Via this WHT offer. CityNetHost looks like the hosting arm of CityNet Telcom in Egypt, so it’s more likely to have telcom/network infrastructure in place. It is currently offering an Xen VPS special at $24/year, which comes with
- 256MB memory
- 10GB storage
- 100GB/month data transfer
- Xen
Servers are in Egypt so it might be a very good location for some of us here (not me though, almost 400ms ping). It looks like they have just branched into selling VPS as the ordering pages are still very dedicated-server-centric. I wonder whether you can really buy a $2/month VPS and hook it up with a 320GB SATA drive at $10/month extra, as it is available in the option.
Having the entire telcom company’s 2 name servers on the same network is indeed a bit strange though.
Related Posts:
HostSailor: KVM, XEN, or OpenVZ in the Netherlands from $1/mo!
HostSailor's Cyber Monday Specials are a Boatload of Deals! (512MB for $12/year, e3 Dedi for $32.76/...
HostSailor - 512MB KVM VPS for just $1/mo in the Netherlands + Many More Options!
Servarica - $10/month 3GB Xen VPS with 3 TB disk space in Montreal, Canada
TruxgoServers - VPS Promo Servers, special offers from 12 different locations!
AIT – $1 for first month on 512MB Xen VPS w/ UNLIMITED bandwidth in the USA!
The Founder at LowEndBox
The original owner of LowEndBox known as LowEndAdmin or LEA for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource Low End Boxes. After creating the roots of the community that we know today, LEA stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.
Latest posts by LEA (see all)
- 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 get about 205-210ms pings, which isn’t bad at all for the mideast, IMO. Looking at their ASN, it appears their bandwidth is pure Level3, which is nothing to sneer at. (DNS, on the other hand, they should know better about… or so you’d hope.)
I placed an order for a VPS a couple of hours ago; we’ll see how things go.
Worth noting is that they only accept bank transfers, Western Union, and credit cards – no PayPal.
I hate to say this, but in my opinion:
Companies with Live Help that have buttons stating “Click here to chat” or “Online” that redirect you to a leave message page deter me. They’re pretty much lying to your face about live support being available. I’m not saying this specifically at CityNetHost (even though it’s the same scenario) but it’s just a huge deterrent in my books.
@Mike – Let us know how it goes :)
@Adam we don’t have to lie about live supporting maybe it’s just you have been through bad experience through companies that provide live support service but i knew this website through the live support program as it shows me referrer for who ever visits our companies website.
Have a good day and we would be so glad to help you at CityNet
Khaled
System Administrator/CityNet Host.
LT – Egypt
2 times timeouts and ping overall is
Pinging citynethost.com [196.46.188.10] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 196.46.188.10: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=115 Reply from 196.46.188.10: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=111 Reply from 196.46.188.10: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=115 Reply from 196.46.188.10: bytes=32 time=166ms TTL=111 Ping statistics for 196.46.188.10: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 104ms, Maximum = 166ms, Average = 134msSeems very poor performance for Europe to Europe, my VPS on the East cost of the US gives me 118 stable ping, it may be a good offer for this that have some local websites, but lol I wouldn't even get this for anything related to European visitors.
I was able to chat with them several times yesterday evening (Sunday), and this both with sales and support.
Setup of the VPS was done in about 2.5h.
Hello,
No Extra Hard disk space available with promotion.
Some times we can not answer live chat during high traffic of low priced promotions!! hope to see you soon.
This is one awful company. Every dealing I have had with this company has been bad. They are the ultimate timewasters.
Mike : “Looking at their ASN, it appears their bandwidth is pure Level3, which is nothing to sneer at”.
can someone give some explanation about ‘pure level3’ ?
@shifttmalam
It means that all traffics to their DC is routed viz Level3.
This is not a good idea as their whole traffic from US to their DC will be down if Level3 have any problem. Most DCs will mix different BW providers, like Level3, XO, BTN, Cogent (Not preferred, though)
@Khaled – Never had a bad experience, it’s just “false advertising” in a way, stating live help is available when it’s not. All you need to do is change the button to say “Offline” or “Not available” when no one is really there. Just my opinion :)
@Kliki: Obviously multi-homed would be better, but I’ll take a single tier-1 provider over a blend of tiny regional carriers (which is what you usually see in the mideast) with questionable peering any day – especially given the recent history of damage to subsea cables in the region, which have temporarily severed some of those smaller carriers from the rest of the world, at times.
Still waiting on setup, FWIW.
Their network is all Link (Egyptian ISP), its really low grade transit. Outaging all time, bad packet loss during busy periods. Link is like Cogent but a lot lot worse.
If you want a VPS in the Middle East forget Egypt, its not a country to buy services, most of these ‘datacenters’ have domestic airconditioner think $300 at Costco and no UPS/Generator. In a country that has at least one power outage a week, thats not even funny.
In Dubai there are 1-2 really high grade DC’s, you wont get a VPS for $24/year but you will get a proper DC, with proper kit.
@Anonymous: can you give some links towards low-cost VPSes in Dubai?
BGP shows AS33785 (CITYNET)’s only peer as AS24863 (LINKdotNET-AS). Most of the traffic that isn’t served directly by Link appears to go through Level3, though:
http://www.robtex.com/as/as33785.png
http://bgp.he.net/graphs/33785-4.png
Service provisioned in 15 minutes after payment, and by the way they do accept PayPal now.
Well, fifteen hours later, they’ve authorized $24.20 (eh?) against my credit card, and sent me a very useless order confirmation e-mail. Still no VPS, though. Maybe I got flagged as fraud? Or their e-mails aren’t making it to me? We’ll see…
I did get my “details” after about 2.5 hours.
Don’t like the sound of this company. A test file would be appreciated.
Jack.
I eventually got mine setup and provisioned. I opted for Debian. I received a Xen VM with 256MB RAM, 480MB swap, and 9.4GB EXT3 disk space. /proc/cpuinfo lists four 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs. Apt sources file points to an “Unofficial Xen Installation Media” DVD that I obviously can’t access, as well as a set of (unsigned) Citrix XenServer repositiries, but changing this to a working set of apt repositories is fairly easy, though the system (Debian Lenny) appears to be fully up to date with regards the base system (The DVD repository is dated 20100628, i.e. June 28th) when checked against the Turkey Debian mirror.
When I received the VPS, /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow contained a user “vps” created with a password unknown to me, able to login and get a bash shell, with a home of /home/vps. I consider this an egregious security violation and deleted the account immediately, then changed the SSH keys on the server.
Overall pretty impressive, especially for the price, though not terribly noob-friendly (the useless apt setup).
I thought I’d add, for those who are curious:
host:/var/log# hdparm -tT /dev/xvda1
/dev/xvda1:
Timing cached reads: 1378 MB in 2.00 seconds = 688.82 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 518 MB in 3.00 seconds = 172.65 MB/sec
host:/var/log#
Can’t complain about that for $24/year.
Egypt has been recognized as “Enemies of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders. Many bloggers are arrested because of the “Crime of criticism of the authorities”.
@Adam Thanks for your suggestion and it will be concerned
@Jackk http://citynethost.com/testspeed.asp
For everybody who have ordered VPSs it takes 24 hours for setting up progress but in most cases 2 hours.
@Mike Thank you for your comments, this is a low end VPS package, if you need to test a premium VPS service try one. you got your server within 24 hours.
If youa re goin got use this company or any company in this region – pay by Paypal. Do NOT give out your credit card detils. The fraud rate in Egypt is incredible.
I meant – if you are going to …..
Thanks for the test file – got 70Kb/s from the UK.
@Anonymous more than 90% of our customers use credit cards very safe. we have less than 0.01% charge back records. that is why some orders take a longer time to verify against fraud. if you do not like paying by CC use Wire Transfer.
@JACK are you testing from an ADSL line !!
Its not you I was worried about, it was the customers! Egypt is a hotbed credit card fraud.
@Mohamed – Kinda, it’s not ADSL, it’s a cable connection to the end of the street and then fibre optic. (Virgin Media, UK) It’s capable of 10Mbps so I don’t see what the problem is. (Just checked and it’s running at full speed! I’ll also add that I’m currently the only machine connected to the network.)
Speeds from my VPS in Hetzner, DE are a bit faster.
Jack
@ 19 – Mike
All your comments considered, Thank you.
@Anonymous 12
We are located inside GPX Global Data Center Building http://www.gpxglobal.net/
We are not using $300 air condition system.
Please see GPX Global facilities which is a State-of-the-art world class data center
@Jackk
You are using a shared VPS @ $2/month, if you need premium service try our other products.
Dear Blog owner.
kindly remove anonymous $300 air condition comment, it is not practical to imagine data center facility before you see it.
Edited by LowEndAdmin — I don’t see the comment directing at you, but his perception on DC in middle east in general. It’s an opinion.
To 100Mbit finnish consumer class line. Fair enough I would say.
I was getting about 3.5 mbps, which should be fine since your only getting 100GB/month data transfer
@Mohamed – So? My VPS is capable of bursting to 100Mbps as shown below. Low an end providers can often provide just as much as the average VPS provider imo.
100.SE – 321 KB/s
100.SE – 570 KB/s
100.SE – 239 KB/s
100.SE – 289 KB/s
100.SE – 467 KB/s
1000.FR – 450 KB/s
20.UK – 514 KB/s
100.UK – 353 KB/s
I’ve no idea what speeds are like to other places, and I know how odd peering and routing can be, and how much they can affect speeds.
For example, from one of those .SE to the website, it’s 19 hops, and passes through .DE and .FR.
On the 1000.FR it’s 13 hops, FR to UK, back to FR, then onto EG.
From home, the 20mbit, it’s UK > FR > EG, no messing about, 12 hops.
Sure, these VPSes aren’t great to the rest of EU but I’d imagine that for their target audience they perform better.
I know GPX’s site, its good by Egyptian/Middle Eastern standards but compared to anything in Europe or USA, its really 100th rate.
Transit via Link is really poor. Out of Egypt, the only transit providers worth looking at are TE Data (the national operator) and Teleglobe (now VSNL).
Link’s network is a low grade service for DSL customers, they try to pass it off as business grade but compared to anything that the rest of us are used to it, its awful.
If you want a VPS in the Middle East – avoid Egypt – go Dubai or even Kuwait.
@Anonymous: care to share some names/links of “good” providers in the Middle East?
I’ve searched, and it’s very hard to find anyone with an English-language site that offers servers or hosting actually in the Mideast. (There are a lot of webhosts from the region, but it’s amazing how many of them run off of servers in, say, Texas.)
I strongly suspect that one issue that would rear its ugly head quite quickly is censorship; not all of the countries in the region are equally liberal with regards to freedom of speech, et cetera. (I’d be very, very cautious about offering shared webhosting on a server in, say, Dubai, or Qatar.)
Keeping this in mind, I intended from the start to use my VPS from CityNetHost as a slave nameserver, which should be about as inoffensive a use as possible. That said, to be on the safe side, I’m going to take some pain to see to it that I’m not hosting DNS for any potentially objectionable sites. (The CityNetHost AUP isn’t terribly clear – it just mentions that you can’t use the service for anything that violated Egyptian law, without really going into what that entails – but I strongly suspect pr0n sites are a big no-no, among other things. I’m not sure how the complaint process would work, exactly, and I don’t really want to find out. I can live quite happily without receiving threatening letters from a foreign country’s Ministry of State Security, or whatever…)
Mike:”I strongly suspect that one issue that would rear its ugly head quite quickly is censorship; not all of the countries in the region are equally liberal with regards to freedom of speech, et cetera. (I’d be very, very cautious about offering shared webhosting on a server in, say, Dubai, or Qatar.”
In indonesia, it is because bandwidth is very expensive.
If you really want a VPS in Egypt, then talk to Link or TE Data directly. They will both offer you the service.
TE Data is Telecom Egypt, Link is primarily DSL provider but they like to dabble in anything that they can turn a quick buck on.
If I was going to do something in Egypt it would be with TE Data, they own the national infrastructure and have the highest amount of spend going into their infrastructure.
Do remember connectivity into Egypt is almost exclusively over the SEA-ME-WE cable system and most traffic goes via Marseille or Sicilia.
If you traceroute from your VPS to the main domestic IP providers – 3g is prevalent:
– Etisalat http://www.etisalat.com.eg
– Mobinil http://www.mobinil.com.eg
– Vodafone http://www.vodafone.com.eg
you will often find that the traffic will leave the country, go to Europe and back in. So if you are looking to deliver content to an Egyptian audience then Paris or London is better suited. You can avoid the double hop (read congestion) in and out of the country.
@Anonymous
You are total unfair.
1- You do not know much enough about GPX Global http://www.gpxglobal.net/ they are Tier 4 DC.
2- All local traffic in Egypt is local, traceroute from Egypt to any host inside Egypt will never go through international links. All ISP’s in Egypt peering in CAIX and/or MEIX.
3- LinkDotNet is a very stable ISP in Egypt, How much you know about ineternet market in Egypt, what is your source of information!!.
4- I am not sure what is your problem with Data Centers in Egypt!!!
have a nice weekend
@Anonymous
Dear Anonymous can you please tell me who are you, why you are using Anonymous nick name and telling untrue stories about Egypt.
Im happy with them, i can easily get 10Mbit to Austria (EU), VPS is Stable (tough i broke it today and wait for reinstall now), payment was by paypal (which is not offered anymore) – the price is very good, and the servers are nice (but the debian OS template includes much unused crap like bind and apache)
If you need a presence in Africa/ME and dont have much money then citynet is the way to go.
Mohammed, Khalid, People who posts comments as ‘Anonymous’ are either not for real, or they are chicken s***. So I think you can ignore their comments. Probably he is one of competitors who is afraid of losing business to you. :) All the best of luck guys.
@Sree – However, I think their comments have some truth to them.
@Jackk
We would like if you can sort out what is true and what is untrue.
You should not allow anonymous users to add comments on any company or products.
Tried to order just to test out the server but due had to cancel my order due to an interrupt.
Now http://client.citynethost.com is and has been for some time….
Woops, the cat ate my words and moved them around… the server is DOWN, I meant
Yeah and their online live help domain is down as well. Good start.
How did it go with your order mkn ?
Anything new?
:)
Dear ALL
We have just updated our Web site to the latest WHMCS version realesed few days ago.
Sorry for the down time.
You can place your order now guys :)
My experience, in case anyone stumbles across this thread –
I signed up on a Friday. I was asked to send a scan of my credit card, which I couldn’t since it was a virtual credit card number (paypal). I sent an image of my passport (number redacted) instead. At first they said they were refunding my money due to a fraud alert (refund hasn’t gone through) but got a 2nd invoice on Monday, which I also paid.
Tuesday night, my VPS still hadn’t been set up. I used the “live chat” feature, explained my situation to Mohamed. I had my VPS within minutes without a fuss.
So – they’re a little disorganized, but I had a very positive experience /w Mohamed’s help. Definitely worth a look. I’ll post again if I have anything to say about uptime (too soon to gather data) or network quality (so far, passable.)
is ur vps service on 24 hours? Can it be used 4 24 h0urs forex trading?
@ Nurin YES
Now we accept PayPal payment.
But I did not find any downtime with citynesthost…! Already used them for 23 days and counting. Their server is fine on Asian countries as well. I recommend them.
@Mohamed glad to know you activate your PayPal. Have good business…
08.10.10 09:00 Server is down, citynethost.com is down to… WTF?
@AcerExtensa
I see this post too late, we are online Sir.
down again, once aweek
This is normal I guess. And before someone drop by to say “hey contact support instead of whining here”, sorry, both their website and support portal are down too. :-)
It’s back online. Someone toying with their BGP or core switches?
Probably they are having hard time getting electricity for their servers because Egypt had really hard time last Ramadan. There was electricity failures allover Egypt almost every day and some were for several hours.
Sorry to post again I have a question which I think will concern all guys around. I found that you offer up to 10TB monthly bandwidth for dedicated servers
Can you tell me the line speed? 100 Mbps or 10Mbps or what?
It’s down again. I don’t think it’s the electricity, the server was running fine (uptime 7+ days before it was down *again*) but a traceroute showed timeout when it hits the first Level3 node.
As for the speed, I only managed to get approx. 2MB/s on my VPS with a test to cachefly file, and that translates to something like 16mbps? Not sure about local EG users, but in general with this speed I don’t think you can push 10TB through the line.
After three months, my VPS is down – or gone, I can no longer log in to the control panel, and the sales/support staff are now denying I was ever a customer, in the absence of an order number I was never given. Lovely. Oh well, only twenty-four bucks wasted on these clowns…
@Mike,
I just need any reference to make sure you are the owner of the server.
Some thing like your full name/email address/Credit Card Transaction ID/PayPal Transaction ID/
You submited a ticket with an email not registered on our billing system, you need to login to submit a ticket using email registered with us. If you lost your Client Area password you can simply reset your password by using your email registered with us.
Please advice!!!
You have my full name, and you have the e-mail address I registered with, and to which you sent the setup details originally, in August. That e-mail address is no longer recognized by your “Client Area”, handily preventing me from resetting the password to my account, which I think it’s becoming increasingly clear you deleted for no good reason. I paid with a credit card (ending in 9280, if that helps), on 01 August 2010, and never received a “transaction ID” of any sort.
Incidentally, “making sure I am the owner of the server” does not in any way explain why the server is and has for several days been down, when I’ve prepaid for another nine months.
*When you were actually providing the service I paid you for*, I had no complaints whatsoever about it. Pity that you’ve decided to arbitrarily and without warning remove it, and then lie about it.
@Mike
I recognized your order using your credit card ending 9280. why you think we deny your order while we are working for you to provide your hosting needs. I asked you from the beginning to give me any reference.
I found your server down, just restarted it for you.
Looking for your comment!!!
Just a followup, they did eventually restore the server, though no explanation has been forthcoming as to, you know, why it was down in the first place, why they couldn’t tell I was a customer, et cetera.
Tested 1 month VPS. So far, I can’t understand why all the complains are about on this website. For that price, I’m happy with the service given.
So, I suggest you all can stop complaining. Please, you all have thousands of other providers you can go with, if you are not satisfied. Aren’t that the way it should be instead of whining of a $25/- a year server?
It appears that citynethost.com DOES accept PayPal.
The server was setup automatically within seconds.
I am very pleased with the service for the low price!
Everything is working wonderfully for me.
Stay away from cityhost, there service goes down numerous times a day and there internet speed is 56k speeds if not slower.. i’ve been trying to reconnect to my vps with citynet for more then 8 minutes, and this is almost a hourly occurrence but i guess with most things said you get what you pay for BUT this server should be free for the usability it has which is next to none.
was going to preform a speedtest but there connection is so poor.
The connection has timed out
The server at speedtest.net is taking too long to respond.
Stay AWAY from CityNetHost – here is my review after beeing customer for 2 months with 24 VPS with them :
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1060071
I am using citynethost vps service 8 months ago, very good support team and improved up time.