Gullo's Hosting 2021-03-07

So, I have a small [in fact I'd say VERY small] VPS that I rent from Gullo Hosting. It has just 128MB of memory and doesn't run very many applications at all. I use it mostly as a jump host to access other devices and as a bouncer that keeps me connected to IRC chat rooms even when I close my chat application. It doesn't have awesome performance and it has very limited TCP/IP ports that it can use (for inbound purposes that is). Frankly, I have to assume that because Gullo Hosting makes very little money off me, their intent is to make me happy enough with my small VPS that I end up buying larger ones as well. It isn't uncommon for that to be used as a sort of marketing strategy for VPS resellers.

A screenshot from Evoland.

This morning my VPS went down (well, the SSH session I keep open to it all the time disconnected) and I couldn't reconnect to it. I was a little irritated, but I don't have anything mission critical on there so it wasnt the end of the world. It did cut me off from access to one of my other servers though and I wanted to get it fixed. So after some fiddling around I figured I should open a support ticket. I was a little worried that my worthless little VPS wouldn't be worthy of a support ticket, especially since it was clear when I bought it that support would be almost non-existent. But when I opened up a ticket [and described the troubleshooting steps I already went through] it was mere minutes before I got a reply. He said that there was a problem with the firewall rules and that it should be up again. I tried again and WAS able to SSH in to my VPS. Win!

The bad news was that it didn't seem quite right for some reason. I couldn't use it as a jump host to access my other servers, I couldn't use it as a proxy in my browser, and I couldn't even ping from it to the outside world. After a little more fiddling I updated the ticket to say my outbound traffic was still broken. Less than half an hour later I got a reply asking me to try again, and as it turns out everything was working again. Don't get me wrong, I'm not thrilled that it was down for an hour or so total, but frankly the level of support I got [on a Sunday afternoon] for a VPS that costs me US$2 a year was pretty sweet. Just sayin'... if you're thinking of trying a new VPS provider, it might be worth looking at Gullo.