Web Hosting Help - Dedicated Servers

I’ve been a loyal customer with The Planet (theplanet.com) for over three years and have experienced nothing but great service from them…until three months ago. My websites have been growing steadily over the last 12 months and knew it was only a matter of time before I had to upgrade to another dedicated server. While browsing a popular web hosting forum, WHT, I came across some specials they were running for their line of E2800 dedicated servers that came with dual Xeon processors and SCSI hard drives. Since, I had such a great experience with The Planet up to that point; I finally jumped on to the boat and ordered it online. For the next three weeks, everything was smooth sailing as I slowly moved my websites to the new server.

Then about two months ago, my server would unexpectedly freeze up and only a cold reboot would fix the problems. I quickly checked my logs for system errors and so forth but nothing was showing up. Then I moved my diagnostics to hardware and checked the temperatures of the system. The software that came with the dedicated server included health monitoring tools that captured the systems fan speeds and temperatures of the main components. It was basically telling me it was too high so I reported to the technical staff. They responded by saying it was “normal” for it to be left operational in high temperatures in 60+ celsius degrees. With patience, I said it wasn’t since the system was crashing. After about three or four rebuttals, they promised to move the system to another position on the rack. When they finally did move the server, it took them over two hours to just simply “move it”. I thought the saga was over until….yes it happened again – high temperatures. Again, lodged another ticket via orbit and after another hour of downtime they moved me into another rack position. Finally, this fixed it.

So in summary, The Planet are good when you don’t have problems but when you do…it can get ugly.