FOOD FOR THOUGHT Hiformance hosting reliability

[rick]

Signed up for hosting for the texas server around 6/21/2018, loaded incredible and working great after a few hours could not connect to it nor the server itself. Finally, submitted a ticket to hiformance, after a few hours they responded that they move me to a buffalo server because of problems in texas( on other explanation).

Connected to buffalo the same day, everything is working. This past week last Thursday, 6/31/2018, I lost connection again, submitted a ticket and their response was to reload. By the time this was answered the pbx was working again no problems. Today, a week later, locked out, no functioning pbx by midday( worked fine before outage). And now it is working again, out of the blue. I have not done anything but submit another ticket with my concerns of reliability of server. Don't believe this is a firewall issue.
Wondering if anyone else is experiencing similar problems with hiformance. All hosting at vultr is solid.

 

[geopeterwc]

@rick ... except for some getting started issues (mostly mine) my iPBX13-13 has been working flawlessly. I'm still having issues with getting email to work, but I think that problem is more likely between my ears than a problem with HiFormance. My installation is at LosAngeles.
/Pete./

 

[wardmundy]

We're running seven servers at HiFormance. Six have been flawless for many months. The newest one is having some performance issues, and the HiFormance folks are working through that one. Their responses have been timely, and I am confident they will figure out what's causing the problem and address it.

In the words of Steve Jobs, "we eat our own dog food."

 

[rick]

The response from L3 support at hiformance:

Very sorry about the inconvenience. From time to time we get an abusive user on the node which causes havoc for other clients.

Best Regards,

 

[kmcdaniel]

Are Vultr and Hiformance okay for production environments?

 

[pixelflow]

Currently using a cheap Hiformance server as a test server/mess-around sandbox-ish thing, it's fine for production it seems... (still haven't worked out how on earth to setup SSH without needing to login to the SolusVM webpanel though..)

 

[geopeterwc]

I've been pleased with the performance and reliability of my small installation for home use on HiFormance. It's been quite stable and seems to be reliable, following my initial mis-steps in configuring the iPBX 13-13 system.

I have a client with a small installation of 10 phones and 2 DIDs (with Vitelity) that I am considering moving them off a hardware installation (with iPBX13-12) to HiFormance. But I am concerned about the long-term reliability of the service. Has anyone had long-term experience that would lead to using HiFormance for a production server? Comcast is the service provider and Vitelity provides the DIDs.

Comments, anyone?

/Pete./

 

[restamp]

My experience with low cost VPS offerings in general is that the good ones tend to grow until they get big enough to attract the attention of the bigger fish, at which point they get bought out, almost always to the detriment of their customer base. HiFormance seems to be such an outlier -- good and cheap. So use them if you like, but always have a Plan B in your back pocket in case things turn sour.

 

[Waffull]

The past handful of days, inbound calls stop ringing and outbound calls are going through an incorrect route. A reboot of the server corrects these. I haven't been able to spend any time troubleshooting. But what I've noticed is that it happens at different times of the day, it's not the same amount of time from the last reboot and running asterisk -r, in whatever default state it's in from the last running of the naf script, prior to incrediblepbx including gvsip by default in it's builds, shows no errors, shows communication between my ipphones and obi 202... so it all looks the same as it does right after a reboot.

Anyone else experiencing this?

I'm in the process of setting up incrediblepbx on my raspi, but I don't want to make it my production server until I can adapt the raspbx backup script so I can have an image of it in different states of configuration. Unfortunately hiformance has said they don't offer any sort of backup image and the limited HD space precludes one from being able to take an image of the system... making any changes on a production server not a very smart move

 

[chris_c_]

The past handful of days, inbound calls stop ringing and outbound calls are going through an incorrect route. A reboot of the server corrects these. I haven't been able to spend any time troubleshooting. But what I've noticed is that it happens at different times of the day, it's not the same amount of time from the last reboot and running asterisk -r, in whatever default state it's in from the last running of the naf script, prior to incrediblepbx including gvsip by default in it's builds, shows no errors, shows communication between my ipphones and obi 202... so it all looks the same as it does right after a reboot.

Anyone else experiencing this?

I'm in the process of setting up incrediblepbx on my raspi, but I don't want to make it my production server until I can adapt the raspbx backup script so I can have an image of it in different states of configuration. Unfortunately hiformance has said they don't offer any sort of backup image and the limited HD space precludes one from being able to take an image of the system... making any changes on a production server not a very smart move

1. If you buy 3 years of the $10 vps, you can ask for double disk space for free, this would let you save backups to the VPS.
2. Their vps servers are oversold, this means neighbors on the same server can negatively impact your VPS performance and slow it down, this is probably why your PBX phone calls are intermittently failing.
3. For higher reliability you should consider a switch to KVM, whether from the same host, or from another host, because KVM isolates you much better from your neighbors, KVM's not really vulnerable to neighbors on the same server cranking hard on the CPU or disk or network, while an oversold VPS server neighnors can much more easily cause negative impact on your VPS CPU, disk, and network.

 

[ajonate]

We're running seven servers at HiFormance. Six have been flawless for many months. The newest one is having some performance issues, and the HiFormance folks are working through that one. Their responses have been timely, and I am confident they will figure out what's causing the problem and address it.

In the words of Steve Jobs, "we eat our own dog food."

Just curious which data center you are in. It could be that some locations do better than others.

****EDITED TO ADD****
I got an email from HiFormance yesterday evening offering 2 cpu cores, 4GB memory, and 20GB SSD for $11.99/year (double one resource with 3 year prepay). That's at their Los Angeles location. Very tempting...

 

[ajonate]

OK, I have some input now. My HiFormance VPS account was in Chicago. I've been using it for experimentation, since the performance wasn't good for much else. The few times I used it I had to open a support ticket because it was slow to the point of being worthless. They would do something to get it going. That was a repeating pattern whenever I had some experimentation to do. The performance was never really great, but at least they got it to the point of being useable whenever I needed it.

A few days ago I asked to be migrated to Los Angeles, where they use the Quadranet data center. There was a small fee ($5) for migration, but I was OK with that. Migration happened quickly.

Seriously, the service in Los Angeles is terrific! I've never had it so good. Administration interface is snappy, and no sound break-up at all. Installs are incredibly fast and the IncrediblePBX 13-13 template works great (give it 10 minutes to install).

If anyone decides to take a chance on HiFormance I can't encourage you enough to select the Los Angeles data center. I'm considering putting my HiFormance VPS into production use.

 

[Waffull]

Where are you located? I'm in the northeast, so LA wouldn't make much sense. Especially with the god awful internet service we have available to us in rural Vermont

OK, I have some input now. My HiFormance VPS account was in Chicago. I've been using it for experimentation, since the performance wasn't good for much else. The few times I used it I had to open a support ticket because it was slow to the point of being worthless. They would do something to get it going. That was a repeating pattern whenever I had some experimentation to do. The performance was never really great, but at least they got it to the point of being useable whenever I needed it.

A few days ago I asked to be migrated to Los Angeles, where they use the Quadranet data center. There was a small fee ($5) for migration, but I was OK with that. Migration happened quickly.

Seriously, the service in Los Angeles is terrific! I've never had it so good. Administration interface is snappy, and no sound break-up at all. Installs are incredibly fast and the IncrediblePBX 13-13 template works great (give it 10 minutes to install).

If anyone decides to take a chance on HiFormance I can't encourage you enough to select the Los Angeles data center. I'm considering putting my HiFormance VPS into production use.

 

[ajonate]

Where are you located? I'm in the northeast, so LA wouldn't make much sense. Especially with the god awful internet service we have available to us in rural Vermont

I'm in Las Vegas, NV. I usually select a Chicago data center for hosting applications because it's more or less central to North America. But that's less of a factor than it used to be. Internet communications have improved leaps & bounds from what it was even a few years ago. I have someone in Sofia, Bulgaria testing my connections and latency is acceptable (less than 300ms) even from eastern Europe.

I get a 70ms ping from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. You might try pinging to see how you do from your location. 107.173.12.120

I've read a lot about ping times and voip. While opinions vary, 100ms or under is generally considered pristine service while up to 300ms is still considered acceptable. Interestingly, cell phone providers consider anything up to 1000ms to be acceptable. Take that advice with as many grains of salt as you wish.

 

[MGD4me]

From Vancouver BC, I see 40ms pings for comparison.

 

[ajonate]

HiFormance servers in the L.A. data center have port 25 blocked by default (I don't recall having that problem in Chicago). You'll need to open a ticket and ask to have it opened. Just tell them that you need to email administrative messages to yourself.

 

[sleipnirtron]

Just canceled and asked for a refund of the two servers I paid 3 years for. My servers have been down for the past two days without a single response to my support ticket. This is on top of many small issues that are obvious evidence of carelessness and the inability to provide what they offer. Never received the resource upgrades from purchasing three years, never got the full number of CPUs even after several support tickets, etc. Not quite as bad as Cloud@Cost but still abysmal.

 

[wardmundy]

Definitely had some rough sledding the last couple days in a couple of data centers. All issues appear to be resolved now.

 

[ajonate]

Definitely had some rough sledding the last couple days in a couple of data centers. All issues appear to be resolved now.

In a way I'm happy to hear that. I've been busy with another issue the past few days but had a few people complain about break-up during phone conversations. I wasn't sure if it was them or me.

 

[qtlnx]

We're running seven servers at HiFormance. Six have been flawless for many months.

my PBX has been running for many months, hypervisor went down, control panel can't access it, filed a sev 1 ticket, no response for over 24 hours!