VPS hosting done right that is.

I am some-what hard to please, especially when it comes to hosting and technology in general. I hold web hosting companies to standards I would expect myself to meet if I were in their shoes. I dont want unexpected outages, unexplained server performance, random machine reboots, and probably my #1 pet peeve with hosting companies is often I feel like I monitor their servers better than they do. Is it really that hard for companies to tell their customers what is going on? 

The other day I received a lovely text message from my pingdom monitoring of biturl (the site hosted on my slice) notifying me that it was down. Probably 30 seconds later I received an email from slicehost letting me know what’s going on.

   The server your slice was on became unresponsive to our monitoring at 04:05:50 UTC and an emergency reboot was required.

   Slices were restarted and are running, however we will be monitoring this machine for further trouble.

   Please note this was a server issue and your Slice activity was not a causal factor.

   We’ll notify you should further action be required.

   We apologise for this downtime and please contact us if you have any questions.

Slicehost Support

[39001]
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Slicehost Support
support@slicehost.com

The downtime only lasted 10 mintues but it could of lasted an hour and I wouldn’t have minded. Instead of me thinking “WTF?! why is this down“, and going through the process of opening a ticket, talking to a support guy who doesn’t know anything, and never getting a definitive answer on what happened, they simply sent a courtesy email to me. Downtime is inevitable, but when it does happen I appreciate being notified on what is going on. It’s these little gestures that go a long way in a host and really sets them apart from other hosts.