Why I Won't Use Rimuhosting

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rimuhosting

by joao • 17 years ago

105 123 17 years ago

shabda• 17 years ago

In a way, isn't this a reason to use Rimuhosting. They obviously care about their customers enough, to proactively monitor and step in that everyone gets a fair CPU share.

rwolf• 17 years ago

From bizarre reactions to imaginary CPU use problems, to hacking in to their client's servers, this article presented some good reasons not to use Rimuhosting.

mdasen• 17 years ago

You can make sure that people get a fair CPU share without resorting to such primitive (and wrong) methods.

Xen has the ability to cap CPU usage with either hard or soft caps. Most VPS companies seem to use soft caps. That way, if there are 4 instances on the box and each is doing lots of stuff, they'll each get 25%. But if 3 of the instances are mostly idle not using CPU, but one needs more CPU it will be able to use extra. It works out really nicely because it means that your usage can burst at certain times when it's unlikely that your co-habitants are similarly bursting.

See: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#cpu-scheduling

bretthoerner• 17 years ago

Doesn't Xen do proper CPU sharing (but not proper I/O sharing, yet)? What are they using?

mcantelon• 17 years ago

They are likely using Virtuozzo-based VPSs which, unlike Xen, don't properly implement resource limits.

pavs• 17 years ago

If you were to believe the author, his VPS wasn't causing high CPU usage.

Regardless, doesn't most vps instances have limitations built into their VPS instances? It shouldn't matter to other VPS in that box how much CPU is being used by other VPS, as long as they are within their limitations?

That was my experience with slicehost and other VPS

californiaguy2• 17 years ago

Except most providers grossly oversell their VPS instances just like bandwidth, and when someone actually starts using 100% of their quoted capacity, it throws everything out of equilibrium.

aaronsw3• 17 years ago

As I note in the article, they already had placed a CPU cap on me. They could have lowered it to whatever my fair share is instead of breaking into my box and turning off my webserver.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

It would have made a lot more sense for them to just pause your VPS.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Except that the need to manually deal with CPU usage shows that they are amateur idiots.

There's no reason to be assigning VPSes to particular machines in 2009 -- distribute the damn things instead of selling shared hosting like in the bad old days (except this time with VM overhead!).

rdtsc• 17 years ago

They showed their lack of technical proficiency. CPU caps should be enforced without having to edit partitions, adding ssh keys to users accounts, asking for root passwords, or manually killing Apache.

So to put it bluntly they are very nice and helpful, but stupid. I wouldn't trust them with my data. But I can see how some customers might prefer them, as there is always a nice person on the other end of the line...

catch23• 17 years ago

That's sorta like a hotel renting a room... and if you overstay your rent, they throw you out the window. Sure it's their room, they're allowed to do anything they want with it, but I wouldn't want to be that guy thrown out the window either. There are better ways to solve the problem than using a shotgun.

mattculbreth• 17 years ago

I've used Future Hosting http://www.futurehosting.com/ for a few years now, with two different VPS instances for $30/month each. Never had a problem, and if they did something like this I'd be shocked.

neilc2• 17 years ago

They ... offered to take a look at the problem if I gave them root on the box. “Over my dead body,” I thought

That seems a little silly to me. If they control the hardware, they basically have root already. They shouldn't need root to investigate the alleged problem, of course, but the level of trust you need to grant your VPS provider is essentially the same as giving them root.

aaronsw3• 17 years ago

Technically the police can break down my door too, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to trust them with a key. There are both social reasons (a key is an invitation) and technical (it's much more noticeable if they break down the door).

brk4• 17 years ago

Yes, but in this case they weren't breaking down your door (at least not yet anyway). They were asking for a key for entry in order to assist you.

You could have most likely also given them an account and appropriate sudoer rights.

neilc2• 17 years ago

There's a social difference, yes. In this case, I'm not sure the technical difference is all that large: if they were at all competent, they could have easily snooped on your VM without your knowledge.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

I think it isn't. Even if they have physical access to the machine, breaking into it is ethically questionnable and highly unprofessional. Unless they detect some sort of illegal activity or there is a real emergency, this is just simply unacceptable.

rufo2• 17 years ago

From their point of view, he'd repeatedly ignored three separate requests to clean up his CPU usage. After he refused to do anything about it, they took care of the problem. Would it have been better if they disabled his account entirely?

mleonhard• 17 years ago

I've had good service from Linode for nearly 2 years: http://www.linode.com/?r=73dc8f5748a14c821e64febc5e461a606f6...

chollida1• 17 years ago

was the referral link really necessary?

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

That went well for you.

mark_l_watson• 17 years ago

I have been using RimuHosting for my own projects and for customers for test deployments for years - so far I have had good experiences with them. They did complain once that I was using too much CPU, but I checked, and found problems (my fault) with a Merb deployment).

SwellJoe8• 17 years ago

Several of our customers are hosted with Rimuhosting, and we've interacted with them on a number of occasions because of that. In my experience they are very responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. That's not to say this isn't a pretty irritating set of events...and silently shutting down Apache shouldn't be anyone's first instinct.

But, I've had bad experiences with literally every single host I've ever used (dozens of them), and the longer you stay with a provider, the more likely you are to find a tech having a bad day, or their network fiber getting cut by the utility company, or various other demonstrations of man's fallibility.

I think the good probably still outweighs the bad with Rimuhosting...as Aaron mentioned, they do have a good reputation among many people who ought to know. The horror stories I hear about really bad hosts leave this event in the dust in terms of sheer stupidity and lack of good intentions. If this is the worst you've ever experienced with a hosting provider, count yourself very, very lucky. The data loss stories I've heard, in particular, are enough to keep me awake at night.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention that Rimuhosting is a customer of ours (along with thousands of others). So, if you reckon a commercial relationship worth a few hundred bucks a year would sway my opinions, feel free to take this comment with a grain of salt or not at all.

_pius2• 17 years ago

The longer you stay with a provider, the more likely you are to find a tech having a bad day ...

I'm sorry, but the behavior described in the article is completely unacceptable. I don't care how bad of a day anyone's having, you don't break into your customer's server and shut off Apache without notice.

SwellJoe8• 17 years ago

It's not "breaking in". They own the server, and pretty much every host's terms of service allow them to do pretty much anything they deem necessary to maintain service for their other customers, or in response to abuse or law enforcement requests (read the terms of service at your favorite hosting provider; you'll find that you've agreed to this kind of intervention when you signed up).

So, this particular event shows a lack of good judgment on the part of the tech in question, and a lack of common courtesy in not notifying the customer of the issue in advance of taking action...but it is not an illicit act. No "break in" happened here. The options a hosting provider has when things are behaving badly are pretty much all things that a customer will not like. When a dedicated server is compromised and is being used to send spam, for example, the host will simply firewall the whole thing off from the world, shutting down all services. This happens all the time; the effected customer blames the host, sometimes. Sometimes there are other options. In this case, the host opted to turn off one (disputably) offending service rather than kill the whole host. I think we can all agree this wasn't the best way to handle it. Thus my assertion that this is a tech having a bad day (or simply one bad support tech at Rimuhosting, among mostly good ones).

Actually, I think the one thing I'm uncomfortable with is the illusion of propriety (ownership) Rimuhosting has given by saying "You are able to remove that if you are not comfortable with that.", in reference to the ssh key. This is a bit of a disconnect from the reality that under some circumstances, they will have to exert their ownership rights, and there's nothing you can do about it. At some point you just have to trust in the good faith of your provider. But the only alternative to doing what they did (assuming they, in good faith, thought Aaron's VM was damaging service for others), assuming they don't have the ability to throttle Xen instances on this particular machine (maybe it's too old to have that capability, I dunno, or maybe the tech in question didn't actually understand those capabilities; the tech could be new...everybody starts somewhere), would be to turn his VM off completely. From the techs perspective he may have thought he was doing Aaron a favor by leaving mail and other services running.

Again, I'm not arguing it was good judgment on the part of the tech. But to say that Rimuhosting broke into their own machine is ridiculous.

astrec2• 17 years ago

If my VPS was on the same host I'd pretty much demand they do exactly that.

Actually I'd probably demand they stop the instance, so I reckon he got a free kick if they only stopped the offending service.

DocSavage• 17 years ago

The data loss stories I've heard, in particular, are enough to keep me awake at night.

Over four years ago, I was helping my father-in-law establish a web presence and e-mail system for his small business. Things were fine on my personal dedicated server but I decided to move their stuff to Yahoo's "proven" business service. One day, I found out everything was removed -- email accounts, web site -- for no explainable reason. The whole sordid affair was documented here:

http://billkatz.com/2005/6/Run-Dont-Walk-from-Yahoo-Small-Bu...

apotheon18• 17 years ago

Gaining root in such an underhanded manner against the client's wishes is bordering on criminal behavior. It doesn't get much worse than that.

Of course, I write about security professionally. Maybe I have a different perspective on what constitutes unacceptable behavior than you have.

SwellJoe8• 17 years ago

Gaining root in such an underhanded manner against the client's wishes is bordering on criminal behavior.

No. Not even close. Rimuhosting owns the box in question. You can't possibly break into your own box.

Of course, I write about security professionally. Maybe I have a different perspective on what constitutes unacceptable behavior than you have.

I work in the hosting industry professionally. I've never been or worked at a service provider, but I've worked for the industry for 12 years as a vendor.

As a security professional, perhaps you can take the other side's view for a moment...

What would you, as a security professional who was dumped into the role of running a hosting data center, do when a box on your network (which has thousands of other boxes) has been rooted and is sending out spam at a rate of a million messages per day, even if you know that your paying customer is not responsible for sending those messages? This much traffic is impacting network performance for others, is spewing filth into the mailboxes of innocent people all over the world, and your customer is unable to stop it or cannot be reached in a reasonable time frame. What do you believe your responsibility would be in such a case?

How about if it is (innocently) DoSing other systems on the network? This happens a lot more than you'd think.

Many people here are suggesting that simply applying resource limits would solve this problem...but that exhibits a lack of understanding of how such resource limits work, and the likely end result for the customer of such resource limiting in the event something has gone wrong. To the customer, a limit on resource usage could very well also result in services becoming unavailable. If you cap CPU at 10%, and your website gets enough traffic to need 90% of the CPU, you'll only be able to serve a small percentage of your clients (and they will wait a long time). The same is true of nearly every resource limit in a hosting environment. If you are using more than your fair share (which I know Aaron has explained he was not; again, probably poor judgment and problem assessment on the part of the tech) then when the limits are imposed, you will be "turned off" for some of your users. You needed those resources to serve all of your requests...you don't have those resources anymore, so you can't serve all of those requests anymore, or if you do, you do so very slowly.

As programmers, you all know there are no silver bullet for solving hard, complex problems. Resource usage in a virtualized environment with untrusted users is a hard, complex problem. No amount of hand-waving about your "rights" makes that less true.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

as another security professional I'm inclined to agree with Swelljoe.

(mostly because it's clearly going to be in the T&C's)

rbanffy• 17 years ago

Rimuhostinh owns the box. The client rents it, but the owner never gives up the right to step in and fix something if it is impacting the service they provide for other clients.

If I require this level of privacy, I will go with a co-location contract, not a virtual machine. Those are different products with different features. A VM on a shared chassis is hardly a private computer.

Oddly, I have some experience with virtual servers and never had much trouble throttling down an instance that wanted too much resources.

olihb5• 17 years ago

I'm with Rimuhosting since forever.

Their support is unbeatable. Many times they helped me(I'm a dev. not a sys. admin.) for free where other companies would have charged me.

I agree that adding their key on the VPS without talking to you sucks but having a 100% utilisation of your CPU is a bit egoist. That means that nobody on the host machine can burst their share for a quick high-cpu job.

If you want total control over your machine, get a dedicated box. Even then, some hosters demand root access on your box.

tdavis2• 17 years ago

nobody on the host machine can burst their share for a quick high-cpu job

That only makes sense if there is only one other VM on the machine. Which is basically never the case.

EDIT: Or they use a pedestrian virtualization layer.

olihb5• 17 years ago

I'm not sure I understand.

If there are 8 VPS on a machine and I'm always using 1/8 of CPU time, nobody else can't have access to this 1/8 share. I know that 1/8 of the CPU share "belongs" to me but it's a shared box and it's just being a good neighbour. I appreciate it when I need to run a quick high-cpu on my VPS and I can use more than my 1/8 share of CPU.

dschobel• 17 years ago

but having a 100% utilisation of your CPU is a bit egoist

I thought selling access to a shared resource without the ability to moderate consumption was the ridiculous bit.

pyre6• 17 years ago

But Rimuhosting states in their email to him that they can give him a fixed CPU share, and then they don't care what he does with that. And they already had given him a fixed CPU share. If it was too large they could have further limited the size of his share, and then called him to notify him.

sho11• 17 years ago

This article reminds me of Hard Disks. Talk to any "PC fan" and they'll regale you with a story of how they will never, ever use $HD_BRAND after it crashed and lost all their data. Thing is, the brand changes depending on who you talk to. And a real professional will tell you that all the brands have similar failure rates, not to put your faith in any hardware, and advise you on a RAID and backup strategy.

Same here. I know people who use rimuhosting, they seem happy enough. I use Linode personally but have no real preference. This article smacks of a one-off bad experience which could happen anywhere - and doesn't even seem that bad. It's a VPS, for christ's sake, if you don't like it get a dedi or even better a colo.

madars• 17 years ago

Breaking in customer's account could happen anywhere? Really?

sho11• 17 years ago

Stop using emotive language like "breaking in". They just killed a runaway process on a user account. Nothing more. I guarantee you they could not care less beyond that.

apotheon18• 17 years ago

The reason I don't use consumer-grade Western Digital drives has nothing to do with a specific drive failure event, and everything to do with the fact that consumer-grade drives from WD are basically factory seconds of WD's enterprise-grade drives.

sho11• 17 years ago

All the more reason to have a failure-tolerant scenario with backups!

Confusion2• 17 years ago

Which is exactly the kind of story that gets perpetuated over and over again, with different $brand's substituted. It doesn't even make sense: what criterion is used to seperate 'enterprise' from 'consumer'? They can't possibly test every drive (too expensive) and if they watch production parameters and decide based on those, chances are that most consumer drives are 'enterprise' as well. I find stories like these extremely implausible.

philwelch• 17 years ago

Shit, I hear the same stories about shipping companies. And cell phone companies. I now know never to use FedEx, UPS, or DHL.

sho11• 17 years ago

You got it. Also, never visit America, Mexico, Canada, Britain, or any other country on earth.

callmeed• 17 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I got a VPS from them after asking HN for VPS recommendations in Europe.

Had issues from the start. The setup wasn't what I ordered. Once it was setup properly, I started getting alerts from their staff that my VPS's resources were spiking–but this was before I had even logged into the system and done anything. That didn't do much for my confidence in their operation.

Anyway, I canceled with them and will probably use Rackspace as they have UK/European data centers.

blhack2• 17 years ago

Would you mind posting what the offending CGI was doing? If you coded up your index.cgi to walk all over the CPU as badly as it sounds like you did, something was probably very very wrong.

That said, they were absolutely in the right to do this (except that they should have notified you first...).

I saw that you (or somebody) used the analogy of a landlord and an apartment. Let's explore that further...

Say you are renting an apartment, and the landlord doesn't charge you anything for water (which is pretty common, if not standard). Now, there is a bit of a gentlemen's agreement here. Yes, you have "unlimited" water but, like everything else in life, this needs to have the words "within reason" appended to it.

Now lets say that, for some reason, your apartment was using 10x as much water as everybody else in the building...so much so, in fact, that nobody else in the building could reliably get any water.

Your landlord calls you and says "Hey, joao, would you mind cutting the water back, please? You're kindof using too much", which you ignore.

A couple of months later, again, the landlord calls

"Hey, Joao, you're still using a shit-load of water, and your sortof hogging it all. Some of the other tenants are complaining...if you want, leave a key to your place in the office and we'll go check it out!"

Which you respond "over my dead body".

So, finally, after months and months of you hogging the water, they just use the master key to the building to go into your apartment, where they see that you've had the shower, the sink, and the toilet all running constantly for the last 4 months. They shut them off, then call you

"Hey, joao, yeah, we noticed that you pretty royally messed up and kindof left EVERYTHING in the bathroom on at the same time. Not cool...so we shut it off. Sorry for the inconveinience. BTW, sorry for having to go into your appt. like that, but the other tenants were complaining. Here are some instructions so that you can change the lock on your door an keep us from being able to help you like this in the future. Have a nice day!"

And your response to ignoring their totally legitimate requests for you to stop hogging all the resources is "WHAT A BUNCH OF PRICKS!!"

I think somebody needs to calm down and take a step back from the situation.

pyre6• 17 years ago

Great analogy, but you missed the point. (Great analogy because I can still use it to demonstrate the point) I would be pretty pissed if my landlord use the master key to access my apartment when he had a valve in the utility closet to just shut-off all water to my apartment.

These are VPSes here. They can just pause the entire VPS instance, or further cap the CPU usage from what they had already capped it at.

blhack2• 17 years ago

Hooray for this analogy! Sadly, you didn't really use it correctly :(.

Pausing the VPS instance would have been like locking them out of the apartment completely...

I would much rather have a landlord come into my apartment to turn my faucet off (keep in mind: after I ignored her requests to for MONTHS) than lock me out of it completely.

christefano• 17 years ago

This is the only time I've seen anyone in this thread ask what the process was. I voted you up for that. Did the offending proccess really warrant the kind of intervention that RimuHosting is being criticized of?

tszyn• 17 years ago

I signed up with RimuHosting a few months ago, since everyone was raving about their competent and responsive support. So far it has been a mixed bag for me. They offered to set up some services for me when I was signing up (a monitoring service and a pop3 server). Whoever was setting these up did a horrible job; I'm talking about basic mistakes in the config files that prevented these services from even working. So I would not trust RimuHosting to set up anything on my server.

On the other hand, when I experienced weird routing problems between my machine and my home, Rimu eventually offered to move me to a more expensive London VPS at the same price, even though the dropped packets were not their fault. So they are willing to go out of their way to make a customer happy.

As I said, a mixed bag. I'm not planning on changing hosts anytime soon.

robertduncan• 17 years ago

Am I the only one thinking that Rimuhosting is a rather unfortunate name?

helveticaman• 17 years ago

Fanatical service, man.

martey• 17 years ago

It's the name of a tree native to New Zealand (where the company is located): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacrydium_cupressinum

Maro• 17 years ago

Something similar happened to us a few days ago on our RimuHosting VPS. A Python script was eating ~80% of the VPS CPU, so their tech guy, without asking us, tries to login as root to our box (WTF?). He fails, so he responds by rebooting our VPS, thus (?) causing some disk corruption, which he then tries to repair. Then, after-the-fact, he writes us a very confused email about the whole story.

Needless to say, we're moving away from RimuHosting. This is unacceptable.

An excerpt:

"I noticed your VPS was using a lot of CPU. I was not able to log in there, and on the console I saw lots of out-of-memory messages.

I restarted the VPS to make sure it was running in a sane state. I checked the console after a reboot and saw an error indicating some filesystem corruption. I stopepd it again and repaired that. Then replaced the /etc/inittab file which appeared to be corrupted. Now I see that has booted fine."

edgeztv• 17 years ago

In my 2+ years hosting typeracer.com with Rimu, they have been absolutely outstanding. All my questions, no matter how complex, were answered within 10-30 minutes. Hundreds of times. Anything I've asked them they did. They installed all kinds of packages and performed configurations I requested, all for free and without hesitation. And I'm not a premium customer by any stretch. I only have 2 quarter-VPS instances with them for about $200 a month.

In the 2 years I only experienced 20 minutes of downtime recently due to a one-time network hardware upgrade (1 week's advance notice was given - a bit short but forgivable) and another 20 minutes due to a DDoS on their network about 6 months ago (which most likely prompted this recent hardware upgrade :).

I really hope people don't jump to conclusions from a single data point (aaronsw). I would recommend RimuHosting to everyone I know without hesitation.

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

It can't be left unsaid: I assumed (no pun intended) this was a joke posting when I first saw it, seriously "Rim You Hosting"??!

Why I Won't Use Rimuhosting

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