I agree that you get what you pay for. Just because you don’t have a budget for a $1000/mo dedicated server does not mean you have the right to that service level at a lower price.
As fellow geeks I am sure we have all been asked for advice on buying computers from our family and friends. I’m a mac person and use a $3000 laptop but I know most of them will not be willing to spend this much money. I normally quote them a $600(ish) computer that has at least an i-Series processor and 6-8GB of RAM. I tell them to avoid a couple vendors that I consider to be bottom of the barrel. It never fails though, that for all the reasoning and advice I give them, if they find a computer for $400 in the Sunday paper all that gets thrown out the window. They don’t want a computer that fits their needs they just want the cheapest computer. It also never fails that the moment it starts having problems they come to me for help and if I give them any slack for buying a cheap POS that I am suddenly considered an a-hole for not helping since that’s all they can afford.
The way I look at it is I spend my hard earned money on a reliable machine so I am not put out by the type of issues you get with cheap hardware or cheap services and you did not head my advice to avoid the same issues and thus by asking me to give up my weekend or even a couple hours to help you makes you the a-hole not me.
I have used, Rackspace, Linode, DO, AWS, and Google Apps among others and none of their status pages are every very helpful. It’s really a problem with Google Apps since my users know to check there and then claim the problem is not with Google even though it is. I frequently have issues with their IMAP servers failing where a user can connect via the web interface but not through a IMAP client. This is never shown on their status page. Of course I am going to check the status page.
The only hosting provider I have no complaints about is Rackspace but those servers are almost $1000/mo. On the other hand they do open up tickets for me faster than I can log into the management portal to do it myself. Even still I have had hour-long outages. If you don’t have HA you WILL have outages no mater who you use or how much you pay. Ironically the worst service was from The Planet even though those where still $800/mo dedicated servers. Their status page was a twitter account that they did not advertise on their homepage.
I have debated moving our average SMB size clients with no HA from linode to DO just because tools like Packer can interface with them easier. Still don’t know about that.
As fellow geeks I am sure we have all been asked for advice on buying computers from our family and friends. I’m a mac person and use a $3000 laptop but I know most of them will not be willing to spend this much money. I normally quote them a $600(ish) computer that has at least an i-Series processor and 6-8GB of RAM. I tell them to avoid a couple vendors that I consider to be bottom of the barrel. It never fails though, that for all the reasoning and advice I give them, if they find a computer for $400 in the Sunday paper all that gets thrown out the window. They don’t want a computer that fits their needs they just want the cheapest computer. It also never fails that the moment it starts having problems they come to me for help and if I give them any slack for buying a cheap POS that I am suddenly considered an a-hole for not helping since that’s all they can afford.
The way I look at it is I spend my hard earned money on a reliable machine so I am not put out by the type of issues you get with cheap hardware or cheap services and you did not head my advice to avoid the same issues and thus by asking me to give up my weekend or even a couple hours to help you makes you the a-hole not me.
I have used, Rackspace, Linode, DO, AWS, and Google Apps among others and none of their status pages are every very helpful. It’s really a problem with Google Apps since my users know to check there and then claim the problem is not with Google even though it is. I frequently have issues with their IMAP servers failing where a user can connect via the web interface but not through a IMAP client. This is never shown on their status page. Of course I am going to check the status page.
The only hosting provider I have no complaints about is Rackspace but those servers are almost $1000/mo. On the other hand they do open up tickets for me faster than I can log into the management portal to do it myself. Even still I have had hour-long outages. If you don’t have HA you WILL have outages no mater who you use or how much you pay. Ironically the worst service was from The Planet even though those where still $800/mo dedicated servers. Their status page was a twitter account that they did not advertise on their homepage.
I have debated moving our average SMB size clients with no HA from linode to DO just because tools like Packer can interface with them easier. Still don’t know about that.