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Dead Pool May 2010

I am now making my dead pool posts a monthly feature, looking at the low end VPS providers that have FAILed this month. It seems to be a really busy month with new’ish players dying left and right.

ReVPS ReVPS

ReVPS came into scene in early January, when the domain was first registered. It was selling 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $5/month. The IP still resolves to somewhere in HostNOC. Still pings, but port 80/443 fails to connect since May 7. If you actually checked the original post, their entire website spelt dodgy, with mis-spellings and very bad geography knowledge. Another BurstNet reseller that we probably do not need.

FierceServers FierceServers

FierceServers was first reported here back in February 2010, sitting on a relatively new domain (registered in November 2009). Their doamin stopped resolving on 10 May, and I guess their servers are probably too fierce and burnt all their customers’ virtual server as well. Here is one relevant discussion thread on WHT. Do note that they have domain privacy on their domain. WHOIS privacy something that is okay for small blog sites like this. However if you are a business dealing with clients on the Internet, it would be a big dodgy sign IMHO.

TheVPSNode TheVPSNode

TheVPSNode came into scene back in March 2010, and they are reselling BurstNet’s OpenVZ offerings like many low end budget providers. They were doing it at the same price as BurstNet, and that does not seem to help bootstraping their business, especially after this scamming fiasco surfaced. The website thus has never been fully setup — nor were client’s VPS I guess. The company still appears to be registered so maybe it will comeback one day. Maybe not.

OneNetwork OneNetwork

OneNetwork got featured on LowEndBox again in late March 2010 — looks like we have more and more “very short lifespan” hosting providers recently (although some people would prefer to call them scammers). It lived on a 13 year old domain — but then the age of domain does not really tell you about the history of the current registrant. There were DNS issues with domain, so on 28 April it decided to not resolve at all. The website did come back on 8 May, showing that it is currently out of business. Did people actually have a business plan when they start?

Linux Managed

LinuxManaged.com gotta be one of the biggest joke — asking/advertising for pre-order of their VPS products when their website was in development. At the same time emailing me multiple times to have the site featured on LowEndBox, and then sockpuppeting on WHT with fake recommendations.

I guess no one is surprised by the out come. Their website was NEVER finished, and the domain is currently not resolving. The IP address is still live so I tried to connect to it, and the browser brought back RoyaleHost.com on the same IP. Maybe there is a part 2 in this story?

That’s it for this month! There are some other providers that look half-dead which may appear in next month’s dead pool.

  • HostMist — Showing emergency page since May 24. Will they finally bring back their website?
LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

33 Comments

  1. HostMist seems to have returned!

    June 1, 2010 @ 11:26 am | Reply
  2. Indeed they have! Hopefully not because of the mention here :)

    June 1, 2010 @ 11:40 am | Reply
  3. Love it, my pessimism for Burstnet resellers is justified, at least in my own mind :)

    June 1, 2010 @ 2:07 pm | Reply
  4. Dirk:

    Hostlambda should somehow be on this list too.
    They are back online, but that’s about it.
    Have a VPS with them, is no longer accessible.
    No responses to tickets (open now for more then 10 days) or emails.

    June 1, 2010 @ 4:11 pm | Reply
    • @Dirk — Yes I saw Hostlambda going up and down throughout month. I will take note of that and may include them next month.

      @Mudel — I’ve never used VPS from BurstNet and its resellers before maybe I will give it a try to see how bad they really are (although I got bitten by quite a few other dreadful providers through running this blog).

      @Dan — well there are different types of defence. BurstNet has its unique way :)

      June 2, 2010 @ 2:13 am | Reply
  5. Mudel:

    What’s up with all the BurstNET resellers? ^_^ Surely people realize reselling products for $2 more than BurstNET is not a sustainable business plan.

    June 1, 2010 @ 7:37 pm | Reply
  6. It’s not just about the fact there are more and more BURST RESELLERS coming in to the industry with no clue but BURST themselves are truly awful – looking to the power issues lately and I think we all know about BURST’s reputation and the “You get what you pay for” theory.

    June 1, 2010 @ 9:32 pm | Reply
  7. Mudel:

    @ Jason – Fully agree with you. Not to mention, I’m tired of going through the WHT forums and 1/4 of the VPS forum posts are BurstNET complaints >_>

    I’m sure some BurstNET rep will come here now and attack me for posting this ^_^ They always get so defensive on WHT.

    June 1, 2010 @ 11:51 pm | Reply
  8. @ Mudel

    Have you actualy looked into the threads in detail?, As am sure you have noticed that nearly most of the time its due to the actual client. And burst has refused to help (For Free), because of this they make silly threads.

    June 2, 2010 @ 12:15 am | Reply
  9. @Mudel

    “They always get so defensive on WHT”.

    What would you do if your company was getting slammed, and you are just going by your TOS?

    June 2, 2010 @ 12:17 am | Reply
  10. Mudel:

    @ Daniel – I’ll agree that there is a lot of dumb threads and BurstNET has every right to defend themselves in that situation. However, sometimes the Burst rep gets a little heated and starts going at everyone that says something.

    @ LEA – I bought a $5.95 VPS there once and the biggest problem I had is support (though I didn’t expect a lot for $6, I’ll admit).

    It would be interesting to get your perspective on their service though :)

    June 2, 2010 @ 3:29 am | Reply
  11. @ Mudel

    They get many posts per Week Saying “Burst Sucks” “Burst Is Poor” all that rubbish, And its usualy because the client has messed up which i made clear earlier. Take HostFX for example, Claimed burst was having firewall issues and some other rubbish, In the end it was due to him not paying his Bill. And half of these reviewers are kids who know nothing about linux.

    I have to say i do have services with them, They have always been good to me , Great support, AV responce of 30 Mins which isnt too bad, They must be doing something right, They have thousands of customers.

    June 2, 2010 @ 7:19 am | Reply
  12. Gary:

    I wouldn’t accept packet loss, downtime or excessively bad performance, but $6/month for 1TB transfer, 512MB ram, 20GB space and guaranteed 1ghz CPU is insanely cheap. I wouldn’t expect any support other than getting the thing running and keeping it running.

    June 2, 2010 @ 3:43 pm | Reply
  13. Re: Hostmist: “Oops, we forgot to put the new site up! They’re talking about us over at LEB! Quick, where’s the files that need to uploaded?!?” maybe? :)

    June 2, 2010 @ 5:36 pm | Reply
  14. Rick:

    IMO Burst as well as their resellers are driving the price of VPS down as other companies are trying to compete. In the most part this leads to poor service and fly by night companies with no actual business plan.

    June 2, 2010 @ 5:37 pm | Reply
  15. vpseu.com are still alive but they stopped their xen service in a very uncomfortable way.

    June 2, 2010 @ 8:39 pm | Reply
  16. @Rick — “poor service and fly by night companies” existed long before BurstNet came out with their OpenVZ low end packages though :)

    @gomobi — sorry I will only put a provider into deadpool if they are completely dead like the examples from above.

    June 2, 2010 @ 11:15 pm | Reply
  17. @Rick, they were saying the same thing about ev1 when they started doing $1 for the first month servers.

    June 3, 2010 @ 12:29 am | Reply
  18. Mudel:

    BTW, what a waste of some pretty decent domains :(

    June 3, 2010 @ 6:37 am | Reply
  19. Another vote for HostLambda. VPSes are unreachable. Tickets are unanswered. Support is unreachable. The “Live Support” thing on their home page is always marked OFFLINE.

    June 4, 2010 @ 6:32 pm | Reply
  20. Hi,

    I noticed our website was “featured” here. Just to clarify, we are in no way linked to LinuxManaged.com.

    We host our main website at another company for redundancy purposes, and the dedicated IP provided to us seemed to have been in use by LinuxManaged.com previously.

    Hope this clears things up.

    Regards,
    Abigail P.
    RoyaleHost

    June 8, 2010 @ 11:45 am | Reply
  21. @Abigail — well that’s pretty unfortunate getting the same IP address as another company with bad records.

    June 8, 2010 @ 12:52 pm | Reply
  22. @LEA

    I wouldn’t remove them from the list either way, How many times have you seen hosts hop from domain to domain and they be the same person(s)? Too many to count i know. Just my opinion though.

    June 8, 2010 @ 1:33 pm | Reply
  23. Hi,

    No need to remove our website from the list – we have not requested that and had only posted here to clear things up. However jumping the gun so quickly only goes to show the extent that a competitor is willing to push and reflects very badly on itself.

    I have made my point and will not be commenting any further unless any further clarification is required.

    Regards,
    Abigail P.
    RoyaleHost

    June 8, 2010 @ 1:52 pm | Reply
  24. 24th and 31st were two separate incidents. We were not down the entire week we were down for 12 hrs the one day and the other one was like 4 hrs in the morning. DNS was either slow to update or you had a cached page of our backup site. I made it load like that because clients don’t want it to be flashy they want to be able to read it.

    24th was an incident involving a fiber cut between Wowrack’s Bothell and the Westin Building. The 31st was a planned migration and both times the VPSes were up and running as usual (since they’re in a different building).

    June 9, 2010 @ 7:24 am | Reply
  25. Destruction Jigsaw:

    I am sorry, but if a company has 2 different days of problems then you might want to wait before busting their chops on something you might not know the full story about. so i think you might want to remove Hostmist from the list as they work hard to keep sites like this up and running 24/7. Appreciate they didn’t like, oh maybe can your butt if you complain like some other companies would as they would say its in their tos! so give them a break and remove them!

    June 10, 2010 @ 5:18 am | Reply
  26. Was HostMist actually been on the list? Nope. Re-read it again. They were out of action for quite a few days before I wrote it up so I said that it look half-dead and may appear in next month’s dead pool. It did come back after I wrote those and let’s hope that they’ll be more serious about the availability of their website.

    June 10, 2010 @ 5:51 am | Reply
  27. LowEndBox,

    Is it confirmed that RoyaleHost and LinuxManaged are owned by the same people. RoyaleHost seems to be actively posting in WHT.

    June 12, 2010 @ 4:46 pm | Reply
  28. Hi,

    We have responded to your query on our WHT topic, if in doubt please request for a WHT moderator to verify our identities as well.

    Regards,
    Abigail P.
    RoyaleHost

    June 12, 2010 @ 5:00 pm | Reply
  29. WHT Moderator Cannot verify identities……

    June 12, 2010 @ 5:31 pm | Reply
  30. Hi,

    To my knowledge, it is not allowed for the same user to have more than one account on WHT. Running several companies and using WHT to advertise them is also disallowed. If this is the case, you can request for a WHT moderator to look into the issue and confirm if we are indeed the same person/company (whichever suits the accusation better).

    I can assure you that we are completely different companies and people. We have responded to the issue and provided all the necessary information to the best of our knowledge. If there remains speculations, there isn’t much we can do about it either – we may have just started, but check on us in a few years’ time, and I can assure you our business will still be up and running.

    Regards,
    Abigail P.
    RoyaleHost

    June 12, 2010 @ 5:36 pm | Reply
  31. @Free Hosting — likely some unfortunate provider got the same IP as LinuxManaged.com right after they went off-line…

    June 12, 2010 @ 9:21 pm | Reply
  32. innya:

    breezehost.net went offline for a few days.

    June 27, 2010 @ 4:51 am | Reply

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