Stay away from Serverbeach

As a startup, one often needs to rely on some externally hosted servers. As an example - to host your web based service for which you need a dedicated server or to host some service which can be used between you and your customer ... now obviously such a service cannot reside within your intranet.

One of the big reason for us to go for a server hosting provider was that we didn't have the bandwidth to manage the servers, i.e., getting a static IP, making sure there is no power failure etc.

When we were out on the looking for a server hosting provider we got to know about serverbeach ... I think the first time we read about it was on Russell Beattie's Notebook ... now when I look back, I think it was a very very bad decision.

In the recent months the kind of incidents that we have been through ... it is amazing how a server hosting provider could do something like this. Let me take you through a few things that have happened.

• One of our servers (at serverbeach) which was hosting one of our products was attacked by a virus and that virus in turn started making requests to other servers ... usually serverbeach would inform you and tell you to address the situation in 24 hrs or else they'll bring the server down, in our case ... we never got those 24 hours, we realized that the server was down once the customers of our product started complaining that the service was not longer accessible.



• This story is amazing - serverbeach has this automated system that is continuously looking out at the servers and zeroes out any server that it thinks can be claimed. Unfortunately, we were the lucky ones this time around ... it suddenly took over our system, zeroed out the disks and voila ... not only was our server down, all data on it was gone which we then had to get back from our backups.



• Well, for the server that was zeroed out ... our old disk was mounted on it in case we could recover any data and were told that we had a time of approximately 1 week to recover any data that we needed. However, again serverbeach failed to meet their commitment, not only did they remove the disk on the second day itself, they also just halted the system ... AND they did not even feel the need to inform us.
  

It looks like serverbeach reserves the right to play around with any server that it might give to you ... whenever they feel like it.

Anywayz, my objective behind this post was to tell you the kind of things we have been through with serverbeach. Im hoping that when you have to select a server hosting provider ... you make a wise decision.