ColoCrossing/HudsonValleyHost review I read a lot of hate towards CC/HVH due to their involvement with GVH V1, V2, V3, V4 and so on. I was initially very sceptical and concerned about this.
I will admit, I did rush my decision to order from them. I had just had my server wiped by my old provider, and was running everything from my screaming, crying OVH server. I have had a lot of bad experiences with US providers, and thus I didn’t have my hopes very high at all.
I contacted HVH on the afternoon of August the 20th (and have just renewed and entered my 3rd month with them). Under half an hour later I get an email to say that a sales agent is looking at my ticket, and then an hour later I get an offer from @Ernie • E3-1240v3 • 32GB RAM • 1TB HDD • 240GB SSD • 5 IPs • 1Gbps Port • DRAC With Virtual Media access • 10TB BW • $75/mo And so, for the next few hours, I fire questions to Ernie and he fires responses back to me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fully ready to order at that point. I ask Ernie to wait. He was very willing to wait for me, and said for me to order when I was ready.
Sure, a few days later I reply back and say that I am ready to order. He comes back under 10 minutes later and we fire more messages back and forwards, with me signing up on their portal. I did have an issue here, with their platform failing to accept my UK HSBC Visa Debit. Eventually I resort to using shudders PayPal. At this point, it is 5PM in the evening over in Buffalo and its late at night here in the UK. I was really surprised at this response time, and I am very happy that I found a datacentre that replies this late, and even has the “Operations Manager” respond to me.
I then get an email at around 6PM Buffalo time from Ernie, and he wanted to know what OS I wanted installed and on which disk I wanted it installed. This was on the 21st August (a Friday night too!). I didn’t expect anything until Monday at the earliest, but sure, as I was sitting down for lunch on the Sunday, I get a ping and see that there is an email to say that it has been delivered. At this point, I am incredibly happy, as
a) I had something to do on Sunday evening b) I got my server!
I then had to leave the server for a few days as I had a few personal issues to sort out. On the evening of the 26th August, I sat down to sort out ProxMox and start running my VM’s. I hit a snag in that I had made quite a few mistakes in my network configuration. I reach out to Peter in technical support (another awesome guy). I then watch him on KVM, as he logs into the server, and immediately goes for the /etc/network/interfaces file, and then with the speed of a ninja, he sees my mistakes and fixes them. He even taught me how to identify which is the live NIC in a server – so thanks Peter. He also went into detail about what I had done wrong.
All was fine for a month and a bit. Every other night or so I pull VM backups from that server, across to my server at OVH in GRA. Normally these take a couple of hours to run as the VMs aren’t small. One day, I noticed a backup had been running for going on 6 hours. I took a more detailed look and to my horror, the network speed had slowed to a crawl. Sure enough, I then logged on to LET, and I saw the news that CC had added Telia in Buffalo. I joined the crowd of people who were moaning, and I also ticketed. I was told that the issue should be resolved in 48 hours, but sadly 48 hours later, the network speed was still as slow (100 Kbps to OVH).
The network sorted itself out a few hours later and since then I have had no issues with the server and it has been fantastic for my use.
I do read that the CC Buffalo network “isn’t the best”, but I have to disagree with that. 100ms from my home connection (Virgin Media in North London), and 90ms from my OVH server. This is fantastic for me as that server runs a set of gameservers, and so latency is a big thing for me. This is the reason that I wasn’t that worried during the bandwidth issues, as latency wasn’t affected. Downloading from the server, to my OVH server regularly exceed 500Mbps, and downloads on my home line (152 Mbps down) usually hit upwards of 60Mbps.
Overall, I fully recommend HudsonValleyHost. Very fast support. I will be sure to return to them if I need any more servers.