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Dead Pool July 2011

July has been an eventful month for me. Took 2 weeks break, and came back on the day with a messy DDoS on this blog and LowEndTalk. There have also been quite a few dead providers who went to ‘da pool last month. Listing them in alphabetical order below…

availablevps AvailableVPS

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

AvailableVPS was labelled as “knocked semi-unconcious” in last month’s dead pool post. I guess someone has finally pulled the life support from it. They would have been labelled dead in March when they moved all their VPS customers to SetupLink. Interestingly “admin@availablevps.com” has sent me new offers as recent as 9th of June. Website was no longer resolvable a month later, and they announced that they were selling the domain over here.

Sorry for those who signed up to their $14/year 128MB OpenVZ VPS last September — lucky if you have received half of the service.

LogicIdea LogicIdea

Current Status: Redirect to ClientCentral.info

Problem for low end VPS providers — if you give too much resources, you are likely overselling and everyone gets bad performance. If you give too little resources, no one is buying from you. I guess LogicIdea falls in the later. $5.63/month for 64MB OpenVZ instance with 30GB/month data — I doubt they get many takers. However they still seem to be hanging there, as LogicData has now rebranded as Zingiri. VPS is no longer available for odering.

SuperBytes SuperBytes

Current Status: Brand closing down

SuperBytes was one of the original low end VPS provider, offering 64MB OpenVZ boxes for $5.10/month ~3 years ago. It’s one of the Canada-based Kerplunc sites, who will continue their VPS hosting business with their other brands — TinyVPS and Fiber Firefly. From the website it says “SuperBytes is no longer accepting new sales. All current servers will stay online and operating normally.” which is good to hear.

Upcoming

There are definitely some upcoming dead pool candidates for August. Some are already dead in fact, although I’ll give them until early September to see whether they’ll respawn.

  • ClubUptime — their website is no longer resolvable as of 3 August. We all know what happened, or maybe we don’t. It did have pretty good response at the beginning offering cheap Softlayer-based VPS, but things went downhill this year. Discussions on them can be found at LowEndTalk with Matt chimed in. From the look of it there is still much to say about it.

  • SimpleRack — Cody said back in May that he is buying the site back and getting ready to relaunch. A quick WHOIS shows that he is indeed the owner of the site now. However the “count down” on the website has been showing a string of ZEROs for a very long time now. Maybe they should declare themselves dead?

  • TropicHost. Their website has been dead since 5 July showing “Under Construction!!! Prepare to be surprised……. In ~30 days (~08/23/2011) :-)”. That’s almost 2 months of downtime to prepare for the “surprise”. Won’t surprise me if they end up in dead pool then. I’ll keep my eyes open.

That’s it for this month. /me getting back to work now.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

49 Comments

  1. CU is confirmed dead by Matt.

    Called it on AvailableVPS!

    Francisco

    August 10, 2011 @ 2:28 am | Reply
    • Yeah I know :P Since they “officially” go offline on 3 August I’ll give them some slack and leave them for my next month’s post.

      August 10, 2011 @ 2:48 am | Reply
      • Matthew Rosenblatt:

        We’re not bringing the brands back, or coming back into this industry any time soon. You can mark Club Uptime as dead whenever you want.

        August 12, 2011 @ 9:03 am | Reply
    • Maybe we should start a betting pool on these.

      August 10, 2011 @ 1:04 pm | Reply
  2. Not dead yet, just reorganizing and cleaning up the mess left behind by the previous administration.
    Look for everything back up by next month.

    August 10, 2011 @ 3:23 am | Reply
    • Maybe restarting the count down again? :)

      August 10, 2011 @ 3:55 am | Reply
      • Done.
        Thanks for the suggestion. I am working hard to rebuild and restore Simple Rack to its former glory. All suggestions are appreciated!

        August 10, 2011 @ 7:22 am | Reply
  3. It appears as though W2Interactive is dead. They haven’t got back to me in 4 days on my VPS being down…

    August 10, 2011 @ 5:35 am | Reply
    • thekreek:

      @DanGarion your vps was still active, you been lucky a lot of people have had their vps down since the begging of the chaos with them. According to the CEO blog, they were coming back at the first of july. Anybody else has news from them?

      August 10, 2011 @ 5:57 am | Reply
      • Actually I don’t know how long it has been down because I was working on a project back in May and then put it on hold, so for all I know it could have been down for a couple months.

        August 11, 2011 @ 12:43 am | Reply
        • Djegy:

          Yes dead… Can we open a zombies pool? They are sending emails but no service from them since june.

          August 21, 2011 @ 4:40 am | Reply
    • yaocheng:

      r u still using w2? omg … u r so lucky

      August 10, 2011 @ 9:22 am | Reply
      • Pretty much. Last I knew they were completely down with datacenters cutting them off.

        August 10, 2011 @ 1:05 pm | Reply
  4. Another one three bytes the dust.

    August 10, 2011 @ 8:02 am | Reply
  5. Luigi:

    Also FirstnetServ is dead. All vps down and customer area also down. (https://www.firstnetserv.info/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=4)

    August 10, 2011 @ 10:04 am | Reply
    • I guess he really really really needed to fill those nodes.

      :P

      Francisco

      August 11, 2011 @ 12:25 am | Reply
      • We have moved are billing system, we are working on updating the site.

        “I guess he really really really needed to fill those nodes.”

        Another smart comment. And unlike some people we don’t oversell like mad.

        August 14, 2011 @ 11:43 am | Reply
  6. Gary:

    I got an AVPS box when it was posted here, I reckon I got my money’s worth. Uptime was good, customer service was worthless. You gets what you pays for. :)

    August 10, 2011 @ 10:15 am | Reply
  7. Volume VPS User:

    We got a VPS from Vazapi that worked well for a few days. Then it went down. The first trouble ticket resulted in a fix “had to unwind corrupted volume”. Then it went down hard. No response to trouble ticket. Then an email dated July 12th announced that Netrouting of Netherlands was acquiring Vazapi and relocating from Chicago “to Netrouting, Inc.’s Datacenter located in Miami”.

    After that, we got an invoice, and automated messages about tickets left open. Never did get a full month’s service, or any further communications.

    August 10, 2011 @ 12:50 pm | Reply
  8. FZ:

    Dashinghost.com should be in dead pool too. The web site is still there but according to this thread at wht, seems servers are being sold and wiped clean without notice to existing clients.

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1068867

    August 10, 2011 @ 3:53 pm | Reply
    • Thanks. Looks like I’ve got a bit of amendment to do today.

      August 10, 2011 @ 11:35 pm | Reply
    • I’m lost as they’re discussing/ referencing Club Uptime in that thread as well. is there a connection between the two?

      August 11, 2011 @ 6:18 pm | Reply
      • Matthew Rosenblatt:

        No connection, just speculation. Club Uptime only encompassed clubuptime.com and brohoster.com (Unless they were reselling our services, but I doubt that as we hadn’t offered budget services in months).

        August 12, 2011 @ 8:58 am | Reply
  9. Go:

    That remains my worst nightmare in the industry, since I was a victim of it few times alreade. I can’t describe how I feel when my provider tells me somehow that he will shutdown, it means I going to have countless trouble and head ache, and I have to deal with it. If I get such news in early morning that is enough to ruin the day and the following days altogether.

    August 10, 2011 @ 4:57 pm | Reply
    • iKocka:

      Always have a backup plan to minimize the downtime ;)

      August 10, 2011 @ 5:50 pm | Reply
    • If stability is your concern, you would go for the big named brands. Not saying Rackspace or Softlayer, but maybe our quarterly poll results would be a good starting point.

      – BuyVM
      – RAM Host
      – QuickWeb
      – Hostigation
      – VooServers

      these are less likely to be in the dead pool, than a lot of VPS providers featured on this blog.

      August 10, 2011 @ 11:38 pm | Reply
      • Yup, joined 3 of them.

        August 11, 2011 @ 5:10 pm | Reply
        • Raj:

          Personally, I’d rather pay a few bucks more per month for the peace of mind that my VPS provider isn’t going anywhere.

          Even if they do go under, I backup nightly.

          I also took LEA’s bootstrap script and added to it some new functions to rebuild any VPS complete with config files. So I can have the new VPS stripped down, reconfigured, backups downloaded and extracted, and running in a short amount of downtime.

          August 11, 2011 @ 7:05 pm | Reply
    • Go:

      Thanks a lot, a valuable advice :)

      August 11, 2011 @ 4:53 pm | Reply
    • At least in your case, you got notice. Many of these providers who wind up in the deadpool, they give no notice. Or try to pass the blame.

      August 11, 2011 @ 11:28 pm | Reply
  10. Jim Snow:

    Highendvps in the Atlanta Category is also dead (domain expired) time 2 remove

    August 11, 2011 @ 1:10 am | Reply
  11. innya:

    LEA,
    you forgot or left out about ENOTCH.
    It has been down, gone and belly up.

    August 12, 2011 @ 6:50 am | Reply
    • Don:

      Not looking good for Enotch, although they claim the will be back:
      http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=7623889

      August 12, 2011 @ 1:20 pm | Reply
      • Thanks for the link. They’re passing the blame onto Cogent bu8t some folks are calling them on the story. I seriously doubt that an uplink would be cut after 4 hours after a single spam complaint like they’re trying to say.

        August 12, 2011 @ 10:01 pm | Reply
        • They stated it was a cancellation ‘done too early’ of their service with cogent and they were looking to move locations (was there ever an email/heads up/announcement about this?)

          They had issues earlier in the year where they went dead for a while due to spam complaints, or so they say.

          I personally know that when our old shitecenter back in Portland had pure cogent for the longest time and cogent didn’t even care that they were hosting spammers/etc. They complained, but the only time they had issues with the line was money related, not abuse.

          Francisco

          August 12, 2011 @ 10:12 pm | Reply
        • Another plus for controlling your own IP ranges I guess. I know ours are from our uplinks so we would be in the same boat but we’re pretty quick on spam related complaints. At least for the most part. I know we’ve had a couple of discussions with our uplinks over complaints but 1) our clients know to cover their butts and operate their lists correctly and 2) we’ve never been threatened.

          But yes, our in house pool lines and their ranges, we’ve never heard anything about them.

          August 12, 2011 @ 11:01 pm | Reply
        • ab:

          what is “shitecenter” and why exactly o.O

          August 12, 2011 @ 11:46 pm | Reply
        • Spirit:

          Single homed “datacenter” Directspace.

          August 12, 2011 @ 11:52 pm | Reply
      • I believe that they should be on the deadpool. They had been responsive (at least from what the people on the thread says)

        August 16, 2011 @ 9:31 am | Reply
    • Don:

      My Enotch VPS is back online. They say “All Services have been restored.”.
      The ‘uptime’ command shows it was up the whole time of the disruption.
      The VPS is very slow even though I’m not really doing anything on it – I
      guess everyone else on the node is catching up.

      August 16, 2011 @ 10:00 am | Reply
  12. Appearing in LEA’s “dead-pool” is probably every VPS provider’s worst nightmare.

    August 12, 2011 @ 10:20 pm | Reply
    • Actually it does not matter. If it’s dead, it is dead – probably wont care about landing on someone’s record keeping blog post…

      August 12, 2011 @ 11:39 pm | Reply
  13. fred:

    Clubuptime did a terrible dirty job with me.
    They deleted my server without notice, even thou I asked them if they would delete it or keep it.
    they say they will keep servers running for 3 months for those who need it.
    suddenly my server was delete, as in “rm -rf”. unrecoverable, out of nothing.

    I had backups, but a day downtime totally sux.

    Not to mention that they did not refund my $40 I had just paid for a 3 month subscription.
    they totally ignored my emails.

    Those dirty cheaters should be beaten up.

    August 18, 2011 @ 4:14 am | Reply
  14. Hello,

    Thanks for the review. I’m working on a mini redesign and a few new products for TropicHost, we will be back up soon.

    Have a good day!

    August 19, 2011 @ 12:44 am | Reply

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