# GreenValueHost review



## hellogoodbye (Mar 11, 2014)

@MannDude said it won't hurt to try my hand in contributing content to the forum, so here is my attempt at writing a review. Don't laugh too hard! 

 

I had a VPS with GreenValueHost from late January up until a couple of days ago when I cancelled it, which makes it about a month and a half or so. Since this is my first review ever and I wasn't with them for very long, please excuse the tl;dr mess up ahead. I'm going by chronological order rather than organizing my review into neat sections. It's also not going to be very in-depth because frankly, I lack the knowledge and background for a true analysis. I will try my best to be impartial and neutral, though.

 

 

After the multiple threads about GVH, I honestly was not very keen on ever purchasing anything from them given their attitude and overall way of handling the situation. However, their announcement about leaving ColoCrossing piqued my interest and I took a look at their LET offers to see who they were with now and what the plans were like. I decided to give them a chance after all and purchase one of the plans since it did seem like a pretty good deal and, if nothing else, I was only going to be short $5 anyway.

 

These were the specs at the Dallas, TX location:

 

LET February Special #1

 

100GB LSI HARDWARE RAID-10 SSD Cached Disk Space

30TB Premium Bandwidth, 500mbps Port

2048MB Guaranteed RAM

4096MB vSwap RAM

4 IPv4 Addresses - Additional IPs @ 0.25/m per IP with justification

32 IPv6 Addresses - ADDITIONAL IPs FREE upon Request!

$5.00 per Month OR $45.00 per year (SAVE $15/y by paying yearly!)

 

My vSwap did not show the correct amount when I was provisioned with the VPS and the speeds I was getting were just downright awful (I had posted some of the benchmarks I was getting here in an older thread). Since I also wasn't able to change my hostname in their control panel, I opened a ticket to address all of that at once. Support was very quick but like many others have noted, the replies are very curt and only two of my issues were fixed. There was no explanation offered regarding the slow I/O speeds and nothing was done to fix it as far as I'm aware. I believe they mentioned in a comment somewhere that it was due to people abusing the nodes, but I honestly did not see much of a difference as time went on. I/O was around ~20 mb/s at first, afterwards it was typically around 60-80 mb/s. I didn't save a recent benchmark before I cancelled the plan so I can only offer an older one:



```
wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model :  Genuine Intel(R) CPU  @ 2.00GHz
Number of cores : 4
CPU frequency :  2000.054 MHz
Total amount of ram : 2024 MB
Total amount of swap : 4096 MB
System uptime : 4 days, 20:51,
Download speed from CacheFly: 47.4MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 36.1MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 54.7MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 7.46MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 11.1MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 10.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 5.47MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 28.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 27.7MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 31.3MB/s
I/O speed :  82.9 MB/s
```

I monitor uptime using Uptime Robot, which showed quite a few downtimes during the time I had my plan. To be fair, most of these were short and lasted on average around 4-7 minutes, but the longest lasted over seven and a half hours. At one point, my uptime was down to around 96% for the last 30 days. But since I was only using that particular VPS as a file repository at the time, I wasn't pleased but not to the point of opening another ticket either.

 

Around mid-February, they posted at LET with another set of offers that changed up some of the specs but were essentially at the same price. I didn't think anything of it until I noticed someone asking if they allowed changing or upgrading plans, to which GVH-Jon replied yes. Someone else said he was experiencing problems until he requested a move to another node which was granted right away. I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask as well, so I opened my second and final ticket with GVH and asked if I could 1) switch my plan to the current offer (at the time) since the pricing was the same and 2) if it was possible to move me to another node. 

 

Like before, support was quick to respond but the first reply I received informed me that they did not allow plan switching, though I could purchase a new one if I wanted. Once I linked to GVH-Jon's comment on LET, they changed their mind and switched my plan-- in fact, they gave me another extra 25 GB of disk space and allowed me to keep 2 extra IPv4 addresses, which I have to say I was pleased with. I was asked if I was happy with the changes that were made to which I answered truthfully yes, but that I would be even happier once I was moved to another node. Again, it felt as if the topic was avoided and no attempts were made to address the node issue (be it to give me a definite yes or no).

 

I was originally planning to use the extra disk space - now at a sizeable 200 GB - for backups and possibly hosting a Wordpress site, but after a few more downtime stints and consistently low to mediocre I/O speeds, I realized as great of a deal as it was, I was lacking trust in the server to be reliable in terms of uptime and speed. Since I already had two other plans with other providers that were more than adequate for my needs, it only made sense to cancel the one I had with GVH.

 

 

*The good, in a nutshell:*

 

- The specs were honestly a steal for the price, and they went above and beyond for me when I asked about switching plans (after what I presume was a misunderstanding).

- Support was always quick to respond, and if it was too late in the evening they do respond the next morning. Both tickets were opened on weekdays, so I can't vouch for their ticket response on weekends.

 

*The bad, in a nutshell:*

 

- I/O was honestly subpar and did not improve much throughout the duration of my time with them. 

- Downtime was frequent, with the longest lasting over seven and a half hours. Definitely not a good choice if you're running anything that is mission critical.

- Repeated requests to change nodes were ignored (though to be fair, I wasn't very assertive or demanding about it either).

 

(Note: They did mention something about the issues lying with their upstream provider and that they were planning to move all the Dallas clients to Chicago in the near future, but there was no ETA given and I'm already content with the two plans I currently have so I didn't bother to stick around.)

 

 

*Conclusion:*

 

Overall, I would say it's a mixed review with some positives and some negatives. I can only speak for the Dallas location since that was the only plan I had, but if speed and uptime are some of your chief concerns when buying a VPS, I would advise you to save your money and look elsewhere. I'm not tech-savvy so I didn't run more tests on the server to see how well it handles high CPU loads or heavy RAM usage, but the specs are very generous and if you're bored with $5 to spare and want a test environment or something to play around with, why not give it a try?


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## drmike (Mar 11, 2014)

*" longest lasted over seven and a half hours"*

What was the reason given for this?  Quite long downtime.

That Dallas location has been a problem since day one for GVH.   Hopefully they consider a better upstream with better hardware and more responsive support.


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## hellogoodbye (Mar 11, 2014)

drmike said:


> *" longest lasted over seven and a half hours"*
> 
> What was the reason given for this?  Quite long downtime.
> 
> That Dallas location has been a problem since day one for GVH.   Hopefully they consider a better upstream with better hardware and more responsive support.


Honestly, I never asked outright about that particular incident, but GVH-Jon did comment on LET and said there was a bunch of instability/downtime issues relating to Serverhub which I guess is the reason for it?


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## GVH-Jon (Mar 11, 2014)

Thank you for the honest review.

May I please have a copy of your uptime report statistics so that I may analyze the information and do some investigating? Our TX3 node statistics show:



> 20:24:29 up 45 days, 21:13, 0 users, load average: 3.66, 4.15, 4.74


In response to the IO issues that you have experienced, those were due to multiple abuse incidents and inbound DoS attacks that a particular user on the node has been experiencing last month (that user has been removed). I do sincerely apologize for any of the inconveniences that you may have experienced during your stay with us, and do hope that you would be willing to give us a try in the future.

Best of luck,

Jon


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## hellogoodbye (Mar 11, 2014)

GVH-Jon said:


> Thank you for the honest review.
> 
> May I please have a copy of your uptime report statistics so that I may analyze the information and do some investigating? Our TX3 node statistics show:
> 
> ...


Not a problem! I don't really know if there's a way to export the stats neatly so I hope you don't mind screencaps.





I also wanted to add that speed/uptime issues aside, it was not an awful experience by any means and if I didn't already have another two servers with other providers I probably would have stuck around and waited for the Chicago transfer. Thank you!


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## GVH-Jon (Mar 11, 2014)

Those dates look about right where there were a few confirmed incidents that we were aware of. Everything should be resolved now, I checked in with a client with a VPS on that node (who has an uptime monitor himself) and everything has been going well so far since the past week or so for the node after we've resolved a bit of issues

Thanks again for the feedback, we really appreciate it


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## DomainBop (Mar 11, 2014)

> In response to the IO issues that you have experienced, those were due to multiple abuse incidents


Are you using any anti-abuse tools like nodewatch (http://vpsantiabuse.com/ developed by IT7/BandwagonHost...Fabozo is even using it now on his nodes)?


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## 1vpsmf (Aug 16, 2014)

My Greenvaluehost server has been down for the last 3 days.... Talk about long down time... The reason given is: migration. They can't tell me when it will be back online either. I asked for a refund since that is their policy but since then I haven't heard back (this was yesterday).


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## noosVPS (Aug 17, 2014)

Worry not, they have a "Anytime Money Back Warranty" now:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1401850


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## DomainBop (Aug 17, 2014)

noosVPS said:


> Worry not, they have a "Anytime Money Back Warranty" now:
> 
> http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1401850


Worry plenty, they're already finding ways to weasel out of honoring that "Anytime Money Back Warranty".

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=9203800&postcount=137


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## 1vpsmf (Aug 17, 2014)

I just realised that Greenvaluehost's technician closed my support ticket without testing my VPS to make sure that they fixed the issue (because they didn't)... It's common sense that they should have tested it after "fixing" it or at least notify me that they were done working on the issue and I would have been glad to test it for them.

Now they tell me that I am not eligible for the refund because they didn't know that it was still down and I should have contacted them again... I did contact them many times days after I opened the first ticket (it's been down for 4 days now afterall)...

I guess Jon should not be dealing with customers and technical support, he should hire someone that knows how to do that.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Aug 17, 2014)

They're too busy trying to fish information about Shared Webhosting setups from other providers to properly take care of their own clients, it seems.


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## 1vpsmf (Aug 18, 2014)

They finally fixed the issue... hopefully that is the last migration they will need to do while I am still a customer.


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## Schultz (Aug 18, 2014)

1vpsmf said:


> They finally fixed the issue... hopefully that is the last migration they will need to do while I am still a customer.


lol.

if you're running any production services (like a site or gameserver for example) I'd switch to a "proper" provider like BuyVM, Ramnode etc..


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## iClickAndHost (Sep 5, 2014)

luckily i had a bag of peanuts close to me as i knew a GVH review would lead to a good thread and was not disappointed.


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## Alex U (Sep 5, 2014)

iClickAndHost said:


> luckily i had a bag of peanuts close to me as i knew a GVH review would lead to a good thread and was not disappointed.


You do realize the last post was like a month ago   But yes, these types of threads require peanuts/popcorn.


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