🖐🏽 🐢 🤭 It seems to me that Russian VPS / VDS hosting comes from hell (and yes, we mow too) 🐠 👨🏿‍🚒 ⚪️

In general, I want to say right away that the opinion about hell and that the service of many of the two thousandths is a value judgment. In fact, of course, they come from Russia. In fact, of course, we are also good, and I will also tell about these spots in the biography. In fact, in recent years the same support has become much better for many. But still, some people’s pedigree pops up in some places.

Let me go over the problems that often directly unrealistic hurt the hosting clients, tell us what is good and bad with us and how it looks in other hosting services in Russia and abroad (but there, obviously, I know less about the insider).

The first story is iron. It’s unrealistic to infuriate customers when a RAID controller has flown or several disks have flown at once, and support makes it easy to replace. We had one client, which was first bounced by a DDoS on a neighboring VDS in the same server, then two hours later the scheduled work with the network adapter began, and then the raid went into rebuild after switching on and rebooting. By the question of didos, we will return, by the way.

So, you can take cheap “near-by-product” iron and often repair it, or you can server-based - we have Huawei corporate line. As far as I know, we and two other players in the Russian market have professional server hardware. Correct me if I am mistaken. This is because at the start we thought that we would live more than five years and decided to write off old iron at least five years after the start of operation. By the way, again, something like that came up with a tariff for 30 rubles for VDS, dare you?

Iron dilemma

So, we have an enterprise-class Huawei. Usually hosters in Russia have self-assembly, which is bought in wholesale stores with office and home desktops for components, and then it is assembled and works using various dendral methods. This affects the frequency of breakdowns and the cost of services. If with the frequency of breakdowns everything is more or less obvious (the worse the iron - the higher the chance of downtime), but with the cost of services everything is more interesting. With our cycle of five to six years, it turns out to be cheaper to buy just the servers and network devices of corporate lines for data centers.

Yes, they are more expensive to purchase. Yes, they have a very expensive warranty (we have extended it for all new devices on the next business day, plus extended the series not for the most successful ones far beyond the warranty on time). Yes, you need to keep the repair kit on the site: we change the same disks, RAID controllers, RAM strips and sometimes power supplies from our own spare parts in all ten data centers. Somewhere more spare parts, somewhere less, depending on the objective number and age of servers there.

When we first started business, we immediately decided to take iron more reliable. Because there was a chance to check: before RUVDS, we were engaged in algorithmic trading and used just self-assembled cheap iron. And it turned out that the difference is really very big. Consumables are bought simply centners. Naturally, if hosting has such costs or a shorter write-off cycle of iron, then the price of tariffs rises. And since prices for more or less the same configurations are more or less fixed throughout the market, something else usually degrades. As a rule, not support, but either the quality of communication or information security.

Of course, I may be mistaken, but the assessment is this: whoever does not explicitly indicate a partnership with an iron vendor and a professional line of iron on the site uses the “near-core” one. Maybe someone is just hiding their cool equipment.

We did a cheap (but not the cheapest) VDS hosting , so we carefully calculated and consider operating costs. I do not really understand the models of other companies, but it seems that the fact is that they have planning horizons of two or three years, and we just have more. Perhaps we are wrong, and Russia should not plan so far, but so far, pah-pah, we have won this and continue to grow as a company.

Data Center Place

Most VDS hosting has one or two locations. We have ten, and not only in Moscow, but also close to major Russian cities (Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk), which is important for Minecraft and Counter-strike servers, this is Switzerland, England and Germany. And at the same time, Russian-language support is everywhere.

Why do we need a second location, it is clear - the services must be geo-distributed. But why do we need data centers in other countries? This is a very interesting question.

Firstly, the data center in Switzerland is considered more reliable than the Russian one. This is not an objective assessment, but the opinion of most of our customers. I must say that yes, of course, there can be epic gouges there, as elsewhere, but in general they have much more carefully followed maintenance procedures and a very strong external security perimeter. That is, their problems should happen less frequently.

Secondly, of course, outside of Russia. It is important for someone to trade closer to the key points where orders are processed. It is important for someone because of their own VPNs (I think that at least a third of our servers were purchased specifically for organizing VPN tunnels through other jurisdictions). Well, there are people who caught masks in their data centers in Russia and now simply prefer not to store data with us. Although, in theory, no one is safe from this either. Just the default on hitting a data center is different.

I must say right away that some of our commercial data centers are no worse than those in the UK or Switzerland. For example, in Petersburgthe site is almost without jambs (and certainly without serious ones) and complies with Uptime Institute (T3) standards. Well guarded. That is, objectively, it is very good, but among customers it was somehow convinced that it is safer abroad. And those Russian hosters who do not give foreign locations do not immediately fit into the needs of the market.

Change server configuration and billing

We did surveys and studied what matters to customers. It turned out that parameters such as the quantization unit in the tariff and the ability to quickly change the server configuration occupy a very high place. We know that somewhere a virtual machine is created manually in one to two hours by request, the configuration changes per day by request in support.

We automated the processes until the median for the creation of the virtual machine began to equal four minutes, and the average interval from application to launch was 10-11 minutes. This is because some complex applications are still made by hand in about 20 minutes.

Our tariffication is per second (and not hourly or daily). You can create a server, look at it and delete it right away, saving your money (we ask for a prepayment for a month, but return it if it doesn’t come). Most Russian sites need to rent an OS license separately. We have WinServer delivered to all machines for free and included in the tariff (but a desktop version of Windows is not possible).

Server configuration changes in about ten minutes from the interface, both down and up. Two exceptions - down the disk is not always possible automatically (if the space is occupied by something), and when transferring from 2.2 GHz to 3.5 GHz it is done through a ticket. Manual applications have an SLA for the first response of 15 minutes, processing time of 20-30 minutes (maybe more, depending on the amount of data being copied). In tariffs, by the way, where we have HDD, everywhere in fact SSD with restrictions on HDD speeds (it turned out to be cheaper, and we switched to SSD completely about a year and a half ago). You can take a car with a graphics card. There is a recycling rate (there is a complicated formula from the processor, RAM, disks and traffic) - if you have peak calculations, it’s cheaper, but there are also clients who do not correctly predict their consumption and pay twice as much as the usual rate sometimes.Well, someone is saving.

Yes, all this requires automation costs. But as practice shows, this also allows you to save a lot on support and retain customers due to the quality of service.

The negative point is that sometimes we recommend taking 10 GB more for certain software. Or sometimes, in correspondence with the client, we understand what kind of software he has and we see that he simply does not have enough RAM or processor cores and we advise buying it, but many people think that this is some kind of wiring from support.

Marketplace

Overseas there is a tendency to provide not only VDS, but also immediately a set of pre-installed software. In one form or another , all large hosting companies have a marketplace and often do not have small ones. Our providers still often sell empty cars, as in Europe.

The first candidate for the marketplace after WinServer was Docker . Our technical experts immediately said that a marketplace is not needed, because admins are not so armless. Putting Docker is a couple of minutes, and don’t need to consider them so lazy that they won’t do it. But we deployed the marketplace and put Docker there. And they began to use, because laziness. Time saves! Not much, but it saves. This is not a vital necessity for customers, of course, but already the next market standard.

On the other hand, we do not have the same Coober. But the Minecraft server has recently appeared . It is still more in demand. There are interesting directions for VPS with pre-installed software: there is a configuration with a stripped-down Win (so that it does not consume performance), there is an already pre-installed OTRS. We give preinstalled software, and how you will activate it is up to you, we don’t see this.

The coolest marketplaces in the world, it seems to me, are Amazon, Digital Ocean and Vultr. Startups want to come to the Amazon marketplace: if you made some kind of tool like Elastixerch, but didn’t get into the marketplace, no one will know, no one will buy. And if you get it, then the distribution channel has appeared.

DDoS

Attack every hosting. Usually these are weak omnidirectional attacks that are similar to the natural microflora of the Internet. But when they begin to put a particular client, the problems begin for those neighboring with him on the same “branch”. Typically, these are those served from the same network device.

More than 99% of clients have no problems, but some are unlucky. This is a common reason why customers do not like us because of server downtime due to DDoS to a neighbor. For a very long time we tried to minimize these stories, but, of course, we could not completely avoid them. We cannot all in a row include DDoS protection in the cost of the tariff, then services will rise in price on the lower lines by about half. When support recommends that a client under DDoS take protection (paid, of course), the client sometimes believes that we specifically put it in order to sell something. And, most importantly, there is no way to explain, and the neighbors are suffering. As a result, we had to get deeper into the stuffing of the network adapters and write them our own drivers. It is the driver for the hardware, yes, you heard right. The second circuit - there is a double protection system that can switch routes in minutes.If you fall into the antiphase of checks, you can get a simple maximum of four minutes. Now switching still creates some problems in virtual switches and switches, we are finishing the stack.

Support

Russian support is one of the best in the world. I'm serious now. The fact is that many large European VDS hosting companies simply do not bother to take on many issues. The situation when someone works only in the mode of answering letters is widespread. Even constantly appearing small Russian hosting services of two or three people usually have either a chat on the site, or a phone, or the ability to knock on the messenger. And in Europe, large hosting services support for several days (especially if the application is before the weekend) considers the ticket, and it is unrealistic to call or write on the social network.

Our clients, by the way, choose locations in their cities, as our support jokes, in order to fill our faces on occasion. Actually, a few people came on the way home to the office.

And here it is time to start talking about our epic shoals.

Our jambs

The smallest is disk crashes, RAM and controller raids. It’s easy to come up and replace, but when the server crashes, several clients suffer at once. Yes, we tried to do what we could, and yes, reliable hardware is cheaper in the future, but it’s still a lottery, and if you get such a breakdown, then, of course, it’s a shame. The same Amazon is also not immune from anything like that, and breakdowns happen there quite regularly, but for some reason, customers each time expect us to be perfect. Forgive us for the physics and bad random if it hit your virtual machine.

Then the aforementioned DDoS. In December 2018 and in December 2019. Then in January and March of 2020. In the latter case, several servers stopped responding (physical machines clogged tight, and the virtual machines were on them) - a hard reboot was needed to make the network adapters come to life. Deploying back is not the most fun procedure, and a couple of people got simple in hours, not minutes. Attacks happen every day, and in 99.99% all the circuits work out normally, and no one notices this, but there are times when something goes wrong.

In December 2018, during a four-hour attack, the network switch failed. The second one did not pick up due to some mysticism, while trying to reanimate it, looped traffic appeared, and while we were sorting out what was going on, a simple one appeared. There was surprisingly little negativity; everyone understood that DDoS was happening. Although we raised the network for quite some time by our standards. If you suddenly came across this incident, then forgive us, and thank you for understanding everything correctly then.

Another important point: DDoS is always local. It never happened that problems in one data center developed simultaneously with problems in another. Well, for now, the worst thing that has happened locally is rebooting a switch with multiple machines.

To finally reassure our hacking clients, we insured liability at AIG. If they break us, and our clients suffer, insurers must reimburse. It turned out to be not very expensive per unit tariff, but it somehow gives confidence.

Support . We tried to make cheap hostingwith different features to choose from and sufficient reliability. This means that our support does not do two things: it does not talk with the client in long polite phrases and does not go into the application software. The second one came back to us last year, when numerous Instagram divs came along who bought VDS for installing like cheat engines and post automation. It is impressive how some people are extremely far from IT, ways to correctly understand the installation of software on a virtual machine. There is no such instruction that phytonyas will not master for a 30% increase in subscribers. But for some reason, they broke down on setting up outgoing traffic inside their software. Perhaps the instructions did not provide for this. We cannot be responsible for the operation of third-party software. And the problems there are not only that the user does not understand how to configure it, but also in stability. For instance,Here’s the man’s installed auxiliary software for cheating views on YouTube. And it comes from some forum complete with a trojan. And in the Trojan a bug, his memory is flowing. And we don’t fix bugs in trojans. If we put software, then this is a product out of the box.

This problem began to be solved with a knowledge base . There are three stages: we do not know what kind of software is there, and politely reply that we do not support such things. The second stage: there are several such calls, we understand one or two and write instructions, put it in our knowledge base and send it to it. The third stage: there are a lot of such calls, and we start the distribution kit in the marketplace .

And here, as we work with more and more "non-administrators", we began to encounter a second rake. Support always tried to work quickly and answered shortly and dryly. And some perceived this as passive aggression. What is permissible in a dialogue between two administrators is completely unsuitable for a regular user who has taken VDS for his small business. And over the years there have been more such users. And the problem there is not that support says something wrong, but how it says it. We are now doing a great job of updating the templates - we include in each of them not only something in the spirit of “we don’t support, sorry”, but a detailed description of what to do and how, why we don’t support it, what is now, and it’s all polite and understandable . More details and explanations and more etiquette, instead of three-letter abbreviations, simpler explanations are there.We rolled it out for a week, we look at it so far. Prior to the pandemic, the priority was not to lick the client, but to solve the problem as quickly as possible. We are in the philosophy of an enterprise like McDonald's: you can’t choose a meat roasting, support does just what is standard requests quickly. In general, the lesson is that if you answer dryly, people will often think that they are somewhat rude. We did not think until the last year, honestly. Well, they didn’t want to offend anyone, of course. In this regard, we lag behind developed support services in the market: many have the goal of being very careful with the client, and we just started working with this priority.support does only what is standard queries fast. In general, the lesson is that if you answer dryly, people will often think that they are somewhat rude. We did not think until the last year, honestly. Well, they didn’t want to offend anyone, of course. In this regard, we lag behind developed support services in the market: many have the goal of being very careful with the client, and we just started working with this priority.support does only what is standard queries fast. In general, the lesson is that if you answer dryly, people will often think that they are somewhat rude. We did not think until the last year, honestly. Well, they didn’t want to offend anyone, of course. In this regard, we lag behind developed support services in the market: many have the goal of being very careful with the client, and we just started working with this priority.

Fare . Well, our most epic fail is problems at the 30-ruble tariff. We have a special line of already weak iron, where VDS costs 30 rubles per month . It is very popular. They immediately said in the description that there would be full stuffing, the tariff is not for work, but for training. In general, AS IS, and this IS will often be very scary.

As it turned out, such a description of the tariff stopped few. 30 rubles is still cheaper than the ipv4 address, and then there is a virtual machine with it right away. It seems to me that many bought just to buy, because we open it in waves. The first time everything went more or less normal, but then we did not pay due attention to the fact that after three or four months recycling began to grow gradually - the projects were not launched there immediately, and by the end of the year the load became less comfortable for the average client, large queues appeared to write to disk, for example. Yes, there is an SSD, but we limit it to HDD speeds at a tariff, and this is not NVMe, but cheap Intel drives for server configurations specially purchased for experiments. We changed the disks for a larger and more normal, this allowed us to get at least some performance.

The second discovery of this tariff has brought us thousands of Chinese users. They wrote scripts that scorched our site, because about 800 cars were bought by the fraternal people in the window between the news on the site and the newsletter, and this is literally a few minutes. I can’t say exactly what they were doing there, but judging by the nature of the traffic, they were dissidents who circumvented the Great Chinese Firewall. Under the terms of the offer, we prohibited buying a car otherwise than to citizens of the Russian Federation. To protect Kweimyon, we had to suspend the creation of virtualoks. First, Russian users told us thanks, then support - some of the users “in the process” had to be completed with their hands. Well, there was a negative, because many were waiting, and when I received the letter, the tariff was already over.

Now we have several thousand active customers at a 30-ruble tariff. If the administrator has straight arms, he makes the cheapest VPN in the world. Someone knocked on support with Linux screenshots with some kind of GUI (I don’t remember what it was, but the fact of the GUI on such machines with memory limitations is already cool), someone put an ISP panel and so on . Someone really used for training. Once again we will do this action, taking into account the mistakes, but just know that somewhere there, in the Middle Kingdom, there is a maaalenky forum for about a million registered participants who are subscribed to the thread about our servers.

The main lesson in this story is that cars initially ran faster than expected, and people formed wrong expectations about performance. When she began to fall to the promised level, complaints began in support, and she was bombarded with negativity. Now, of course, we will more accurately explain what awaits at such a tariff. Forgive us once again if you are hurt by this story.

This is what my vision of different moments in the market looks like. And now I want to ask you to tell us what infuriated you in the market and how this can be fixed for earthly money. If it is economically feasible, we will try. Well, other hosts will look at this slice of comments, and maybe they will.

It seems to me that Russian VPS / VDS hosting comes from hell (and yes, we mow too)