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by bakugo 250 days ago
Be warned though that, when renting dedicated servers, there are certain issues you might have to deal with that usually aren't a factor when renting a VPS.

For example, I got a dedicated server from Hetzner earlier this year with a consumer Ryzen CPU that had unstable SIMD (ZFS checksums would randomly fail, and mprime also reported errors). Opened a ticket about it and they basically told me it wasn't an issue because their diagnostics couldn't detect it.
1 comments
CaptainOfCoit 250 days ago
Yeah, their support, for better or worse, is really technical and you need to send all the evidence of any faults to convince them. But when I've had random issues happening, I've sent them all the troubleshooting and evidence I came across, and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

And based on our different experiences, the quality of care you receive could differ too :)

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bakugo 250 days ago
> and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

To be fair, they probably would've done the same for me if I'd pushed the issue further, but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem with the hard drives (they said one of the drives was likely faulty and insisted on replacing it and having me resilver the zpool to see if it fixed the issue. spoiler: it didn't) I just gave up, disabled SIMD in ZFS and moved on.

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CaptainOfCoit 250 days ago
> but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem

That sucks big time :( In the most recent case I can recall, I successfully got access, noticed weirdness, gathered data and sent an email, and had a new instance within 2-3 hours.

Overall, based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven.

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vanviegen 250 days ago
> based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven.

Can you name one tech company that's scaled passed the point where the founders are closely involved with support that has consistently good tech support? I think this is just really hard to get right, as many customers are not as knowledgeable as they think they are.

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CaptainOfCoit 250 days ago
"Consistently" is hard, people's experiences tend to differ with every company out there, even by what country you're currently in. For example, I've always had quick and reasonable replies from Coinbase support, but I know friends who've had the complete opposite experience with Coinbase, so won't claim they're consistent. But their replies to me has been consistent at least.

Probably the company most people have had any sort of consistency from would be Stripe I think. Of course, there are cases where they haven't been great, but if you ask me for a company with the best tech support, Stripe comes to mind first.

I'm not sure it's active anymore, but there used to be a somewhat hidden and unofficial support channel in #stripe@freenode back in the day, where a bunch of Stripe developers hanged out and helped users in an in-official capacity. That channel was a godsend more than once.

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trollied 249 days ago
It's not hard to get right. It's expensive to get right. And that affects pricing and profitability. You have to have a threshold.
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