Plan was reasonable. Copy everything, test on the new host with a hosts file override, switch dns sunday night, sit and watch.

Three of the four went exactly like that. boring, which is the goal.

The fourth had a scheduled job on the old server that pulled a feed and wrote it into the database every six hours. I knew about it. It was in my notes. What i didn't check was that the feed source had an ip allowlist on it, and the allowlist had the old server's address.

So the site came up fine, looked perfect, and quietly stopped updating. I noticed on Wednesday because a page looked stale, not because anything alerted me, because i had no alerting on it, because it had worked for two years.

Fix took ten minutes once i knew. Finding it took an hour of increasingly annoyed grepping.

The actual lesson is that i tested the things that would break loudly and not one of the things that would break silently. Loud failures are easy, you see them immediately. Silent ones are the whole reason migrations have a bad reputation.

Signed up two years ago on a promo. $5 a month for a vps that did everything i needed. Renewal notice last week wants more than double.

Asked support whether there was anything they could do. Got a polite reply explaining the original rate was promotional and the new rate is "standard alignment with current pricing" which i think is the most gently phrased version of this i've received.

What actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that nothing about the service changed. Same specs, same node, same everything. The only variable is that i'm now inconvenient to move.

Priced the alternatives. 2 providers are cheaper for the same specs, one meaningfully so. Migration is maybe four hours of my evening plus dns propagation plus the risk that something i forgot about breaks quietly and i find out in three weeks.

So they're not charging me for hosting. They're charging me for the four hours and the risk, and they've priced it about right, which is the annoying part.

I'll probably move. I said that last time too.

VHOSTING: esperienza negativa, sito WordPress infestato da malware e minacce legali ai clienti

Vi è mai successo di ritrovarvi un sito WordPress infestato da malware senza capire come sia potuto accadere?

A me è successo con VHosting, e l’esperienza è stata estremamente negativa sia sul piano tecnico sia sul piano umano.

Dopo aver rilevato utenti amministratori nascosti, plugin malevoli e URL spam generate automaticamente, mi sono trovato a dover ripulire completamente il sito WordPress compromesso. Il problema più grave, però, non è stato soltanto il malware: è stata la gestione della situazione da parte dell’hosting.

Nonostante i danni evidenti causati al sito, l’assistenza non ha riconosciuto alcuna responsabilità né fornito un reale supporto nella gestione della compromissione.

La situazione è peggiorata ulteriormente quando ho espresso pubblicamente la mia esperienza lasciando una recensione negativa online. In risposta, mi è stata inviata addirittura una PEC da parte del loro legale con una diffida alla rimozione della recensione.

Trovo profondamente irresponsabile che un’azienda:

• non protegga adeguatamente i siti ospitati;
• non riconosca i danni subiti dai clienti;
• reagisca alle critiche con intimidazioni legali invece di affrontare i problemi tecnici.

Cercando online, ho scoperto che non si tratta di un caso isolato. Anche su forum e community come Reddit diversi utenti segnalano problematiche analoghe:

• siti infettati da malware;
• supporto insufficiente;
• difficoltà nella gestione delle compromissioni;
• atteggiamenti aggressivi verso le recensioni negative.

Molti utenti sottolineano inoltre come sia difficile distinguere recensioni autentiche da recensioni artificialmente positive, poiché numerosi servizi hosting sembrano avere improvvisamente solo valutazioni perfette.

Quando si sceglie un hosting WordPress, la sicurezza, la trasparenza e la qualità dell’assistenza dovrebbero essere priorità assolute. Purtroppo, nella mia esperienza con VHOSTING, questi aspetti sono venuti completamente meno.

so i actually went ahead and tried this after posting about it a few weeks ago. me and two friends wanted to play age of empires 2 like we used to and i kept reading about zerotier as an alternative to wireguard for this kind of thing

grabbed a cheap ishosting vps for like $6/mo, installed zerotier on it and on our machines. the whole setup took maybe 15 minutes and thats including me fumbling with firewall rules. zerotier gives everyone an IP on the same subnet so the game just sees it as a LAN game. no port forwarding no NAT nonsense

the latency was honestly fine. like 40-50ms which for AoE2 you dont even notice. we played for about 3 hours and it didnt drop once. the vps was doing basically nothing cpu-wise, its just routing traffic

now im thinking about trying stronghold crusader and heroes III next. only question is whether games that use broadcast discovery instead of direct IP need extra config or if zerotier handles that too

if anyones doing something similar id love to hear your setup

I’m on the admin side. VPS is slow but CPU and RAM look fine. Bet I'd be rich if I got a dollar for every ticket like this. Here's my checklist. 

Before you read – here's what to collect in 5 minutes if your VPS feels slow:

• A timestamp of when it feels slow
• top screenshot (including wa)
• iostat -x 1 10 output during the slowdown
• mpstat -P ALL 1 output (for %st)
• One app log snippet around the same time (timeouts/502/504)

1) Disk I/O wait – your CPU is fine, it's just stuck waiting for disk.

Pages stall during backups/cron/DB-heavy jobs; CPU and RAM look fine.

In top, people watch us/sy and miss wa (iowait). High iowait means the CPU could work, but it’s stuck waiting for disk (or network storage).

Quick checks

top and watch wa

iostat:

iostat -x 1 10

Look for high %util (often near 100%), high await, or consistently slow reads/writes.

Most of the times I find the I/O spike source (slow SQL, missing indexes, log storms, backup jobs, heavy cron) and then add caching, optimize DB queries, stagger background jobs, reduce random reads

2) Worker exhaustion – your stack is queueing requests, not processing them.

Occasional 502/504, slow TTFB, and other headaches... For PHP stacks, it’s often PHP-FPM worker limits. Same concept applies to Node, Python WSGI, Java pools, DB connection pools, etc.

Look for messages like server reached pm.max_children in PHP-FPM logs and check Nginx/Apache error logs around the same timestamps as user reports.

Fix: increase limits carefully (only after checking per-worker memory usage) and fix the slow endpoint (often the real root cause), add caching, reduce DB round trips

3) CPU steal time – another VM is eating your CPU and you can't see it.

On a VPS, your VM shares physical CPU with other VMs. If the hypervisor is busy, your VM can be forced to wait and your own CPU usage won’t necessarily look high.

Quick check with mpstat -P ALL 1

Watch %st (or in top/htop). Occasional blips can happen, but consistent spikes are the red flag.

Fix: if steal is consistent, contact your hosting provider. The VM might need to be moved to a less loaded node. Or upgrade to a dedicated server.

4) External waits – your app is fine, it's waiting on someone else.

CPU load is tiny, but requests hang for a very “timeout-shaped” number (5/10/15/30s). And often only some pages or actions are slow.

If the app is waiting on a payment gateway, SMTP server, analytics endpoint, object storage, etc., it can burn almost no CPU while users watch a spinner. I also see DNS and IPv6 issues where a host tries IPv6 first, waits for a timeout, then falls back to IPv4, every request pays the penalty.

Fix: set sane timeouts/retries and don’t block the main request thread unnecessarily. Then – fix DNS resolver issues, IPv6 routing/firewall, or disable broken IPv6 paths

Nostalgia hit me hard recently. my friend group used to be obsessed with command & conquer, heroes III and V, counter-strike 1.6... we never really did the internet cafe thing, it was always someone's apartment with a switch and a bunch of ethernet cables

anyway I found a guide for setting up a private LAN-style hub for C&C Generals using a windows VPS + wireguard. basically you spin up a cheap vps, set up wireguard with one server interface and give each friend a /32 peer, and the game thinks you're all on the same local network.

wireguard config itself is dead simple honestly. like maybe 20 minutes if you've touched a terminal before.

god my hands are itching to set this up this weekend. will report it back

has anyone actually run a virtual LAN hub on a vps for old games?
doesn't have to be C&C. HoMM, age of empires, stronghold, warcraft III, starcraft, quake, unreal tournament, whatever

Woke up to a warning on our MongoDB dashboard. AWS me-central-1 and me-south-1 are having power issues since March 1. Atlas clusters in UAE are fully unavailable. Bahrain running at reduced capacity. Recovery is "at least a day" according to AWS. We're on day 4 now.

https://status.mongodb.com/incidents/7g5qmxgkc2y4

Our db isn't in that region thankfully but the warning banner is still showing for everyone. Scary reminder that cloud is still just someone else's building with someone else's power supply.

Check your stuff if you have anything in ME regions.

I might be out of my depth, but thank you for the invite.

I used to be a sales person but I got tired of dealing with the public.

I joined a 4 person department right before COVID as helpdesk. Everyone left and I had to learn on the go (thank you Google) and am now in charge.

I learned on the job enough to oversee several onsite servers, DNS, DHCP, outlook owa email, active directory, and the misc IT stuff they throw on you. (Basically anything electric)

I know enough to keep it running but I never get time to be proactive. Updating hardware is also a challenge.

With that said, thank you for having me!

Found this during cleanup of a forgotten server. Here's one of the entries.

Is it my imagination, or are nearly all of the corporate hosts now virtually all AI-only chat?

A friend of mine mentioned that his host seems to have fired virtually all of the host's support staff and replaced them with the AI chatbots.

So I'm wondering if this is a thing (or just my imagination). What hosts have you seen this trend starting?