Tuesday, November 5, 2013

A warning to people who want to host a VPS at Afrihost

I've hosted VPS`s with many companies. VPS.co.za, Afrihost, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Linode and even Virpus. Well actually there are too many companies to list but my point is that I have a decent amount of VPS experience.

Last year I signed a client up for a VPS at Afrihost. The market is very competitive but I thought I would give them a chance. By and large they have a decent enough reputation as a hosting company.

All went well until this month. Afrihost has out of bundle overage charges. Meaning that if you use up too much bandwidth they will charge you X amount per GB of over used bandwidth. My clients VPS came with a small bandwidth allocation of 100GB. (I best my international readers are wondering why there is such an insanely low cap)

Needless to say, everything was pretty much okay. There was the odd strange event like Afrihost shutting down my VPS for no reason and a couple of other issues but we got through them all. My client hardly ever went over their bandwidth. In the entire time I was there we got sent notifications about usage 3 times.

Things changed and one of the things that changed at Afrihost was in the month of October they did not send me any bandwidth notifications. Not a single one to warm me that I had over used. Instead what I got at the end of October was a bill for over R3000 (over $300!)... for excessive bandwidth usage.

Apparently the VPS has used in excess of 400GB and for that 400GB Afrihost charged me over R3000. Wow, was I blown away. Such a large amount deducted with absolutely no warnings! Yup, the month that Afrihost didnt send out a notification was the month that this VPS went into massive overages with them. What an amazingly convenient financial coincidence for them.

So my warning to anyone who uses an Afrihost VPS. Just remember that you or one of your clients can be hosting a Wordpress or Joomla website. It can easily be hacked.... and you are then responsible for a massive out of bundle bill. Those of us in the hosting industry know that hosted websites (especially out dated ones) are hacked a dime a dozen.

Its not just Vodacom and MTN that hit you with the OOB shark. Hosting companies are just as happy to take your money.

So a warning to all potential clients. Afrihost do not give you the option to hard cap your VPS, neither are they reliable in their notifications warning you of excessive usage. Understand that using them does add a certain amount of liability and risk to your company.

Needless to say we have cancelled all our services with them. It is not a risk we are willing to take.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for letting us know this warning in advance for host a VPS at Afrihost. As a result we will able to keep us alert when we will go for hosting a VPS at Afrishost. Anyway, thanks a lot for your wonderful concept.
    linux VPS

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  2. Thanks for the warning...all this helps to choose a good host at the end..When choosing a host one should look for the reliability,reputation,support that the host provides.By looking through the user reviews one can get clear idea about the host because it will contain honest feedback.The host should satisfy the customer's demands without any hidden charges.I chose my host, 9cubehosting.com based on the above aspects and have no regrets.

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  3. Why not go for a unlimited traffic vps host

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