I have hosted one of my site at Hostdime Brazil branch and after hell of weekend (Fri/Sat) I have decided to run away from them as fast as possible. There is nothing more painful than looking for hosting in South America. The prices are double of everywhere else. The networks are crap. But that is only half of the problems. So since 2013 I have used Hostdime.com.br. First it was a shared hosting but later I have moved to VPS.

I have never been really happy with the network link between them and Europe. However, I think it is acceptable and maybe I am really too much used. to great network speeds I got here. I need to serve websites for local customers in Brazil anyway and that is the single thing that matters. This year, everything got just worse. There was a network outrage that lasted for a day couple months ago. The communication by support looked poor. This Friday something similar happened and Hostdime support had hit new low.

Friday on 6 pm local I have noticed that site does not work and rebooted it. I have managed to connect through SSH but website was not working and connections just died suddenly after entering simple commands. The problem was weird, and hard to track down remotely. The support was not helpful at all : They kept repeating that everything is fine and asking for pings and traceroute data when the problem was in their data center. That continued for like 6 hours, then silence.

During next day I have managed to identify when the connections will fail: Each bigger data transfer (around a screen full of symbols, or ls -la data for medium sized folder) will cut the data connection. My data was hostage on the server and the Hostdime 24/7 support did totally nothing. I got really interesting answers to my tickets later on and I do not understand how can one tell these things to any customer.

At that point I have decided to move my site out, managed to purchase, configure and recover data from backups. The databases were easy as I had backups ready in good format. But I had to organize some files. On late Saturday night I got my server running on another provider and serving visitors. I got my site up in ~32 hours and at the moment of writing (45 hours since incident )  the old server and network still got the same problems.

The Hostdime support procedure is bad

Hostdime claims that it provides 24/7 technical support. That is partially true. There are support people that can respond to your issues but it looks like they can’t perform actual infrastructure fixes. This particular answer shows me the depth of this problem:

The admins are checking the problem. They monitor it. They can’t tell how long it would take to fix them. They don’t have time to describe the problem to customers and what steps are taken to mitigate or solve the problem. They don’t have time to reply to support ticket updates for 6 hours. Maybe I am not important for them like (undoubtedly) other customers affected. But hey, they at least monitor it and after multiple hours in their own data center they know that the problem exists. Somewhere. And it is too complex for me to understand.

The first answer about what is particular problem was received 20 hours and it was in Portuguese. The short version “It’s out of our control, network problems, sorry, we are trying to work with other parties involved to fix them” even if they claim that they knew about them almost a half day ago.

Hostdime gets a lot of “Out of our control” problems that take long to fix

This is a second such problem (I mentioned the one couple of months ago). And it is weird how Hostdime has no procedure to fix it in timely manner. It looks like there is no plan for network outrages.

Hostdime reacts to complaints and not to the issues 

It took them hours to find problem after I have complained even if the problem could not affect me only. They either don’t monitor service or don’t want to scare their customers by notifying them about problems with the services. The communication looks like they wanted to hide the fact that there is outrage and hoped that it will be fixed soon.

There are few things worse than support that does not acknowledges the problems and communicates backs in timely manner.

Update about HostDime:

~48 hours after the network started showing problems, the services got restored and I received email :

The issue was resolved, we saw some bad routes, and optimize they.

Good to hear, HostDime, that it was not something serious. But aren’t the network routing something you control?

Categories: General

Giedrius Majauskas

I am a internet company owner and project manager living at Lithuania. I am interested in computer security, health and technology topics.

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