Comment by aosaigh
6 years ago
I don't have hosting with Gandi, but I do use them for domains and DNS. I'll be considering migrating my domains from them after this.
Their response to this is exceptionally poor. To say essentially "this could happen to any other web host" it nonsense. I've never had this happen with any of the providers I've used for hosting and I'd be very angry if I had just lost an entire VPS. The fact that they've lost all snapshots as well (which are advertised as backups of the underlying volume) is unforgiveable.
I had an incident similar to this with linode, which is why I use and recommend Digital Ocean nowadays.
My machine going away because you had hardware issues isn't my problem, and I'll spend my money on a more competent company.
I had the exact same experience on Digital Ocean. Attempted to resize a VPS, the process got stuck for eternity, and support tells me all data is lost.
Always have your own offsite backups.
To be clear, disk corruption can happen anywhere due to many reasons, in particular when VM disks map to local disks on an hypervisor, which gives you fast SSDs without network latency. Probably that the resize command had an issue and corrupted the image on disk. Then there's not much that can done aside from restoring from a backup. Having had backups enabled on the droplets, they would in all likelihood not have been corrupted since backups with DigitalOcean are stored offsite. In such case they could have been used to restore the droplet.
In some extreme cases, a concert of bad luck may coincides to ruin things despite multiple levels of redundancies. But that's extremely rare, especially nowadays. However DO is much larger now than it used to be, so the odds of hearing about extreme accidents increase.
disclaimer: I used to work there.
When I worked at the WordPress hosting division of Copyblogger, we always had issues like these with Digital Ocean. They would email us saying that the node had a problem, and we had to recreate the server on our own.
Good thing we only kept caching servers in Digital Ocean, so those were easily recreated, but that always kept me away from DO, personally.
In fairness to them, though, DO do not claim to keep backup of the servers, as far as I know.
DO has a service to automate backups. You can't download them or snapshots though, so you if you want a off-server copy you have to do it yourself.
I use Gandi for domains & DNS too. I've never had any problems so far but I don't want any surprises... Where do you want to migrate? What is a better alternative?
I like Cloudflare and find them to be a very good value proposition. They have a domain registrar now as well, though I haven't tried that yet. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
Cloudflare DNS is free, and they support DNSSEC (unlike Digital Ocean). The web UI is good, and there's an API, and Terraform provider.
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I moved a couple Namecheap domains to Cloudflare's registrar when they launched, no complaints here. One domain took a bit longer to transfer, but the first took only a few minutes so I didn't mind it at all. I already used them for DNS so it felt like a no-brainer.
I use Hover for DNS and domain registration, never had a problem and their interface and support is top-notch.
Same here. Wondering what alternative there is. Heard good things about https://porkbun.com/
I'm using Porkbun and like it. I've used Namecheap, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, and Gandi. I prefer Porkbun to all of them, but I'm a fan of simple, no-frills stuff.
I've used support twice when transferring domains into Porkbun and they were good. I transferred a domain out and has no issues. Their 2FA options are really good. They frequently have the best prices around (tld-list.com).
I wish porkbun allowed easier DNS record management. It's very cute, but I cant edit a bind style file, which means a lot of extra clicks.
I used to use Gandi for all my domains. I've switched to OVH though. Their DNS also propagates in like a minute.
Same boat. As much as I hate to give Jeff Bezos another penny I can't look further than AWS for everything at this stage.
Don't worry, if you purchase a domain with a .biz (or 300 other junk-tier tLDs) extension from Amazon Route 53, Gandi still gets paid[1].
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/re...
Huh. I wonder how they will react to this. Thanks for highlighting that.
FWIW, I've found GCP a pleasure to work with in comparison to AWS.
Same here, of the big three (AWS, Azure, GCP) I found GCP's panel to be the most comfortable. The recent news of unjustified Google account closures and billing mishaps are putting me off moving there, though.
I found their dashboard pretty sluggish in some parts.
I had one weird incidence with trying to host wireguard on it, I couldn't get it to work reliably even after changing MCU to suit them or trying other fixes.
I've used it and it's not near as good as AWS. Plus Google have a habit of shutting stuff down so I have basically given up on them for critical stuff.
I've been burnt several times now by smaller players claiming a higher degree of privacy that suddenly charge high fees, sell to a competitor, or sell my data. As of last month, I've moved my domains to Google. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.