heavynode.com

Don't Get a Managed Dedicated Server

I've been using HeavyNode for about a year and half now. When I decided to make my own server, I went with HeavyNode.HeavyNode's prices are some of the best I've ever seen. HeavyNode is probably the only trustworthy host I've seen that actually offers prices as low as they do for the performance at hand. ESPECIALLY for shared hosting. I genuinely think their shared hosting plans (even the ones without dedicated cores), are amazing for the price. If you're buying a shared hosting service, I think HeavyNode is definitely the way to go. Their panel is nice to look at and isn't full of a load of crap like other hosts. Everything I want from a panel, HeavyNode has, and the panel looks great. Some panels don't offer phpMyAdmin - HeavyNode does. Some panels don't let you change the startup command - HeavyNode does. In addition to that, you can choose what ports to allocate, and their panel is WAY better looking than some other ones I've seen.Their support is good for the price and the size of the company. I think people are a bit too harsh on critcizing the support of HeavyNode. Their response times are usually within a day and they respond and handle tickets on weekends too a lot of the time. I also like the fact that you can get support through the Discord or just the traditional billing panel. For me personally, I don't mind either but I've seen hosts which force you to have a Discord account just to get support.Now that I've gotten all the good stuff out of the way, let's talk about why I'm leaving 3 stars...I've been renting one of HeavyNode's (managed) dedicated servers for almost a year straight now. In addition to that, I've been paying about $9 extra a month for offsite, managed backups. For starters, HeavyNode offers their panel and managed services on dedicated servers at no extra cost, which is great. But recently, I needed to obtain a backup from my dedicated server because of some lost files. I contacted support and was told my backups couldn't be restored because: "a PDU failure, looks like one of the daily backups was still in process and didn't complete correctly, which seems to have damaged a part of the backup repository for your server."Again, I've been paying for a a dedicated server from HeavyNode for about a year now. I understand incidents do happen and cutting them slack is something I really wanted to do, but this incident made me lose all my trust in HeavyNode. I had been paying over $100+ USD per month to make sure I had my data secure when it clearly was not. If something major had happened and ALL my data was gone, I would have been completely out of luck.For this reason, I decided to move from HeavyNode to another bare-metal host provider, and manage my panel and backups myself. Combine this with a few other nuances, such as me not being able to change my dedicated server's primary port from 25565 to another split server forcing me to pay for an extra shared host server for my proxy.Another time, I was charged $114 on the 5th of the month when my billing was due on the 19th. I was refunded for this incident, but it's things like this that just pile up and hurt the trust I have with the host. Because of the lack of trust I have for HeavyNode's dedicated (managed) plans, I wouldn't recommend anyone to get them. If you want to get a dedicated server from HeavyNode, I recommend managing it yourself.I really wanted to give HeavyNode a good review, especially since I've been with them for so long. But, the lack of trust with not knowing what might be happening on the backend of my managed server was just totally offputting and forced me to move hosts completely.

Date of experience: Jan 18, 2025