[Host Review] Bad Experience with MCProHosting

[akulla]

Hi all,

Just wanted to report a negative experience I had with MCProHosting, a host recommended at www.factorio.com/partners.

I've been hosting a small public server on AWS using a t2.small instance and playing with a couple friends lately. Our base has recently reached the 1k SPM mark, all vanilla, and we've begun to make expansions toward 5k SPM, while adding a few mods in. All good and all, until we added our 5th nuclear reactor and the game started to take real performance hits. I tracked the CPU usage on the AWS instance and sure enough, our CPU usage was at 99.9 percent whenever we had slowdown.

So I decided to give this host a shot, hoping to resolve the game slowdown issues. I purchased their "Manufacturer" tier service, which is their mid-range, last week with an coupon, which ran me about $9 bucks. Not bad.

Long story short, the server performed even more slowly than on AWS. I asked them increase resources, but it didn't help. I asked for help with keeping the experimental Factorio branch up to date, but received no reply. Finally, when I asked for a refund, since I didn't use their service, they dinged me with a Terms of Service asterisk which says that purchases with a coupon are not eligible for a refund.

All in all, it just left me with a disappointing and gross experience. I wanted to help out a small company over a massive corporation and I legitimately gave them a shot, taking the time to learn their server management GUI and waiting for over a week to fix their issues. And at the end of taking a chance with them, what I received was a tricky legalese gotcha as a goodbye. It just hurts to be treated like this.

So all in all, I just wanted to give you all a heads up about my experience. Maybe some of you will enjoy the service and find it good enough. That's fine. My experience just wasn't up to par.

Anyhow, here's a TL;DR:
* Don't use a coupon if you want to use the 7-day refund.
* They don't allow SSH access, so expect to learn to use a server management GUI.
* Their experimental Factorio branch sits weeks behind the real thing.
* You can use FTP to manually apply an experimental update to their server, but this had intermittent success, with me running into server segfault issues.
* Customer service reply time is on the order of 1 day per message.
* The servers don't give enough resources to run a >1k SPM megabase.