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Unreliable management
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This person (Vee Tran) also trades under DediDirect and probably some other names.
Six years ago the price for the server and bandwidth we leased from Vee as DediDirect was good. Now it's pretty easy to find undramatic but workhorse servers in the same $50 to $75 range with the same or better features.
This is a case of awful management. The unmanaged dedicated CentOS/Apache server hardware has been reliable and the Internet connections quite good. The only significant outages have been caused and drawn out by Vee's management.
For example, the management "lost" a block pf IP addresses that were in use on a production server. All the domains that depended on one of the IPs for SSL certificates couldn't even migrate to another server without a good bit of reconfiguration on our part. All in all it took Vee a month to replace (not recover) the IP addresses. Most of that time was lost because the 24/7 support does not work evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations -- and message response times are measured in days and weeks.
For example, it took nearly a month to get a rDNS set during which time places like gmail were rejecting emails from the server. At one point the management tried to argue that "unmanaged" included configuring the data center router tables and trunk line interfaces -- over which the server leaseholder has absolutely no control.
For example, we offered to pay for preventive maintenance -- replacing drives and a power supply. At first Vee ignored the request. Then he refused the request. Finally he capitulated but by then we'd opened another dedicated server elsewhere for critical functions.
Right now it has taken nearly three weeks to replace a failing drive and still we can't find out from Vee when we will get access and credentials for an IP KVM to re-provision as soon as the drives are replaced. Requests are simply ignored whether by email or trouble ticket.
Kind of like adding insult to injury, most server leases include hardware maintenance. Based on our experience we felt certain that it could take months for even an ordinary drive replacement (most hosting outfits stock drives and can replace one in hour), so we bought two enterprise level hard drives and shipped them to the data center with Vee's permission, hoping that would spur the replacement.. Never-the-less Vee is simply ignoring perfectly reasonable requests to tell us when and how we're to get IP KVM access immediately after the drives are replaced. This silly dance of begging for information and being ignored has already forced us to reschedule once and is headed into it's second week of delay as I write
I suspect this is a one man show that easily gets overextended. What it means for you is that the hardware may be good but you can't count on even the most trivial level of timely cooperation..
Aza D. Oberman
Washington DC
2/13/2017
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