Member OP
My first provider just went dark for 72 hours with nothing but "we're upgrading" on the status page
I'm still pulling backups through a rescue ISO
What signs did I miss, and how do I get out alive next time
Pro tip: this checklist saved my free tier migration twice.
I documented my escape from RackNerd to Oracle Cloud here. The 200GB always-free block storage is underrated for this.
My clients depend on my infrastructure choices. I only use premium providers with premium support. If there are red flags I open a support ticket immediately. The premium hosts respect that.
My clients have never lost data. Premium SLA guarantees that.
Actually (back in my day (which was 2019 (specifically running Proxmox VE 5.4-3)))) we had a different term for this. "Stability event." The provider (won't name names (actually it was a small operation in Germany running OpenVZ (not even KVM!))) sent "we're upgrading" and then... silence. For six weeks. I had migrated everything to a self-hosted XCP-ng 8.0 setup by then. Nested virtualization was a nightmare but you do what you must.
Member
Did you test your restore? 😊
The 3-2-1 rule isn't just for backups, it's for providers too. 3 copies of your data, 2 different hosts, 1 offline or air-gapped.
Before I migrate I always:
The checklist is good but the real test is "can you actually leave in 24 hours?" Most people can't.
Which RackNerd plan had the 200GB
That was the 2.5GB KVM Black Friday 2022 deal. 200GB SSD, 5TB transfer. Gone now. I only mentioned it because the migration path matters more than the plan.
Oracle Cloud's always-free tier is what I actually run on now. 200GB block storage per account, two ARM instances, no expiration.
This is cargo-cult resilience. Running five $5 VPSes doesn't give you five nines. It gives you five times the alert fatigue and five times the attack surface.
My clients get RAID-10 on NVMe, offsite replication to a second premium facility, and a support contract with a human who answers in under 15 minutes. You can't checklist your way out of cheap infrastructure.
My five providers don't alert because they're not running anything that needs 99.999%. They're warm spares. The whole stack restores from Terraform in 40 minutes.
Your premium SLA didn't help when OVH Strasbourg burned. Premium just means premium price. The fire didn't check contracts.
