Okay guys. I’m back from my “short break” and decided to finish up my last month’s Dead Pool post. I have been writing my monthly dead pool provider list since May last year, and all I have experienced is that the list just gets longer and wackier. As usual, the list has already been discussed on this thread on LowEndTalk. Here we go.
CPanelHost.me 
Current Status: CPanel Account Suspended Page
I first listed CPanelHost.me more than 2 years ago when they were reselling BurstNET’s 512MB Linux VPS product for $5/month (listing BurstNET’s resellers is something that I no longer do here however). Somehow a keyboard duet erupted between “Mike Miller” of CpanelHost and “Robert” in the comments, which got escalated to potential legal threat against LowEndBox.com. That’s indeed a sure way to never get listed again on LowEndBox.
It appears that the whole business died sometime in 2010, as there does not seem to be any activity on WHT. Domain now owned by Russell of WebRulon/AlienVPS.
eNetSouth 
Current Status: IP address not resolvable
I guess most people here would have known the story. I listed eNetSouth Cloud’s WHT offer here back in July 2010. A nice deal — $5.99 256MB VMWare VPS in Chicago on some premium hardware. Brandon has since been providing the LowEndBox community some exclusive offers on their VMWare platform, and offered to host LowEndTalk community a few months later. Earlier this year Brandon launched eNetSouth site for SolusVM-based OpenVZ/KVM hosting. Finally in October he offered this too good to be true deal, which sparked the collapse of his VPS hosting business. A month later, and they were gone — leaving many customers VPS-less.
I won’t go down to more details on what has been going on, except to confirm that Brandon has indeed done a runner.
HostMonkey 
Current Status: CPanel Account Suspended
HostMonkey was first listed on LowEndBox in August 2010 by the same guy who ran a dead pool host before. A few days later they offered an exclusive offer for LEB community, and 2 months later business sold to webRulon. Like CPanelHost, its website was also turned off last month.
MountSpot
Current Status: IP address not resolvable
When MountSpot was first listed here in August, it was targeting an interesting niche — low cost VPS in the South Asia region where there is no other competition at this price range. I guess now it’s obvious that they were competitor-less because they were just not sustainable. They were listed for sale on Flippa, but don’t think they have sold it as WHOIS is still pointing to their Hong Kong-registered business.
Nixhost 
Current Status: 502 Bad Gateway
Nixhost.co.uk was first listed here merely 4 months ago, and when questioned about legitimacy, Ben assured us that they “are not going down the drain”. 3 months later and they are dead, with CloudFlare showing gateway error (i.e. the actual box hosting the website is no longer up). Sometimes you gotta love how quickly the LowEndBox community can kill a hosting business.
PrestonHost
Current Status: Redirecting to BigBrainHost
LowEndBox first listed Singapore based PrestonHost in May 2010, and it appears Faris had sold the business to BigBrainHost last month. Looking at how well Brian has been running BBH these days it might be a good news to all the PrestonHost customers.
SlickWebHost
Current Status: IP address not resolvable
SlickWebHost first emailed me in May to have their OpenVZ plan listed, Their servers got suspended by their provider (HostNOC) in November due to abuse, as reported by the admin “Claudiu Amarandei”. They can’t afford to bring the servers back up and have decided to end the services there.
UptimeVPS.co 
Current Status: IP address not resolvable
Ken from UptimeVPS emailed me in August to list their Xen VPS plan. Problem started right from the beginning when he could not resolve the routing issue. They then moved to offer OpenVZ services instead with very cheap annual plans and 3 EUR 1GB plan. Issues started happening in October (which Ken claimed fraud as the culprit) but things quickly gone downhill in November. Their domain, “uptimevps.co” stopped resolving on 14 Nov and that spelt the end of it.
Vazapi
Current Status: AdSense for Domain
Vazapi was the new venture from the ServerMinds/Graxis in 2011 (after they sold BuzzServers and Zabogo, both were also featured on LowEndBox in previous years). Not surprisingly it also faced the same fate, as Vazapi got sold to Netrouting in July 2011, and all servers migrated by August. I guess Netrouting has just turned off the hosting for the website in November, and it’s now parked on AdSense.
VPSBB 
Current Status: Website not connecting
VPSBB was 123Systems’ attempt on offering simple minimalistic VPS plan on a simple minimalistic website. 123Systems is still kicking, but VPSBB website was down since 14 November. Andrew has forgot to transfer the hosting once last year so I am not surprised that he might have fotgotten again this year. There’s probably no point of having a separate brand anyway.
VPSCheap.info
Current Status: IP address not resolvable
VPSCheap.info was first listed in September offering $1.50/month VPS in Scranton or Phoenix. They had a rough ride right from the beginning with services going up and down. They finally did a runner at the end of October, and their domain stopped resolving in November. Well, Erez still runs CheapDomainNameDot.com and the website is still up there. Not for long I guess.
ZazoomVPS
Current Status: Website timeout
Daniel first got me to list his ZazoomVPS hosting service in June offering KVM on SolusVM, and by the time it got sold in September it has got some pretty happy clients. Daniel decided to move on to get into tertiary education, however it seems he had sold the business to the wrong person as neither the website nor the VPS host nodes have their bills paid for.
Upcoming…
These are the hosting providers who are currently marked as down at the moment. Likely to be in Dead Pool December 2011.
- Ethelite Hosting — Bad Request at the moment with their website.
- LeetNet — Website timed out at the moment. I guess the BitCoin bubble burst might have something to do with it.
- RapidoVPS — Website showing account suspended. Down report at WHT and looks like a runner here.
- vpsVIBE — IP address not resolvable for now. It’s the ex-GenVPS + ex-AlienVPS team doing another round of scam?
That’s it from last month. I’m still busy and won’t be posting much for December.
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
leetnet confirmed they were deadpool at the bottom of their sales thread.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a post this long, that’s for sure!
Francisco
> I can’t remember the last time I saw a post this long, that’s for sure!
Ditto
倒闭大量
真的嗎？
Sort off depressing that this many hosts have disappeared.
Wow LEA! That was a very very short break. I thought you ain’t gonna coming back until after new year’s eve.
More to come, don’t you worry. At least some providers give you notice when they are leaving.
Is true？
擦，两天前infinitie.net也中断了两个钟头，域名无法解析，vps连不上，我还以为他们也跑路了，还好后来复活了，我还有台vps在他们那里。
Yes I completely agree :) .. Why would you put a post in chinese on an obviously english blog if you want people to care.. must have forgot he is looking through his magic ‘google translate’ spectacles again!
Quality servers is probably one to add, the URL now redirects to their new venture and over the weekend a host died and James has stated they won’t be replacing it.
Because we had enough space on our other nodes to redeploy everything. Feel free to add vz3uk to the dead pool ;)
That’s alot of Dead Pool Providers, More then last month I think.
But as a provider enters the deadpool another provider springs up… It’s a never ending cycle.
no nordic vps?
They could make at least some money back by selling their website designs or just websites. Worthless to just disappear.
[joke]maybe, it’s because they are using “CPanel” name in domain?[/joke] :P
I can confirm that we acquired cPanelHost.me and HostMonkey.net last year. We have just discontinued the brands and are solely focused on our AlienLayer brand.
Sites now forward to AlienLayer.com
You guys should update your blog.
Yes redirecting them would be a good idea when you decided to turn off the light — at least those monitoring them would know what’s going on.
I’m sorry I honestly had no idea people were still monitoring these sites. We haven’t had any signups on them in close to a year and all existing clients were transferred to Alienlayer months ago.
LEA watch everything…. xD
An extra question (repeated I think). Do you offer any SLA?
Welcome back LEA! Hope you had a nice trip. :) This is a long list indeed. Seems to be a tough market to break into and keep your head above water.
Agreed. How’s the ceiling?
Ceiling — all fixed. The floor has to be re-sanded as the floor boards are wrapped due to leaks, which was done with polyurethane applied when we were away last week.
@eNetSouth.
I can’t believe they lasted this long with all the troubles clients had with them with waiting days, sometimes even weeks for a ticket response and not just recently, I seen reviews and complaint threads at WHT dating back almost a year ago, and following all the way up to now but in the past 6 months a lot have also been complaining about not even getting a VPS after ordering it for days or weeks.
I’m actually happy he’s gone, He always seemed sketchy to me and now I know my gut feeling was right, all from his smart-talking on WHT got him to this level, and not providing a legit business and providing his clients with the service he over-advertised, and smack talked it up to be. Surprised me really that now is when he’s going under, and it’s not a surprise to me that it’s running.
Any current clients have any update on that or any contact from him about it closing, if your getting your service/subscription refunded for the most recent month as it is kind of mid-Decemember, or if any clients had pre-paid payments.
@LEA: How do you feel about it going under, and him running… personally, as I know you had your site hosted with him for a good period of time and it actually never had a issue which I was surprised about, but he used that he was hosting you I seen alot to try to “beef” up his service. The only reason I don’t personally like him, and the company is because I was one of them people on the tons of clients that ordered a service from him and waited almost two weeks for the service to be activated and provisioned, and it never did, I only got a response when after 4 business days of waiting I opened a support ticket, no answer for another 6 business days, then opened up a billing ticket saying I will be opening up a dispute if I’m not provided my service/refund or a response back to one of my tickets to let me know what’s up, and I understand providers go through some periods of times where thing’s happen that cause delays, and all I needed to be happy was to be provided my service or a response, I actually didn’t get a response until another 1 & 1/2 weeks (total: 27 days after I placed the order) and that was when the paypal dispute was resolved in my favor and he responded with saying that he was going to be charging me for violation of terms of service and service agreement for opening up a dispute against a payment, and I told him go ahead and try and see how far you get, and actually posted this on WHT and from his responses there he acted as if I had something to do with a handful of other clients canceling and opening up disputes because of no responses to support, or the tickets would “magic” disappear, and he would respound on here or WHT stating there was no ticket when the client had a confirm. email including ticket information, I had a good laugh at the end.
– – – –
I actually can’t believe the fate of ZaZoomVPS, Daniel ran a nice operation over there and I knew when he ran it and managed it with his team it was doing well and successful, but as you stated I guess they sold it to the wrong person and now look, Daniel’s hard work now died. Sad..
– – – –
Russell:
If you don’t mind answering this question: You migrated all the clients of them two businesses over to the AlienLayer company? Why is that instead of running them as their own business as it seemed HostMonkey was a good company and successful from the looks of it and all, what was your purpose overall in purchasing them? Just to merge them into make AL bigger? As I do know your not the ‘founder’ of AlienVPS, you purchased it from someone else and added the extras to it, correct?
Also, I do have a question.. I wanted to test something out and noticed something, I know you guy’s had issues and were deactivated at your first east coast data center and had a downtime and moved the gear to another facility, and your original location on the east coast was Yonkers NY (Information provided by your sales team), but, yet you still claim to advertise the packages being hosted in NY on your website, and that is even what your sales rep told me that your services are based in NY, when you actually told someone that they are not, they are hosted in a NJ facility. I had a interesting convo with that person to, telling me I was lying saying that the equipment is physically hosted inside a NY data center anymore, and that it’s in a NJ data center, but they said I was lying, strange to have a sales rep call me a liar on information that is told by the owner/ceo of the company, but can you confirm this and explain why you haven’t updated your website with the new location of were your equipment is hosted, and located now? I mean you’ve updated your website to add them holiday packages, but not able to fix the location info? I’m not putting your business down because of _this_ reason, but it’s something I was curious about.
Your new HOS was the previous HOS at BuyVM too? ;)
Just another month for the world of LEB…
On a serious not there are a lot this time round, must be because christmas is coming up!
Such a competitive industry, will 2012 be more of the same?
I believe so, I’ve always loved reading the dead pool though,
I had a test vps with ENS in around august I think it was, and to be honest there were no issues, but just as the month was coming to a close I was hearing of issues all over the place, they did stay up longer than I expected though.
I wish these providers wouldn’t run, some do seem to work hard to succeed but then when the going gets tough they’re just gone!
Well, some say “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going”.
@LEA,
Good to see you’re back! Don’t worry, everything has been calm and fine :D
Enjoy your holidays with your family.
VPSBB is back up.
Cripperz.sg is mostly down.. no response from them, its been almost a week. Deadpool 2012?
I think so. Another fraudulent provider ripping off customers. I think there is a great market for service providers to sell off some capacity to LEB users. I don’t, however, think that the LEB market is profitable on it’s own. I think I have only managed to pick 3 dead poolers this year. However my two core LEB have been great and stable.
Oh God, they’re dropping like flies!
But still, it’s nice to see we still have a few providers I’d dare to call reliable. I’ve also learned something here: if it’s too good to be true, it is too good to be true.
That’s a bit of host going down !