GVH suspended after minor use of 100TB plan

[devonblzx]

Well, I signed up for the 100TB plan on GVH because, why not? I was suspended after 2 days of using the resources in my plan.

RAM

I wanted to benchmark to see how the system would handle if I actually consumed the resources, so this is what I found.  I ran a script to allocate 3GB of RAM.  What I found was that instantly, the system would start swapping out the RAM to the swap and the system would slow down to a halt, even though there was "free" RAM on the system.  So it would be impossible for a reasonable person to be able to use the 4GB of RAM they include in the system.   This leads me to believe that their systems are out of RAM and are swapping or their swappiness is set way too high for a proper VPS system.

Upload Speed

I have quite a few servers, so I was running upload tests to them to see how it would handle.  One day after having my server setup I was warned about uploading at 7.2MB/s from the disk.  So I cancelled the upload and said, it doesn't make much sense for you to offer 100TB if you are saying I can't use 7.2MB/s from the disk (that would only be 17TB total served from the disk).

Either way, I loaded up a tmpfs and served the files from the RAM.   It wasn't long before I was capped at 160mbps (20MB/s).  I could tell this because between 3-6 threads and 3 locations, the upload speed was exactly the same as my graph proved over 12 hours.

160mbps is actually more than I was expecting but it does go to show you that they aren't allowing customers to actually use 100TB.

Downloading & Load Average

Since I was warned about the disk speed, I set up a 100gb download but limited wget to 4MB/s.  Prior to the download my CPU usage was around 15% of one CPU and my load average was around 0.5 from the scps through tmpfs.  After starting the wget, the CPU usage of wget was around 5% but my load average and disk wait shot up greatly.  The load average went from 0.5 to 1.7 just from downloading with a limit of 4MB/s.  This shows me that the disks are extremely taxed.

Two hours after starting the download and getting some things setup through yum, I get my system shut off, refunded via PayPal, and sent a notice:

"It's obvious that you are just abusing the resources here and not actually use the VPS for any legitimate reason."

Apparently, downloading a file at 4MB/s is abusing the resources.  But what can you expect from a $5 100TB plan.

 

[Jack]

They aren't just going to let you abuse it though are they? If you're just wget'ing files constantly that's not really using it fairly.

 

[devonblzx]

I wasn't wgeting constantly.  It was one big file limited to 4MB/s.  Either way, it really shouldn't matter how a person uses the system.   I was just testing it for a couple days to see how the speeds held up and I was in the process of setting it up as a free proxy service for users.

 

[Mun]

vnstat
Database updated: Sun Jan 26 15:11:01 2014

venet0 since 01/23/14

rx: 128.00 GiB tx: 913.08 GiB total: 1.02 TiB

monthly
rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Jan '14 128.00 GiB | 913.08 GiB | 1.02 TiB | 3.94 Mbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 154.81 GiB | 1.08 TiB | 1.23 TiB |

daily
rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
yesterday 12.22 GiB | 415.70 GiB | 427.92 GiB | 41.55 Mbit/s
today 5.48 GiB | 195.70 GiB | 201.17 GiB | 30.87 Mbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 8.66 GiB | 309.33 GiB | 317.99 GiB |

That is my GVH server, and it is constantly uploading at around 4MB/s

 

[MCH-Phil]

There are, FAR better, more legitimate uses of the resources than what you were using them for. I think this is the problem. Maybe I'm wrong :/

 

[MartinD]

So this was locked....


And now unlocked. 2 parties involved have asked for it to be reopened so it can be resolved.

 

[Nett]

lol to GVH

 

[devonblzx]

There are, FAR better, more legitimate uses of the resources than what you were using them for. I think this is the problem. Maybe I'm wrong :/

I guess we can argue about legitimacy all day, but using my allocated bandwidth and resources and not doing anything illegal seems legitimate to me.   All I did was test the resources within my limits (even less than my limits as I only used 3GB of RAM out of 4 and ~2TB over the 2 days I had the server), my CPU usage never used more than 100% CPU (usually around 10%), the load average only went high when I was using the disk.

The download/upload tests were only a few threads and were served from RAM after I was confronted about the 7.2MB/s disk speed so it barely affected the CPU and didn't affect the disks. I was only testing it yesterday and today., I was downloading the 100gb test file to put up on a web site as a test download for users. I chose to download it rather than create it via dd since dd would hammer the disks a lot more than downloading at 4MB/s.  I was allocated 250GB of disk space and 100TB of bandwidth, so 100GB test file seemed fine to me.

The proxy server was installed and running and I wanted to realistically see if I would ever be able to use the 4GB of RAM and 100TB of bandwidth, which seems like a legitimate thing for anyone to wonder.

 

[Hxxx]

Maybe it would be better in offers with so much high resources to specify something like : *Resources will be monitored and only the ones with legitimate use will be allowed. Aka no memory allocation for testing or speedtest downloads to waste bw.

 

[devonblzx]

Maybe it would be better in offers with so much high resources to specify something like : *Resources will be monitored and only the ones with legitimate use will be allowed. Aka no memory allocation for testing or speedtest downloads to waste bw.

Sure, but a normal host should not be monitoring what processes you are running unless you get an abuse report.

I guess you can think of it this way, for someone buying a 4GB RAM server, it should be able to handle 3GB of RAM, so my usage to test the RAM seems legitimate.  For someone who buys a server with 250GB of space and tries to transfer over all their files from another host would need to transfer at 4MB/s for 18 hours in order to start using the service, so downloading a 100GB file at 4MB/s seems legitimate to me.

 

[NodeWest-Dan]

I won't lie. It's 2 legit 2 quit.

 

[MannDude]

Call me crazy, but I subscribed to the mindset that you should be able to utilize what you're sold.

100TB/mo is around 3.33TB a day. If you can, somehow, use 3.33TB a day via legitimate means while also not going over your CPU allocation or straight up raping the disks, you should be able to.

Sadly this is all a marketing gimmick to get people to talk about GVH, which obviously it has worked. They've been the word-of-the-day for the past week now. This isn't to offer you a great service at a low cost, it's to get people talking. GVH this, GVH that.

What they should have done was just called it 'unmetered' instead of trying to place a 100TB cap on it. Saying that they came with a 100TB limit was foolish and obviously was going to be met with a challenge. "Unmetered" doesn't sound nearly as bad, and is more or less 'as much as you realistically need for legitimate purposes' as opposed to, "Do everything in your power to use 100TB in one month"

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

Sounds to me like he's starting to panic about overage fees from the owners.  I believe Mun is still running his torrent box... but he went in making it clear his usage would be legit - Jon can't afford to shitcan him without an excuse.  I'm curious if anyone else that signed up was able to keep their VM, or was everyone thrown out for "resource abuse"?

 

[MannDude]

Sounds to me like he's starting to panic about overage fees from the owners.  I believe Mun is still running his torrent box... but he went in making it clear his usage would be legit - Jon can't afford to shitcan him without an excuse.  I'm curious if anyone else that signed up was able to keep their VM, or was everyone thrown out for "resource abuse"?

I think I know someone else who is using theirs a good amount, so that's two people, at least.

 

[devonblzx]

I think I know someone else who is using theirs a good amount, so that's two people, at least.

Yes, the bandwidth use didn't seem to be an issue, although it did seem they silently capped me at 160mbps a few hours into my upload tests.

Ultimately I was suspended because my load was above 1, which happened anytime I used the disk.  So I think my problem was that I was on an oversold node that the server was swapping a lot (as seen* from my RAM tests) and the disks were already being taxed so my disk wait (and subsequently my load average) would shoot up when trying to access the disk.  It wasn't like I was running dd tests or random I/O either, just the single threaded sequential download.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

Y'know, I was almost hopeful for the kid last night.  He came into IRC and PM'd me, some big rant about changing his ways for the better, admitting to his lies and sticking to the truth (no mention of what said lies and truth were).  Saw the thread on LET.. which honestly struck me more as insulting than anything else.  (I did notice he hasn't bothered apologizing to this community - I suppose he realizes that won't quite fly here).

And then, 15 minutes after this supposed fresh start... "We have 18 staff members" <_<.

 

[DomainBop]

I wasn't wgeting constantly.  It was one big file limited to 4MB/s.  Either way, it really shouldn't matter how a person uses the system.   I was just testing it for a couple days to see how the speeds held up and I was in the process of setting it up as a free proxy service for users.

Testing a server before putting it into production use is a perfectly legitimate use although it may be a foreign concept to many low end hosts who I've seen push a node into production hours after receiving the server without doing any burn-in testing.

It's not surprising that some hosts would consider burnin testing to be "abuse" since some of these hosts are so inexperienced and clueless that they don't even bother to check the peering and do traceroutes on their rented servers before posting an offer, and some of these hosts don't even know which city their frickin' server is actually in (recent example: NodePacket posted an offer recently advertising an NYC location and didn't realize that their server was actually in Buffalo until people pointed out to them in the offer thread that the test IP they gave was Buffalo not NYC )

I guess you can think of it this way, for someone buying a 4GB RAM server, it should be able to handle 3GB of RAM, so my usage to test the RAM seems legitimate.

Truthfully, if you're buying a 4GB $5 plan on a 32GB RAM E3 there is no need to do any testing to find out it can't handle the RAM you are supposedly guaranteed.  It can't.  Selling 250GB-300GB of RAM on these E3's is common and I've seen as high as 400GB-500GB on an E3 (DigTheMine, selling 2GB RAM Minecraft slots with a full /24 worth of accounts sold per node...do the RAM math on that one)

edited to add:

Saw the thread on LET.. which honestly struck me more as insulting than anything else.

I saw the thread on LET and had trouble telling it apart from a similar sob story "I was a bad boy, I promise I'll change" thread he posted on WHT last year.  He didn't change after the WHT thread and I'm not holding my breath waiting for him to change after this latest sob story thread.  Maybe he'll surprise me and actually change but I'm more inclined to believe it will be more of the same.

 

[devonblzx]

I'm not here to thrash GVH as I don't know much about them.  I think it should be a lesson for them to prepare their nodes or disclose expected usage speeds before offering a plan that consists of 4GB RAM, 250GB space, and 100TB of bandwidth as I saw that trying to use any of the limits resulted in some sort of cap or complaint.   I figured this would be the case prior to signing up, as with experience in this business, it was far too good to be true, but I think it is still important to show the results of my usage.

 

[GVH-Jon]

Hello sir,

Thank You for sharing your experiences. I know that this thread has been closed in it's early stage however I've requested Martin to reopen it as we don't wish to hide from our problems and we wish to work with you to resolve this issue.

I've recently stepped down in my frequency of supervision of GreenValueHost and was not aware that this incident happened until this thread was brought to my attention. I checked in with my team and it turns out that one of our new supervisors has been doing internal audits of our VPS hosting nodes and have singled out your virtual server for abuse as you were found to be performing tasks in which the supervisor considered unnecessarily wasteful and inconsiderate to other clients in the virtualization environment.

If you would like to email [email protected], one of our quality assurance and/or relations personnel will get back to you and reach a final resolution/agreement with you on this issue as soon as possible. Since I was not involved in this incident, I do not have much knowledge of the situation at hand however I have assigned this thread to a few of our managers to look after and public questions will be answered by them in this thread as soon as they have a chance.

I still do recommend emailing us though however as we really would like to work with you and get to the bottom of this to ensure your satisfaction. I can assure you that the response that you have received, "It's obvious that you are just abusing the resources here and not actually use the VPS for any legitimate reason." is not considered an appropriate way for one of our staff members to act and I will re-address the issue of treating our clients with utmost courtesy to our staff to make sure that this does not happen again.

If anyone would like to contact me directly, you may do so by emailing me at [email protected] however some of our other managers will be available in this thread shortly to assist.

Thank You,

Jonathan.

 

[DomainBop]

one of our quality assurance and/or relations personnel...
I have assigned this thread to a few of our managers to look after...

...and with that post GVH-Jon just proved that nothing has changed.