mousetrap.net downtime
My VPS hosting provider had a billing anomaly and the server went offline some time overnight.
Normally it goes like this:
- invoice emailed
- bill autopays with my CC on file
this time
- no invoice emailed
- autopay failed or wasn’t triggered
- 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:
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.