It feels that it has been a while since I last posted a CityNetHost offer. Earlier this week Mohamed from CityNetHost emailed me their current OpenVZ and Xen LowEndBox offers, for those who fancy a budget Egyptian VPS. Two offers —
- VPS-Starter-Xen
- 256MB memory
- 15GB storage on RAID10
- 500GB/month data transfer
- Xen/SolusVM
- $4/month (Direct sign up link)
- VPS-Lite-OpenVZ
- 128MB guaranteed/256MB burstable memory
- 10GB storage on RAID10
- 200GB/month data transfer
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
- $23.40/year (Direct sign up link)
PayPal or Moneybookers. Servers in Egypt, and you’ll see plenty of reviews here from their past offers (including those during the time of turbulence in Egypt earlier this year). CityNetHost is backed by CityNet Telecom there. I have no first hand experience but they seem to be working hard on providing a good product from the past reviews. However network connectivity might be a let down.
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Nice to see you guys come out well after all the crazy things going on in Egypt, I may give you guys a test one day, your plans look nice :)
170MS ping from uk, Not Bad.
Weird network though, i always get a traceroute problem
http://pastie.org/2513494
Daniel: The trace doesn’t stop, the server nodes just don’t respond to ping requests and tracert doesn’t display their IP addresses.
Yeh, thats a little weird though, and when Tracerouting out of the citynet network you go though about 6 10. ip ranges
Pretty bad to Australia…
Attend to distance !!!
Keep in mind that Egypt is a leaf site on the Internet. They have no transit connections to their neighbours.
If all you want are good connections to hosts within Egypt, it’s fine. All traffic leaving the country is routed mostly to New York or London, with minor uplinks to France and South America.
Don’t put important services on CityNet hosts or have a backup plan ready, at least. To be fair, their servers are up most of the time, i.e. more than 50%. YGWYPF.
> (they show up as 10.x.x.x when you trace in the other direction)
Many carriers in Asia use internal IPv4 addresses for their routers. They just don’t have enough of them to waste addresses on hosts that don’t have to be reachable globally.
You might actually get decent connections to Asia, since the last additional fiber cable was launched at the end of 2010 connects Asia-Europe-MiddleEast:
http://www.cxotoday.com/story/nine-telecom-operators-launch-imewe-submarine-cable/
I remember it was Level3 (via Paris) some time ago, now it seems like it’s always passing through flagtel (AS15412 I bet) from my end, either via Mumbai-Dubai-Alexandria or via Hong Kong-Cairo-Alexandria. Ping responses range from 230ms to 330ms.
It just shows there are 5 hops which are configured not to respond to traceroutes, and most likely those are in the LINK.NET network (they show up as 10.x.x.x when you trace in the other direction).
I had their VPS, two major problems I had were:
1) tun/tap becoming non-operational every time the node reboots;
2) date/time becoming wrong (off by many hours) every time the node reboots;
Each of these happened 7-8 times, requiring tickets and waiting for a fix (with them every time assuring ‘now is the final time and this will not happen again’) I just stopped caring and reopening tickets and just installed a Tor and i2p nodes there, to burn through the traffic at least make some use of that VPS.
Moral of the story: do NOT prepay for a year, keep your option to just pack up and walk away next month, if some b/s like this will happen.
After deadpool providers the worst experience i have made!
11 hours of downtime yesterday.
Last Up 9/9/2011 8:48:51 PM UTC
Last Down: 9/10/2011 8:38:12 AM UTC
Downtime: 11 h 47 m 38 s
I’d say check you ping service or use at least two different ping services, since false alerts are common these days.
I had a vps with them before and the vps is very unresponsive. The TUN/TAP stops working just like rm from above experienced. And they never responded to my support ticket.
I tried them once for a month. At first, my application marked as spam (as was said by the support personnel) then he told me the payment has been refunded but it never happen, and I ask them again about the refund, but then after 24/hours they said that my box was ready :| .. I access the box using SSH, update it using yum… then guess what? the connection was so slow, just playing 250kb/s to 600+kb/s Y__Y Then after looooooong time on SSH, I give up and just forget about it and look for another vps provider.
Bad network, bad uptime, random reboots, rude support staff… I think I’ll pass. :)
Hey, it’s Egypt, not Canada what did you expect :)
This should not be excuse for rudeness, technical incompetence, lies, etc… I believe that many of us never expected brilliant connectivity from Egypt, etc.. but this what turned us off is their incompetence, their incapability to reply with fair, truthful ticket response. Buffoons..
They somehow lost my vps and then respond with something like “node is fine so it’s your problem…”. Huh?!! They was trying to do everything to convience me that I ruined my vps while I didn’t even use it.
Finally they RECREATED new vps with new IP on other node. Can user ruin own vps to extension that SolusVM reinstall wouldn’t solve issue? Of course not.. but they never admitted that it’s fault on their side. After some time I found out (on wht) that there are more people which citynethost vps misteriously gone without explanation and appear back newly recreated with new IP and still… it’s always users fault – thats their stance even when obviously they messed up.
I didn’t do anything with my citynethost vps so there wasn’t any loss but even if some user would ruin it this wouldn’t require new account recreation on new node with new IP, that’s a fact and because that I find their claims thats user “has done something” as insultive sign of incompetence.
Took me quite a bit of harassing them before they admitted to rebooting the node. They plain denied it at first. So apart from crappy customer service, they’re liars too.
+1 Some time ago I posted here my bad experience…
I’ve been a user with them over a year and I did renew last month for another year.
There was a 7 hour and 26 minute downtime yesterday from 1914EST Friday night to 0427EST Saturday, according to Nagios which does a 5 minute ping / SSH check, plus the infamous Internet blackout during the riots.
Yes, routing does suck from certain places (for instance, my Nagios is in Las Vegas and it’s RTA 240.93 ms) but it may be your country’s issue or the fact that there is not many ways into Egypt due to routing so you should be finding VPS servers according to your requirements and not shopping around for one based on your budget like a used car.
That’s my 2 cents
I completely agree. I think everybody that is complaining about routing and downtimes should just check what a political situation we have here atm. There has been an anarchy since a few weeks. So LEB-hunters, how would you feel if there is constantly a mob outside waiting for struggle to burn somebodys house down. Thats how it is currently here. Would you invest in new telecommunication? Probably not. But there are some guys that do. So be nice.
Kids here don’t read the news: they are too eager to call a company a fraud, scam and solicit sympathy when they shopped for a VPS on price rather than what they need.
A prime example is the “ha ha 100gb/mo isn’t enough for me!!!” when actually, I run a site that gets 200k page views per month on average and including Debian updates, I rarely go over 20gb per month. 25gb per month is a “busy month” for me
That’s not fair as you made up false arguments not those which are written in most of complains. I am glad that you’re one of rare person here with positive experience with this host but that’s not experience of many others. There’s no single reason for rudeness and yes they know to be very rude in most ordinary situations.
very bad hosting…never ever choose this company …iam being experienced with them.. worst hosting provider on the net…..weakly twise servers down…. ha ha ha ha ha funny thing is their website will be down once in a weak…
Hosts like this should not be posted in LEB
Then we wouldn’t be able to expresss our opinion and personal experience with such hosts. Take this rather as advantage when you’re looking for new host. I prefer even negative reviews more than no reviews at all. That way I atleast know what to avoid.
+1, before I shop for a leb, I first check the review here on LEB :)
I think maybe that new offers from such hosts shouldn’t be listed might be a better idea and LEA has stated a couple of times that some hosts will no longer be listed.
Then all you would get is BuyVM, QuickWeb and Ramhost offers ad nauseam. Oh wait, that’s the popularity contests results on here
You making up again false arguments. No one said this, it’s just your fake conclusion for the sake of argument.
So James are you saying that every single host here except for those three that you list have ripped off every client listed here? i think you’re going to piss off a lot of people if that’s what you are saying.
LEA has stated that there are a couple of hosts who have gone to the extreme end with ripping off their clients and will no longer being listed. Having said that, even hosts like w2 haven’t made that list.
James, I think your just being argumentative. Oh and just pissed off hundreds of providers.
This is the worst provider i’ve been with during my whole time.
I’ve had like 20 VPS with them and just had bad experience. Canceled all contracts 4 months ago.
If you’re interested in my reviews :
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1060071
I don’t think it is the worst provider ever but its network is not dependable and has serious interconnection issues, sometimes peering in the US to reach another Egyptian providers. I ordered the VPS to serve Egypt audience and after several months of bad service that audience decreased a lot. My bad, sure, as there are good providers in Egypt like ECC Solutions and Link. I don’t believe in “you get what you pay for” but in this case it was very true.
Well, for me it was. I’ve moved with all my users to a german, pretty unknown provider which is established since 2007. Had not a single outage since then and also perfect english speaking customer service.
CityNetHost is, to be honest, just incompetent and not willed to solve customer enquiries over a long term. Whats important is money – no more no less. I can do better hosting with even better connectivity and speed on my home line.
If Germany works for you IMO it is unfair to compare connectivity and prices with any Egyptian (and many other countries) provider.
@Francisco
if you read this thread closely, connectivity is almost the least of the people’s complaints.
@rm: If you read this thread closely you will realise that most people don’t even seem to realize that they are dealing with a country whos political situation is upside down right now. Most of these comments reveal that most posters are dumb morons who do not seem to realize that the political situation is indeed a valuable fact for being able to make business. If you have anarchy, there is not much to do if somebody decides to shut down the telephone-lines or to burn the house down.
I would like to see, how all these white-class kids react if their beloved goverment is gone and some dubious military generals make their own rules. If the police is not to trust anymore. If it depends on the goodwill of the companies if you receive energy or water.
I guess there are much deeper problems — but not on the side of the company.
But then again, you live in Russia. You ought to know what i mean with unreliable situations and the rulership of the most powerfull and the abolishment of democracy.
@Tom
it was crappy in exactly the same way long before the political situation, etc, etc. (6 months, to be precise). http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/citynethost-2-5-512mb-openvz-vps-in-egypt/ I doubt there was anything particularly bad going on in Egypt in Aug-Oct 2010. If you remember, the political events were in Feb-2011. So no, that’s not an excuse at all.
Agree with you rm, crappy… and not about network…
@rm: The revolution started in December 2010. I don’t know what media you consult, but the Guardian referrs the first cut down of mass media (SMS, Internet, Facebook) by the Government of Egypt since October 2010:
“The first experiment was back in April 2008 while the second one was on 10 October 2010, three months before the revolution; it sought to test cutting Egypt’s internet connection, blocking some websites and implementing procedures to prevent access to the internet in one or more governorates,” stated the verdict to the lawsuit filed in April by the Egyptian Centre for Housing Rights.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/13282.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/egypt-facebook-revolution
http://www.al-bab.com/blog/blog1010a.htm#egypt_cracks_down_on_text_messages
@rm: Also on ForeignPress: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/31/egypt_planned_internet_shutdown_since_2008
@Tom
Don’t trust mainstream media its full of crap. You need better news sources :)
@Daniel: What would your `underground` news-sources state on that issue?
No, Alternative media such as RT etc
@Daniel: Ok, so what did they say about that incident?
Not sure, But Unlike the BBC/CNN/FOX etc that brainwash people with utter crap. i can safely say RT does real journalism. Its mostly related to the NWO
@Daniel: RT is a state owned TV broadcast with the intention to be the russia BBC. RT cites scientists that have completely lost their scientific honour.
Why do you come up with RT if you don’t even know what they say about that incident? What was your intention? I’m just citing several well-known sites.
It sounds to me like to don’t even care about that incident. You just throw in some other state-owned media for the sake of it. I don’t care about a specific brand of media. I care about that indicent.
Perhaps but i have more trust in the Russians than David cameron/Rupert Murdoch and barack hussein obama
I don’t care about your political believes. Nor did I present mine here. All I care is about the incident.
Seems like you are more angry that you put your eggs in the proverbial one basket than anything, just an observation, because it’s similar to the “OMG W2SERVERS STOLE ALL MY DATA” threads you would see on WHT.
James please show atleast a bit of respect to other posters here and actually READ, YES READ their arguments. Problem with this host isn’t that things go wrong, most of us are prepared for something like this so that’s not issue. Issues are their rude responses, constant denials when they messed up, lies to customers… You’re obviously lucky with them and that’s great. But I would like to see you here defending them when/if they will by mistake delete your vps and in response reply you: it’s your fault, you did something.
Come to LEB and show us your happines with them then…
@ Citynet: Since you are a DC this is just a note, that many people are willing to pay more for getting VPS with you, but your prices are actually comparable to budget USA and other famous places! So, you would better improve things that are getting all complaints, and at the same time increase your lower plan costs that you share here, up to $7/m is still perfectly fine to be offered here.
@ all: I wanted the 23.40/year VPS if I did get it I will update you with how things goes in terms of uptime.
@Citynet If that wasn’t clear, I meant that:
Higher priced but acceptable VPS >>>> Such price with all reported complaints and negativity
My 2 cents:
I have 2 VPS with them prepaid for 2 years each. I don’t have access for few days in January. But after these days – VPS is working as it expecting to work. Now in this single moment the ping returns this:
Pinging steliyan.com [41.223.53.126] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 41.223.53.126: bytes=32 time=185ms TTL=46
Pinging latribubar.com [41.223.53.206] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 41.223.53.206: bytes=32 time=188ms TTL=46
So, I’m in Europe, a little country named Bulgaria and my personal Internet access is capped to 34mbps. So while my connection is OK for me – Egypt is fine.
Encouraging review, thanks for sharing.
@Go: Both my VPS are less $100/2yr.
Up and down and up and down again.
This is a typical CityNet month: http://i.imgur.com/OPRZt.png
ordered service, was set up imeediatley, but server did not come on line, no reply to support ticket, recommend you stay away from these guys
So because it wasnt instanly accessible you reccomend we stay away from them? How do we know its not you’re lack of knowledge?
Indeed. After the payment they provided server’s info during 24 hours. But server didn’t work. So 1 ticket + 3 days in waiting = working VPS.
They don’t answer quickly. They could answer, but it will not help. :)
And usually network problems (so long downtimes happen). May be 6 months ago it was a good VPS provider and I recommended it to a few friends, but now it’s awful. :(
Update, I did hear from them, after ordering a second VPS which worked right away, never solved the issue as to why my first one would not come on line. Satisified for now
Speed – 25 KB/s for Premium Xen VPS. :(
wget ftp://ftp.ovh.net/test.bin --2011-10-06 06:06:26-- ftp://ftp.ovh.net/test.bin => `test.bin' Resolving ftp.ovh.net... 213.186.33.9 Connecting to ftp.ovh.net|213.186.33.9|:21... connected. Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in! ==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done. ==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed. ==> SIZE test.bin ... 104857600 ==> PASV ... done. ==> RETR test.bin ... done. Length: 104857600 (100M) 0% [ ] 399,648 21.1K/s eta 64m 19sJust google about Citynet Host. You will see the truths about them.
I was with them for well over a year and they were okay – I even nominated them for Best Provider as I figured they could use some good publicity after the internet shut down – but I’ve finally given up on them and closed my vps. Really, really poor support.
Just an FYI to the community – had a VPS with them recently, requested it canceled – and they canceled it – but continue to bill us. Have submitted multiple tickets to them to have this corrected with no response – only “auto close” on the ticket after 72 hours.
Not Cool. Avoid if you can.
Just to give my review on this company, I have had my VPS with CityNet Host since September 2010 and always found it to be stable, and on the odd occasion I have used their support they have been helpful.
OK the network speed is not as quick as some but would you rather have an unstable box with poor resource and blazing speed or stable box with not so fast connection?
I don’t use it as a production box I only do family based stuff on it so for me it is OK
They were good once, I was with them in 2010-early 2011, for the price and location it was a bargain. They replied to my tickets within 24 hours and it wasn’t with any negative attitude, though this was long ago, it’s sad to hear that it’s gone just downwards for CityNet.
Awful customer service. Tickets automatically closed without response. Looks to me like they’re just letting it all go.
Would NOT recommend.
Anybody using TUN/TAP successfully on CityNet?
If I remember correct TUN/TAP was deactivated with this host after every host node reboot. And I remember also a lot of reboots. But that was some time ago. I don’t know how they operate today.
I confirm :
– awful customer service with tickets automatically closed
– lots of reboots and frequent period of downtime
Avoid these joke artists, placed my order, they would never respond to your tickets, will close it without even care to respond, will set the order for pending forever and at the end mark it as fraud and never refund you, i dispute it on paypal, its a crappy service without even deliver, glad i didnt it buy it yearly.