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We want to acknowledge our patient AngryBox customers as we finish up repairing our hardware. For all of our AngryBox customers, please be aware that you will all be receiving a special and important email from us. Please read it and get back to us with any outstanding issues it deals with, as we want to make sure that we take care of our customers as expeditiously as possible.

Over the last several days, AngryBox has rebooted spontaneously several times. GuaranteedVPS will be shutting AngryBox down for emergency maintenance tomorrow night for hardware replacement. No data is at risk of loss and nothing is wrong with storage, but there is a malfunctioning device causing reboots which (obviously) needs to be replaced. All AngryBox customers will see a brief (several minute) outage tomorrow night during the replacement. No significant impact is expected to the box, other than to replace the device in question.

We thank you for your patience in this matter.

[Additional Note]
Maintenance is scheduled for 2:00am EST Thursday 21 February. As previously noted, we will be swapping out a component of the box and downtime is expected to be minimal. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to call us, email our support staff, or visit us in our support channel on IRC.

We’ve been struggling very hard at GuaranteedVPS to make sure that we grow our tools as well as our business.  We’ve been very fortunate to grow the latter, and now we must make sure that we follow through on our commitment to grow the support as well.

 With this in mind, I just wanted to let you all know that you will be seeing some changes in the very near future.  A new billing system is currently being tested, as is a new ticketing system (details to be released later).  Better phone routing support is being implemented, and even more redundant systems are being put into place so that you have a choice of communication methods if something were to go wrong (including how you’re notified, how you contact us, and how we resolve the problems).  A new frontend website will be put into place to replace the look and feel of this website, and more powerful tools will be available to our customers regarding their backend account management.

While we have a fairly precise roadmap to this future, we believe in the knowledge and experience of our users.  If you, as the customers who will be using the backend, have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to email support or to discuss with us at IRC:blitzed.org/#guaranteedvps. 

As of 2:22p PST Nov 30, all problems from the datacenter outage are resolved. Downtime varies depending on which server the customer was on; all servers except DoomBox experienced less than two hours’ outage, whereas DoomBox experienced an outage for some protocols for a further hour and one half. All VEs have been manually verified as running and routable. No data is lost. No hardware is damaged. All known results of downtime are resolved. Everything is once again hunky dory. If this outage has affected you as a customer, please let sales@ know. If you find that the outage has caused even minor issues and you would like assistance smoothing them out, please let us know.

We would like to thank our customers for their graciousness during this stress. Some hosts would brag about four hours of total downtime in eight months; we would not. Measures are being taken to harden the rack against such problems in the future.

Our lifetime uptime is now 99.9305%. Bye bye, 100%; we’ll miss you.

GuaranteedVPS was created because we were tired of the guesswork, vaguery, and misrepresentation that we constantly ran into with virtually every other hosting provider we encountered.  Our goal was, and continues to be, to create an environment where our customers get exactly what they expect, with nothing hidden, no overages, and no calculator required to figure out things that shouldn’t require such. 

With this said, there are certain times when Irony will reign supreme.  As you’ve probably read from our explanation post, we had quite the circus of events today.  I would like to reiterate that the incidents of today (which lasted 1 hour and 58 minutes) were the result of uncontrollable events which occurred when our upstream provider attempted to cooperate with us to ensure that the best possible setup was achieved and that a situation like today’s was virtually impossible.  Naturally, all the problems occurred when we downed our redundant systems to move them into their new homes. 

I would like to personally reassure our loyal GuaranteedVPS customers that we do have redundant systems in place.  We wholeheartedly believe, subscribe, and insist from our upstream providers that there be an excess of redundant systems, whether they be power supplies, routers/switches, or internet pipelines.  Please rest assured that under normal conditions very few things short of a veritable nuclear holocaust would disable our systems as they were so disabled today. 

I also understand that, while you all have explanations and comprehend that we did not create this problem, that it is still our problem to deal with.  Today, someone else’s problem became your problem, and our dedication to our customers makes this our problem.  As Director of Operations and Market Manager for GuaranteedVPS, I would like to encourage you to bring your problems that were caused by the incidents today, to me.  If there’s anything that I can do to fix, whether preventively, retroactively, or directly, please don’t hesitate to call me or write me an email (my extension is 801 and my email username is simply josh at the guaranteedvps.com domain). 

Please understand that we never expect to go through such an ordeal again, especially since we were attempting to have our setup such that it was even more bulletproof than before.  While I can’t predict the future, I can tell you that we are even more immune to such incidents than we were before.  You have my word on that, and our word is only one of the guarantees we give you at GuaranteedVPS.  As I said before, if there’s any result of this outage that I can help you deal with, my door is open to you. 

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

A series of new modules have been loaded across all boxes to allow custom iptables and ipchains. Several customers expressed a desire to custom configure their firewalls, and we aim to please. As a result, shorewall deployments seem to be cropping up like moss. We like to see growth, don’t you?

GuaranteedVPS - we may make bad metaphors about moss, but our servers are diesel.

This post is long, so I’m breaking it into pieces; follow the “read more” link to see the whole thing. Short version: we know that PayPal is having issues, and we’re not shutting off any PayPal customers who aren’t able to pay. You’re all covered. No worries. We’ve actually got some pretty strong feelings about the issue, though, so if you want to see how this particular ISP reacts to situations like these, read on.
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We have expanded our support hours to 8a-10p, eastern standard time.

There was a four minute outage of network access to AngryBox (most .79.* customers) while a switch at the data center was replaced. We apologize for the inconvenience, though it doesn’t seem that anybody actually noticed. There was no loss of data and nothing is wrong with the machine; just that one of the upstream switches went kaput.

Prices have changed. All customers prior to April 5 will continue old pricing, including for new slices. Please see the pricing page for details on the new prices.

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