10/4 Town hall transcript

Rus F.
Hi Thanks for coming to our first town hall. I’m Rus and I’m the Managing Director of VPS.net and responsible for handling the day to day running of the company.
Gordon
OK LETS GOOOOOOOOOO
Kamen G.
Hey Rus
Tigran N.
Hello, Rus
Terry M.
Hi Everyone, I’m Terry Myers, the Chief Evangelist for VPS.NET. I’ve been working here for about the past year, so I suspect I’ve spoke with many of you. If not, my inbox is always open at terry@vps.net.
Tyler
Hi Rus.
anthonysomerset
Barry Sacks: S: yes so was i
Jeff N.
hey
Happy H.
Hi Rus and Terry
Boffolow
Hello.
Jason
Hi Rus and Terry.
Kody R.
I’m Kody. I’ve been with UK2 Group for a little over 2 years. I started with VPS.NET an
d have worked here for almost a year and a half. I’m the Customer Evangelist of VPS.NET. As well, my email is always open for comments regarding service too — kody@vps.net
 
rabby
hi guys
Happy H.
So when are your removing the 100% uptime slogan?
Mark (.
Hi Rus, Terry and Kody.
Rus F.
We gave a few things that we wish to go over before any Q+A’s including an exciting bit of news.
Boeki
hello rus, terry, and kody!
Tyler
Great 🙂
Rus F.
Firstly we all know that cloud stability is high up on the list of priorities for all staff and customers. We are already undertaking a very agressive upgrade schedule for resolving the major issues with SAN and cloud stability.
This process should be completed by the end of next week with the upgrade of all our OnApp clouds to OnApp 2.2
We have completed the first round of SAN maintenance and whilst to early to offer a definite resolution we have seen some very encouraging results from the clouds.
Richard
..why not 2.3? that’s the latest?
Happy H.
@ Rus Why not posting about the upgrades in tha blog?
Rus F.
This has included a coupled of scenarios where an issue in the software would of caused a cloud to crash and it has actually continued working without downtime.
Tyler
Does this affect all VPS.net products?
Terry M.
We’ll be taking questions in about 10 minutes.
Barry S.
As with London H last week I assume?
3:05 PM
Rus F.
Another main question that has been raised is with regard to support. As such we have just undergoing a round of hiring people who will be based out of the US office.
😉
When is the new control panel going live?
rabby
When free beta japan clouds end date? I didnt tested it yet 😀
*nodes
Rus F.
These people will be providing phone support and this is planned for the end of October as a go live date
Skyler C.
Nice.
Tyler
Gotcha. Sounds good
Matt B.
WAHOO!
rita
great
Kamen G.
Nice move.
boskonay
will this be paid support?
rita
for managed clients only?
Rus F.
This will be provided to all customers for no charge beyond the cost of the call
Tyler
🙂
Matt B.
Fantastic
Boffolow
Which will be how much from England?
Eugene A.
Free on skype Boffolow
Rus F.
We are planning a UK and US based phone number.
Tyler
Why not toll free?
Boffolow
Excellent.
Tyler
1(800)?
Mark (.
Rus Foster: Great stuff.
Mark
Sounds good Rus!
rita
and what about peak times when something fails (SAN, etc)?
Happy H.
1 (800) doesn’t work from Europe guys
Tyler
Right, but for US calls… UK has their own toll free prefix, no?
Eugene A.
That is awesome Rus!
Rus F.
There final phone numbers are still in discussion but it will be available to all people. We will not be doing premium rate numbers for this however.
Tigran N.
Let’s not get distracted by tiny details… I’ll call any number if I have to.
Barry S.
Telephone support is great news, be better if we didn’t need to call though
Mark (.
Tigran Noryan: Likewise
Matt B.
it’s inevitable Tigran – nothing’s perfect
3:10 PM
Jeff N.
all sounds good so far, hope the stability improves
Boffolow
Loving this idea. Especially if we could potentially call Skype to Skype…
Rus F.
Beyond that we are not going to be announcing any new products or similar today as we don’t want this to be a sales pitch. As such we are now opening the floor for questions. If you would like to ask a question please place a * and then people will be taken in order. This is to avoid confusion and allow everyone a fair chance.
Tyler
Anyway… it’s good news.
Matt B.
*I’d like to start by inquiring about how you all are going to go about being better at communicating with your customers during downtimes and about other issues. Personally I think the whole ATL-E cloud issue over the last two weeks was handled horribly and very little communication existed between you and us, and that put me in a terrible position with my clients. To be down for 5-6 days and only get about 3-4 updates on status.vps.net is ridiculous. You need to send out email updates to affected members of affected clouds regularly and also update status.vps.net and then publish it on twitter/facebook/email so that we know an update has been published. At a minimum
John S.
haha Matt B. this won’t happen. it’ll highlight their instability
bobby
*is there going any chance of automatic paypal payments in the future
Tyler
I agree.
Jeff N.
Esp. Twitter
Ian
With all due respect, who cares about telephone support if the product is not reliable?
Barry S.
As a customer I just want my business accessible to my customers but if there is an issue I want to be the first to know.
John S.
I hope VPS.NET will have lots of call centre staff. It’s always going to be ringing or you’ll have crappy hold music
Tyler
It doesn’t matter, phone support should matter
Jorje
Phone support generally slows all other support down though
Mark
* With Japan coming out of beta (and seeming to be very good!) are there any other planned locations? 🙂
Larry
I just came in. Is all this negative talk about VPS.net?
Tyler
Well, not necessarily
Rus F.
Matt B: Yes communication is an issue that we are actively working on. One of the tasks the new support staff have been hired for it to help with the flow of information. We have a number of procedures in place as well as ongoing training that will be used to facilitate this. We are also looking at things such as recorded status which will be updated on a regular (15 minute basis)
Kody R.
Please, if you have a question, please place a * and one of us will get with you. We need to avoid confusions
John S.
why is phone support needed when VPS are good at replying to faults AFTER the event and you’ve noticed the downtime
Happy H.
*When are you taking away your promise of 100% uptime. My 30 days London H uptime is a lousy 90.6 %
Rus F.
Bobby: We do accept Paypal and we are looking at improving that payment offering.
Richard      
* In what situations did you find the cloud software was causing cloud downtime?
Matt B.
Ok. Just know this is a serious concern that I amongst others have had. Previous vendors have been much better at communication so it’s been tough to experience such bad communication
Barry S.
@ Happy H
Jeff N.
For those of us who resell, we need better communication b/c it puts us in the hot seat with our own customers
Jorje
* Why OnAPP 2.2 instead of 2.3?
Rus F.
Mark: We are planning a number of new clouds and new locations over the next 12 months. However we going to make any promises on locations or time delivery to avoid setting false expectations
Boffolow
*From a security point of view do you feel that it is good practice for your support staff to put keys on our servers. Furthering on that is there the potential that asking for the login details to our server is not the first step support take when either the issue is known and told to them or is not a direct result of anything on your VPS.
Kamen G.
* any chance there could be a middle cloud hosting plan between 65 a month and 160 a month. I have clients in the middle of that range, as far as traffic goes and 160 breaks their budgets.
Mark (.
*Related to Happy H question – the uptime on LON-F is 99% compared to LON-H’s 92%. What are the differences between these two clouds that have caused this disparity?
Barry S.
I agree we need totally transparent and honest visibility of outages and their resolution in realtime
Rus F.
Happy H: The 100% uptime what we aim to deliver and if it is not met then we offer service credits relating to your hosting.
Richard: There is a known bug in OnApp 2.0 that we are running that can cause downtime on HV’s. 2.2 fixes this.
3:15 PM
David S.
* Will the OnApp upgrade prevent the server instances going into read only file system errors?
Rus F.
Jorje: OnApp 2.3 is still in BETA
Jeff N.
good question @David
Rus F.
Boffolow If you are talking about SSH keys this is more secure than asking for your password. There are times when it is best to avoid getting all information together to avoid going backwards and forwards on support tickets.
Tyler
*When you have time, can post the differences between 2.2 or 2.3? Is it anything significant? New features?
Barry S.
* I have never received a service credit and I am on London H. How do I receive them – I have asked!
Meshezabeel
I have found the current support and service at VPS.net to be top notch. I have been pleased all the way through, and VPS.net has certainly showed they care about their customers even through the little hiccups.
Rus F.
Mark DG: We have a hosting solution that will be in that price bracket but its also there is an arguement for a mid-range package
Johnny H.
When there is a planned outage or a server needs to be reset, how are we notified in advanced so that we can know and plan accordingly?
Terry M.
Hi Tyler, 2.3 is mostly a maintenance release that will allow for IPv6 support.
Rus F.
David S: The OnApp upgrades will help along with the SAN upgrades we have done to resolve this problem. Coupled with that our new Nexenta storage will resolve this further.
Kody R.
Barry: Can you give me your ticket number and I will ensure this is completed.
Mark (.
Meshezabeel: Agreed – the staff are actually the best thing about VPS.net in my experience. Most of the time they are responsive and friendly.
Rus F.
Any other questions?
Matt B.
*I’d like to inquire about the managed service. I subscribed to it for 2 months, but ended it and was given a refund as it didn’t perform at all like it claimed too. This is something I’m extremely interested in and want to know if fixing this to be truly managed and “worry-free” support is on the horizon?
Happy H.
I concur. No complains about the staff
Jeff N.
likewise
anthonysomerset
* you keep mentioning a new control panel and new white-label reseller panel, and its been mentioned as far back as around a year ago and i know you have had mark boulton and co working on it, when is that really going to see the light of day?
Tyler
Same, the staff is always reliable.
bobby
*i have another question to ask, how come when someone new registers on the vps.net support board they get auto banned why is that
Rus F.
Matt B: We have looked at the entire managed/on-demand ticketing options and have something in the work to improve that.
Mark (.
*The last month’s uptime on LON-F is 99% compared to LON-H’s 92%. What are the differences between these two clouds that have caused this disparity?
Barry S.
Rus Before introducing new products and services which I assume take up management time please just fix the stability and availability of the current services. Make them 100% or as close as and I for one will be much happier.
Tigran N.
* All this talk reminds me. Is there any plan to introduce inter-cloud unlimited bandwidth / shared IP addresses so that we can set up reliable redundancy / failover solutions? In that case any one cloud outage won’t be as drastic.
Happy H.
Matt Brown: B My first 2 months here were managed, but instances occurred nevertheless. Even with the unusual downtime the 10 per ticket is cheaper than managed
Kody R.
AnthonySomerset: The reseller CP is in beta, if you would like a login please open a ticket and ask for it to be moved to the reseller department. I will make sure this is done for you.
Larry
I’ve found the staff to be arrogant and argumentative, and not really interested in listening to the needs of their customer base. The concept is great, but the implementation lacking due to that mindset.
Matt B.
I second Tigran – I’ve looked into setting up a failover server but was told it wouldn’t really be possible with the current setup
Terry M.
Bobby, that is something I’m working on. We put in place a spam prevention service that is somewhat too sensitive. I’ve made is much more lenient in the past couple of days. If you’re still banned, please file a ticket and we’ll give you customer access.
Rus F.
Mark: LON-H was upgraded to the new SAN configuration last month. This month should be able to delivery a much higher uptime
Tyler
*Have you considered pay-per-use pricing for cloud servers?
Richard
* Are there any ETAs on the ability to fail a VPS between datacenters automatically?
David S.
* Are there any plans to allow across cloud load balancing, a chat with sales staff who said it wasn’t possible, only failover dns. I think allowing that kind of set up would provide a reliable and scalable offering.
3:20 PM
Rus F.
Tigran: OnApp 2.2 has load balancing support. We are looking at our options to leverage that.
David S.
Sorry Tigran, busy typing, didn’t see you post the same question!
Rus F.
Tyler: We have a daily node pricing point. OnApp does support per minute billing and before we could do that we would have to upgrade all our clods to OnApp
Mark (.
Failover would be brilliant as it could allow us to compensate for any downtime, even if some might argue that we shouldn’t have to.
Johnny H.
* QUESTION FOR RUS: When there is a planned outage or a server needs to be reset, how are we notified in advanced so that we can know and plan accordingly?
Rus F.
Richard: There are no ETA’s yet as its technically complicated to replicate data between locations
Steph G.
Rus Foster: What surprised me, after 12 months of being with VPS.NET, was that when I had a real problem, the support team just weren’t committed and capable of resolving it – I had ticket threads of 50+ messages stretching over almost a week of downtime. Glad to hear you’re upgrading the SANs, but fundamentally, my perception was that VPS.NET isn’t on top of its technology stack. Are you doing anything to give clients a sense that when things do go wrong, you have the technical team with skills to fix it?
Tyler
Gotcha, I only ask because I may terminate a server if I no longer intend to use it further.
Rus F.
Johnny: We do aim to send out emails before maintance though this is something we are looking to further improve.
Johnny H.
RUS – I have never received anything like this and this has caused major problems. Is there a standard procedure in place for notifying outages or when server is reset? or is it left up to support to do on the fly?
Skyler C.
* What is the status on backup snapshots? Do they work?
Boeki
*when will the tokyo cloud be available again?
Tyler
*Will they refund accordingly if you terminate your server before your regular billing period?
Barry S.      
I had my first email notification this week with the upgrade of London H
Kody R.
Steph: I am working on our Team in the US. We have hired some members in our Utah office that will be providing level 1 and phone support for our services. We believe that this is a big step in making our way to improve customer communications and technical support.
Rus F.
Johnny: Please send us a ticket and I can check into it for you
Happy H.
*Terry what is the most stable cloud between LON and AMS?
anthonysomerset
i second: * What is the status on backup snapshots? Do they work?
Rus F.
Sklyer: This is fixed in OnApp 2.2
Kody R.
Boeki: The tokyo cloud will be converted to paid nodes within the next 2-3 weeks. (we will let you know before hand). The tokyo cloud is going to be an actual production location.
John S.
* has anyone used these: http://www.melbourne.co.uk/server-hosting/… – VERY good reputation
Rus F.
Tyler: We will issue a service credit
Boeki
*enkompass was planned some months ago. any news on when a template will be available?
Skyler C.
*Rus: Which SLC clouds have OnApp 2.2?
Johnny H.
i have sent multiple tickets on this issue and have tried to contact customer support Terry Myers on multiple occasions and this has never been properly addressed, so i’m concerned submitting a ticket will not result in any change. Is there someone else i can contact directy?
anthonysomerset
* what was broken about the snapshot backups and how does “yet another onApp update” solve the problem like promised so many times previously?
Boeki
Kody Riker: thanks. i wanted to sign up on the tokyo cloud but couldn’t get one.
3:25 PM
Happy H.
* Which template is the most stable for WordPress?
Terry M.
Happy H., AMS is running a new stable SAN setup, however we recently put in place a number of changes on the London clouds, so I’m confident that you would have a good experience there too.
Mark (.
*Rus: What would really help is a regularly updated list, somewhere, of each cloud along with the characteristics of each (software version, SAN version etc.). is this possible?
Tyler
Happy H. What do you mean?
Rus F.
Boeki: We are revisiting our entire Windows based setup and looking to massively improve. I’ve personally been to see Microsoft in the UK in the last few week regarding this.
John S.
lol @Happy H you serious?
anthonysomerset
Happy Hotelier: build your own from scratch with debian:)
John S.
Happy Hotelier:
Tyler
or Ubuntu 😀
Terry M.
Happy H., in regards to the operating system? I would go with the operating system you’re most familiar with.
Barry S.
A customer dashboard of all locations with live availability statistics so that customers can choose where to locate would go a long way to enhancing the reputation and trust
Rus F.
Skyler: We will be updating SLC-E + F this week to 2.2
Kamen G.
* What’s the best way to find immediate info if I get downtime alerts? Do you have a better plan rolling out? (Example, Hurricane Electric in Fremont CA is good about reporting through Twitter, so a quick glance lets me know it’s not my servers in that datacenter) The status blog has been terrible…. like CHI-D was out for 8 hours before it was updated not that long ago.
Skyler C.
*Kody: Where does VPS.net post their job openings for the Utah office?
Rus F.
anthonysomerset: We have pushed OnApp very hard to get the snapshot issue fixed in this version.
John S.
Barry Sacks: S why waste time developing things like that and why not make services reliable.
Happy H.
I am serious and mean server setup. I’m on CentOS 5.4 x64 with cPanel and WHM but hear stories it gives to many issues
Johnny H.
* QUESTION FOR GROUP: My site has had major downtime when scaling up by adding slices, something that is advertised as being “worry-free”. We even notified support in advance and they were unable to do it correctly. Anyone else had consistent problems with adding slices?
Rus F.
Mark: Its an idea we will take on board however we are working to bring all our platforms to the same level of software. This will help with maintenance and new product rollouts.
Kody R.
Kamen: We are revisiting the current outage reporting that we do. We currently report on status.vps.net and twitter.
Mark (.
@Rus: Fair point – once stability is improved, it become irrelevant I guess.
anthonysomerset
Happy Hotelier: your more than likely on 5.7 now if you haven’t disabled updates, its not bad per se its just more resource intensive and overkill for a single site
Terry M.
Skylar, we use a number of local recruiting services.
Barry S.
Why waste time developing it? So you think VPS.NET does not already have this information? A readonly dashboard on our control panel – an hours work at most. BTW 02 send their customers SMS messages or both outages and resolutions in realtime.
boskonay
* There are several OnApp providers now that seem to enjoy great stability – are the issues here more than just software?
Boeki
Johnny H.: even if i pray hard before scaling up/down, i still get several hours downtime!
Johnny H.
For Outages, I use PINGDOM which notifies me of server and site problems before VPS.net ever does
anthonysomerset
Johnny H.: thats normal, you have to resize disk, if you dont need the disk space upgrade then choose not to update storage, then its generally only a reboot needed
Rus F.
Boskonay: Our SANS have been our weak point. That is what I’m personally overseeing resolving once and for all
3:30 PM
anthonysomerset
oh btw
Barry S.
Johnny H. Yes I have had to have support rebuild my kernel because of these Ksplice updates taking out my servers
Munz
*How long is this chat scheduled for?
Terry M.
Barry, do you have a ticket related to that? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
anthonysomerset        
Screen Shot 2011-10-04 says its from nick@vps.net still
Johnny H.
Terry, you have multiple emails from me about a very similar issue. let me know if you need me to send again
Terry M.
Munz, no scheduled end time.
Tigran N.
* With so many different clouds, it would be nice to standardize VPS templates. Some exist on one cloud but not another. Also, how often are these updated? Also, some documentation for the existing templates would be nice. On thing I like about Slicehost (just looking around, not shopping for a new provider) is a nice Tutorials area, aside form the support forum.
Terry M.
Anthony: yes, my mistake; Nick is still involved with VPS.NET, however in the future they’ll be sent out from mgmt@vps.net.
Rus F.
Tigran: By moving everything to one version of OnApp we can have constant templates. We do have a dedicated member of staff assigned to template building now so its definitely in hand. We also have a Wiki that we are populating at http://wiki.vps.net
Boeki
* so for now tokyo is not available? what’s the beta nodes for?
Tyler
What? Beta? Where?
Johnny H.
*The upgrading of the slices had been written on the vps.net front page as being “worry-free” – yet several people here are reporting constant problems. where is an FAQ on how to upgrade slices without downtime?
Skyler C.
* Does VPS.net have additional announcements today? Q/A really took over quickly after the phone support announcement.
Kasper C.
Hello, do you plan to offer some sort of dedicated servers?
Kody R.
Boeki: For now, Tokyo is still unavailable. We are still doing abit of testing with our beta customers. After 2-3 weeks, we will open it for public sales.
Rus F.
Kasper: No we don’t but you can see our sister US and UK companies who do offer dedicated servers
Terry M.
Skylar, No, we didn’t want this to be an advertising spiel. This was meant to be a way to connect with our customers, and address your concerns.
3:35 PM
Boeki
* speaking of dedicated servers, how about cloud-enabled bare metals ala storm?
Skyler C.
Thank you VPS.net, I look forward to the future improvements. I am signing off now.
Rus F.
Boeki: We have a request in with OnApp to have this functionality added so we can offer this
Terry M.
Skyler, we’ll also be holding future town halls. We hope to make it a routine thing.
Boeki
Rus Foster: that’s great to hear!
Mark
I can see it working well in the future, especially once the general issues are solved, and these can become positive 🙂
Eugene A.
Yes, thank you VPS.net! I’ve been with you guys for over two years and I’ve never looked back. Your growing pains are hard but growth nonetheless. I look forward to many more years with you. Keep up the great work!
Matt B.
*I think it’d be a good idea to work to build a few small focus groups as well. It’d be good to bounce ideas and plans off of us customers as you work to implement policies, strategies, etc. I’d be interested in partaking in this.
John S.
Terry Myers: Myers: * have you connected with customers? They all seem very concerned about reliability and there hasn’t been any real assurances that things will significantly improve. The reliability claims on your site and automatic switchover of hypervisors etc are false advertising.
Tyler
*I know you probably get asked this a lot, but where’s live chat support?
Tigran N.
Rus: Thank you. I would love to know some sort of an ETA for all this, but am afraid to ask 🙂 Like Anthony Somerset mentioned, the Beta control panel still being in the works after at least a year after the initial announcement… And I do understand about setting expectations, but it would be nice to know when all these are going to take place, at least approximately.
Terry M.
Matt, we’re going to be looking back at how today went and seeing how we can improve. Something like small focus groups may be best.
Matt B.
Ok. great. Add me to your list of folks interested if you can.
Boeki
* my worst grief with the server’s i’ve had with vps.net is when they go into read-only. how much less likely is this not happening in the new configurations you’re planning?
Kody R.
Tyler: We are looking to have Live Chat rolled out with the Utah staff at the end of October (with Phone support)
John
Coming in late to this…….any chance there’s a transcript of what was discussed previously?
Johnny H.
* RUS / TERRY – it’s not just server reliability, but also keeping us customers in the loop when there are server problems. we can all understand that sometimes servers go down. But to not be notified when this is happening makes matters much much worse
Tigran N.
Matt, Terry: Count me in!
Rus F.
Tigran: Its something I’ve taken over and am now pushing hard. I want a release this year for it
RafaelRibeiro
@vpsnet we offer Videochat applications that is nice for this kind of webchat .. what do you think about test it for free 🙂 tell me @xpsvideochat
Johnny H.
* RUS / TERRY – any comments on how to upgrade slices without crashing? is there an FAQ?
Terry M.
John S., we know that our reliability is our customer’s top concern. Our goal through this chat was to connect with our customers and discuss how we’re improving that on a one-to-one level.
Rus F.
John: Yes we will be putting up a transcript
John
thanks
Kody R.
Johnny: We are working to revise communication breaks with the staff and the customers. We believe that we are actively working on this but is something that will take time. We appreciate our Customer’s patience.
3:40 PM
Johnny H.
*KODY – is this is process? the issue has been brought up months ago and have never heard of any specific changes that were planned. would love to hear what the thoughts are on how this would work and what the time table is 
I’ve been very patient – contacted customer support to let them know my concerns and issues to help them understand the issues from a customer perspective, but have never heard back any planned changes to the lack of notification.
Kody R.
Johnny, the communication is something that will take time. I strongly believe the new management will help in this process. Rus is very seasoned in the fields of his technical skill, and customer relations. Again all I can stress is the communications will take time to fix. Its something that we cannot just simply click and fix
John S.
… just like the reliabilty of VPSs
bobby
#can you guys email me the transcript of this chat
Johnny H.
*KODY – if this was an issue that was just coming to light today, i could understand this. But it’s an issue that’s been a consistent problem for months – and it’s never been addressed before
Boeki
* which clouds now have nexenta and onapp 2.2?
James C.
Are you going to provide transcript for this chat? I’ve only just been able to login as it’s been ‘full’?
Jay   
* RUS / TERRY communications about outages are more important that the outage time itself. If we can plan based upon feedback about outages we can deal with the outage and be happy to stick it out. Faster posting on status blog or twitter will go a long way with us. Thanks for the consideration.
Kody R.
Generally within the past month or so since we started implementing new policys we have noticed an increase with our customer satisfaction on ticket replys.
Terry M.
James C., yes, we’ll be posting a transcript of the chat.
Rus F.
Boeki: Just Japan currently
Barry S.       View paste
 Terry: Sorry for the delay, there is no search across my tickets so had to find it manually ticket number: 127250 Subject: Re: [#127250] (On Demand) – (London) – Zone H – 109.123.112.253 – mysql will not restart on production database  Hello,  Sorry for delay,  I have checked the logs of your server, and seems problem was caused by one ‘ksplice’ (ksplice_juzpl1wc_vmlinux) kernel’s module which could not work with the newer kernel, and OS could not boot.  Regards,  —  Andriy  L3 Support Engineer
Varun B.
I’d love a transcript too.
John S.
Jay: are you serious? how about little to no downtime?
Kody R.
Johnny: As I have stressed, I believe the new management will help with the communication problems.
Terry M.
Varun, we’ll be posting the chat trascript on our company blog at https://www.vps.net/blog/
John
Kody, I don’t have a lot of confidence in that. The response to problems lately has been even worse in my experience.
Boeki
Rus Foster: thought so. too bad i can’t get in yet. i guess i’ll have to wait 2-3 weeks for the tokyo cloud to go into production.
John S.  
How many customers does VPS.NET have roughly at the moment?
Varun B.
great, thanks
Terry M.
Barry, I’ll need to do additional research on that. Thanks.
John, company size is strictly confidential.
John S.
lame
Jared J.
seriously?
3:45 PM
Tigran N.
For those pasting their email addresses, FYI… Since this transcript will be posted somewhere in the support forum / online, you’re risking to have your email addresses harvested by spam-bots.
Barry S.
Terry: Be very happy to hear from you.
Johnny H.
*KODY – that’s unfortunately very vague. what’s the time table? and what changes are being planned? is this something that will be fixed in one month or one year? so that i can know if i need to find a new hosting company – in general VPS has been great, but the notification of server outages is absolutely terrible because it’s non-existent.
Kody R.
John, can you please email me a list of ticket numbers and I will check into these for you. I was hired on as our customer evangelist.. I am working to revise the issues with customer satisfaction. This is something that cannot be changed overnight.
kody@vps.net ^
John S.
* do you think you’ve done exactly as UK2 do and oversubscribe?
John
Yes, I would be glad to.
Kody R.
Thanks
Terry M.
Tigran, we’ll go through and edit out customer email addresses to make sure they cannot be harvested by spam bots.
Tigran N.
Thanks, Terry. That is very thoughtful of you!
Rus F.
John S: Its technically impossible for us to oversell our infrastructure.
Terry M.
Tigran: I honestly didn’t think of it but you raised a good point so I’ll make sure it’s done.
John S.
Rus Foster: impossible? Surely if customers use more resources than you have then it’s very possible
mattc
I had problems at the start (2 months ago) but I must say my service has been fast and so has my website loading speeds 🙂
Rus F.
John S: If we oversold VM’s then they wouldn’t build. We have x TB of RAM and that is all we can sell
John
What have the recent changes been with personnel? Has Rus taken over Nick’s job, and Terry kept a same role, or new roll?
Terry M.
John: Yes, that’s pretty much it.
Boffolow
mattc: I think we can all say that if there is one thing VPS.net is not bad for it’s the speed of their servers.
John  Got it.
Terry M.
Some roles have been re-defined, but for the most part we’re all still here to help you.
bobby
Thanks staff for telling me all this great news take care
John S.
Rus Foster: you can’t predict how much ram each VPS would use on a server. If you put too many VPS’s on each server you’ve oversubscribed and made the server unreliable.
Mark (.
Boffolow: Yes, the product itself is great with the uptime issues put to one side. Definitely important to recognise the positives.
John S.
If there is too much network traffic everything slows down
Happy H.
Okay thanks for the effort guys. I’m signing off and will be contacting Terry M soon re moving
Dattas
John, Xen doesn’t work like that. Xen has dedicated memory. If you try to put a vps that would exceed that memory, it will fail to create it
3:50 PM
Terry M.
John, since we use cloud technology a VPS is capable of booting up anywhere in a specific cloud. Even if a customer upgrades their VM from say 2 nodes to 45 nodes, we’ll still have the capability to do that.
John S.
@Mark product is good BUT reliability is piss poor and extremely important for sales, seo and many other things
Terry M.
So, a customer isn’t tied to a specific server, which would limit their growth potential.
Dan H.
Just want to pop in and say I’m a new customer, less than 1 mo., so I haven’t had to live through the downtime. However, it is encouraging to see that you are being proactive and hiring new people to address your customers’ issues such as communication and localized support, even if it may have taken longer than many would have liked.
John S.
@Dan move while you can.
Dan H.
Also, I’ve used competing services from multiple different cloud vendors and none are perfect. I’ve had downtime with all.
John S.
@Dan you tried serverlove?
bob j.
@dan. none are perfect. however none are worse than vps.net
Mark (.
@John S: Yes, it’s been tough on some clouds… I’ll give you that.
bobby
thanks Terry M and Rus for this wonderfull chat today
Terry M.
We’ll be ending this chat shortly. However we’ll be holding a 2nd chat starting at 11AM MDT at 5PM GMT.
Johnny H.
*KODY, i’ve forwaded you the list of the server issues that i’ve had and the lack of communication or notification about server outages and server restarts. Please contact me when you able so that we can resolve the issue. again, the issue isn’t downtime – everyone has that – the issue is not notifying us when there is downtime. that’s a relatively simple fix that has a huge impact on customer service
John
I agree with Dan H that none are perfect. But I haven’t ever had worse support response times or reliability ever.
bob j.
john is right. just to put this into context folks. i currently spend about $1500 per month with vps.net
Gobala K.
I agree, no notification on downtimes.
Dan H.
@John, and that is why I’m encouraged by the steps they are now taking to correct that.
bob j.
soon i will be spending $0
Kasper C.
The amsterdam clouds have been working out great for us, we moved away from the london cloud and the speed have been amazing, so I don’t think vps.net is that bad, come on guys.
Dan H.
even if it has taken them too long to take these steps
Jay
Any plans for a West Coast US based location for the cloud hosting. I would like an alternative to ATL or as a failover if we move our sites over.
John S.
If they spent all their time notifying then there would be no time fixing.
Meshezabeel
Any way to stop the chat from scrolling, I’m busy helping people (on and off) at work right now. I keep coming back and missing some of the chat.
John S.
Put it into context. Monitor status.vps.net
Dan H.
I agree, more US clouds.
Terry M.
Bob, I’m not familiar with your specific account. However I’d like to work with you to see what we can do to address your concerns.
Kody R.
Johnny: I will look into this later on after the webinars are over. Is this satisfactory?
Rus F.
Jay: Yes we have looked at that as a possible location along with other US locations.
Tigran N.
* So a quick semi-noob question: If I need to quickly deploy more nodes to scale up the server, and choose to update the storage later on at night, is there a good possibility that the storage nodes will be rebuilding for many hours and the server still won’t be available in the peak hours? I’m always sleepless when this happens.
bob j.
the first priority for VPS.NET should be to get quality engineers
Johnny H.
* KODY – thank you, i appreciate it. i’ll look forward to your response
bob j.
and “on site” engineers
John S.
@bob j agreed
John
Dan H, some of us like myself have been here for 2+ years and experienced a lot of grief. I think its a testament to our customer loyalty that we have been here so long in the first place. There have been promises of change and phone support. But nothing has ever gotten better. That said, I truly wish the best for vps.net and hope to see improvement even if I leave before it happens.
John S.
Tigran Noryan: Get dedi
Johnny H.
TIGRAN – i’ve had major problems scaling up – been down for hours unfortunately. only advice i have is to constantly monitor your site for outages
Kody R.
Johnny & All Customers: As I have said previously, if there is something you are not satisfied with (staff/engineer responses/etc) please make me aware and I will do my best to try and resolve them.kody@vps.net
bob j.
think about it. they have offsite enginners. which means if you put in a support ticket the engineers need to put in a supprt ticket with whoever is onsite at whichever cut rate data center is being used
Gordon
are there plans to cut prices??
3:55 PM
Dan H.
I understand that for those who have lived through all the downtime, this all may be too little too late. What I see as a new customer is encouraging, though. I hope they can follow through.
Gobala K.
I have constant problems with “high CPU usage” and every time it seems the blame is pinned on us. We tried everything, same problems happens.
John S.
@Dan H: VPS have always been encouraging
bob j.
@dan. for a company that cant even keep a SAN up and running. really?
Mark
How is the white label WHMCS plugin coming along?
Tigran N.
If I was on dedicated servers, I wouldn’t be with VPS.net’s cloud hosting now, would I? 🙂
Kody R.
Mark: The plguin has been released and availible for some time.
Andrew S.
Did i miss anything interesting?
John
Kody, I appreciate responses like that, and if you are the Kody that has helped me in the past, you and Nick N had been very helpful at times. But I always wondered, and said to Nick, “Why do I have to rely on senior people in the company to do support? Why can’t support do support?”
Kody R.
For more info on the reseller program, you can contact resellers@vps.net and they will get with you.
Dan H.
I didn’t come here to be trolled, but it is apparent that some of you only came to troll.
Terry M.
Andrew: we’ll be posting a chat transcript on the blog and as well, having a 2nd chat at 11 AM MDT.
bob j.
lol .. why are there no russian names in here? 😉
Andrew S.
ah, thanks Terry
Kody R.
John: This is something that is being worked on I can assure you. And yes, I’m the Kody that was here when VPS.net was built 🙂
Mark
Kody Riker, yes the original, but there was supposed to be a new version out in the 3rd qtr of 2011.
Tigran N.
Bob: there are plently Russian names here 🙂
Rus F.
I would like to thank you all for coming for this chat. If you have any other questions please feel free to email mgmt@vps.net and we will be happy to help. If we could please ask people to allow other customers to login that would be appreciated.