Why I Won't Use Rimuhosting

Several of our customers are hosted with Rimuhosting, and we've interacted with them on a number of occasions because of that. In my experience they are very responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. That's not to say this isn't a pretty irritating set of events...and silently shutting down Apache shouldn't be anyone's first instinct.<p>But, I've had bad experiences with literally every single host I've ever used (dozens of them), and the longer you stay with a provider, the more likely you are to find a tech having a bad day, or their network fiber getting cut by the utility company, or various other demonstrations of man's fallibility.<p>I think the good probably still outweighs the bad with Rimuhosting...as Aaron mentioned, they do have a good reputation among many people who ought to know. The horror stories I hear about <i>really</i> bad hosts leave this event in the dust in terms of sheer stupidity and lack of good intentions. If this is the worst you've ever experienced with a hosting provider, count yourself very, very lucky. The data loss stories I've heard, in particular, are enough to keep me awake at night.<p>In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention that Rimuhosting is a customer of ours (along with thousands of others). So, if you reckon a commercial relationship worth a few hundred bucks a year would sway my opinions, feel free to take this comment with a grain of salt or not at all.

Something similar happened to us a few days ago on our RimuHosting VPS. A Python script was eating ~80% of the VPS CPU, so their tech guy, without asking us, tries to login as root to our box (WTF?). He fails, so he responds by rebooting our VPS, thus (?) causing some disk corruption, which he then tries to repair. Then, after-the-fact, he writes us a very confused email about the whole story.<p>Needless to say, we're moving away from RimuHosting. This is unacceptable.<p>An excerpt:<p>"I noticed your VPS was using a lot of CPU. I was not able to log in there, and on the console I saw lots of out-of-memory messages.<p>I restarted the VPS to make sure it was running in a sane state. I checked the console after a reboot and saw an error indicating some filesystem corruption. I stopepd it again and repaired that. Then replaced the /etc/inittab file which appeared to be corrupted. Now I see that has booted fine."

This article reminds me of Hard Disks. Talk to any "PC fan" and they'll regale you with a story of how they will never, ever use $HD_BRAND after it crashed and lost all their data. Thing is, the brand changes depending on who you talk to. And a real professional will tell you that all the brands have similar failure rates, not to put your faith in any hardware, and advise you on a RAID and backup strategy.<p>Same here. I know people who use rimuhosting, they seem happy enough. I use Linode personally but have no real preference. This article smacks of a one-off bad experience which could happen anywhere - and doesn't even seem that bad. It's a VPS, for christ's sake, if you don't like it get a dedi or even better a colo.

In my 2+ years hosting typeracer.com with Rimu, they have been absolutely outstanding. All my questions, no matter how complex, were answered within 10-30 minutes. Hundreds of times. Anything I've asked them they did. They installed all kinds of packages and performed configurations I requested, all for free and without hesitation. And I'm not a premium customer by any stretch. I only have 2 quarter-VPS instances with them for about $200 a month.<p>In the 2 years I only experienced 20 minutes of downtime recently due to a one-time network hardware upgrade (1 week's advance notice was given - a bit short but forgivable) and another 20 minutes due to a DDoS on their network about 6 months ago (which most likely prompted this recent hardware upgrade :).<p>I really hope people don't jump to conclusions from a single data point (aaronsw). I would recommend RimuHosting to everyone I know without hesitation.

I'm with Rimuhosting since forever.<p>Their support is unbeatable. Many times they helped me(I'm a dev. not a sys. admin.) for free where other companies would have charged me.<p>I agree that adding their key on the VPS without talking to you sucks but having a 100% utilisation of your CPU is a bit egoist. That means that nobody on the host machine can burst their share for a quick high-cpu job.<p>If you want total control over your machine, get a dedicated box. Even then, some hosters demand root access on your box.

<i>They ... offered to take a look at the problem if I gave them root on the box. “Over my dead body,” I thought</i><p>That seems a little silly to me. If they control the hardware, they basically have root already. They shouldn't <i>need</i> root to investigate the alleged problem, of course, but the level of trust you need to grant your VPS provider is essentially the same as giving them root.

I have been using RimuHosting for my own projects and for customers for test deployments for years - so far I have had good experiences with them. They did complain once that I was using too much CPU, but I checked, and found problems (my fault) with a Merb deployment).

In a way, isn't this a reason to use Rimuhosting. They obviously care about their customers enough, to proactively monitor and step in that everyone gets a fair CPU share.

Would you mind posting what the offending CGI was doing? If you coded up your index.cgi to walk all over the CPU as badly as it sounds like you did, something was probably very <i>very</i> wrong.<p>That said, they were absolutely in the right to do this (except that they should have notified you first...).<p>I saw that you (or somebody) used the analogy of a landlord and an apartment. Let's explore that further...<p>Say you are renting an apartment, and the landlord doesn't charge you anything for water (which is pretty common, if not standard). Now, there is a bit of a gentlemen's agreement here. Yes, you have "unlimited" water but, like everything else in life, this needs to have the words "within reason" appended to it.<p>Now lets say that, for some reason, your apartment was using 10x as much water as everybody else in the building...so much so, in fact, that nobody else in the building could reliably get <i>any</i> water.<p>Your landlord calls you and says "Hey, joao, would you mind cutting the water back, please? You're kindof using too much", which you ignore.<p>A couple of months later, again, the landlord calls<p>"Hey, Joao, you're still using a shit-load of water, and your sortof hogging it all. Some of the other tenants are complaining...if you want, leave a key to your place in the office and we'll go check it out!"<p>Which you respond "over my dead body".<p>So, finally, after months and months of you hogging the water, they just use the master key to the building to go into your apartment, where they see that you've had the shower, the sink, and the toilet all running <i>constantly</i> for the last 4 months. They shut them off, then call you<p>"Hey, joao, yeah, we noticed that you pretty royally messed up and kindof left EVERYTHING in the bathroom on at the same time. Not cool...so we shut it off. Sorry for the inconveinience. BTW, sorry for having to go into your appt. like that, but the other tenants were complaining. Here are some instructions so that you can change the lock on your door an keep us from being able to help you like this in the future. Have a nice day!"<p>And your response to ignoring their totally legitimate requests for you to stop hogging all the resources is "WHAT A BUNCH OF PRICKS!!"<p>I think somebody needs to calm down and take a step back from the situation.

Am I the only one thinking that Rimuhosting is a rather unfortunate name?

Couldn't agree more. I got a VPS from them after asking HN for VPS recommendations in Europe.<p>Had issues from the start. The setup wasn't what I ordered. Once it was setup properly, I started getting alerts from their staff that my VPS's resources were spiking–<i>but this was before I had even logged into the system and done anything</i>. That didn't do much for my confidence in their operation.<p>Anyway, I canceled with them and will probably use Rackspace as they have UK/European data centers.

I signed up with RimuHosting a few months ago, since everyone was raving about their competent and responsive support. So far it has been a mixed bag for me. They offered to set up some services for me when I was signing up (a monitoring service and a pop3 server). Whoever was setting these up did a horrible job; I'm talking about basic mistakes in the config files that prevented these services from even working. So I would not trust RimuHosting to set up anything on my server.<p>On the other hand, when I experienced weird routing problems between my machine and my home, Rimu eventually offered to move me to a more expensive London VPS at the same price, even though the dropped packets were not their fault. So they are willing to go out of their way to make a customer happy.<p>As I said, a mixed bag. I'm not planning on changing hosts anytime soon.

I've used Future Hosting <a href="http://www.futurehosting.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.futurehosting.com/</a> for a few years now, with two different VPS instances for $30/month each. Never had a problem, and if they did something like this I'd be shocked.

It can't be left unsaid: I assumed (no pun intended) this was a joke posting when I first saw it, seriously "Rim You Hosting"??!

I've had good service from Linode for nearly 2 years: <a href="http://www.linode.com/?r=73dc8f5748a14c821e64febc5e461a606f6bf7b1" rel="nofollow">http://www.linode.com/?r=73dc8f5748a14c821e64febc5e461a606f6...</a>