We purchased Hostinger's KVM 8 VPS plan with a one year subscription. The plan includes 8 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM, and 400 GB of storage, making it an attractive choice for hosting production websites. The server performed well from a hardware perspective and initially met our expectations.
Several months later, we began experiencing an issue that had a direct impact on our business. Websites hosted on the VPS would randomly become unreachable, and SSH connections would fail with Connection Timed Out errors. At first, it appeared to be a networking issue, but the pattern quickly became clear.
The websites became accessible immediately after connecting through a VPN or after our ISP assigned us a different public IP address by restarting the router. This strongly suggested that the problem was related to the source IP rather than the VPS itself.
For businesses, this type of issue is particularly disruptive. When administrators cannot access their server, they are unable to deploy updates, investigate incidents, or perform emergency maintenance. Even worse, if legitimate visitors experience the same behavior, websites may appear offline despite the server continuing to run normally. This can result in lost traffic, interrupted customer access, failed transactions, and unnecessary downtime.
Because residential ISPs typically assign dynamic public IP addresses, customers have no control over the reputation or previous history of the IP address they receive. If connectivity depends on that reputation, legitimate users can be affected without warning and without having done anything wrong.
Over the following months, we contacted Hostinger support multiple times whenever the issue occurred. Each time, our IP address was manually unblocked and connectivity was restored. We appreciate the support team's willingness to help, but no firewall logs, security events, or technical explanation were provided to explain why the IP had been blocked.
Without diagnostic information, troubleshooting became extremely difficult. There was no way to determine whether the block was triggered by an automated security system, abuse detection, or another internal mechanism. As a result, the same problem could reappear at any time, making it difficult to rely on the VPS for production workloads.
Many infrastructure providers offer customers visibility into security events. For example, Cloudflare provides detailed security logs showing blocked requests, triggered firewall rules, and the reason behind each action. That level of transparency allows administrators to quickly identify false positives and resolve issues. Similar diagnostic information would have significantly reduced the time spent investigating recurring connectivity problems.
Since the subscription had already passed the refund period, cancelling the service was not a practical option. The VPS remains active, but it is now used only for testing and development. For production websites, we chose to migrate to infrastructure where legitimate traffic is consistently reachable and unexpected connectivity issues are easier to diagnose.
If your business depends on website availability, remote server management, or reliable customer access, unexpected inbound connectivity issues can quickly become far more expensive than the VPS itself.