Rich Thanks for that Hivelocity anecdote! Their pricing is some of the best (reduced our MRC direct with the data center by 25% when I was expecting the data center themselves to increase pricing the other direction.) But yeah they can also be silly and their hourly hands-on rates can be all over the map it seems.
I make a fubar configuration mistake and took our router down a year or so ago, and recovery with Hivelocity was more fubar than my mistake! That basically came down to our inability to access our company email accounts so didn't get the authentication code to sign into their portal to request support, and the subsequent rigamarole was a clown show of epic proportions with trying to authenticate my identity. All I wanted them to do was to rollback the config with the reset button but it took hours!
It seems they've increased un-rack/re-rack pricing to $200 both directions, so if I need a hardware node updated it costs me $400. I complained about that and they offered to halve it, so it'll cut our migration costs by 50% to let us slowly migrate away.
I've never had them damage anything of ours but they can be slow to respond to tickets. During the outage this past Sunday I was waiting over an hour to put one node into rescue mode because it was offline and not accessible remotely and I needed to fsck it. Eventually had to chat to get them to respond and do a simple reset/grub boot menu action and they didn't even put it into rescue lol. But it was accessible by that time so I was able to handle it remotely.
Raid10 is what I'd prefer, but we use 1U nodes for density, with four drive bays so RAID5 is the best we currently do and has been great. Never lost two drives at the same time but I do worry about it, and the LSI controllers with BBU have been great. Am I jinxing myself though?
I'll be happy to have our gear closer at hand for sure, but the PITA it represents make me dread it. With 25 years of hosting I'm older and crankier then ever before ha ha.
