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LiquidHost - $3.74 256MB OpenVZ VPS in Seattle

Liquid-Host Alex wrote to me 2 weeks ago claiming that I have been ignoring his emails (which I have to apologise that I often do to most providers featured here) where he tried to have his low end VPS hosting plans listed on LowEndBox.com. No URL included in the email, and googling his business name “Liquid Solutions” turns up nothing hosting related. Finally, googling his email address turns up his site, Liquid Host, from some odd posts at Hacker Forums. Turns out his previous emails also got swallowed by Gmail’s spam box. Alex had just emailed me again yesterday demanding a reply — so here it is — your VPS plans on LowEndBox!

Their unmanaged VPS plans start at $4/month for “Level 1” plan, or just $3.40/month or $20/year according to this WHT offer with 15% off recurring discount code wht15off. You get

  • 256MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
  • 20GB storage
  • 200GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
  • OpenVZ/SolusVM

Oh wait, there’s also a “10% PayPal fee” that is payable which makes Level 1 $3.74/month instead (after discount) — even if you choose Liberty Reserve or AlertPay, which are the other 2 payment options. Servers in Seattle WA with Sentris. Domain was registered in July this year, however WHOIS info has been masked. You can still get his contact information from Liquid Solutions’ domain though. Both NS are on the same host. Website appears a bit incomplete — unless white empty space is hot again.

I’ll give a “pass” on this one. There are other offers in Seattle — for example the new FTN Hosting-backed URPad.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

26 Comments

  1. ab:

    i hope this is a joke and no one is actually dumb enough to use this “company”

    November 29, 2011 @ 4:39 am | Reply
    • Spirit:

      How can you tell that! This is going to be our favourite VPS host. Beside that some people need replacement for UptimeVPS! O:-)

      November 29, 2011 @ 4:49 am | Reply
      • Maybe some of these new providers are again the same guy behind downtime vps, rackvm and so.

        November 29, 2011 @ 6:38 am | Reply
    • The conspiracy theory is that I am posting these “offers” to boost number of page views here :P In this case I am just doing what the guy has asked for.

      November 29, 2011 @ 5:20 am | Reply
      • I think the more you post people on here that ‘started on hackforums’, it’s just going to validify them as a reputable place to offer and then endangering their customers to tons of DDOS complaints and likely server exploits due to most of these people not having a clue what their doing.

        It’s hopeful that once people get screwed enough times they’ll learn, but at the same time it isn’t really helping clean the market of bullshite “companies”. I’m sure a lot of your userbase (be it scraped or direct) is from countries that can barely speak a word of english so they go into this unknowingly.

        I’d love if there was a clause that hosts had to justify their pricing/pasts, but that’d simply be too much work on you, considering the only companies financially supporting the site are the ones advertising :) UptimeVPS wouldn’t have been listed nor many of these other brands that don’t deserve it.

        Francisco

        November 29, 2011 @ 6:13 am | Reply
      • @Francisco — yes for this particular provider, I listed them because they “nagged”. However I am not really in the business of top provider lists, and a large part of activities here is for the community members around this blog to fault-find and criticise providers, to help others who might have come across them via search to not fall for them.

        As of being too much work for me — yeah that’s still the case. Wasted 2 hours during my work hours answering LowEndBox/LowEndTalk related emails and doing researches :P Time to move on?

        November 29, 2011 @ 8:00 am | Reply
        • I don’t mean to come off as criticizing, just always worried that the quality of the community gets watered down with a lot of these sketchy providers. Normally it’s just Mike that’s chiming in fully but I figured i’d try to lend him a hand.

          Francisco

          November 29, 2011 @ 8:03 am | Reply
        • No prob. I think I’ll only do one “bad providers” day a week. Gonna post some more reputable offers later.

          November 29, 2011 @ 8:05 am | Reply
  2. Alex has been here a long time :) Since around start of June he started Planning for liquid host.

    November 29, 2011 @ 6:50 am | Reply
    • D:

      Really? The website looks as if it hasnt even had 5 minutes of planning put into it.

      Run away. Run far away.

      November 29, 2011 @ 7:18 am | Reply
      • He did have a different design up in july that was completed i think its a work-in-progress :)!

        November 29, 2011 @ 7:34 am | Reply
        • That “work in progress” has not really changed for the last 2 weeks. Did he really work for Liquid Host?

          November 29, 2011 @ 8:01 am | Reply
        • Spirit:

          He’s careful, patient and know that every good thing require some time! :P I actually appreciate those blank pages. They serve me as proof that he have serious intentions to become “best host in industry”. I wouldn’t expect anything less from him.
          So anyone ordered it already or I should be the first one to replace my old UptimeVPS box? :)

          November 29, 2011 @ 1:39 pm | Reply
  3. Alexander Barakov:

    Hello.

    First, thank you for the listing. About the many emails and the nagging – I just heard from other providers it takes alot of emails and alot of time to get listed, so I basically started forwarding the same email to you about 5 times, 1 time per day.

    Anyway, it does not really matter. Thank you for the listing.

    About most of the comments regarding my website – currently the livechat addon/button is somehow blocking some of the qjeury’s and make the hole website look unfinished and yeah, there are still things that need to be fixed. HOWEVER, I do not really understand what does this (the website design) have to do with the whole listing. Our expertise is not website design, we specialize in hosting. I would personally prefer to see comments about the hosting and services, as I do belive that we offer decent services for that price and judging on our constantly growing user base, I can say that our clients are satisfied with what they are getting.

    I am not claiming to be the best, neither think so. I am not claiming that we have lasted long too, as I havent. We do try to do our best and sooner or later it does repay.

    About HackForums – I am listed in there and I am not hiding it at all. I am exploiting it for traffic and yes, it is successful. The TOS are strict and I can for sure say that there are no abusers currently on the shared or the current VPS node.

    And yeah, you can troll (some of the commenters that did or did not yet post) for as long as you want. Most of the other providers are getting heavily trolled too, so I am okey with it and to be honest I do not really care about other providers (as I can bet for sure) trying to trash a listing in here.

    Anyhow, @ lowend Admin – thank you one more time for the listing in here.

    November 29, 2011 @ 1:18 pm | Reply
    • meow:

      > About HackForums – I am listed in there and I am not hiding it at all. I am exploiting it for traffic

      What a joke, “exploiting it for traffic”, that’s what they all say

      December 3, 2011 @ 2:20 am | Reply
      • Alexander Barakov:

        Go ahead, I am listening. What exactly does it make a joke?

        December 3, 2011 @ 4:14 pm | Reply
    • About the many emails and the nagging – I just heard from other providers it takes alot of emails and alot of time to get listed, so I basically started forwarding the same email to you about 5 times, 1 time per day.

      This isn’t directed to these folks but I and others have suggested posting an “You can email me this many times within this much of a time period” rule as well as a sh*t list for those hosts harassing you, LEA. You should not be taking that kind of abuse. I know you’ve mentioned in the past that BURSTNET (Got to remember kiddies, that’s all in caps!) has done this as well as others.

      But from reading this comment, sounds like this provider is equating all negative comments as trolling. We have enough of these folks around here. I think that this is just a sign of believing bad customer service is acceptable. I’m currently going through this with my storage locker place as they’ve recently lost a three month payment. I would hope that you (or any other provider here) wouldn’t think that my complaint of such is trolling although that’s what I;m getting from those folks.

      Turns out his previous emails also got swallowed by Gmail’s spam box.

      I’ll be honest. This company’s name sounds very familiar as being a spam support site. I’m hoping that I’m getting confused with Liquid Web, a provider that used to be well respected but has been going down hill recently, Considering that we’re talking about hacking forums, I kind of doubt it.

      The paypal fee, of course, is against their polices and should be reported.

      And that’s Dr. Mike to you, Fran. :)

      December 4, 2011 @ 8:45 pm | Reply
      • ab:

        At least burst has some semblance of legitimacy unlike this bullshit, though.

        December 4, 2011 @ 9:14 pm | Reply
      • Yes I might need to add that to the FAQ. There’s a reason why some first timers were never posted — I don’t really want you guys to get public humiliation :) Unless they nag and insist though.

        And I guess don’t bother to ask for the post to be taken down because you think it’s a mistake to ask to get listed (I’m talking about the JayStorage guy)…

        December 5, 2011 @ 2:28 am | Reply
        • Jaystorage isn’t the first to ask for that then.

          There has been at least a hand full of “providers” that have asked that.

          @Doc – When we get a shot of the diploma you’ll get your full salutation ;) Otherwise i’d be asking you to call me Professor CrankHandle (inside joke).

          I think you should colourize the joke listings and have this song/video playing on the background: http://www.trololololololololololo.com/ (you can hate me later).

          Francisco

          December 5, 2011 @ 2:41 am | Reply
  4. Alexander Barakov:

    Well, I am not taking all the negative comments as trolling. I generally go through the comments of most of the hosts and there are a couple of users just trolling at every single host, of course except theirs. Anyway, as I said, I do not really care. If you have had bad experience with us – go ahead, share it. If you had a good one – well, you might sahre this as well. I am not claiming to be the best, neither think so. We do try to do our best and so far it pays out. We do have enough satisfied customers and we are getting plenty of new one every day and we are happy with the growth. Running stable and smoothly for a new business.

    I honestly do not care, or lets say it like this – I dont give a damn fuck about empty, completly empty negative comments. I am monitoring this listing, if I do get negative complaints and comments regarding the level of service, I am going to take a look in them and resolve them if I can. As I said, I am not claiming to be the best, we have our ups and downs as every single other provider, but we DO try to provide a good level of service and support.

    About the emails – I have been talking with more than 3-4 (maybe more) providers that get listed here every month. Every single one of themt old me that listing is hard and usually takes more than 1 email. About getting into the spam. I do not really belive this, I was sending a email with title “Budget web host listing” from my personal gmail account/email, but w/e, we did get listed after all.

    December 4, 2011 @ 9:38 pm | Reply
  5. I have had an unmanaged VPS with Liquid Host since 29/11/2011 and on first impression I thought it was quite good actually. Tickets were answered very quickly and the client management area was well designed and easy to use. Apart from some initial setup issues the service seemed pretty good for only $30 per year.

    So after some initial issues with the creation of my account I finally got my box up and running after about 3 days and as I wasn’t in any particular hurry to have it going I was let it slide. I upgraded my VPS from the ubuntu 10.04 image liquid host offered to ubuntu 11.10. After a couple of hours of fighting with a patchy console connection (provided by liquid host’s online VPS management tool) I finally got the bare-bones box up to point I was happy with.

    The following day I tried (in vein) to ssh into my instance to start configuring a firewall and to get my box ready to run a jboss instance. After checking the client area for my account I noticed I’d been suspended so I submitted a ticket to find out why. The response I got was accusatory and quite snipey. So didn’t engage it to avoid antagonsing an obviously cranky Alex and was happy just to have my service returned. Anyway I set up my firewall to allow traffic on only 2 ports 22 & 80. The next day I couldn’t access the machine again so I went on to try to use the console provided by the liquid host. I was greeted with a 404 http error so logged on to the client area of my account to see what was going on to find my VPS was “Unavailable”. As I was pressed for time I just decided to try again later.

    After a few hours it was back up and I was able to access my machine again. When I checked my firewall set up I noticed it was disabled which seemed strange as I had previosly tested to make sure it was enabled at start up, anyways I though nothing of it and went on setting up some other bits and bobs. A couple of days later I sshed in again and the same thing my firewall was disabled which again struck me as strange but whatever. I was working away for a fantastic 5 minutes before I was kicked out of my ssh session and again the “Unavailable” status showed in my VPS’s client area.

    Just today I attempted to get back into my box and AGAIN “Unavailable”. I have now requested for my account to be closed and for a refund to be issued as I have only been able to successfully access my instance 3 times. I am sure that with time Liquid Host could be very good however currently it is unusable.

    The pricing plans offered are generous and the available options are very good IMO. For those ragging on the look of the website: they obviously didn’t set up an account and use the VPS management because as I mentioned before it is well laid out and easy to use… Anyway aesthetics should not be the basis for your decision to avoid a company especially one trying to establish itself – if it works and it’s cheap then happy days! If I had any advice for Liquid host it would be: 1) Allow someone else to handle your complaints if you are easily offended by criticism – the key to success is customer satisfaction even if that means taking a hit financially early on. 2) Upgrade your hardware so it can actually provide the service you offer, abuse of resources is one thing but accommodating normal use and even availiblity in general are a must. I wouldn’t completely write off Liquid Host just yet but for now I need something reliable for my startup company.

    December 12, 2011 @ 4:12 am | Reply
  6. SW-Cody:

    I thought it was illegal under PayPal terms to charge a PayPal fee??

    December 19, 2011 @ 4:30 am | Reply
  7. thegosea:

    what’s happend,this vps host website down after payed?

    December 27, 2011 @ 2:34 pm | Reply
  8. urian:

    This service is a joke. Technical support ignoring you for weeks and do not able to solve any problem.

    January 19, 2012 @ 1:51 am | Reply
  9. xiaoyaoyou:

    The 100m port, speed so slow?Can be solved?

    wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
    –2012-07-29 08:47:32– http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
    Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net… 205.234.175.175
    Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80… connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
    Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
    Saving to: `100mb.test.2′

    3% [===> ] 3,449,096 592K/s eta 2m 48s

    July 29, 2012 @ 7:57 am | Reply

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