Our community site, LowEndTalk, has been down for the last 6 hours. For those who didn’t get the context, read the comments in eNetSouth’s last offer (warning: 800+ comments currently and takes a while to load). So I thought I might as well start a new blog post to discuss the issue here.
The website is still currently hosted at eNetSouth sponsored VMware VPS in Chicago with ColoCrossing. The VPS is actually up, except that it is not usable. Like what terry has described, loadavg continued to climb and VPS is not responding at all.
I did decide to stick with eNetSouth when their San Jose/8×8 servers were failing — I know Brandon is technically competent, has many years of experience, and I do genuinely hope that they’ll eventually put out the fire. However, at the same time my commitment is with the members of LowEndTalk, and I won’t be able to wait for eNetSouth indefinitely to resuscitate their servers.
So,
- I’ll wait for now. Yes I know — LowEndTalk is down, but it’s just a damn community website. Go out & enjoy a day at the beach or at the park.
- However I might move the site tomorrow to a different hosting provider, if LowEndTalk stays off-line. Thanks for all the offers, but I think I’ll choose NOT to be affiliated with a provider this time.
I’m taking some time off computer for now. Have a nice day :)
Related Posts:
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
I’d be happy to sponsor a VPS for LET if it helps :)
Doubt he is interested in a provider who says DD means nothing and that 10MB/s is awesome for a VPS.
I didn’t say awesome, I said a poor indicator of performance.
Your one of hundred’s i would imagine :P
Interesting to see which companies will put an offer forward without expecting something in return :)
I think almost every LEB provider, would kindly sponsor a LEB. You can’t get any better advertisement if you are focusod on selling low cost VPS’s.
Well that sucks, hopefully it all gets worked out although I remain doubtful :(
I guess I’m heading to bed too then… wake me when LET is back online… Wizard needs food badly.
Hmm i should also start a lowend vps website, maybe then i’ll get tons of VPS sponsorings too :D
LEA needs a BuyVM box!
“Thanks for all the offers, but I think I’ll choose NOT to be affiliated with a provider this time.”
So, what about the previous comments? Can you read? ¬_¬
Btw, maybe you can take a look on some plugins for paging comments in WP
It doesn’t take that long too load.
http://fpt.pingdom.com/#!/euCOS3mOz/http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/enetsouth-7-2gb-openvz-vps-in-san-jose/
I don’t think pingdom renders the full webpage. Your browser does, and it can take too long.
More if you don’t have a powerful cpu
It should do – I believe Pingdom is simulating a view from Google Chrome.
It seems
http://fpt.pingdom.com/#!/p076NMfvx/http://whatsmyuseragent.com/
And also this.
http://fpt.pingdom.com/#!/wcgZtNy9/http://lowendboxiscool.com
:)
Yep, that happenned to me too, lol
> Go out & enjoy a day at the beach or at the park.
I don’t get these things in my basement.
Brandon is fine, he’s just busy. Btw he sent me a pic yesterday.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2472/3770149268_16b2232c37.jpg
So stop bothering with your problems!
But I **NEED** my LET….
:)
Don’t you have access to any beach, or, park?
I don’t have any beach :(
Yerp, it’s not exactly sunny in the UK. It’s miserable weather. I guess one good thing was that it forced me to do my revision xD
Which version of Debian was that released in? Can I use apt-get to install it? Keeps telling me that the package is not found.
I’ve found you a guide which will hopefully assist you with the install.
http://www.debianadmin.com/how-to-play-sexy-beach-3-on-debian-linux.html
I suggest walking, not only it kills time but also for a good mood, and health.
Sadly I live in the UK and so walking isn’t possible without getting wet.
sexy bitch!
Go: I walk at least a short marathon every day to keep my doctors happy.
Ixape: Wine doesn’t work on my eee pc. Yes, it;s supposed to but it just kicks out with errors.
Thanks for the update, I’m wishing it’s solved soon, and LET is back :)
Load at 157 now. I wonder what happened that doesn’t make the VPS crash but the load kept going up.
Seriously, someone should post a screenshot.
You asked, you get! http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/850/capture8q.jpg/
FTW!
I’ll go read http://old.lowendtalk.com/ and http://v2.lowendtalk.com/ until it’s either fixed or moved.
Here’s the rrdtools graph for the VPS running LowEndTalk at the moment. Not as bad as yours, but you can pretty much see the effect. The ever-raising loadavg is probably caused by the cron jobs spawning new processes, which are D on arrival due to IO wait.
http://www.lowendbox.com/media/pix/loadavg-enetsouth.png
Hahahaha! Pretty cool n_n
It sounds like their SAN took a crap again and your boxes are simply stuck in IOWAIT.
Francisco
What host are you planning on using?
Folks do realize that this means we’re now going to have a 4th version of the forums, right?
Why would a VPS failing cause him to loose the current forums?
Agree
You guys are no fun. Just trying to give LEA more to worry about.
Thankfully LEA increased the database snapshots to being hourly when things were starting to look grim :)
Francisco
Yeah. Actually everything has already been sitting there on a new VPS for a few days waiting to be switched. Was hoping eNetSouth would turn things around…
Maybe they would. However at this stage I am not really interested in being affiliated with a particular provider anymore. @Francisco — thanks for asking whether I need a new VPS but at this stage I’ll probably prefer staying more independent.
Sure, just lemme know if you need anything temp :)
Francisco
Lowendbox is slow by any standards. Aren’t the pages cached or something, or do you just get that much traffic?
To be honest it doesn’t speak very well of LEBs.
It’s proxied via CloudFlare.
I think you’ve mixed things, as the second note above contains a typo saying “if LowEndBox stays off-line”, while it means “if LowEndTalk stays off-line”. Only LowEndTalk, the community site, is having a downtime, because of eNets hosting. And LEB (this site) isn’t slow either, but hte opposite, it has been opening fast at least for me. But if you are having an issue it may be (I guess) out of CloudFlare caching which is currently used here.
Yeah sorry I meant “LowEndTalk”.
I mean Lowendbox. I find myself waiting for the page to load more often than not. Even my sites load faster including my Dreamhost shared hosting ones.
@rchurch — the footer clearly shows how much time it takes for the page to generate. Yes no caching is used on the WordPress side, but opcode caching + MySQL query caching. If it loads for you, then maybe CloudFlare issue?
Personally I found it’s more worthwhile fighting off the scrappers — that brings down the load *a lot* :)
It’s not slow at all here.
Whatever or whoever CloudFlare are they are certainly not doing you any favours on my end.
Pages generated in less than a second take over 45 secs to arrive.
Definitely hope that LEB/LET breaks all ties with eNetsouth, they are rude and arrogant and the support is horrible and certainly don’t deserve the support/opportunities they get here.
That is most of America’s merchants right now. He should break ties because they do not seem to pay their bills or provide any support what so ever. I am of the same opinion as LEA is in that he does not want/ and or need someone to sponsor him. He would be much better off paying for the VPS and then he can do as he wishes. Also he would not be affiliated with anyone, which in turn lends more credibility to his neutral point of view.
What LEA meant by “if LowEndBox stays off-line.”? it is online as usual isn’t it?
He meant LowEndTalk not LowEndBox, typo.. ;)
ok i thought i let him down by hosting/trusting LEB with us :)
This days, QuickWeb isn’t a LEB provider anymore, so anyone can trust ;)
Good luck getting LET back up.
“Go out & enjoy a day at the beach or at the park.”
That’s actually an excellent idea, I think I’ll do that. Have a great weekend everybody.
You also Kilo, Too cold here to do much. I can’t even work on my bike today :/
If I can spend 4 hours today outside selling BBQ for a local church, you can work on your darn bike. :)
I did try man, managed to stay outside for an hour until the sleet started to sick in my goatee lol. Still no spark in the bike :/ Everything has power and points be working but no spark. If it was a LEB I would have scrapped it by now lol.
Just came back from taking my girls for a bike ride and it was a nice sunny day. Oh, push bike rather than motor bike :)
How much RAM did it have?
@LEA When you have made up your mind to stay away from sponsors and have a vps ready with LET loaded on it, why keep the site down. When someone tries to visit a site and finds it’s down, there is bound to be a bad feeling (not necessarily related to the goodwill of LEA/LET).
“I’ll wait for now. Yes I know — LowEndTalk is down, but it’s just a damn community website. Go out & enjoy a day at the beach or at the park”
I miss the humour with this. How did you know I m(or anyone is) in need of a time out. It’s more likely that I had a great time at beach / park and want to enhance the day with some bytes from LET, Only to find that LET is down and LEA sort of indicating “go away guys, after all I am doing this as a social service and you’ll have to wait till I say ready”.
I might sound immature/noob/novice/idiot or all of them and I might be one. But it actually has the potential to piss off some one but may not actually affect LET/LEB/LEA in any way.
Ok! I m ready and putting the defences on high alert NOW!
I think he’s just trying to give them the benefit of a doubt. Unless ColoCrossing unplugged his SAN for non payment, the issues people are having are likely because the SAN took a dive.
It actually happened last week or a little before then as well but Brandon was able to address it pretty quick.
Francisco
Summary of my 200 words essay above is that LET (or any website with a decent number of visitors) shouldn’t be down when it is easily possible to keep it kicking.
I understand what LEA is trying to do. But he is WRONG (IMHO).
People do get upset even in 21st century!
Yes, you sound like a kid. Is a community site, and isn’t your site, LEA can do what he wants with it. You are not gaining or losing nothing with it, ok?
Worry when you lose money ¬_¬
Or, worry if you want, I don’t care lol.
@yomero it’s not about ownership and there is more to it than losing or making money.
It is the association with something you like, that makes one worry(like i did) and defend it(like you are doing). And you do care what people say/feel about LET/LEB/LEA and thats why you replied to my post.
Atleast an Admin would understand that when things grow to a level, the responsibilities grow manifold. And the way things are handled will decide if the future will be exponential growth or stagnantion (normally it’s in between).
@veer — if all I care about is making money, LowEndBox/LowEndTalk won’t be around either. People think that I care about the pennies I made from a few of those ads here — they are dead wrong. It ran as a hobby back in 2008 and it is still today.
Actually, you guys are more like a liability to me at the moment. I am spending hours each week on this blog with negligible revenue + headaches associated with dealing low end providers, where I could spend on building my own company that gives me six figure income and lets me hire 2 other employees also on a similar salary.
Whatever.
@LEA my mention of money was on a different context all together. It was not to indicate that you are making money or to undermine your sincerity.
I was just debating a simple decision of yours. But it seems things are getting bitter. Wouldn’t like to make it worse by continuing with it.
Honestly, I liked your blog(s) and you are doing a great service to the lowend segment.
Finally it’s your blog, your community of people, your decisions and your choice of words.
All the best for all of your ventures and have a nice time!
@veer I apologise for sounding bitter. It’s a great community, but I hated it when people assume that I am in it for the money…
No hard feelings!
I m happy that LET is back and that it is on linode(hopefully a much stable service)
Haha i found this funny:
– “But it actually has the potential to piss off some one but may not actually affect LET/LEB/LEA in any way.”
People get pissed off when LEB/LET is online (they get DDoS’d) and even when they’re offline (like now). So what? let them get pissed off.
No-one can satisfy everybody.
Who is it that the downtime satisfying? It’s actually funny!
When people DDoS, the admin fights it and keeps the site live.
When the site is offline(for external reasoons) the admin uses alternate resources to keep it online.
It’s as simple as that.
And “let them get pissed off” would probably be the last thing in mind of someone running a respectable service. That is exactly the same mistake committed by ens. A paid service and a free service shouldn’t differ much in handling.(evrything has it’s own model and expected returns even if it is just self satisfaction you are expecting in return).
I didn’t say anything about satisfaction, but probably the people doing the DDoS’ing will be those candidates.
Im sure you’re aware, but a paid service have different resource limitation than a free one and there’s only so much “satisfying” you could with a free service with limited resources. I wouldn’t expect LEB/LET to have the same level of uptime/SLA as, say, facebook, twitter or a banking website.
Give the guy a break!
I would completely understand if he says “go away guys, after all I am doing this as a social service and you’ll have to wait till I say ready”
Because he’s putting his time and effort into this website for free. I value time more than almost anything else. People need to do away with this notion of self entitlement.
Those are my thoughts.
@armyf9 I was exactly pointing out things which would stop LET/LEB from growing like twitter or facebook one day. (as far as i know, neither of them are paid services).
I take exception to the notion that if someone is doing a great job, no one should point out anything going wrong. Criticism has no less contribution than appreciation for the growth of anything or anyone.
And those are my thoughts.
“People need to do away with this notion of self entitlement”
It was about what was going wrong, rather than my rights and entitlements. Many of you got it wrong. So, probably I couldn’t put it lucid enough.
Why do you feel that eNet is going to pay their bills at Colocrossing, after not paying them at 8×8? I don’t think LET should stay sponsored by eNet, it gives people the wrong impression. Especially after the way Brian posted on the eNet 2GB LEB post. They don’t deserve any more business, nor do I think they can handle it.
And V2 is still up, what a tease, LEA, hehehe…
LEBs are not good for serious purposes. Shared Hosting from decent provider is better than LEB in most of the cases, I think.
That’s not true, you just need to go with a reputable host, and you need realistic expectations of what you can get for a certain price. Setting up shared hosting is just as easy as setting up a VPS, so there’s no real guarantee you’ll find quality hosts. In both areas, shared and VPSes, you need to go with reputable hosts with realistic pricing. A $7/mo 2GB VPS just isn’t sustainable, on the other hand a 512MB VPS for $7/mo is.
@Tanmoy – In most cases, I agree. But if you want/need more control a LEB can be a great solution. As prices continue to drop for hardware and bandwidth we’ll find some providers rise above the fray and find a way to provide decent service and make enough money to support their operation.
It’s a challenge now but we’ll get there.
Alright. eNetSouth has not fixed the IO problem, and I have now moved LowEndTalk to a VPS I have with Linode in Dallas. DNS should hopefully resolve soon.
Why Linode?
– It’s relatively cheap for me. I have enough credit there to run this VPS for 10 years.
– It’s not a low end provider. As I have stated before, I do not wish to host LowEndTalk on a provider featured before. Being able to organise my own provider does give me a lot more flexibility. Don’t think Linode is getting into the low end market anytime soon…
A disappointment that LET (and maybe soon LEB) won’t itself be hosted on a LEB. Doesn’t say much for LEB’s. It was seeing this site stay up and responsive that got me to try LEB’s in the first place (just a few weeks ago). I lurked for a month or so before signing up for a LEB and starting to post. Before that I thought of these VPS’s as basically toys, but they work a lot better than I expected despite the hiccups and transience that we see.
Whatever.
Give me a stable low end provider that has and will never be featured on LowEndBox — I’ll host it there in order to declare non-affiliation. But if such provider exists, wouldn’t I want to tell everyone by posting them on the blog?
Linode runs Xen, right? So split your Linode in several smallish OpenVZ containers and then you can say LET and LEB are hosted on a low end box :) The only problem is that linode has to give you extra IPs for this and i don’t know if they are willing to do it.
Yeah, I see the point, it’s kind of difficult–even if you never announced who the host was, people could figure it out from the IP address.
I have several VPS’s by now that I’m not doing much with, so I’d be happy to donate one to you (I’m not affiliated with any vendor so it wouldn’t be sponsorship, at least by a vendor, and I’d stay anonymous just like now). But it still creates a relationship between you and the vendor, even if you don’t pick the vendor (i.e. I currently have 4 vps’s, so if you accept this offer, I’ll flip 2 coins to choose randomly which one to give you).
I wonder if you can give up on “stable”. Set up the code to automatically mirror all updates to several different places so you can withstand a crash/disconnect without losing data, point the main URL at a reasonably reliable low traffic place (maybe a Linode if necessary), and have that url just serve a redirect to a LEB serving the actual content. Then if the LEB goes away, you can update the redirect without having to wait for DNS to propagate. I’ve been thinking of something like this as a way to combine multiple LEB’s into a more reliable service.
actually when i start to read comments i thought: “hmm i think he is gonna migrate to linode” it seems i was right.
Linode definitely most flexible and stable provider in market (considering price)
I hope everything gonna be alright now and future.
LEA has a thing for them ;)
Does Mrs. LEA know?
There’s supposed to be humour tags around that. I forgot that this is wordpress and humour gets stripped out.
Haha
Congrats! And luckily, it’s now resolved!
ie WORKING :P
Well it’s working, but not “resolved”. I much prefer Brandon and team to turn things around.
i need refund and data
You need refund and data?
…of LowEndTalk?
LEA, Congrats of the move, just out of curiosity, which LINODE is LET on? the standard 512 (or some addons)?
On the eNet note, Brandon is a nice guy, we had a good exchange of emails and he gave me a VMWare box which I used for a month (may be more) and then I cancelled it because I did not needed it anymore. You wont believe but I sent him literally hundreds of reminders for the invoice and I never got them. He always said, “I know you are good for that, I will generate on in due time”. I am not sure what happened to him and his team. I hope he can get it all fixed soon
Yes a 512. That’s as much low end as it can go there, unfortunately.
I had good dealings with Brandon as well, slow response aside, but I’m totally lost here. My Chicago VMWare VPS has been down for over a day now and I’m unable to pull my data. This is no fun.
My Chicago and Texas servers are still running :) I’m wondering how long will it stay online.
wtf? Texas?
Nice move LEA :-)
I’m sure Linode won’t disappoint you.
My VPS at eNetSouth is still up, but any tickets there are left not replied…
LEA :) Do you want to go back and host it on VPSLINK 64mb plan?
J/k
VPSlink is now part of EIG, the HORRIBLE EIG IIRC. :P
Yeah. Still can’t believe Cameron did that, i.e. sold VPSLink to EIG. Actually after running LowEndBox for the last couple of years I can now understand why VPSLink did that. In this industry almost everyone is looking for an exit when the price is right…
Actually Spry was also sold to EIG, seems EIG put a really nice offer.
Its sad to go see good providers going offline. Hope it will be all fixed up soon. All the best brandon.
Try out BuffaloVPS.
Got an account with Buffalo back when they had the awesome sauce going.
$6.99 per month for 1 gig, 30 gigs, 1.5 tb
Rarely is there a tic or any noticeable downtime.
I have to agree with John_R I have a box with buffalo and I haven’t seen it go down or be rebooted since the day I got it up 157 days at this point. I was thinking of switching from there to eNetSouth but after all the stuff they have been through I am not going to be renewing with them if they are still around then. They also haven’t answered a ticket I opened with them about a week ago. I guess it just goes to show you what overselling does to a company.
I think it would be smart NOT to go with a LEB next time… just my take on it.
It’s FINALLY fixed. I am not sure how high it got but when I checked it was 500+ yesterday.
My VPS with enetsouth is currently offline, makes me sad.
Hope it is back on real soon.
I had a VPS with them since 2010, now it’s offline for than 24 hours, and I have no answers to emails.
Think I will label this “dead pool” :(
Regards,
/Sorin
Well, looks like eNetSouth is ready for the dead pool!
According LEA, isn’t
Their client area, all servers and WHMCS are all down, the only thing still up is their site, which is useless without the others.
I’d say their ready for the deadpool.
My eNetSouth VPS has been down for 3+ days now. Usually Brandon is fast to response (if not to completely fix the issue) but he hasn’t been responding to tickets in the last month.
A month ago I had to practically beg a response out of “Brian”… but this time no one is responding at all.
Sigh. They were good when they worked.
:( I used them for about 17 months with only minor glitches.
I setup a Tor node and only had to go there once a few months for keeping current. Traffic was great, I felt a bit ashamed to use all unmettered 800 K available and lowered to 500.
I am afraid there will never be another host to allow for Tor and that traffic at that price, not to mention VMware and all.
M
is enetsouth offline, my servers been offline for 1 day right now….
I stalked Brandon for a few days and managed to get a hold of him via a very circuitous route. Things are as they seem, he’s done.
He says he got hit with some serious fraud back in July/August and wasn’t able to process credit card payments since early Sept. After that people stated reversing Paypal transactions and that account got locked in October. So hes got major bills and no money and thats all there is to it.
I asked if it was possible to get Softlayer back up even briefly to retrieve data and it sounds like that will only be possible if the datacenter is feeling generous… he doesn’t have the resources.
Please let me know if there is a way to access the backup / my vps for a few hours. I need the latest backup for my files. :(
I was only with them for a month, and brandon seems to have a good rep. so if he is able to turn this around i would be willing to pay the mighty sum of $7 for another month. Otherwise goodluck to him, and otherwise check my fairly poor (the more views the more people who will tell me to make them better) backup scripts
So far they have saved me in these situations.
I’m at the tail end of my 3-month signup with them. My VPS was slow or unavailable on various occasions. Then late last month, it went down permanently. I’d definitely avoid them.
As of today (Nov 19th) http://www.enscloud.com does not resolve, so I’d say they should be in the dead pool.
Yes it is dead.
Who is the provider of lowendbox? I’m impressed by the current website speed :)