In this article we explain what information we need to be able to help you if you experience a problem on your VPS. By sending this information we can immediately think along with you and come up with a solution quicker. The information in this article also helps you to more easily solve VPS problems yourself, by getting into the same troubleshooting process as our support department uses.

My VPS is unreachable / down

(Network) Incident

We monitor our network 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee on our VPSs. In the unlikely event that a fault occurs, and your VPS / server is unreachable / down, an employee is always on standby to act. The incident is then resolved as quickly as possible.

In such a case, we will always keep you informed of the progress by email (unless you indicate in your control panel that you do not want to receive maintenance and incident related notifications), until we can sign off the incident.

If you want to contact us in response to a (network) incident, click on the ‘Contact Us’ button (or on this link) at the bottom of this article.

No (Network) Incident

If there is no known error and your VPS is unreachable / down, we are of course happy to help you think about a solution to your problems. Click on the ‘Contact Us’ button (or link) at the bottom of this article.

In order to be able to provide you with the best possible service, we need an answer to the following questions in such a case:

• What is the problem? Please send us any error messages and such that you may see.
• What does not function? Are all services not functioning, or for example only websites hosted, does email work?
• Is the VPS unreachable via the VPS console in your control panel? If the VPS is accessible via the VPS console and you can, for example, ping Google from the VPS, there is very likely no network or hardware failure, but a problem in the configuration of your VPS.
• What VPS (s) is involved?
• Since when does the problem occur (date and time)?
• Is there any difference after a restart of the VPS?
• What have you researched / tried yourself? 

Network Problems 

In addition to answering the above questions, we need some additional information for network problems:

• The output of an MTR (traceroute) measurement.
• The network configuration of the VPS, for example with CentOS 7, this would be the output of:

  sudo cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

• Do you experience the problem with the IPv4 and / or IPv6 connection?
• Please send us the output of the command: ip a
• Is the MTU value of your network interface set to 1500, or has it been adjusted (see the ip a output)?
• Is TCP Segmentation Offloading enabled for your network adapter (Windows / pfSense)?  

Websites / domains on my VPS are unreachable

When a website is unreachable, there is usually a configuration problem. By answering the questions below we can help you quickly find the cause:

• Which domains / websites are unreachable?
• Are all domains / websites unreachable? If so, is your apache / nginx service still on (systemctl status httpd / nginx)?
• What kind of error message do you get when visiting the websites?
• Since what date / time does the problem occur?
• What have you researched / tried yourself?  

I cannot receive and / or send mail on my VPS

If you experience a problem with e-mail receiving and / or sending, that can have various causes. For example, the reverse DNS can be set incorrectly, the DNS of a domain can be incorrectly configured, or for example a configuration error on the VPS is the cause. With the help of the information below, the cause can often be found quickly:

• What is the exact problem? For example, can you not receive mail, send mail, or both?
• What is the mail address of the sender and receiver?
• What error messages do you see (e.g. what bounce message are you getting)?
• Are there additional notifications in the log files of your mail server (depending on your OS and mail server for example in /var/log/maillog, /var/log/exim/mainlog, /var/log/mail/log, etc.)?
• Can you send a test message to test@mailtesten.com? This is a test address owned by TransIP and using this address we can view the headers of your mail and check whether a message is misconfigured.
• Are you using our VPS mail service?
• As of what date / time does the problem occur?
• Is the service of the mail server you are using enabled? With Linux, check this with the following command (replace servicename with, for example, dovecot, exim (DirectAdmin and cPanel), or postfix (Plesk)): 

  sudo systemctl status servicename

A service on my VPS does not work

If a service does not work on your VPS that is not related to the problems mentioned above, then we need the following information to be of service to you:

• What kind of problem occurs? / what does not work?
• Do you get error messages, and if so which?
• What VPS(s) is involved?
• What is the output of journalctl -xe -u service name? For example, if there is a problem with fail2ban: 

  sudo journalctl -xe -u fail2ban

• Are there any relevant configuration files of which you can send its content?
• What have you tried / researched yourself?  

What information do I find where? 

Due to the ever-growing number of articles in our knowledgebase, naming all VPS-related items is too confusing. We therefore recommend using the tags in our knowledgebase (see screenshot below).  

If you use DirectAdmin or Plesk, we advise you to consult the respective tutorial series. In time we will expand our tutorial series and they will also be available for Ubuntu, Windows (Active Directory configuration), etc. 

• DirectAdmin Tutorial Series
• Plesk Tutorial Series
• cPanel Tutorial Series

Finally, below are a few articles about topics that we regularly get questions about. Is the topic you are looking for not listed here? Take a look at our knowledgebase, or click on 'Contact us' at the bottom of this article and send us a message! 

• Setting the VPS mail service
• HA-IP en HA-IP Pro
• Microsoft license
• Private network
• Backups
• Overview VPS infrastructure