The Quest for a New Web Server (And 3-month Review of Krypt.com)
The long process of finding a new web host began back in December of 2008, and continues into March 2009.
My goal remains to cut my fixed costs associated with hosting my personal web sites and those of my family/friends. Note that I have not experienced a single problem with my dedicated server at ThePlanet, and they continue to provide excellent service -- I've retained their services as a "life boat" to which I can return in crisis while I search for a permanent solution. After a brief sojourn from their network from January 2009 until a few days ago, I'm back with thePlanet for the moment.
Prior to today, my blog web site was hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) from Krypt.com. As my readers may have noticed, service over the last few months was less than stellar (terrible, in fact), as I experienced a number of quite protracted and unexplained outages, during which my VPS was entirely unavailable/unresponsive to all web traffic and any administrative connection.
Indeed, even Krypt's own technicians were unable to restore the VPS during those outages and, at one point, arbitrarily (and with no warning whatsoever) assigned me to a new server with a new IP address, requiring that I scramble to update DNS settings across my web portfolio.
At the same time, they entirely deleted all my site materials and left me to re-configure the entire web server on the new VPS from scratch -- no setting or software was carried forward onto the server. Fortunately, I maintain an off-site backup, so restoration of site files was relatively simple, though re-configuring IIS was a bit of a pain and a waste of time. I completed the work, however, believing that my troubles were drawing to an end.
As it would turn out, my troubles with Krypt.com were not complete as the new VPS began to settle into the precisely identical pattern of unresponsiveness as its predecessor with Krypt. Only this time, I added documentation to my technical support requests at Krypt by sending in tracert outputs to demonstrate that the connectivity problems were not on my end as certain Krypt technicians had implied. Take note of the last network "hop" to my server and the associated ping times.
After supplying this documentation to Krypt.com, they were still unable to address the problem, though my opinion of the root cause had changed (to oversold servers and/or bandwidth). There is very little else which can explain the slow response in the last hop to my VPS -- that is, the most rational and most likely condition to create such a large spike in ping time in the last hop is a destination server overburdened with other client's applications and email (SPAM) servers.
Although my experience with Krypt's "quality" of service may not represent the VPS industry as a whole, I believe my server usage and technical requirements are such that a VPS environment will be unacceptable to me, regardless of the provider. So with that in mind, my mind is set to leave Krypt behind and continue my quest elsewhere, only using revised terms of search that now are revised and include only dedicated servers over which I will be master of my own.
I've already placed the order. More to come soon.
My goal remains to cut my fixed costs associated with hosting my personal web sites and those of my family/friends. Note that I have not experienced a single problem with my dedicated server at ThePlanet, and they continue to provide excellent service -- I've retained their services as a "life boat" to which I can return in crisis while I search for a permanent solution. After a brief sojourn from their network from January 2009 until a few days ago, I'm back with thePlanet for the moment.
Prior to today, my blog web site was hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) from Krypt.com. As my readers may have noticed, service over the last few months was less than stellar (terrible, in fact), as I experienced a number of quite protracted and unexplained outages, during which my VPS was entirely unavailable/unresponsive to all web traffic and any administrative connection.
Indeed, even Krypt's own technicians were unable to restore the VPS during those outages and, at one point, arbitrarily (and with no warning whatsoever) assigned me to a new server with a new IP address, requiring that I scramble to update DNS settings across my web portfolio.
At the same time, they entirely deleted all my site materials and left me to re-configure the entire web server on the new VPS from scratch -- no setting or software was carried forward onto the server. Fortunately, I maintain an off-site backup, so restoration of site files was relatively simple, though re-configuring IIS was a bit of a pain and a waste of time. I completed the work, however, believing that my troubles were drawing to an end.
As it would turn out, my troubles with Krypt.com were not complete as the new VPS began to settle into the precisely identical pattern of unresponsiveness as its predecessor with Krypt. Only this time, I added documentation to my technical support requests at Krypt by sending in tracert outputs to demonstrate that the connectivity problems were not on my end as certain Krypt technicians had implied. Take note of the last network "hop" to my server and the associated ping times.
Tracing route to customer.vpls.net [98.126.15.X] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.10.32.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.X.X.X
3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms X.hsa1.X.level3.net [64.X.X.X]
4 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms ge-7-0-X.mpls1.X.level3.net [209.244.22.1]
5 * 6 ms 4 ms ae-2-0.bbr1.washington1.level3.net [4.68.128.201]
6 5 ms 6 ms 5 ms ae-24-79.car4.washington1.level3.net [4.68.17.70]
7 5 ms 5 ms 6 ms 10ge-3-1-0.was10.ip.tiscali.net [4.68.110.98]
8 70 ms 70 ms 69 ms so-4-0-0.lax10.ip.tiscali.net [89.149.187.93]
9 76 ms 74 ms 74 ms vpls-gw.ip.tiscali.net [77.67.68.98]
10 74 ms 74 ms 75 ms vlan2099.br1.lax3.vpls.net [67.198.200.18]
11 1353 ms 227 ms 383 ms customer.vpls.net [98.126.15.X]
Trace complete.
After supplying this documentation to Krypt.com, they were still unable to address the problem, though my opinion of the root cause had changed (to oversold servers and/or bandwidth). There is very little else which can explain the slow response in the last hop to my VPS -- that is, the most rational and most likely condition to create such a large spike in ping time in the last hop is a destination server overburdened with other client's applications and email (SPAM) servers.
Although my experience with Krypt's "quality" of service may not represent the VPS industry as a whole, I believe my server usage and technical requirements are such that a VPS environment will be unacceptable to me, regardless of the provider. So with that in mind, my mind is set to leave Krypt behind and continue my quest elsewhere, only using revised terms of search that now are revised and include only dedicated servers over which I will be master of my own.
I've already placed the order. More to come soon.
Labels: Krypt, Krypt.com, new web host, Review, VPS
posted by Brent at
9:39 AM
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