Very big surprise this morning: tried to access our website hosted on a VPS account and instead of our regular home page I seee:

Apache 2 Test Page
powered by CentOS

... and the rest of the welcome page

FTP not working, VPS access not working. Just like the IP is no longer pointing to the right machine. We supposed to be on Windows VPS and as far as I can understand our IP goes now to a CentOS server.

Have you submitted a support ticket to vps@hostmysite.com? If so, let us know the ticket if you haven't received a response yet and we can take a look into it for you.

Thanks.

Edit: I see the issue was explained to you in your ticket. Please let us know if you need further assistance.

Hi,

Yes, issue was solved and I thought it will be just a "rare exception". Basically your mates wrote me " This problem is very rare and far between, and I am a bit surprised that it occurred in this situation" ... Let's say I can understand that.

BUT... today when I have opened my browser I had a shock! My website looked like 10 days ago even if we update it DAILY! I was checking the source files and ... SURPRISE! Last update date was August 31! Like I told you before we are updating this application DAILY and all our customers are using it to upload their files. Everything between August 31 and September 12 is lost! Thank GOD the Database is hosted on a separate server and we have all the data intact.

I have all the source files on my computer and I could upload them back quick but we are still missing all the files uploaded from the interface by our customers and our employees. How can we recover all this? They are probabily tens or hundreds of pictures and other files!

I had a very good experience with HostMySite so far but things changed since we moved to a VPS plan! How can you explain the support and everything was better before and now, when we pay more, we keep having problems?

And most important: how do we solve this? How can we get back all those missing files between August 31 and September 12? There are almost two weeks of hard work we lost!

Get a Dedicated Box, and watch as you never get another strange error again. I used to have 4 VPS windows Boxes. Everyone of them had issues. Since moving to a dedicated box, I no longer have any down time. The memory management on the VPS is crap ( doesn't matter where its hosted ). Not sure if I would trust the cloud either, bu I have no first hand experience with cloud hosting.

Ditto.

Ever since we moved off the VPS to a co-located box, we have had 0 issues and 99.9% uptime.

Ditto, seems that you are a very lucky person... Since we moved to the VPS we keep having problems every few days And I am not talking about 5 minutes downtime or anything, but serious issues taking hours to get fixed.

Right at this moment our VPS is down for more than an hour and we have nothing else to do than wait... and appologize to our customers by phone

"(...) In this case it is not just your VPS that is effected, but the entire hardware node, which it appears had to be rebooted again and is taken a little longer to get fixed than originally anticipated."

Am I very very unlucky?

Adrian,
Even though I do cherish my VPS boxes for the learning experiences they provided me. Similar to your parents buying you an old car with engine problems. You will learn how to cope and diagnose it. I only have 1 client left on a VPS, and I am about to move them to a dedicated box as well. They emailed me today saying the VPS was down. The VPS wasn't down by MySQL was down.

The problem with the VPS boxes is they fight over the kernel memory on the 32bit environment. Its a known issue ( doesn't matter if its with HMS or another company ). I would recommend either upgraded to the newer Cloud VPS, or getting a dedicated server. HMS tends to be priced higher than most hosts. You get the support you need, but the truth is if you know what you are doing with a server and are comfortable doing things like intalling your own patches, Database server, Mail Server, setup websites in IIS. Then you will almost never need the support. I have 2 dedicated boxes ( not with HMS ) and they have not gone down even once. If you are still learning, I would recommend staying with HMS. This will give you the opportunity to learn how to run a server, while you have them for support.

Hi whitesites,

You're right, it's great to run your own dedicated server, but you need time and knowledge to do it. I just want to focus on development and customer support than managing the server. That's why I prefer to pay and get the support.

I am thinking to go with the HMS Cloud Hosting but it is still not very clear to me if this is the right choice, and - most important - how much are we going to pay for it!

I asked for a quote few days ago but still didn't get any answer from HMS.

I know what you mean, that is how I felt in the beginning too. I didn't know how to run a server, and the possibilities sounded scary. The truth is I spent more time them with clients calling me saying the website is down ( on the shared or VPS environments ), then digging through my applications trying to figure out what was causing the servers to crash, only to find it was not my code, but the shared environment.

Since moving to a dedicated box, I have not had a website go down once, and I can actually focus on developing new applications. Dedicated boxes are extremely stable. So much that I am going to colocate my own box, and then start making money from the hosting.