Comment by drej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drej | Hacker News Reader

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A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs.

I guess my account got pwned.

They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run instances without a valid card.

They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues.

I never heard from them again.

My company moved to packet about two years ago, for about half of our cloud-based server needs. We loved the pricing and figured it was worth a shot.

Over the last 2 years, we've had ~4 major outages on their platform. The last of these was so severe we're moving everything back off and over to aws.

4 outages in 2 years isn't horrible.... AWS would have the same story, as would basically any other hosting provider.

It really depends on what you consider a major outage. If we set the bar at at events that would break customers using a single hosted location, 4 over two years isn't horrible. Things in this category are fiber cuts, automatic transfer switch failures and other power issues, PoP router mishaps, HVAC failures, etc. Steps can be taken by the provider to reduce the occurrence of these, but some will happen, and customers that care should build around it.

If we set the bar at events that break customers who have taken reasonable steps to be geographically distributed, 4 over two years is horrible. Things here are cascading router failure, BGP misconfiguration or external hijack, major peering dispute, bad push to critical systems. If these aren't rare, it's likely to be avoidable failures caused by the provider. Sometimes the earlier types of problems hit here too --- fiber cuts between regional data centers can be major problems if more things run on that fiber than expected; it's always fun to learn redundant fiber is in the same bundle, and usually that's learned when the bundle is cut.

same exact situation...we moved over all bright eyed with hip skip and a hop in our step...within 24 hours we experienced a full system-wide outage followed by a full system-wide block storage outage a few days later....their system has the reliability of a hobby project

I've been on Packet for over 14 months and haven't experienced any downtime, ever.

Any feedback is appreciated on this and what went wrong. I'd like to know how they can do better.

Packet is not doing virtualization.

Yeah, sorry, I mean VM as a bit of compute, regardless of its provisioning.

No it's bare metal but can you not run your own virtualization software on the devices themselves?

I think the responder was questioning the phrase about packet asking about the customer VMs. You can certainly run VMs on top of bare metal, but packet doesn't know about that.

Exactly the story he has sounds fabricated. Maybe he is mixing providers up.

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