17
Condor
3y

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

Comments
  • 2
    Welp, you sold me on Hetzner! By the way, it sounds like a neat little project you're running there. Mind telling us more about it?
  • 1
    @Jilano the projects on Hetzner are mostly to sort servers into it seems. By default there's one project, in which you can allocate server instances, load balancers, floating IP's and whatnot. I like the idea of it because while for me it's just personal edge nodes, this also means that e.g. business-related servers could have their own project for that. Apparently you can even invite team members and everything to grant access to the project's server configuration with, pretty cool!
  • 1
    I have dedicated machine in Hetzner for almost 6 years. Still running, had no problems except only one free ipv4 address per server by default and you need to pay for more.
    I like their server bidding service where you can buy very cheap dedicated servers.
  • 1
    Please explain what you actually did to get booted. Was it emails or something else?
  • 1
    Prepare for Hetzner going down during the most random time, and seeing on the status page it's a random switch that's gone haywire.

    All for Hetzner here; honestly... but: do spread the load over multiple locations/load balance :)

    Also, regarding the same provider, they have a history of being abused for spam purposes. Dearly check the status for those servers/IP's :D
  • 3
    @Demolishun honestly nothing fancy, hping3 from one of my servers to those Chinese spamhausen that keep bothering my servers all the time (as often as every minute to every few seconds) that basically created some short bursts of 1Gbps traffic. It did stall their servers, however the bursts weren't ever longer than a minute or so. I wasn't looking to take them down per se, rather to hopefully get an error message or something to pop up on their spam service and thereby say something along the lines of "don't fuck with my servers".

    And then Aruba came in and reminded me of the high school days where you can be bullied all year, but retaliate once and you're the one they're pointing fingers at. So don't retaliate and just.. take it I guess?
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