The New York NOC Reviews

I am just a moderately-skilled business owner who is very grateful to others, most much more knowledgeable than I, who take the time to post their experience on various forums. Information I was able to find on the web has helped me to choose vendors, troubleshoot issues, etc., when I run a one-man shop and pretty much have to wear all hats.

So this is my one-year review of The New York NOC, in hopes it helps someone else who is choosing hosting providers.

I have a mid-level VPS plan with NYNOC, with CPanel, which I use to house several domains, run a couple of Mailman discussion lists, and act as my DNS server and mail server as well.

I can say that with the exception of two or three DDOS attack incidents over the past year (and none in quite a while) during which it was difficult to access my server for about 24 hours, **I have had 100 percent uptime**. Because I am only a beginner at managing a linux web server, I have often needed to post a trouble-ticket and have always got a satisfactory response from NYNOC employees.

In fact, what I have appreciated most is that if I explain in my trouble ticket that I would rather be taught what to do (for next time) rather than just have someone fix it for me ... Andy (NYNOC owner) has gone above and beyond the call of duty to patiently teach me what needs to be done, so that I can become more and more self-sufficient.

I currently have a Super VPS #2 plan which for a mere $9.95 per month gives me 20 GB of storage, 1,000 GB of bandwidth, 512 MB of guaranteed RAM, and for $15/month additional (because someone like me really needs it) CPanel. For years I was with webintellects who I thought ran a pretty good shop but downtime was a little too common and response from my server was extremely slow (whether due to their distance from a backbone, internal network problems, or what I can't say).

Response time to my server at The New York NOC is extremely fast.

Service-ticket response time has been great, and Andy and his staff have been willing to walk the extra mile to instruct me as a customer.

Uptime has exceeded 99.9%.

The cost is hard to beat.

kazar

PS: in response to various negative posts I have seen about NYNOC: If your site is mission-critical or even just "important", in my opinion you should be mirroring your entire site to another server somewhere. Also, I have seen criticism of the fact that NYNOC is very small, with Andy himself often answering support tickets. For me, that is a big plus. I run a small business and I prefer to choose small businesses as my vendors. I do not see this as a downside in any way. But if you would rather go with a big hosting service provider who will not remember you when you contact them, i.e, if you'd rather been an account number instead of a person in your provider's mind ... then pick a big huge hosting provider, not The NYNOC....

It started a little over a month ago when I jumped VPS providers and initially purchase 2 VPS plans . Initially the boxes were rock solid. I could get to my websites, admin area, and have support tickets responded to in a timely manner. Roughly a week later I ended up moving another site to it’s own VPS . This is when I noticied my first issues. CONSTANT ERROR MESSAGES stating the backend was down and to please restart it. I would launch a support ticket, roughly 2 hours later the backend would be rebooted and I could once again access the admin panel and do what I needed to. Like clockwork when I would try to login again later to my admin panel I would be hit again with the backend was down (hypervm would be in a constant refresh). Sometimes my sites would remain online and sometimes they would go down too. This got frustrating but was bearable (I thought). Within a few days I see a BIGGER problem arise. I woke up one morning to find error alerts coming in and realizing 2 VPS’s had been offline for hours on end. I again launch another support ticket for the backend to be rebooted. I get a response everything is ok so I go about my day. I later receive an e-mail stating all of my sites were showing a mysql connect error and panic. Come to find out they had corrupted this time when the backend went down, I repair and optimize and everything is ok. VERY next day I wake up and check my nightly logs to make sure the nightly backup was loaded onto my home server. I don’t see it and find I received an e-mail from lxadmin stating it could not backup the database. Once again…..corrupted. This has been going on since that time frame on almost a daily basis. The backups are iffy if they will come in since when the backend gets overloaded and crashes in the middle of the night, it immediately corrupts all db’s on the VPS. I could understand 1 VPS doing this…..but 3? Come on….

Now comes Thanksgiving, my boxes go down for roughly 5 hours before reboot and once again I have to repair them on a blackberry with ssh since I am away (never fun to type that on a bb). I am back online and go about my day…….then…..Friday. My box goes down at 5pm…..I send in a support ticket to have it rebooted. The next morning at 11am it finally gets turned back on and I get a response that it must have been on my end since everything looks ok from there (granted 3 monitoring services were all showing it down). Once again…..corrupted. I rebuild and think the SLA was 99.9% so I send in a nice message to ask about it. Here is the response:

Posted: 11/29/2008 12:33
Hey Guys.

Since one of the VPS accounts was down for 17 hours do I qualify for the 99.9% SLA?
(3 Monitoring Services show the outage happened at 5:34PM last night and I have recovery notifications for this morning at 11:16AM)

Thanks

----------------------------
IP Address: 71.76.239.xx Andy
StaffPosted: 11/30/2008 20:49 Hi Ryan,

Unfortunately our SLA applies to network uptime and not power or hardware related.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

-------------------------------
The New York NOC Inc.
www.thenynoc.com
Visit our new forums! http://thenynoc.com/forums/

So……99.9% SLA does not cover if no one is in the datacenter to reboot the box because it is off-line…..I thought SLA’s covered your box being on-line, am I wrong?

So now after too many corruptions to count, support taking longer and longer in between responses I am left looking over my books. Last year alone between Thanksgiving and the following Sunday I brought in roughly $2300 dollars in sales. This year for the past 4 days I have brought in $10…… I have had some longtime recurring customers so I asked them for any feedback on what we could do to earn there business again. Out of 40+ people all but one stated that if I could fix the sites downtime they would return (the other responses was of course to lower prices). Second suggestion they had was to fix my e-mails from ending up in their spam box. Yes I was sold ALL dirty ip’s which had all been blacklisted. Some major isp’s worked with me and allowed me in…(some)

Before I get flammed for choosing these guys, they truly were great up front so obviously I got fooled. I have no doubt they are great for some people but I simply can not drive my business into the ground because I went cheap and in the end got what I deserved. I moved to futurehost today and almost **** myself when a response ticket was answered in under a minute (kinda scary for a low priority ticket).

With this said, before you consider NewYorkNoc simply ask yourself if your business or site is important to you, if you can afford to lose business, and if you want constant downtime along with mysql corruptions daily. I am not saying they are the worst as they were helpful at first. Just EXPECT that when the deal is that good, you are being oversold. There is no other explanation in my books.

To sum this up:
Uptime: 3 out of 10 (there were up sometimes)
Customer Service: 2 out of 10 (would have given higher I did not have to repeatedly e-mail over the backend issues)
Price: 10 out of 10 (admit it, the price point these guys have is good)
Value: 1 out of 10 (I made a bad choice, I lost a ton of money in business and now have to work hard to recover my losses and rebuild relationships)
Recommend to others: 2 out of 10 (why 2? This place might be good for offsite backup maybe?)

This review is NOT out of spite due to my recent downtime. This review is merely my opinion and personal experiences and not written to bash NYNOC. If your happy with them then you are doing well. If you are considering them…….I urge you to think elsewhere. All my data is off the VPS and I am running before the backend crashes again corrupted my DB’s. SLA with this company is a joke IMO.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Ryan