mousetrap.net downtime

VPS annoyance

My VPS hosting provider had a billing anomaly and the server went offline some time overnight.

Normally it goes like this:

  1. invoice emailed
  2. bill autopays with my CC on file

this time

  1. no invoice emailed
  2. autopay failed or wasn’t triggered
  3. account suspended (but I didn’t know it yet)

I saw the site was down this morning and logged into the provider to see what was up:

suspended

Weird. I checked my CC statement online and there was no sign of a rejected/failed/whatever charge.

I tried to manually process the payment and it errored out Remote Transaction Failure. Please Contact Support. I did some googling and it seemed to be an error message from a billing backend. The common denominator appears to be a damaged record after the customer edits their card info, requiring manual record repair by the vendor.

That tracks, as I’d recently updated my address.

I made a ticket about the billing failure, and made payment through paypal (linked to the same card); no problem and the site was available again within seconds.

No response yet from the vendor but I assume they’ll tell me to delete/re-add the card.

##Update Apr 14

I’ve removed your CC, please try adding again. It should work.

The ticket was answered as above but no email sent. Email is a vanilla gmail account; nothing in the Spam folder or findable in the search. I used to get invoice and ticket-related emails without problem.


Coincidentally, yesterday a post about linux VPS hosting providers came across my Lemmy feed.

I spent the morning looking for VPS providers in Europe that had at least 1GB of RAM and 30GB of diskspace. Landed on Netcup, a German provider. 2x the RAM, 2x the space, and 2 shared CPU instead of 1 for about 1/3rd less cost. If it’s stable and well-behaved I’ll likely move my personal site and the RVwiki over there sometime this year.

It set up Debian 12 automatically, which is what I wanted anyhow. Their mirrors must be up to date because there were no updates needed after the install. The original language was Deutsche, naturally, so I dpkg-reconfigure locales to select EN and remove DE.

I checked the assigned IP at spamhaus and it wasn’t used for spam abuse before. Yay!

I set up my userspace tools and scripts but won’t do apache, dokuwiki, etc, for a while. Easy does it.

update Apr 21

The new VPS service is hitting on all cylinders. I’ve moved over everything except websites1 and the RVwiki.

For my personal site I’m considering changing Jekyll out for something simpler like gtml templates. Jekyll breaks in strange ways that my non-ruby brain struggles to fix. I’m usually happier rolling my own solution, and might do so.

  1. my personal site and a amateur radio site I donate hosting to. 

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