Inept Customer Service: Welcome to VPSLand.com!

Even though I have several servers that are being hosted, I always have found immense value in a little low powered box sitting on a separate network, preferably far enough away from my production servers, so that I can run some outside-looking-in tests.

With the popularity of "User Mode Linux" and virtualization, having these boxes becomes very cost effective.  On the order of $20 a month, to have a box you can run some monitoring software on and log in to run various tests and such.  Perfect.

Well, finding a good VPS provider is like finding a good provider for any other service.  There are plenty of those who pay more money for marketing than they do for brains, and probably have one or two skilled people who are keeping the ship afloat, while they aggressively pursue world domination without a thought to increasing their core business.  For the most part, this business model works flawlessly.  You can cater to the 80% of the customers who simply want a website, but don't really know enough to realize that a shared hosting provider is a cheaper way of doing it.  But that's fine, the 80% are great.

I'm not the 80%, I suppose.  I expect to be able to use a virtualized server much the same way I would use a colocated server.  I'm not going to spam, harass, send warez or the myriad of other problems most hosting companies have to deal with.  I'm going to use it as a server.  Since that's what I have, a virtual private server.  Not a shared webhosting arrangement.

For the past while (perhaps 7 or 8 months) I've been using VPSLand.com as a VPS.  They were pretty reasonable.  Good uptime, no issues, really.  Quick turn around time to get things up and running, and I was pleased.

Well, up until it became time to use it as an actual server and not a simple webhost/email gateway.  The SSH connections timeout.  Hmm... that's annoying.  It's not from sshd configuration, either it seems.  It looks like they simply drop connections they deem inactive.  That is horribly irritating, because I don't want my connections to time out after a 15 minute break.

Then comes the next step, IRC.  It's nice to be able to launch a screen session and irssi so nothing gets missed.  But... you can't from VPSLand, they have vague terminology about IRC being prohibited.

I figured that it was likely because they had some issues with people running file serve bots, or some other issue.  I email their support team thinking that they just don't like the bots and such, or they were talking about running an IRC server.  Not being one to try things without asking, I sent an email requesting clarification.  I get a great response back.  I love it when support staff act as if they're being paid for brevity:

"We do not support IRC, port used for IRC is blocked on server."

What now?  You do not support IRC.  I'm not asking anybody to support IRC, I'm asking if the vague "IRC is BAD" terminology in the AUP is talking about a server or client, and wondering if I can run an IRC client.  So, I'm thinking at this point he doesn't get that I'm talking about an IRC client.  But, blocking an outbound connection still seems odd.  So, I do some poking and sure enough 6667 is blocked.  Stupid.

So, I further inquire:

"Could you explain the reasoning as to why I cannot make an outbound connection to use an IRC client?"

And, Greg helpfully responds in his normal brief tone:

"Yes, it's almost certain to be victim to a irc dos attack, flood, etc. IRC allowed on a network will bring the network to a halt. It's too impactful on all other customers almost NO provider allows it."

So, I have a technical support person at a VPS provider who is telling me that my IRC client is certain to be the victim of an attack.  A client. 

Priceless.

So, now it's pretty obvious that he really doesn't understand IRC client vs. server distinction.  I'm guessing he is the same type of person who thinks that you can't run Linux as a desktop and KDE is simply a layer on top of Windows.  In other words, using the same tone as Helpful Greg, "hes dumb".

Well, in less than 12 hours I have a linode.com VPS setup, after hopping into their IRC network that they use for support (*gasp* the impactful ness of it!) and verifying they are actually sane.  Just for fun I samples quite a few other VPS providers AUP and nearly all of them prohibit IRC servers, but only prohibit IRC clients for illicit purposes.  In fact, I could only find one that clearly said "no" to IRC clients.

So, thanks for the chuckle VPSLand.com -- you've entered the ranks of companies whom I ridicule.  I feel bad for the guys who are actually making it work, because the support team is undoing the work.  The biggest thing that customer support reps need to learn is "if you don't know, ask someone who does."  Nothing irks a customer more than a dumbass support rep who is condescending and obviously misunderstanding the issue.