It truly saddens us to continue reporting on the state of NexusBytes.

You may recall this company founded by @seriesn.  If you’ve been in the lowend scene for a while, you know that the industry suffers from another copy of another copy of another copy, to quote Fight Club.  I couldn’t count on a school bus full of hands the number of hosts who’ve put up the same templates with dirt-cheap pricing and are gone in a year.

But NexusBytes was different.  Besides cheap prices, they offered a lot of perks: free DirectAdmin, free Blesta, free migration, free Windows Server, NAT backup VPS, DNS hosting, email hosting, discounts on a second order, etc.  We interviewed the CEO, covered their acquisition of Smallweb, and were excited when they launched a new line of budget servers.  The CEO was deeply involved in the community and seemed to have both a long-term plan and the commitment to see it through.

But things started to fall apart in 2022.  As we wrote last July,

@seriesn dropped off LowEndTalk and for a while there was no response on anything from NexusBytes.  People started to post about not getting support.  Eventually, Jay from NexusBytes posted a long explanation.

The root cause is not novel: NB was a two-man show, one man left, the other man couldn’t handle everything.  There’s more details about how Jay caught COVID-19 and some other issues, but it’s the classic one-man-band story in the LowEnd world.

We’ve been hoping that there will be a happy ending to this story but…it doesn’t appear there will be one.

If you are a NexusBytes customer, you should be reading in this thread.  It details how a few LET diehards who have some administrative access with NB have been trying to help customers.  Here is a comment from LET moderator @Jord:

This isn’t a post that I wanted to write, however it has become abundantly clear to me both via this thread and my communication (or lack thereof) with Jay that this isn’t an issue that I can solve on my own.

I joined NexusBytes when Jay began to experience personal issues some time ago, things for the most part were going well, tickets were being responded to and services were remaining stable. I did not gain access to core systems, only the ticket system for which I could reply to tickets.

I just found out that some of the UK servers with Zare had not been paid, and this is why they are currently offline. I am unaware of the specifics of this, both directly with Zare and any other potentially affected providers as I was never given the right access to manage them. I’ve tried everything to get in contact with Jay, to get him to pay for the servers, but unfortunately, that has failed.

I’m beyond sorry and regretful that this has happened, the situation overall was difficult to navigate and I did not want to push for access to things that Jay was not comfortable with sharing. In hind sight, this was a mistake.

I would recommend taking any backups you can, while your servers are online. For any other affected customers whose services may already be offline, I will continue to try and contact Jay to see if we can get these back online.

Once again, I do apologise, but only having access to one system, is preventing me from being able to resolve this matter.

If I can help in anyway please let me know, I will try my best.

And @Zare said:

Just a note if it comes to it and people need to take backups I will restore all servers and allow a timeframe for people to do so.

And:

Jay, the CEO of NexusBytes, was quoted by LowEndTalk admin @DP as saying “I won’t let it die.”  But that was back in July.

We still hope that NB can be saved.  But if you’ve got valuable data, you must back it up elsewhere because the NB environment is not stable.

Many thanks to @Jord and @Zare!

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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