TLDR: Filemedia's customer service is terrible - will break your VPS without warning, post misleading statuses they never reply to, and then act like they sent emails despite being shown evidence they were never sent.
Full story:
Last Saturday I woke up and had messages from my monitoring service that my VPS (personal web & mail) had gone down overnight (Australian time).
I checked Filemedia's twitter stream and they'd posted overnight:
Big DDoS against our main subnets..we are in investigation.
A DDoS against Filemedia took my site offline for several hours last month, so I figured this was the same thing. Loading their main site/client area was super slow as well, so I left it and hoped they'd sort it out.
Saturday evening and my VPS was still down. No further twitter posts about the DDoS from Filemedia, so I tweeted at them to ask if there was an update - saying it was nearly 24 hours since my server went down. I saw someone else on twitter asking the same question.
Woke up Sunday morning (AU time) and still no replies or updates from Filemedia, VPS still down.
This time I loaded their status page. (It's important to use this status page, not this status page which was last updated in 2013 but still linked on the customer service site.)
No mention of the DDoS at all on the status page, but there was a ticket that said:
We change the ipv4 addresses as annouced to our new ip subnet range. Please notice the additional information you got in the email few weeks ago. Configure your network with DHCP to get the new ip addresses after a reboot automatically.
What?!? Check the client area, sure enough I had a brand new IP, and my server had been auto-rebooted 36 hours ago. I updated my DNS records and everything came good immediately.
Then I went and searched my email for this "additional information" from a "few weeks ago". Plenty of billing emails from Filemedia, but no emails about IP addresses. As soon as my mailserver came back up I got a "we have changed your IP" email, sent after the IP change.
I replied on Twitter to the other person asking about the DDoS, and it turns out they were in the same situation (IP changed without notice, had assumed it was the DDoS.)
I opened a support ticket with filemedia, explaining what I'd seen, that I never got an email, and asking "Can you please fix this so in future I will get advance notice of major changes that will break my site?"
Got an email back asking if I'd set a valid email address on my profile (something I'd confirmed in the ticket), saying that the email might have been marked as spam, and asking me to check the "Sent Email" history in their client area.
My reply:
do you have a valid email address in your profile?
Yes, as I said I receive billing emails. I also received these support emails.
You can see the ip address notification and the email with the new ip address in your client area under the email history.
No, I can't see that. As per: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ze1r7m5k1fpcz0v/emailsmissing.png?dl=0
The only IP-related email shown here is the one sent 13.2 - after my IP address was changed. Which I didn't get until after I'd fixed my DNS, because my mailserver is hosted on the VPS.
BTW, your current status on Twitter still says you're investigating a DDoS attack.
Their reply:
DDoS and this action was different. DDoS affected another location and not your vps. Looks like you didn't get the notification.
Um... what? I send them proof that their notification emails aren't being sent from their end, and they say "looks like you didn't get it"?
At this point I figured it was time to cut my losses. I expect some amount of limited service at this price point - but not this bad.
Migrated to a dedicated server at online.net. I've only opened one ticket with support so far (to set up an IP KVM) - but they were swift, courteous and competent. Also, online.net's customer service staff actually replies to people on Twitter - Filemedia's Twitter account still says they're investigating a DDoS from a week ago.
I feel particularly sorry for anyone who pays for their premium "Dedify" product and then has to deal with this kind of customer support.