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:

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.

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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. ↩