Finally Found a Home… I hope

Well after months of moving datacenters because of one thing or another I have finally settled down with staminus.net. As always no one probably cares or is reading this but hey, this bog is for me., id still post if there was 0 visitors a day.

I always wanted a staminus server but they was usually out of stock when I needed one. I found the need for a ddos protected server pretty quickly after having a few problems, and I have got to try every single ddos protected datacenter there is. Anyway here is my adventure:

First started with my own server about 2 years ago now at rackmounted.com , Server was real cheap, support was the best you could imagine, and overall they was a great bunch of guys. But the problem was they had no ddos protection, got ddosed a few times and decided I had to try something else. in total I was there close to a year.

Then I went to sharktech.net I had a horrible experience with them once when I had split a server with a friend and it was down so much I lost every single one of those customers. That server would be down for 10-48 hours at a time. Supposedly they had got their act together as I read on a few posts I had googled on them to make extra sure. Boy, could I ever have been more wrong. That is a datacenter that is actually down more then it is up, their support is horrible, and they don’t care if you stay with them or not. They just got one support guy, that greek guy but all he does is make up excuses when the network goes down or just denies it. The owner was a joke, you would put in a ticket to sales and it would take him a week to answer, like the guy is never home or something. They manage their servers remotely too, meaning they are not physically at the datacenter. In any case I will advise everyone to avoid these guys like the plague, they suck bad.

Usually the owner and staff will try to defend the company by denying downtime and telling people to go in their IRC and ask about how good their uptime is. Which that just goes to show how much the owner is really in there. If you go on efnet, go to sharktech and idle for a while. Every so often and most of the time very often pissed off customers will come in saying “wtf is going on this time?”, “why is the network down?” and either comments and questions like that. I knew it was time to leave them when I tried to have them do a server upgrade for me, my server was offline for 14 hours! I even put in emergency tickets and everything, no answer, they finally answered after the 14 hours and acted like it was no big deal. But what is even more pathetic is when you try to call their phone number. You will NEVER get anyone on the phone, you will get a message saying “this is sharktech, blah blah bla” and at the end of it you will get a message that says “IN case of emergency call some-non-existant-incomplete-phone-number-here” . I’m serious, if any of you ever get bored see for yourself 1-312-846-7642 > Anyway , that’s enough about these jokers, I just wanted to stress how shitty and shady this bunch is and to never waste your money on them.

Nest was softlayer which was pretty good at first, Their sales told me before I bought the server that they would provide ddos protection. I don’t want to get into this too much because it would be a very log story but here is a summary. Got 2 servers there, moved one off cause ddos protection was no good, had a hard drive failure o0n my main hard drive, was down 8 houris restoring my backup drive, got a small 20 mbit ddos they null routed my ips, So I left them.

While I was still at softlayer I was trying to still keep my cpanel server there cause I needed the big hardware, so i moved the directadmin box for high risk sites to awknet. And the awknet review begins here. First off Id like to say Justin is a very cool guy and I was pleased with their network…at first. but started noticing that on average I was only getting around 1/2-3 mbit bandwidth on the server and then he had to null route my ip a few times for a supposed mult-gbit ddos. he tried and was able to block a lot of small attacks but the overall bandwidth was’t good and I was getting customers complain of constant timeouts, netsplits, etc; About the same time all this happened with them I had some problems with my paypal account I was sharing with my family for their business, So I figured that would be best time as any to move, I did.

I seen staminus has some available core2 servers. I had always wanted staminus because my friends have a server over there and its been very stable. I did piss off t0r0 once when I was admining that box as I had these low bandwidth floods that was knocking the server offline on apache, he said he only seen very few packets coming in which I say that’s all he seen as this particular flood sent very small packets.

So anyway got my first server off them, directadmin. It has been very stable every since, not a moment of downtime and the custom firewall is awesome. So I finally moved my cpanel server off softlayer over te 20 mbit null route. And here I am, Of course I have had problems from the cpanel server ebcause that’s what cpanel is for, causing problems but all seems well now. I just wish directadmin sold as well as cpanel because it is the most stable and light control panel Ive ever used I hardly ever have to login to the da box and fix anything, the cpanel box I have to stay logged in.

So that’s my journey to find a reliable ddos protected datacenter, hopefully it has ended.