic as VMWare will be very expensive as of now. We are not sure if customers will agree to pay twice for a VMWare VPS/semi dedicated server with same amount of resources. With Applogic setup, you just need to pay onetime migration fee.

[eUKhost.com]

Just for my curiosity: What difference in price would one see for a WMWare-based cloud setup (I'm on a semi-dedicated server)?

Hi Stein,

Glad to hear from you after such a long time......

We will need to double the price of VPSs and semi-dedicated servers to make some profit from VMWare based cloud setup. I am trying to analyze how many customers would consider to pay twice for such setup. Cost of semi-dedicated servers will become equivalent to dedicated servers.

Appplogic cloud is equally good, but VMWare is basically for enterprise customers who like to pay more. I will start a new poll in Jan 2010 to check how many customers would agree to pay more for VMWare cloud. We will offer all types of Cloud computing solutions to our customers, which includes the existing Microsoft Hyper-V VPSs, new applogic Cloud VPSs and the upcoming VMWare based VPSs.

[steppen]

Thanks for the info, both of you!

If I understand it correctly you will contact us when Appologic cloud is available for semi-dedicated servers? Or do I need to raise a ticket to request it?

[Bryan]

Hi Stein,

A email will be sent to all of our VPS / Semi-Dedicated customer's when the Cloud for the these accounts would be setup. We will also announce it on our Forums just the way we did it for Shared Accounts.