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?

I AM IN RAGE !!! MY MANAGER IS A FUCKIN SNAKE ASSHOLE!

FUCKER RATED ME 3/5 !
i feel like destroying my laptop and putting my papers right away. this is absolute shit hole of a company where corporste bullshit and multi level hierarchy runs the system, ass licking is the norm and still me, a lowly sde dev 1 was giving my 200% covering their bullshit to deliver outputs on time.

let me tell you some stats.

- our app has grown by 2x installs and 5x mau.

- only 3 devs worked on the app. the other 2 can vouch for my competence.

- we were handled an app with ugliest possible code full of duplication, random bugs and sudden ANRs. we improved the app to a good level of working

- my manager/tl is such a crappy person that if asked about a feature out of random, he will reply "huh?" and will need 2 mins to tell anything about it.

- there is so much dependency with other teams and they want us to talk to them personally. like hell i care why backend is giving wrong responses. but i cared, i gpt so good handling all these shit that people would directly contact me instead of himal and i would contact them. all work was getting done coz 1 stupid fellow was spending 90% of his time in coordinations

- i don't even know how to work with incompetence. my focus is : to do my task, fix anything that is broken that will relate to my task in any way and gather all the stuff needed to complete my task

i am done. i cannot change this company because its name is good and i am already feeling guilty about switching my previous jobs in 1 year but this is painful.

in my first company i happily took a 10% hike coz i was out of college and still learning.
in my 2nd company, i left due to change in policies ( they went from wfh to wfo and they were in a different state) , but even while leaving they gave a nice 30% hike
in my current company idk wjat the no. 3 equates to , but its extremely frustrating knowing a QA who was so incompetent, he nearly costed us a DDOS got the same rating as me

------
PS : GIVE ME TIPS ON HOW TO BE INCOMPETENT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT