I finally decided to leave Layered Tech, because of their (lack of) customer support. When I first opened up my account with them two years ago, everything about the company was amazing. Their ticket turn around times were great, the network was superb, but all of that seems to have turned around.

I had just ordered an extra 2 GB of RAM to put into my server for a total of 4 GB, which is pretty much necessary for a large VM based system such as mine. After being brought back up, he server only reported 3.2 GB. Having some background in computer architecture, I knew exactly what caused this, and knew how to fix it. However, I couldn’t because I didn’t have direct console access. So, naturally, I opened up a support ticket.

Fast forward 24 hours. I finally got a reply! The person had booted into the BIOS, seen all 4 GB, and marked it off as being fixed because the computer recognized all 4 GB. Wait! Hold on there a second! I know the BIOS sees it all! And the OS recognizes it all, but it can’t USE it all.

The reason for this is simple: Memory is mapped from the first register upwards, and PCI devices are mapped from the last register downwards. On a 32-bit system, the number of registers is exactly the number of bytes in 4 GB. So the hardware was mapped from the 4 GB mark down to about the 3.2 GB mark, overriding the registers that would have been used to access that ~800 MB. Now, one would think that on a server this wouldn’t be an issue. And in fact, on most any modern computer it isn’t an issue. One would also think that a provider wouldn’t sell 4 GB of RAM on a box that can’t handle 4 GB of RAM. However, I later found out that it wasn’t actually a server box. It was a HP Pavilion dc7600 Small Form Factor PC.

I opened up a KVM ticket so I could look at the BIOS myself and possibly enable the memory hole remapping option.

Lets fast forward 24 hours again. I still hadn’t received any reply on the KVM ticket. I then replied to them saying close the ticket, and I opened up another ticket – this time to cancel my entire account. I headed on over to SoftLayer and signed up there, and everything has been absolutely fantastic. These guys have their stuff together.

Some of the finer points:

1. Fully integrated management panel for your entire account – and YES these are fully dedicated servers
2. Two network cards – one public and one private segment, each on its own VLAN specific to my account
3. Unmetered VPN access to the private segment for secure management and transfer of content
4. Remote power and console access, so if the server’s networking dies, I can still log in and fix it
5. You actually GET the bandwidth you pay for – I have pulled full 100 Mbit (~12.5 MB/second) off of this server without a problem when transferring my data over
6. Super fast ticket turn around times – I have not had to wait more than 30 minutes for a reply to a ticket

I’m not even paying that much more than I was at Layered Tech. $293 a month for a P4D 3.4 GHz, 4 GB of DDR2-677 RAM, and a 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, on a 100 MBit link with 2 TB/month of transfer. Pretty nice deal. I can run just about anything on this machine, which means that I’ll finally be able to start up my shared hosting business again, and do things right this time. If I’m lucky, it’ll start paying for itself.

Oh, and as for leaving Layered Tech? About 30 minutes after I opened up the cancellation ticket they tried to bend over backwards to fix all my issues. At that point, it was too late. It’s too bad because they were an incredible company when I started with them, but since then it’s just gone downhill. Hopefully they can turn it around, but I won’t be going back in any case.

However, it seems that the host operating system decided it’s going to have issues booting back up after I do a reboot from time to time. I also realized that 2 GB of RAM isn’t enough for the stuff I run on it, so I decided to do a RAM upgrade. At that point, I realized that Windows Server 2003 Web edition doesn’t support more than 2 GB of RAM. I also started wondering why the hell I set this thing up with VMWare on Server 2003 instead of Linux.

At this point, my webhost probably hates me, because I have two tickets open – one for a server reload with Debian 3.1, along with data recovery, and another one for the RAM upgrade to 4 GB – and in both tickets, I reference the other ticket, saying if possible I’d like both done at the same time. So, hopefully this works out properly. If it does, everything will be a breeze to set back up. If not, well crap.

However, many thanks to Layered Tech for putting up with me for the past few years. These guys are great.