I hope you are all well and enjoy the following community roundup. Please email me (liam at lowendbox.com) any hints, tips or requests. You can even email some questions for our next interviewee. If you look at the bottom of this post, there is a free domain up for grabs. In case you’re not aware, there has been a recent SSH vulnerability in cloudlinux/redhat/centos etc: http://cloudlinux.com/blog/clnews/sshd-exploit.php.

Community News:

LowEndGuide

A new Tutorial site.

Community member Mikho, has started a new tutorial site. He hopes LowEndGuide will serve as a tutorial site for all of us that are interested into cramming as much as possible into a VPS with really low specs. The intention of his site is not to blog about whats new and whats not, more to post guides on how to manage stuff that you have installed on your VPS, or even how to install them. I’ve had a quick look at his site, and it looks very promising. It already has quite a few tutorials. Mikho, is currently looking for ready made tutorials/guides to post or people to write them. So if you can help – send mikho a message!

z1s.org uptime

A new uptime project.

Community member Raymii, has recently launched a new uptime project. z1s.org, is a public uptime monitoring website using the Uptime node.js application. The idea came to him after he won a virtual server in a project we ran commemorating our 5th birthday. The monitoring tool, monitors hosts by checking to see the uptime status every 10 seconds. When a check fails, Zs1.org will check again every 1500 ms for 8 times. Basically, if a few packets fail from this side, the host will not show up as down. The monitoring is done from Italy, from the Prometeus network, with a 100mbps full uplink. More information can be found on the z1s.org website.

Raymii also has a very informative personal website with many scripts and tutorials on it. He has recently written a database backup tutorial, which can be viewed here.

Mini Deadpool:

If I’ve miseed anyone. Please inform me below.

1. FedoraIT/Budgetno.de – In early january customers began reporting their vps were dead and there domains were down. Zach had ran away.
2. Versatile IT – Whilst versatile were never featured on lowendbox (they nearly were), they were active on LowEndTalk. They shut shop due to personal issues. They hadn’t been around for long.
3. PremiumVM – After deadpooling two or three times before, we were surprised when Dominic launched PremiumVM. He pledged they weren’t a a fly-by-night company and told us how he was here to stay. After several months of business, they closed their doors. As a bit of fun, let’s have a guess what Dominic’s next company will be called?
4. VirExpert – VirExpert were featured once. They actually sent in another offer a few weeks ago but their domain has been unresponsive for a while.

Provider News:

BlueVM Roundup

A collection of news from BlueVM.

For customers of BlueVM and those of you who follow LowEndTalk, you will be aware of BlueVM’s recent migration to new hardware and, in some cases, new locations. We are told that BlueVM has now moved to new E3 nodes and their own IP space. As a result of the move, we are told clients should start to see faster disk speeds and better network speeds. They have also expanded to Buffalo, New York bringing their total network to 6 different locations. In addition, they’ve added rDNS, DNS and TUNTAP activation to their control panel, these features were previously missing.

CrownCloud celebrate their birthday

CrownCloud have now been in business for a year

Australian based CrownCloud are celebrating a successful first year in business. Crowncloud provide OpenVZ and KVM servers in several locations across the USA and Europe. They have been featured once before when we listed them in November 2012. We are told by one of their staff members that they will be sending in an offer shortly to celebrate this milestone.

Dewlance celebrate their birthday

Dewlance have now been in business for 4 years

Dewlance Hosting, the source of many jokes on LowEndTalk and webhostingtalk is celebrating its 4th year anniversary. Dewlance was founded in 2009 and, according to their ‘press release’, hosted fewer than 10 websites at the start. They struggled for nearly 1 year to expand their market outreach but today, they’re proud to say that they host over 1,100 websites and VPSs. They are offering a first month coupon on their website as a way of saying thank you to their loyal customers.

Fusioned Roundup

A collection of news from Fusioned.

In the next few days, Fusioned will be launching their brand new CachedSSD plans. They’ve been testing a particular server setup for a few weeks now, and have came to the conclusion that’s it ready for production. They’re running both the spinning drives as well as the caching SSDs in RAID10 for maximum performance and reliability, and are using LSI’s CacheCade 2.0 Pro as the caching solution. Keep an eye out on LEB and LET over the next few days as they hope to have their offer up shortly.

Their provider’s network is now multihomed. They are now connected to Proserve’s fully redundant network with 4 uplinks and 2 BGP sessions. Proserve have recently added an uplink to Jointtransit. We are told that Fusioned will be upgrading their bandwidth allocations on all of their plans (PureSSD and CachedSSD) for free. For example the 256MB plan will go from 100GB to 500GB and their 512MB plan from 200GB to 1000GB.

GetKVM expand

GetKVM have expanded abroad.

GetKVM, a British based provider of KVM and OpenVZ services, has expanded to New Jersey, USA. Previously GetKVM only provided virtual servers from the Equinox datacenter in Düsseldorf, Germany. New Jersey based servers are located in the renowned Choopa Datacenter in Piscataway, NJ – close to New York. GetKVM, who was founded by the same people who founded VMPort, have been featured 5 times on LowEndBox since they launched in July 2012. If you can remember, VMPort once provided services in New Jersey, albeit with a different company.

PaulVPS expands

PaulVPS have expanded to Los Angeles.

PaulVPS, a chinese based vps provider, have expanded to a new datacenter in Los Angeles, California. Since there was so much demand for west coast servers, especially from China and Australia, they decided to expand to the Enzu LA datacenter. This new location will increase the performance and speed to their Asian clients. PaulVPS have been featured twice before, offering servers across the USA and even in Germany. PaulVPS mention that their recent German offer, that we listed on LowEndBox, can be offered in LA too – if you contact them.

Raidlogic Roundup

A collection of news from Raidlogic.

Raidlogic have just released new OpenVZ based SSD Linux VPS. They now offer off-loaded MySQL for all of their VPS packages and is priced at $2.00 per month. It can be used externally or internally and we are told it’s hosted on a ‘powerful’ server. There is also a New integrated controlpanel for their Free DNS hosting which, along with their new off-loaded MySQL, makes it very easy to create DNS records and create MySQL databases/users. We are told RaidLogic will be launching 4 new locations in the next week, which are: Chicago, IL – New York, NY – Dallas, TX – Amsterdam, NL.

RamNode News

New product line launched

RamNode who have featured on LowEndBox a few times and are very active within our community, have launched a new CKVM-E5 SSD-Cached product line. For those of you familiar with our top providers poll, RamNode came third in our last one after coming fourth in the previous poll.

RamNode also tells us that they’re almost done adding nLayer to their network. Currently their network is single homed with Tinet SpA as the only peer.

SimpleNode New Location

SimpleNode expands to Phoenix, Arizona.

SimpleNode is now offering a new location, Phoenix, Arizona. Currently only OpenVZ and Minecraft services are available in this location on E3-1240v2 Hardware with RAID10, however they plan to bring KVM to this location soon. We are told that current customers with OpenVZ or Minecraft servers, can request a transfer to this new location, however your IP will change. Phoenix servers are located in the PhoenixNAP datacenter, with I/OFlood. A LookingGlass is available at http://phoenix.lg.simpleno.de/

WeLoveServers Roundup

Some news from WeLoveServers.

In December’s roundup, WeLoveServers was featured for its expansion to the Los Angeles market, and back then I mentioned that we would have plans to expand services to the central coast. A few days ago, WeLoveServers expanded VPS services to Dallas, TX to serve the central coast market, offering good latency to the entire US along with Mexico and South America. WeLoveServers are now also offering complimentary DNS hosting management to all their VPS customers.

Interview:

Prometeus Interview

An interview with the founder of Prometeus.

Salvatore, from Prometeus, has kindly agreed to do a short interview with us. More interviews, with better questions, are on the way!

 7 Question Interview:

Q1. Prometeus were founded in 1997, way before hosting providers were selling virtualised servers. Can you tell us more about Prometeus and why it was founded?

In the beginning of 1997 Daniela [his wife] was working as leader of the supportdesk for a software company, asthma forced her to leave (after being in hospital), since it was a closed place with several smokers. So we decided to start realizing small web sites for the local companies which at the time had no internet presence at all (and most not ever known internet). I was in need for a place to host the sites and noticed that there weren’t so many hosting company. We started reselling some packages and two months later I rented the first server (Irix) :-)

Q2. What has been the biggest change in the hosting industry since you began?

Control Panels and the “Unlimited” wave. Panels (ensim, cpanel, plesk, etc) made it simple for everyone to “become” hosting provider, while I had to develop for years my tools and it was not easy. Unlimited, well did unlimited damages to the industry :-)

Q3. Italy is by no means small. Why is it that there are very few Italian vps companies compared to similar sized countries such as the UK?

Most Italian companies works for the domestic market only, so there is little chance they are know abroad. Also the service itself (VPS) is not very common, as it require some skills so often some advanced hosting hide or include a vps service. Then some years ago companies started selling the “cloud” (in most cases simple vps), which was a cool marketing term, so the term vps was almost skipped here :-)

Q4. From backup servers to KVM servers, you guys offer a lot of choice! What has made you guys so successful?

Choice, a good service and a decent price I suppose.

Q5. What impact has LowEndBox had on your business?

When we were listed the first time I was worried to not be able to sustain the flow of orders, reading other’s experiences. It was a small delusion, orders were way below the expectations :P Then I saw the effect of the listing later, the exposures increased the users landing on our site and it was good.

In the end I think it is very important for us to be listed regularly, even when we don’t are able to submit the right offer (such as the last one that was a big fiasco :-D ), as it help the brand visibility and is an occasion for people to appreciate (or criticize) our services in the blog comments. You guys do a great job for both users and providers.

Q6. One big question most of your customers seem to want to know is: will you be expanding abroad?

I don’t know, really. From a business point of view I know it will help, but personally when I had servers in US (or NL, DE) I often felt important. Maybe if I find the right datacenter… ;-)

Q7. What can we expect to see from Prometeus in 2013?

The damn Cloud done right! :-)

Thank you for reading. The first person who emails (liam @ lowendbox com) and requests the following domain, can have domainhelpguide.com for free. I have no use for it and would like to gift it to someone who will use it.

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