Derek Bodner’s Blog

I have a pair of VPS’s that I use for my personal sites. None of which are all that high traffic, so I host the sites off of one VPS, and that VPS also runs DNS. I have another smaller VPS setup as a secondary nameserver. Today I received this message from the one provider:

On Saturday, July 11, we will be moving the server hardware from the current datacenter to our new facility. The estimated downtime for this move will be 6 hours, and will start at 2 PM EST.

As part of this move, all customer IPs will be changing. We will be contacting each of you prior to the move with the new IP address for your VPS.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this downtime may cause, and we will try to minimize it as much as possible.

If you have any questions, please feel free to open a support ticket at

Thank you for choosing as your Hosting Provider.

(snipped because I don’t feel like naming names).

Ok, wow. Where to begin. Let me see:
- You gave me a whole 10 days of notice. Considering I’ll have to be making the DNS changes, it’s going to require my involvement. That timeframe stinks.
- You’re going to physically drive the server to the new location. It’s going to have 6 hours of downtime. This is the best plan you can come up with?
- In the middle of the day? 2 PM Eastern? Really? What, are you too lazy to come in and do it during overnight hours when traffic is down?

So I fired up an email. I was like “hey, the 6 hours is really too much, and with the amount of work I’ll have to do to re-ip, I’d almost rather transfer it to a new account. You can setup a VPS that I can transfer it to myself, then you could simply delete the old VPS. This way I can do so with no downtime. Is this something you would be amenable to?” Their response: “we don’t have any VPS servers setup at the new datacenter. We can give you an old server at the datacenter you’re currently in, and allow you to move to that, but then in two months you’ll have to go through this again”.

Wow. Alrighty, so now it’s time to find a new VPS provider. This will end up being more work for me, but I can do it with no downtime. Even more of a reason I feel like moving, if this is the best plan you can come up with on a planned outage, I’m extremely worried about the decisions that would be made in the event of a disaster. Besides, I’ve been wanting to go to a Xen based provider anyway, this is just the incentive I needed.