Not a very pleasant experience with Privex today

Today I did not have a pleasant experience with Privex. Maybe this is just one of my bad days and I don't have much to blame Privex here. I use Privex as my primary service provider for my servers. For the past few days, there were a few issues and glitches here and there. Two days back I came to know that there were issues with DNS and they also made an announcement on the same. Looks like in addition to that there were also some attacks on the server which should have been a difficult time for them.

Though some of my experiences are related to that, I had a different experience today which made me loathe a little. I usually go to Kale in personal chat if I have any issues with the servers. Most of the time the response will not be immediate but I would be happy with the resolution but today the conversation was short and I ended up loathing it.

Problem

I have been running a Hive witness node for myself and a few other people. I use Hive In a Box to make the setup easier and cheaper for me. I have been noticing that the witness nodes were missing many blocks frequently. For others who have been running nodes, there were no missing at all from day 1. I don't know why but I got servers that had issues with the disk probably and all the witness nodes that I was managing missed many blocks. I reported this problem to Privex about a month back and I got one of my servers moved to different hardware and it was definitely better after that. Today I had a conversation to move my other servers in a similar manner.

Last time during the server move, the new server was first configured and I moved all my configurations from the old server to the new server, and then only the new server was turned off. This enabled me to copy my configurations and also move a few supporting apps that I was running on the server. I was expecting the same thing to happen even now but the new servers were set up and the old servers were immediately decommissioned.

I had some configurations on those servers and it is gone now and no way to get them back. I now have to do everything from scratch now. There were also a few environment variable values that I had set only on those servers and did not maintain a reference or copy for it anywhere else. It is also gone now.

Big lesson for me

After this incident this makes me feel that the servers I buy online are not completely reliable and I have to make a personal copy of the configurations I do or at least keep a note of what I have done. I have to also be very clear with the support people on what needs to be done. I learned that they might be very busy with multiple activities and they will just go and delete my server if I don't give them proper instructions. It will not be easy for them to think about downtime if I don't specifically mention it.

For all the applications I run in production environments, I think I should keep a copy of the environment variables so that even if there are an issue or server crashes due to unexpected issues, I will still be safe. Usually, I'm very careful and I have the environment variables and other things safe for my other apps but just that I missed this one because of my Karma. I consider this as my own personal experience. I have nothing to blame Privex for them.

I still like Privex and would like to continue using their servers for my needs. I just wish that at least in the future their response is a little better or their communication is a little better.

If you like what I'm doing on Hive, you can vote me as a witness with the links below.

Vote @balaz as a Hive Witness
Vote @kanibot as a Hive Engine Witness

Posted with STEMGeeks