A year ago I ordered three servers, one each in Buffalo, in Dallas, and in Los Angeles. The series of problems all started soon afterwards with LA becoming network-wise more and more unstable and with partial denial from their side and no solution in sight I eventually asked for a move from LA to Chicago (and was promptly moved to Dallas ;) ).
Somewhat later Buffalo suddenly started to behave funny and after dozens of ticket responses during the period of a week it got fixed and they established their eventual standard excuse of abusive customers. More on that later.
Next in line were incorrect system times, ranging from a few seconds to up to 20 minutes difference. It turned out they simply did not have any time synchronisation in place but obviously synced every now and then manually via rdate. I take the liberty and post some direct quotes
We have to use the rdate(get the time via the network) command to tweak the time.But we unable to know how it has happened.
By using rdate command we have had tweak the time settings.Actually whenever the node gets rebooted while the time also be changed.So in future will planned implementing some script that added the necessary modules once after the node gets rebooted.
If needed we will use that command also.But ntpd consumes some more resources.
Ok,We will implementing the script ASAP to prevent this issue in future.
We have forget to install ntpd thus,it has tweaked after rebooted the server.As of now i have installed on our server to prevent the issue in future.
After about 2.5 months they finally got the date issue sorted out, at least on the machines I was hosted on. However this was far from being done with problems as only then the previously mentioned abuser issues started. In regular intervals (roughly at least once or twice a month) a machine became either entirely unreachable or showed an extremely poor performance. The usual procedure was first denial, then acknowledgement and then at some point later a brief "it works, please check" response without any further details. Quite often the issue was either not fixed at all or resurfaced a couple of hours late again.
At some point the performance in Buffalo and the level of support got so bad that I eventually requested a transfer to Dallas (where my existing instance worked for URPad's standards relatively trouble-free). Unfortunately this was not supposed to last long as the new instance showed right away an even worse performance. Because of this I eventually asked for yet another transfer to their (always highly advertised and praised) location in Houston, where the situation eventually improved somewhat (still sort of regularly unstable, but at least not constantly anymore).
All of this usually explained with abusive customers on the same host, regular denial of service attacks or simple power outages (no UPS?), garnished with traceroute or ping excerpts when you'd least expect them. What should be also mentioned is that at least on one occasion they logged into the server, respectively accessed the file system without my consent.
Last but not least a recent response which could explain a lot of their issues
Regarding the server monitoring, we aren't monitoring the i/o,cpu resources usage
The forced move now (they close down all of their datacenters and move to three locations only) was the final straw, after already being forced to move three times to compensate for their hardware and competence issues, I decided to cancel the two accounts in question. The entire procedure took two full days, several enquiries from my side asking for confirmation of the terms, several unrelated responses from their side and eventually the cancellation of all three services (even the paid one) without any notice whatsoever (what I actually specifically asked for from the beginning). Fortunately I took a backup beforehand, anticipating this.
With one exception (when Mr. Armado was quite snippy) their support was usually courteous but unfortunately this compensated neither for the support's general slowness nor its, I am afraid to put it so bluntly, simple and utter incompetence (Curtis Manning was a rare exception).
If there is one thing I learned from being a URPad customer and which I could share as experience, then - unless you know a service provider really really well - do not ever ever ever pay in advance for a full year.