Awknet Review 2015 – Not Recommended

We rented a server from Awknet recently, and it was one of the worst experiences I have had, and we have been with many hosts.

• Extremely slow response times

  As mentioned by other reviews a few years ago, their support is extremely slow. I don’t need support in the middle of the night, but they did not respond to a ticket started at 10 AM up until 7 PM (their timezone) when I was able to get their emergency pager email from DeltaAnime. This email was not mentioned anywhere on their website.

  This emergency pager email is not operational all the time either as there was a 9 hour delay the 2nd time I used it.

• Support doesn’t seem very motivated, and doesn’t read the whole ticket.

  Their support frequently does not answer all your questions. Many times when I asked 2 questions, they would only answer 1. I even numbered them. This included important questions such as asking for the emergency contact.

• The DDoS protection itself seems to have issues

  The first time we were attacked, everything was fine. It seemed to work because I saw a tiny bit of attack traffic get through.

  The second time, the only traffic that was coming in was around 5mb/s of SSDP DDoS.

  Before these attacks, I asked them to block udp src port 1900. They told me to give them something in the form of a Cisco ACL and they would try to translate it for me. So I told them to add this.

  deny udp any my_ip my_mask eq 1900

  You can see even though this filter is wrong, it shouldn’t have blocked everything except SSDP. I asked them to check the rule for correctness but they just added the rule without thinking about it.

  They then claimed that the attack traffic wasn’t being load balanced and that’s why all the legitimate traffic was being blocked.

  The third time, one IP was null routed. I left it until the next day because maybe the attack was too big and it was in the middle of the night. When they finally replied, they said they didn’t do a null route and it was probably done by the upstream. I knew this was not true because there were 0 users on it and it was unreachable from multiple servers through multiple routes. I wouldn’t be surprised of one of the staff just decided to null it so they wouldn’t have to worry about monitoring the attack size throughout the night.

  The fourth time, they finally told me that their automated filter was only for TCP and not UDP. I thought that my firewall rules would have tipped them off that I was hosting UDP services.

• Support makes a lot of mistakes

  If the above points aren’t enough, we asked for a pro-rated refund since we barely used the server.

  They didn’t say how they calculated it, but it was obvious that they calculated it from the start of the month even though we only received the server on the 12th. When I asked them to fix it, they started to become argumentative.

  It was just another example of how poorly run things are there.

I was simply shocked that I could find so many issues with this host in just a few days. And some of these problems have existed there for years with no improvement. Please don’t ignore the reviews like I did.

Do not waste your money and stay away. The alternatives are most certainly better.

I have screenshots available for verification if a moderator needs them.

Why would they even have SRC port 1900 for their services anyway? I doubt there’s any of their clients there that need SSDP.

I really tried to like awknet. Justin’s a nice guy but honestly, unless you pay him a very large sum of cash (mid $XXXX was what he kept batting at us) he won’t even handle your tickets in under 24 hours. For us, we had tickets sit 3 – 4 months without a reply, even times when we were willing to discuss a higher price point for better service.

We went to CNServers, while they had some positives they had way too many negatives to continue with them.

Best filtering provider we’ve used to date? Staminus, hands down. Insanely fast support times, even early Sunday mornings. Filtering is fantastic and when we need something custom, they do their best to accommodate.

If you’re budget strapped, Versaweb’s filtering is very affordable.

Francisco

I don’t think they specifically whitelisted src port 1900. I was preemptively trying to filter out src port 1900 but accidentally gave them a rule to block dst port 1900. And they didn’t bother to check if it made any sense even when they said they would translate rules for me AND I asked them to double check the rule.

It was extremely strange we would receive an attack in which legitimate traffic was blocked and only 5 mb/s of SSDP traffic would get through even though we were told that the automatic filter was setup by default to block all UDP. This indicates either one or both of the following problems existed.

• The automatic filter didn’t work correctly.
• They screwed up the broken firewall rule I gave them. Even though my firewall rule was wrong, it shouldn’t be blocking everything except SSDP.

Just to set the record straight, the attacks we received were standard hackforum reflected attacks. Nothing fancy or extreme, and we were told the attack sizes were less than the protection size.

I’m amazed as to how they can stay in business. If I was spending 5-10k per month on servers and only needed TCP, I can’t imagine anyone picking Awknet.