Aquarius Storage Review

It all started back in October. After much research on Web Hosting Talk, I signed up for the A1 reseller plan (do note that the plan specs have changed vastly since then), and they placed me on stinger.aquariusstorage.com. It was smooth at first and support responded quickly to my request for custom nameservers. I felt that my months of research had paid off and that I had made a good choice.

However after about a week, the server repeatedly became inaccessible due to apparent DOS attacks. After looking at the specs in WHM, it is apparent that they have placed me on a VPS which is absurdly underpowered. I ignore this for now figuring that they will be honest enough to say “hey, we made a mistake…this server doesn’t meet our standards and we would like to offer you the opportunity to move to a better one” or “we increased the power on our stinger vps so there shouldn’t be any more problems” but this never happens.

In November, LiteSpeed stopped working and Apache was put back on the server. Ryan Chaffin (the owner) responded within ten minutes (mind you this was at 2am) and had the problem resolved within twenty minutes. Apparently this was never worked out since LiteSpeed never reappeared and subsequently disappeared from the product information page. At the middle of the month, the load of the server started regularly spiking to 300 and it was inaccessible even more often. A high priority ticket ended up taking six hours to get a response this time. This issue continues reoccurring and the service becomes virtually unusable.

On December 1, they bill me the incorrect amount. That was fixed within minutes.

On December 31, I request to be moved to a different server since stinger had become unusable at this point. I’m surprised to actually get a response on New Year’s Eve. I begin thinking that maybe there is hope that this company may actually be decent.

Per your request, due to stinger slowdowns, we will be moving hostifym to our new server fleet around 3AM EST.

We will keep you updated.

We will get your account move to our new fleet during the morning hours, and everything should be back to normal in the AM. We will provide you with new IPs for your name servers during the night.

3am comes and goes and nothing. Finally, at 9am I receive the new IPs and note that I have been transferred to viper.aquariusstorage.com. Of course I had gone to sleep at 8am since I had given up on them keeping their promise. By the time I awoke, the accounts on stinger had been suspended so my sites experienced even more downtime.

Viper was much better. The server was fast and responsive. The server was also an actual server with decent hardware specs.

Fast-forward to February, and things start to degrade on Viper. MySQL begins to fail intermittently. On February 15 MySQL and Fantastico (among other things) stop working. A quick look at the partitions quickly explains why… /var is full… Why is /var full? Because whoever partitioned the server didn’t do such a hot job at choosing the size of partitions (who in their right mind leaves /var at 1gb???). An hour later, I get a response from Aaron (note that up until this point, all responses were received from Ryan):

We resolved this a while ago. We apologize for the inconveniences.

Sure, if you call resolving it killing Fantastico and Softalicious. Services were still randomly dying and it was still virtually unusable.

On February 18, I requested cancellation since it was clear there were going to be serious issues on any server I was placed on (especially since master reselling had just been introduced and the plan specs/prices changed to what I would consider “unsustainable”).

Now offering master reseller on reseller plan a2 and higher. Order today! http://www.aquariusstorage.com/reseller-web-hosting.php
10:45 PM Feb 17th via web

Throughout the rest of the billing period, everything continued to worsen and the server became unusable.

I’ve checked with some people that still have an account on Viper and the entire thing has imploded. Oh, and apparently there are STILL people on Stinger. It is disturbing that they have not yet addressed the problems with their servers and very sad that the potential of having a wonderful company has been washed down the drain. It seems that it was a mistake for me to place my confidence in this company.

If you are unfortunate enough to still be with Aquarius Storage, I would advise taking backups and getting out of there ASAP.

Fortunately for me, I got a great deal on a FutureHosting VPS back in December. I moved everything to it back in February and haven’t looked back. I get 100% uptime AND more for my money! So far, FutureHosting has provided the dream experience (let’s hope they don’t do something stupid).