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CheapVPS - £2.50 128MB Xen VPS in UK

CheapVPS Vladimir from CheapVPS UK emailed me their LowEndBox exclusive offer. Here is the special landing page, and here is the direct sign up link. For £2.50/month (~USD$4.09) this is what you will get

  • 128MB memory/128MB swap
  • 5GB storage
  • 200GB/month data transfer
  • Xen/SolusVM

Servers are in UK in BlueSquare (according to the network/DC page). CheapVPS is a trading name of “Simply Virtual Servers Ltd” in UK (company number 06937918). It was re-launched just a month ago (see WHT post), although according to Vladimir’s LinkedIn page, Simply Virtual Servers Ltd has been around since November 2007. CheapVPS.co.uk was a VAServ brand, which was founded by Rus and later migrated off to be part of BlueSquare after the HyperVM hacking incident. Vladimir (previously) worked for VAServ according to his WHT profile. Well, someone can now come and fill in the blank on how it is relaunched as part of another brand…

They do have some interesting offerings on the website though. Free SolusVM KVM beta testing anyone?

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

28 Comments

  1. 5GB storage ;-(

    April 14, 2011 @ 12:42 pm | Reply
    • Daniel @ LowEndTalk:

      Considering the price of a GB currently sits at around $0.10

      April 14, 2011 @ 12:45 pm | Reply
    • rds100:

      Well, maybe it is 5GB on purpose, if you really need more you can buy a higher plan. There is no much money to make out of a 2.50 sale, paypal’s commission will eat a good part of it anyway.

      April 14, 2011 @ 4:46 pm | Reply
      • Daniel @ LowEndTalk:

        Well, maybe its because if there is another VAServ, theres not much data you could loose.

        April 14, 2011 @ 4:51 pm | Reply
  2. Jason:

    I think LEB should remove his HyperVM comment – in respect to KT Ligesh.

    We all know now it wasn’t HyperVM’s fault.

    April 14, 2011 @ 1:05 pm | Reply
    • We all know now it wasn’t HyperVM’s fault.

      Then why the fuss? It was publicised as HyperVM’s exploit thus I use it as the reference. Those who dig around can read about other side of story.

      April 14, 2011 @ 1:31 pm | Reply
      • Daniel @ LowEndTalk:

        To find out that the media proclaimed that it was the developers fault that it got hacked, and led to one of him killing himself. Then it turns it, it wasen’t their fault and was Rus Foster’s stupidness to blame.

        April 14, 2011 @ 1:38 pm | Reply
        • It wasn’t even media proclaiming, but just words from A2B2. And they are NOT the only one who used HyperVM exploit as excuse for the mis-management of their VPS business.

          That said, HyperVM was a functional, but badly written piece of software.

          April 14, 2011 @ 1:44 pm | Reply
    • CryptWizard:

      The hacking was not because of HyperVM, it was entirely due to the owner’s (Rus’) poor choice of password and then subsequently reusing it absolutely everywhere.

      HyperVM had it’s own share of problems, but it was not the cause of the VAServ incident.

      April 15, 2011 @ 5:56 am | Reply
  3. The Freebie:

    Indeed, It wasn’t even an HyperVM exploit that brought those servers down, it was a weak root password.. the hacker explained that on WHT until it got removed.

    April 14, 2011 @ 1:55 pm | Reply
  4. Let me just remind you couple of facts:

    – Rus sold the company couple of years ago
    – Business was taken over by Dada group
    – Rus now runs other hosting business now
    – Staff that was involved with the hacking incident is not working for the company anymore
    – All our infrastructure now uses SolusVM as a VPS management facility

    Regardless of the HyperVM incident, CheapVPS is now managed by a different group of people since Rus sold the company around 2 years ago. Re-launched CheapVPS comes with new products, new platforms, properly secured and improved in many ways. Not only the infrastructure significantly changed but new staff is now involved on many different levels, assuring that we deliver properly secured and high quality service nowadays.

    You’re more than welcome to contact us if you have any questions.

    April 14, 2011 @ 2:47 pm | Reply
    • To be clear, the original cheapvps.co.uk exploded while Rus Foster was at the helm. I know that because I had a VPS there and lost everything. Eventually I got a new (empty) one, which performed like crap until I finally cancelled it.

      This has nothing to do with the current cheapvps and Vladimir. Mr Foster has long since moved on, spawning two or three different new brands since then.

      Hope you make a success of it Vladimir.

      April 14, 2011 @ 11:46 pm | Reply
      • Snape:

        I, too had (have) a VPS from CheapVPS back in Rus’ day (signed up early May, 2008), which was lost. Mine was promptly reprovisioned, and I’ve had no significant issues since from VAServ, though they stealthily jacked the price up on me at some point, and I now have fewer resources than what I originally signed up for.

        Ah, well.

        April 15, 2011 @ 12:31 am | Reply
        • Thank you for the words of encouragement guys. We are happy to see both new and ex customers signing up with us again. All pending orders have been cleared just this morning so feel free to contact us through our website should you have any questions.

          Cheers!

          April 15, 2011 @ 7:01 am | Reply
  5. Does anyone has the problem of being charged VAT even if you are not in the European region? I am in North America but it seems VAT is still on my bill.

    April 15, 2011 @ 11:46 am | Reply
    • Feel free to file in a ticket via client area or our website and we will happily look into this (US citizens won’t need to pay VAT).

      April 15, 2011 @ 2:33 pm | Reply
  6. Thanks for the discussion, folks. Kind of was wondering what all that was about.

    April 15, 2011 @ 11:12 pm | Reply
  7. TheLinuxBug:

    I ordered a VPS from cheapVPS. I was in no extreme hurry for the vps to be delivered, even so it was delivered within 4 hours. (I believe the site said something about an average of 2 hours… but I was not in a hurry) I did not however get to setting up and using my VPS until about an hour ago. Once I did though I noticed that the only way I can access the vps is via the console on the control panel as it seems my ip address does not work. Upon closer inspection it seems as all the default templates do no include a default gw (or something is awry with the network device setup for Xen). I have tried reinstalling with a Debian Template, as opposed to their default CentOS install and still same results. So at this point, VPS is delivered but has no network access.

    I submitted a ticket, hopefully they have quick support. So far a reasonably positive experience, but lets see how well/quickly this issue is handled by support.

    Will update when everything is up and working…

    April 16, 2011 @ 2:28 am | Reply
    • TheLinuxBug:
      -bash-3.2# cat /proc/meminfo
      MemTotal:       131072 kB
      MemFree:          4456 kB
      Buffers:           572 kB
      Cached:          93216 kB
      SwapCached:          0 kB
      Active:           4024 kB
      Inactive:        91524 kB
      HighTotal:           0 kB
      HighFree:            0 kB
      LowTotal:       131072 kB
      LowFree:          4456 kB
      SwapTotal:      131064 kB
      SwapFree:       130996 kB
      Dirty:              12 kB
      Writeback:           0 kB
      AnonPages:        1836 kB
      Mapped:           1964 kB
      Slab:             9760 kB
      PageTables:        284 kB
      NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
      Bounce:              0 kB
      CommitLimit:    196600 kB
      Committed_AS:     5588 kB
      VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
      VmallocUsed:       288 kB
      VmallocChunk: 34359738079 kB
      
      (Note: There are 4 processors reported all with the same stats as below, processors 0-3)
      -bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpuinfo
      processor       : 0
      vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
      cpu family      : 6
      model           : 23
      model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5420  @ 2.50GHz
      stepping        : 10
      cpu MHz         : 2493.774
      cache size      : 6144 KB
      physical id     : 0
      siblings        : 1
      core id         : 0
      cpu cores       : 1
      fpu             : yes
      fpu_exception   : yes
      cpuid level     : 13
      wp              : yes
      flags           : fpu tsc msr pae cx8 apic cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht
      syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni vmx est ssse3 cx16 sse4_1 lahf_lm
      bogomips        : 6239.11
      clflush size    : 64
      cache_alignment : 64
      address sizes   : 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
      
      -bash-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
      16384+0 records in
      16384+0 records out
      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 12.2702 seconds, 87.5 MB/s
      

      This was all tried VIA console as I am still without network connectivity at current.

      April 16, 2011 @ 2:34 am | Reply
    • TheLinuxBug:

      Ok,

      So after submitting a support ticket their answer was to let me know that if I reinstall I manually have to add route config to my rc.local because their default templates are not even configured to come up with inet fully configured. Odd. Also, seems their OS templates are broken, since I have had inet access I have run into nothing but issues with upgrading their default templates. (Debain 5 32bit, Debian Squeeze 32bit). Once I get this VPS working and doing something useful ill update again, but right now… I am not quite sure how I feel about it. I/O and resources don’t seem to bad, and once I have an opportunity to test the network connectivity it seems as if it will be decent. So far though… nothing but issues getting it setup, online and working.

      April 16, 2011 @ 4:55 pm | Reply
    • TheLinuxBug:

      So it turns out a lot of the issues I have been having are because their offered OS Templates are quite mis-configured, at least as far as any of their Debian images. The 64-bit Debian 5 image is probably the closest to working. I got the Debian 5 32-bit image to work after a few tweaks and a bit of hair pulling. I had a few problems with libc6 and getting Debian to update, but after a bit of reading on google I have been able to find the answer to that issue. I am currently working with Debain 5 32-bit, which seems to be working all-right for now, though I still have a ticket in with support because I would like to be able to use Squeeze instead, hopefully they can get these os template issues resolved soon.

      At present everything looks quite promising. Connectivity also seems quite fast:

      bash:~# wget http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
      --2011-04-17 00:19:39--  http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
      Resolving download.thinkbroadband.com... 80.249.99.148
      Connecting to download.thinkbroadband.com|80.249.99.148|:80... connected.
      HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
      Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/zip]
      Saving to: `100MB.zip'
      
      100%[===============================================>] 104,857,600 35.7M/s   in 2.8s
      
      2011-04-17 00:19:42 (35.7 MB/s) - `100MB.zip' saved [104857600/104857600]
      
      April 17, 2011 @ 1:24 am | Reply
  8. The Freebie:

    Well i signed up for the kvm beta and they still haven’t set me up *cry* :'(

    April 17, 2011 @ 3:19 am | Reply
  9. Backlog of weekend orders has been dealt with today and all orders are now activated. Regarding any questions I suggest that you contact us through the helpdesk so we can assist you in an adequate manner.

    April 18, 2011 @ 4:49 pm | Reply
  10. TheLinuxBug:

    After a bit of help from support, I now have Debian 6 Squeeze 32-bit running! As stated before, connectivity is awesome, i/o is damn good, cpu is fast (compiling is decently fast). Now that I have Debian 6 Squeeze up and running, I am excited to put the server to the real test ;D (On a side note, the Debian 6 Squeeze template they use is VERY minimal… so be ready to start from scratch, not even telnet was installed)

    Support is pretty decent, even if the original staffer isn’t able to answer your question immediately, at least they let you know the ticket has been seen and that they are escalating it to someone who can help you fix the problem. Weekend support times were a little slow, but it seems like they are pretty fast during regular work business hours.

    Only real con that I can see is that some of their OS Templates are a little bit broken, but with a small amount of tinkering you can get most of them working. If you have issues I just suggest you contact support like I did, they were pretty quick about getting back to me and fixing my issues.

    CheapVPS get a 9.5/10 from me!

    April 22, 2011 @ 2:07 am | Reply
  11. Simon:

    Not that im trying to stir anything up, but i was also a member of the old cheapvps, which we all know what happened with.

    After the “hacking” incident, and while waiting for a replacement VPS to be created for me, im *pretty* sure that i was chatting to a support rep called “vlad” at the time. Vladimir, your not that same Vlad are you ?

    April 25, 2011 @ 8:54 pm | Reply
  12. Simon:

    Yes, after some further investigations, it seems you ARE the same chap associated with the old vaserv.

    Evidence ?

    The original “hacking” thread from WHT, paying attention to post 12, where Vlada comments :
    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=867100

    Vlada advertising the new company : http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1040186

    Whats more interesting is that Vlada commented here (above) on the 14th, that all the old staff were no longer part of cheapVPS….. dodgy ?

    April 25, 2011 @ 9:00 pm | Reply
    • You could’ve avoided all that detective work by reading the original post more carefully: “Vladimir (previously) worked for VAServ according to his WHT profile.” ;) When Vladimir said that the old staff were gone, I read that as meaning “other than than me” (obviously). I don’t think there’s a deep, dark conspiracy in that.

      April 25, 2011 @ 10:49 pm | Reply

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