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Dead Pool October 2010 - BlazeVPS, StriveHost and RentaVPS

After a big month back in September, we only have 3 dead providers in October.

BlazeVPS BlazeVPS

Current Status: Hard Drive Failure page

BlazeVPS raised to “fame” when it first introduced the $10/Year 128MB OpenVZ VPS + promising 4 different locations in US & UK back in July. These guys are getting a lot of attentions, and a lot of negative comments as well on WHT and on this blog. It did not take long for the empire to fall apart (if it can be called one in the first place). Plugs got pulled and boxes got taken down in all their locations. And finally their website disappeared, and replaced with a tiny note:

BlazeVPS has recently experienced a hard drive failure in one of our Server Nodes and our SolusVM Master server and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. This server crash has affected our company and we have lost all backups in place including for our Billing System.

Okay. Billing system gone. I guess that’s the end of this company.


StriveHost StriveHost

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

Consider StriveHost only released their “launch special” on 13 September, by 7 October their domain is no longer resolvable. Quite a few problems picked up in the blog post + comments. No explanation either why they are down (although the user who posted the offer on WHT is still active).


RentaVPS RentaVPS

RentaVPS was first featured on LowEndBox back in August 2009, offering 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.95/month. By October 2009 it was sold to Yomura Holdings — Giles’ UK-based company that also collect other hosting companies such as Delimiter.us and XVPS.us. Then on 24 October the web server starts dropping connections — that’s after the website moved to a UK server 2 weeks prior. Is Yomura Holdings dropping the RentaVPS brand?

Interestingly both Delimiter.us and XVPS.us are not connecting at the moment. Yomura Holdings used to have 4 ad slot on LowEndBox and now it is down to only 1 (ironically showing RentaVPS.net). Anything happening there?


And a few others…

Two providers that I have never posted their offers on LowEndBox have appeared dead as well.

  • Akisoft — first spotted by John in the RackVM post. $15/year 128MB OpenVZ VPS back in September 2010. It may or may not be Ben from RackVM, but it does not matter anyway as the IP address for their website is no longer resolving on 26 Oct.

  • LoveVPS — Tom notified me in this comment that the guys behind BitEntity (who was in dead pool last month) has moved to LoveVPS.com. And continue the tradition of BitEntity it went off line without a trace within the same month. Hopefully not many people got scammed.

Until next month :)

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

73 Comments

  1. Gary:

    Yomura have always been heading for a total shutdown. They’ve spent the last few months doing offers, taking customer money and running off with it, leaving the customer without money or service.

    I’m surprised at BlazeVPS. Not that I know anything about them, I’m just surprised that any VPS provider could neglect to have offsite backups like that. The core essentials couldn’t have taken up much space. They threw their business away for the sake of $5 of backup space per month.

    It almost makes me want to start my own VPS company and do things properly…

    November 5, 2010 @ 1:31 am | Reply
    • Snape:

      Sadly, it looks like more people are in the market for hosting that’s as cheap as humanly possible, than are in the market for hosting that’s done properly, and no matter how cheaply you manage to do things right, someone will always come along and undercut you by, well, cutting every possible corner.

      And just to add insult to injury, you’ll then get the distinct joy of messages and e-mails from half-literate little teenaged cretins telling you that your offers suck and are uncompetetive, and don’t you know anything about how hosting is supposed to be done?

      In short, don’t get into hosting. That way lies madness.

      November 5, 2010 @ 1:42 am | Reply
      • Gary:

        God yeah, I wouldn’t dream of it. The “almost” in my last sentence should’ve been in a biiiig font. :)

        November 5, 2010 @ 1:47 am | Reply
      • Haha. “Almost” — until your sense kicks in :) It’s a bad industry working for cut throat margin, dealing with some of the most demanding customers who never appreciate, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

        November 5, 2010 @ 3:20 am | Reply
        • Yeah, It’s a too complicated business to handle for me bro. That’s why I go back and just be a nice referral and not trying to restart my own.

          November 5, 2010 @ 5:36 am | Reply
  2. KLIKLI:

    The page of BlazeVPS has just been updated ;)

    November 5, 2010 @ 5:01 am | Reply
    • Okay. Posting them here just in case it gets updated again:

      BlazeVPS values each and every one of our customers and want to make sure that each and every one of them are taken care of. In doing so, BlazeVPS has been acquired by another company who will now handle all of our existing customers and make sure they’re all taken care of. Over the next 48 hours, you will hear from the new company who has acquired all customers who will make sure that everyone is taken care of and that all customers are set-up and restored.

      November 5, 2010 @ 5:10 am | Reply
      • Rus:

        Wonder who that might be *cough*

        November 5, 2010 @ 5:49 am | Reply
        • So now we know, ThrustVPS has another brand…

          November 5, 2010 @ 6:01 am | Reply
        • Hey Rus. Do you want me to send you the shopping list at the end of each month prior to posting here? :)

          November 5, 2010 @ 6:12 am | Reply
        • Jamie:

          Was such a comment necessary LEA?

          November 5, 2010 @ 9:40 am | Reply
      • I thought it was quite funny :P

        November 5, 2010 @ 9:41 am | Reply
        • Jamie:

          Then it ain’t a problem :) Must have been in a weird mood when i posted that

          November 5, 2010 @ 12:15 pm | Reply
        • Yeah. Sorry it was meant to be tongue in cheek. I usually gather a list of providers that drop dead from my trackers at the end of the month so I can post them here.

          And some bigger players seem to be buying them out.

          November 5, 2010 @ 1:03 pm | Reply
        • id:

          now people visit this blog not only to buy cheap vps, but also to buy/acquire the failing company…

          November 5, 2010 @ 3:49 pm | Reply
  3. So, don’t tell me BladeVPS acquired by ThrustVPS???

    November 5, 2010 @ 10:15 am | Reply
    • We have acquired the assests and goodwill

      November 5, 2010 @ 1:06 pm | Reply
  4. Hm… VPS market, is almost like a HYIP / ponzi scheme.

    Some of the new player, just hit the market with a great offer. Some of them also offering yearly package with great prices.

    After one month or later, they just gone, and maybe open a new VPS company, with a private WHOIS.

    Well, human, may get a lot of money by doing like that in this world, but, if they do anything with honest, i’m sure, their life will be better and blessed by God.

    November 5, 2010 @ 10:16 am | Reply
  5. earl:

    Wow!! BlazeVPS lasted longer than RackVM..

    November 5, 2010 @ 12:52 pm | Reply
  6. Sonic:

    BlazeVPS was bought by Rus Foster

    November 5, 2010 @ 1:17 pm | Reply
  7. I can’t figure out which comment to put this under so I’ll just add it to the tail.

    I wonder how they’re going to restore clients if the hard drive failed? Did they actually have a backup? Or did the hard drive get rebuilt?

    November 5, 2010 @ 1:59 pm | Reply
    • Snape:

      I think you mean “if the hard drive ALLEGEDLY failed”. If the now-former owners/staff of BlazeVPS had told me the world was round, I’d have developed a newfound respect for the flat-earth folks, if you get where I’m going with that. :)

      The BlazeVPS failure: hardware, software, or wetware? We may never know…

      November 5, 2010 @ 2:13 pm | Reply
      • My guess is there are no backups however I am however double checking that so never so never

        November 5, 2010 @ 2:39 pm | Reply
        • tsj5j:

          If they had no backups, what exactly did you buy?

          Goodwill is definitely close to 0, since customers will be really pissed their data is lost.
          Assets… well I doubt they have much assets, probably renting.

          November 6, 2010 @ 3:37 am | Reply
  8. Alex:

    After rackvm and blaze, never buy year plan vps, IMHO.

    November 5, 2010 @ 2:12 pm | Reply
    • I second that.

      November 5, 2010 @ 2:43 pm | Reply
    • earl:

      yup..

      November 5, 2010 @ 7:43 pm | Reply
    • NordicVPS still runs, their $15/year plan works fine from here… They seem to be quite stable to, got an mail some time ago that they were testing automatic rDNS…

      November 7, 2010 @ 11:27 am | Reply
  9. John:

    buyvm is next!

    November 5, 2010 @ 3:01 pm | Reply
    • Gary:

      Yeah, I can see the Dead Pool posts ending up “Guess who Rus & co will gobble up next” posts.

      Fair play to him, I’ve been a customer of his on and off for years and I’ve always been happy with the service. If he can take a failing company with potential, and turn it around, it’s good news for their customers.

      November 5, 2010 @ 3:11 pm | Reply
  10. Akisoft SolusVM is still up. Good thing is just a cPanel DNSONlY node. Time to do more shopping!

    November 5, 2010 @ 4:44 pm | Reply
  11. Giles Anderson:

    RentaVPS was merged into Delimiter about 2-3 months ago. The RentaVPS brand was never that strong to survive on its own.

    We cut advertising on LEB as the click throughs plummeted after the ads started rotating. With a $20 product on a website targeting a market priced at less than half of that; coupled with the excessively low prices on LEB’s other ads, we’re completely outpriced.

    We kept one ad for the relaunch of XVPS, we’ll see how that goes.

    November 5, 2010 @ 4:54 pm | Reply
    • Gary:

      I think the clickthroughs are more likely to have dropped because of the number of people from here and WHT you guys have ripped off.

      Surprised you’re showing your face around here to be honest.

      November 5, 2010 @ 5:01 pm | Reply
      • Giles Anderson:

        I am obviously missing something entirely. Are you saying you have been ‘ripped off’?

        How so?

        November 5, 2010 @ 5:36 pm | Reply
  12. An eCern Admin:

    There is a lesson in all of this though. If you are a hosting provider, or even if you are not and you use systems to provide services of any kind, mirror those geographically distributed systems, even if it is in an asynchronous fashion. There is NO REASON why losing a hard drive should cause anyone much trouble. We expect it and it happens and our clients never even know it occurs as their applications are spread out amongst a large number of servers. Learn to use Rsync and cron together. Take a look at MySQL or Oracle replication if you have database applications. If you want real backups, use a version control system on the servers. That way you can have weekly, daily, and even hourly snapshots of things. Anybody that thinks that they can trust their applications and data to a single server must be really inexperienced.

    November 5, 2010 @ 5:35 pm | Reply
    • This is one of the reasons why we’re moving our back ups overseas. Or trying to at least. :)

      November 5, 2010 @ 6:49 pm | Reply
  13. Karl:

    What I don’t understand is how can somebody believe that BlazeVPS really had a hardware fault.

    November 5, 2010 @ 8:16 pm | Reply
  14. Wow thurstvps is a bit actively buying kiddie hosts, I was told by our CEO he did received two emails from this guy soliciting if we wanting to sell off, we thought it was crazy and offensive… hopefully we won’t ever do that again! never in a hundred years lol, we love our company and we enjoy every minute working at QuickWeb plus the fact that we are growing very fast with a very bright future a head in fact we just added new staffs :)

    November 5, 2010 @ 9:01 pm | Reply
    • Good to hear that from QuickWeb :)

      November 5, 2010 @ 9:42 pm | Reply
    • Beny Ibrani:

      Good to hear that, any way why you don’t publish TestBox II on LEB, I think that’s one is great too.

      November 6, 2010 @ 12:26 am | Reply
      • Thanks for mentioning but it’s up to the LEA to publish our offers/promos/plans or not at the moment we are not contacting him about publishing any of our promos mind you, if you see us here again then it’s his own initiative… his plate must be full at the moment with these other hosts directly contacting him about their promos so let’s give them a chance to be featured here as well as i think we already have enough exposure here :)

        November 6, 2010 @ 12:38 am | Reply
        • Yeah full plate at the moment due to my work & other commitments. LowEndBox is *supposed* to be a small hobby that does not take up time, damn it!

          November 6, 2010 @ 9:35 am | Reply
        • I hope you guys get up here again soon i have a nice little testimony I’m waiting for the next offer to post up :)

          November 6, 2010 @ 11:08 am | Reply
    • Spirit:

      How unprofessional reveal! :P

      November 6, 2010 @ 3:27 am | Reply
      • I get a buy out offer or two every week. You get used to it….

        Heck, I’ve made a couple of unsolicited offers in the past as well.

        November 6, 2010 @ 4:23 pm | Reply
    • I got a “we are looking to buy” email too sometime in the month of October from the same group of people.

      It went straight to the trash.

      Brandon

      November 7, 2010 @ 8:55 pm | Reply
  15. Sad news, got contacted by thrustvps too ;)

    November 6, 2010 @ 12:22 am | Reply
    • Non…! S’il vous plaît, ne me abandonner …! Je vais être un bon garçon.

      November 6, 2010 @ 2:26 am | Reply
      • lol nous restons nous-même! Nous ne sommes pas à vendre, ne vous inquiétez pas! :) We do our business on our own, we are not on sale! :)

        November 6, 2010 @ 9:09 pm | Reply
        • Ah, il n’y a alors pas de problèmes. Je me sens soulagé maintenant.
          So, there’ll be no problem then. I am relieved now.

          November 6, 2010 @ 9:53 pm | Reply
        • Hanh:

          merci de nous laisser en paix

          November 8, 2010 @ 4:49 pm | Reply
    • That’s one of the (many) reasons why I’ve not linked to my own hosting company or even mentioned the name. There is a method to my madness.

      November 6, 2010 @ 4:23 pm | Reply
      • Little Birdie:

        Nigga please..the only reason you don’t mention MDDHosting is because you know damn well nobody here would be interested in purchasing anything from a pathetic little wannabe host reselling Softlayer services such as yourself. Now do us all a favor and stop trolling decent hosts like Psychz before I come to Indiana and shank your bitch ass myself.

        November 8, 2010 @ 7:17 am | Reply
        • Ignoring the offensive comment there, never heard of MDDHosting, no, that’s not me, and no, I don’t resell, I own my own boxes.

          Whatever you;re smoking, give it up as it;s not working for you and looks like to have destroyed more brain cells than it;s worth.

          November 8, 2010 @ 7:36 pm | Reply
        • And how many times have I said we’re a Direct Admin host. MDDHosting is a cpanel host. Get your facts straight.

          November 8, 2010 @ 7:37 pm | Reply
  16. another failing vps provider. whos next..

    November 6, 2010 @ 8:39 am | Reply
  17. Arafat:

    http://www.asim.pk/2010/08/26/thrustvps-a-review-summary-stay-away-from-them/

    @ Asim – Hi asim, thanks for those reports about the reality with thurstvps.

    November 6, 2010 @ 6:14 pm | Reply
  18. There is a lot of good business running in here… I hope everyone to get a good and stable host :)

    November 6, 2010 @ 9:10 pm | Reply
  19. It should be on both sides, good and stable host make customers happy, loyal customers makes providers happy. Just like Yin and Yang both complement to each other.

    November 6, 2010 @ 10:01 pm | Reply
  20. Akisoft:

    Akisoft is still up and running, we’re making a large number of changes and the site is down whilst we do this – we’re not taking on any new clients however, but support is still running smoothly. Most of our clients have been through word of mouth, and we’re not currently seeking to expand further in the VPS market past our current client base.

    Our VPS nodes are still up, we’ve simply come to realise that there’s no money in the budget VPS market and won’t be taking on any additional budget clients. Existing clients have nothing to worry about however, as we won’t be terminating anyone due to this decision. Had we continued down the budget VPS route though, we would of ended up losing a fair bit of money – and rather than collapse later down the road due to poor business planning, made a decision in the here and now.

    We’re going to continue down our route of development and higher end (custom in-house) hosted solutions, but our packages won’t be LEB suitable (there’s plenty of existing competition!).

    – Hallie.

    November 7, 2010 @ 2:05 am | Reply
  21. Hanh:

    Today, my XVPS.us,s VPS on node of FR was down… Logged into SolusVM… my previous OS was an empty space! What happens!

    November 8, 2010 @ 4:51 pm | Reply
    • Gary:

      That’s the world-famous Yomura service.

      November 8, 2010 @ 4:53 pm | Reply
  22. Hanh:

    XVPS.us’s VPS on FR-based node is still down, due to technical error (OS disappeared and could not re-install OS). It should be black-listed.

    November 9, 2010 @ 4:35 am | Reply
  23. Hey LEA,

    Looks like Akisoft finally went under:

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=7193973#post7193973

    Francisco

    December 30, 2010 @ 4:04 am | Reply
  24. At least they’re honest about what’s occurring.

    December 30, 2010 @ 1:14 pm | Reply
  25. Hello,

    I would just like to inform you that we have now purchased the domain from Tim.

    I was the owner of TigerTB.com previously however after selling the company I decided to start up a VPS company.

    I can assure you that LoveVPS.com / LoveVPS.co.uk will not die an early death and that LoveVPS and your servers are in safe hands with me.

    Thanks

    January 21, 2011 @ 7:05 pm | Reply
  26. BlazeVPS is not redirecting to http://www.thrustvps.com/

    July 10, 2011 @ 7:36 pm | Reply

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