Day 21: Expensive Hosting Lesson
I just learned a very expensive lesson about choosing the wrong hosting provider. Here it is so you don't have to.
Five days ago ViberNet's servers went silent.
No warning. No maintenance notice. Just gone.
Three VPS instances. All down. Simultaneously.
The WireGuard tunnels that connect our entire network dropped. Our customer recharge portal went offline. The systems that run ViberNet's daily operations, unavailable. Customers couldn't recharge. We couldn't access the network remotely. Everything that depends on that infrastructure, frozen.
The worst part?
I didn't even choose them because they were cheaper. The pricing was comparable to everyone else. I chose them because the alternative wasn't available at the time and I needed servers fast.
I didn't do enough due diligence. That's on me.
Here's what five days of downtime actually costs an ISP:
- → Customer trust you spent months building
- → Revenue that simply doesn't come back
- → Mental energy that doesn't show up on any balance sheet
We're migrating everything to infrastructure I should have used from day one.
The lesson isn't “avoid bad providers.”
The lesson is more important than that:
Never choose your infrastructure under time pressure.
The urgency you feel in that moment is nothing compared to the urgency you'll feel when everything built on top of that infrastructure goes dark.
For an ISP especially, your servers aren't a back office tool. They are the product. RADIUS goes down, customers lose internet. Tunnels drop, engineers lose access. There is no “we'll fix it tomorrow.” Every minute is someone's connection.
Slow down. Do the research. Choose providers with verifiable uptime records and real support.
We didn't. We paid for it.
Back soon. Better infrastructure. This won't happen again.
Day 21 of my 30-day build-in-public series, building ViberNet and OpenLoop in public, including the parts that hurt.
That's integrity. And integrity compounds.