Not all hosting companies treat customer with anything less than expensive dedicated servers as sub humans.

Recently, I tried in vain to attach block storage to one of my Vultr boxes that costs $7.20 a month.

Follows email interaction with Vultr Support, Saturday early morning.

2:25 Ticket opened

2:39 Vultr: “We can attempt to attach the block storage but it will require a reboot. Please confirm if this is acceptable.”

3:13 Me: “Reboot no problem. Go for it.”

3:30 Vultr: “The block storage has been attached. “

3:34 Me: "THANK YOU! Extremely prompt service. Anything I can do to attach further block devices without bugging you guys?"

3:37 Vultr: “No problem and typically once we get the initial block storage sub added, additional attachments should work. Just reopen this ticket if you encounter further issues.”

No days of waiting. No “no SLA for you.” No “bought unmanaged box, bud.”

My initial enthusiasm for Hetzner is being dampened. A day ago, my box lost its network connectivity. Opened a ticket, no reply except an automatic mail, promising human intervention “shortly.” Sent two more reminders, received two more form letters.

Box still down. Websites down. Mail server down. Enthusiasm down.

Up until a few weeks ago, I sent $150 a month to Contabo for three beefy servers with Cpanel and sundry extra IPs. As of the end of this month, all servers have been canceled, due to atrocious “service” on their part.

A month ago, all my VPS at Contabo went down to a crawl. Their admin panels became unusable due to lack of response. SSH sessions were EXTREMELY sluggish, a post-war teletype was faster than a SSH session with my Contabo server.

Their support wasn’t interested in my plight. If they looked into the matter at all after days of waiting, they came back saying that everything was in spec.

Their responses were mostly boilerplate. I can be very grating to read again and again that they are focused on customer satisfaction when in reality, they are everything but.

When I could convince them to move one server to another datacenter, they botched it, nothing was moved.

When I paid them $36 to move one of the servers to a datacenter in my hometown Tokyo on my dime, they lied to me, saying that they “have successfully moved” the server to Japan, when in truth they never had done so. Days later, they told me that due to “routing issues,” the move to Japan was not possible.

I have been with Contabo for more than 10 years. Most of these years, they delivered promptly, and reliably. Recently, the only thing that was prompt and reliable was Contabo charging my PayPal account.

My servers now are at Hetzner and Netcup.

Hetzner is a joy to work with, support answers promptly, and they are efficient.

Dealing with Netcup can be kafkaesque. To understand their emails, it helps to speak German, so that you can translate their confused English back into something that could make sense. Their support cranks out doozies like “it is with regret that we have received your resignation. Taking into account the agreed notice periods, we will execute your termination as follows …” They insist on answering in contorted English, even if you write to them in German. But their servers run well, and they are cheap.

Whatever you do, stay away from Contabo.