Sean, from OpenITC, has apparently been trying to get listed for a few months now. But oblivious to him, we have a new method for offers. This offer was posted on LowEndTalk a week ago and appears to be exclusive to LowEndBox & LowEndTalk.
OpenITC KVM offer:
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OpenITC have been in business for nearly 5 years and their company is a registered ‘partnership’ in the UK. They were featured many times before under their subsidiary “XenVZ” but obviously that brand isn’t really usable for KVM so they’d prefer to be OpenITC from now on. XenVZ were first listed in 2008 and, we suspect, once offered the cheapest vps plan ever at the time. Users will use OpenITC’s own custom coded control panel to manage their virtual servers as apposed to the popular SolusVM. 37.5GB of Off-site ftp backup space is included with this offer. Seen as they haven’t been listed in nearly a year, please share you experiences with them or XenVZ below.
With their panel, you can install any Operating System you like via the recovery console (VNC or Spice with TLS) and you can virtually mount any CD/DVD from a HTTP server, basically allowing you to install any .iso. You can also set the disk driver and the network model. Whilst it fully supports both IPv4 and IPv6, at present only rDNS on IPv4 addresses can be instantly configured. Cgroups have been fully implemented, allowing OpenITC to control CPU and Disk I/O.
Disk throughput is capped at 180MB/s and Disk IOPS is capped at 540 (Completely Fair Scheduler). They accept both Paypal & Google Checkout as payment methods and have a 14 day refund policy. As well as allowing VPN and Adult content, IRC is also allowed but only on request. Legal content only.
Network Information
Their KVM nodes are online at the RapidSwitch datacenter in Maidenhead, UK. They are a RIPE NCC member and thus their IP space is fully owned by themselves. From this simple search, they appear to have a lot of it. They have a 100% SLA with their upstream provider.
Test IPv4: 149.255.96.39
Test IPv6: 2a03:ca80:8000::1
Test File: http://149.255.96.39/test50mb.bin
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Hello,
We wrote a tutorial on how to accomplish this the other day:
https://forums.openitc.co.uk/index.php/topic,160.0.html
Essentially, you initially install with ide/scsi and e1000 and then switch back to virtio after you’ve installed the drivers.
Hello Sean
I ordered 4 VPS OpenITC-invoice-11759 and after payment was made and now being informed that I have to wait.
All I’m asking for is just 1 Vps for now and the rest at the start of next week is okay. Surely someone can find one more I.P address for this order.
Kindest Regards
Antonio
Hello,
We are actually completely out of IPs until next week I’m afraid. Please get in touch and we’ll be able to refund you.
If it’s possible, he can have my secondary IP.
kvm03/vps5077.vm – 149.255.108.250
I’ll just add a new secondary IP later. I wont be needing it for a while.
Unfortunately our usual process of reclaiming IP addresses involves deleting the VPS. We’d need to manually edit the DB to make use of your IP and time is against us at the moment but thanks for the kind offer.
Anyone of you on the waiting list who wants to get this vps, which I’ve pre-paid until 31 April 2013 for 9 pounds. Msg me.
Hello,
We have scheduled works to grow the /24 to a /23 (149.255.108.0 – 149.255.109.255) giving us an additional 254 IPs without impact on existing services. This will be completed by 16:30 UK time on Monday the 14th of January 2013.
Regards,
Sean McRobbie
OpenITC.co.uk
Thank you for your notification.
Little question. Is it subnet mask change from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.254.0 before or after the scheduled maintenance relevant only for Maidenhead location or both?
Hello,
The change of subnet mask applies only to KVM users on nodes: kvm01, kvm02, kvm03 and kvm04.
It does not affect those on xen19 as we use a routed setup there.
Thanks for sharing Helge Willum Larsen , hoping Sean McRobbie reads this thread and gets me up and running now that you have offer to help. Waiting til Monday is a waste of time as we are in the U.S and there’s a time difference. I’ve got 2 days and part of their Monday which I’ll be up to work on the one VPS. How hard can this truly be, I say not hard at all.
Hello,
We’ll see what we can do but we can’t make any guarantees.
“can-be-improved” IO performance on my VPS called kvm03/vps5072.vm 🙁
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 44.0322 s, 24.4 MB/s
Compared to another VPS i am evaluating (10€/m XEN with same #cores and memory):
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.46073 s, 241 MB/s
But I must say that I like being able to use any .iso (I picked Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS, using ext3 fs)
Would could be the reason behind this difference? Could it be XEN vs KVM??
Cheers, BV
BTW, used the following iso: http://ftp.df.lth.se/ubuntu-iso//precise/ubuntu-12.04.1-server-amd64.iso
you used virtio?
Yes
Hello,
Please try again. We are sometimes finding that cgroups are not created at VPS boot time for some reason. I have re-applied all these server wide which may help.
However, yes, there is a HUGE difference between KVM and Xen.
Regards,
Sean McRobbie
OpenITC.co.uk
Thanks! Seems to have increased to about 40 MB/s which I think is reasonable for a LOB.
Oops, meaning “LEB” or low-end-box of course
Just ran a new test, this time things are looking better
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 27.3969 s, 39.2 MB/s
Have a look at this 😉 this is Hetzner VPS
root@flux ~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test.test bs=1024000 count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 2.67362 s, 383 MB/s
root@flux ~ # dd if=/var/www/12_04_x64.iso of=/root/test.iso bs=1024000
688+1 records in
688+1 records out
704950272 bytes (705 MB) copied, 34.9372 s, 20.2 MB/s
Some kind of cache-ing /dev/zero 😉
Maybe that’s why you see 383M i/o from /dev/zero 🙂
Sean McRobbie
Any word on progress 1 of 4 vps ordered and 1 I.P address offered by Helge Willum Larsen?
We are going into the weekend just in a few short hours 5:00pm here Central Time and wanted to plan the weekend. I’m trusting that since an offer was made and you claim you ran out of I.Ps now you have an available I.P address for my VPS. Let me know as time is getting close.
Hi Antonio – I can’t confirm who you are (as your name here is different to the only account I think this could be referring to) but if you send us a support email I can answer your queries.
Also, we definitely have run out of IPs. If we had more, we’d be happy to continue to sell more VPS 🙂
I have to say I am absolutely ecstatic over the server I got. After a terrible terrible experience with another offer, I got this and I can’t get over how good the whole situation turned out to be. This is a service to grab. Will recommend without any reservation at all.
Oh and their custom console is full of kick ass. Thanks guys! I’m going to be around for a while 🙂
Hi Adnan,
Glad you like the console 🙂
May I ask if it was one of our offers you had a bad experience with?
No no. Of course not. I’d have not come back probably if it had been. While I’m at it I should mention this is the first time I’m running an unmanaged server. To be able to have zero issues while setting up is great. I’m now running my first python web apps and my first personal site and it’s just great to be doing it with what feels like such a rock solid experience. Thanks again!
Seems that you have great problem with your Disc I/O reading through the comments above. But, I need a VPS that has I/O Speed not under 100MBPS. So, I’m afraid of you. RamNode is better in this regard !
Irrelevant random comparisation. Unless you don’t care at which continent is hosted your VPS and some other aspects it may offer. Anyway, I don’t have problems with any of my XenVZ/OpenITC boxes per years. Maybe because some of them I actually use instead doing benchmarks to get out “some” values which most of “testers” here don’t understand or know how to affect productive vps anyway.
“But, I need a VPS that has I/O Speed not under 100MBPS.”
Oh, really? 🙂 What do you host with your low end boxes?
I don’t think that it’s an “irrelevant random comparison”. Bcz, I’m getting quite a good I/O from signing up with a company seeing their offer here (in LEB certainly !). And, I also couldn’t understand what is the relation between Disc I/O with the Datacenter Location. It completely depends on the hardware and it’s optimization. 😉
You may have a good experience but you can also look out the comments above. It may inform you that all the clients experiences are not same as you !
You’re saying that you need lowendbox with more than 100 MB/s I/O throughput speed. And now you’re expecting that I will take you serious? 🙂 Sorry, I can’t.
“but you can also look out the comments above”
I did, and? Apart from little issue with one node which was fixed fast I see completely useful I/O throughput speed results. The thing is that people make those tests, see big numbers but know very little about real vps usage. Some VPSs show really sky high numbers like 400 MB/s however who cares… 40 MB/s should not be issue with any normal low end box usage.
Don’t get me wrong. I have also little RamNode box. It performs excellent. I don’t expect that it will be stable as XenVZ/OpenITC box (only few LEB VPSs I use can match their long term stable perforamce) however I am pretty sure that picking their offer wasn’t bad choice.
What I am saying is that you picked some random VPS provider from some random continent with some random package/payment structure and different (SSD) techology… and this make your comparisation irrelevant.
But to be fair you said “in this regard”. Yeah, SSD is usually faster than HDD 😛
Yeah, you have understood what I meant. I needed the I/O Speed better than other visualizations like CPU Usage/Internet Port Speed. Thank You 🙂
I signed up yesterday also placed a order but have had no reply.
How long does it normally take?
Read comments above. They are out of IPs. I heard at IRC or somewhere that we can’t expect more from this offer till Monday or so.
Anyway… if you invest some minute or two for reading this thread you will see your answer posted more than once.
Hi Gary,
Spirit is indeed correct – we’re out of IP addresses until Monday.
Your order will be approved as soon after that as possible.
We may choose to stagger the approvals so we don’t get all the benchmarkers doing their thing all at once like we did the other day 🙂
At least a provider, who reads the IPv6 allocation and assignment rules! Thanks for that guys!
Signed up for an account several days ago. Logged in today for the first time to see how to proceed (see my comment above) and found my order had been “cancelled.” Not sure what that means?
Hi Vernessa – you’ll need to check your emails as I can’t discuss your account details here without breaching your privacy.
Ordered a VPS last week, been very impressed with the service and speed so far.
Had another VPS for another purpose and the company emailed me this evening saying they were stopping their VPS service. The first thing I do? Place an order with OpenITC, thanks guys!
My VPS stopped as well, I fire and ticket oon their contact form but no response so far. May be I should wait for one or two day before contact them again.
Just to clarify: My VPS wasn’t stopped with OpenITC, another company I used stopped their VPS services so i ordered another from OpenITC.
Hi Link,
Can you contact us via the support form as there’s no way for me to know which account is yours from here.
Regards,
David Man
OpenITC.co.uk
Hi David,
Actually I did and your support team answered that my box was been DDoS that is very strange. I’m still waiting for the investigation…
-L
So mine is really cancelled. Waiting for the refund…
We are currently processing orders and clearing our backlog.
If you have an outstanding order with us, it should be filled within the next 2 hours.
If anyone is finding their orders ‘cancelled’. Please check your email for further details.
Thanks to everyone for your patience.
Regards,
David Man
OpenITC.co.uk
Is the shortage of IPs resolved? When can we expect the pending orders be processed?
I see it’s answer above, /ignore this 😀
I’ve had one of these running for a week now. I’m also running a much lower spec’d Xen box from a XenVZ/OpenITC offer last January. No issues with either and the “Real World” performance of the new KVM box as an Ubuntu LAMP server is excellent.
Hi, I was just wondering: how much of swap is there in those offers? Cause, in your TOS says that anyone creating swapfile will be banned immediatelly – so, just askin’ 😉
A KVM server doesn’t come with “swap”. When you setup your OS you decide to configure this or not like in a real machine. Unless the provider have some templates with this preconfigured.
But, it does – KVM plan comes with allocated space on swap partition: or at least, it should, and thanks to smilie93 (comment down) now I know that it does indeed.
TOS: “13.7 – Adding additional swap space that has not been allocated by us will result in immediate suspension of your service”
Interesting, where it says that?
And the TOS line seems to be related to the Xen services.
Oh my, I did not these lines. That must be the reason my VPS got cancelled right after I set it up 🙁
And, just to say: said policy in TOS is perfectly understandable; they just don’t wan to clog data-hdd performance with swapping; instead, they allocate different harddrives just for swapping: it’s just that I havent’t seen some info about how much swap is allocated to each VPS node?
I still don’t think this has swap.
Hello.
I also wondering about that item in ToS and asked consumer support about it.
>>Item 13.7 states that I am disallowed to add swap on my VPS. Is that term still applicable?
>Regarding swap yes it is safe to ignore this term. I’ll need to update our terms for our KVM plans.
Yep, no swap 🙁 adding swap option would be too good to be true 🙂
@newtesla: SWAP: 1972.99 M
Thanks 😉 is that for 512 or 1024 RAM option, or both have same?
I’ve got the advertised offer with no added extras and installed Ubuntu 12.04. I’ve got 1GB RAM and 1GB swap.
Mine is 3072 on setup 🙂
And now you know that they know your secret too 😉
Do you support Windows 2003? How to install?
I just installed Ubuntu server, but: You get VNC connectivity, you send them a link of an .iso image that you wan attached to your VPS, and therefore install just as it was local 😉 oh, I saw that in order to install Windows, you have to choose IDE, not VIRTIO kind of disk; it’s all in Control panel; you might want to change NIC in VPS settings also: i saw e1000 and rtl8139 emulation 😉
You can and should change it back to virtio once the drivers have been installed.
I’ve had mine running for a week or so now, this offer is so good I’ll probably order another two while I can!
I am getting “This product has been de-activated”. Is the offer out of stock again ?
Same here product seems to be no longer available
Is anybody else havinf these problems? Slow disk I/O?
root@flex:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/vda/dev/vda:
Timing cached reads: 8446 MB in 2.00 seconds = 4230.89 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 32 MB in 3.69 seconds = 8.67 MB/sec
yeap, it’s very bad lately, disk is slow, CPU is almost always on steal time, network is fluctuating.
# hdparm -tT /dev/vda
/dev/vda:
Timing cached reads: 5432 MB in 2.01 seconds = 2709.04 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 34 MB in 3.02 seconds = 11.24 MB/sec
And support just stopped answering emails about the slow hdd issue: I still can’t figure out whether my VPS hdd i/o is limited to 10MBps, or is it just overcrowded?
And the network:
download to vps
upload from vps
Actually: upload is OK: but, download, and hdd I/O, are just terrible.
Hi @newtesla – I’ve not heard back from you from my last email asking if you were still experiencing problems. I’ve checked the node and there’s no unusual disk activity.
@newtesla & @slow – In the last week we’ve had one case of slow I/O and it turns out to have been the distribution that was the issue. I think he swapped over to CentOS and his performance improved significantly.
Would be interesting to know what OS’ you’re currently on.
Feel free to open a support ticket and I’ll take another look 🙂
Ofter sold out 🙁
If you’re suffering from slow disk i/o please ensure you are on virtio and booting with elevator=noop
I/O is indeed throttled but at very high values. It may be that you’re hitting IOPS limits in background processes which will make dd suffer…
We regularly test all host nodes themselves which normally give us 250MB/s or greater during busy periods.
Lastly, if you need a slight performance boost then you can sacrifice disk space in exchange for 15k RPM drives however you’d need a new VPS as it’d be based in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Maybe I am crazy and blind – but this is what I get, it seems that it doesn’t matter what I/O scheduler I use, and whether I boot with NOOP (elevator=noop in grub2) or not.
So, to be honest: this has gone far enough: for two months already I am having I/O issues: the price is/was right for backup purposes, and maybe FTP: anything else is just painfully slow. And yes; I do not care if it works better with centos in VPS: if it isn’t optimized to work with debian – it should be stated somewhere.
This VPS was extremely cheap, and other things are excellent (VNC, cpu, ram, hdd space): but – either fix I/O, or we can shake hands and say goodbye to each other. Seriously. As if story about 250MBps I/O is going to help…
This is one of my other VPSes:
Your VPS hdd I/O is actually slower than eth0!
And I am sorry for this bad review, but: last time I sent You email – I waited for a month, without a reply: this time, I sent you an email more than a week ago… Please, if you need to do some testing, I’ll create an account for you, and I’ll put that account in sudoers; but, this, as it is, is going nowhere: I have customers waiting and a server which is painfully slow.
Fix the problem, please. My invoice is due 1st April.
well i had purchased openitc vps and got it closed within 10 min.
speed was pathetic .
i tried to update server and speed was between 60-100 kbps. You don’t except such speeds.
later on tried checking speed
speed from cachefly was 7 mbps
it did not go forward on test , just looked like hanged.
again tried downloading iso image from Microsoft server using wget and speed was max 100 kbps.
are we paying for mobile connection on vps?
well they scammed me
” Disk throughput is capped at 180MB/s and Disk IOPS is capped at 540 (Completely Fair Scheduler). They accept both Paypal & Google Checkout as payment methods and have a 14 day refund policy. As well as allowing VPN and Adult content, IRC is also allowed but only on request. Legal content only.”
They even not care about there 14 days refund policy. Admin please drop scammers from here.
Hi Saurav,
Regardless what your issue is with the service, whether it be that the service is unsatisfactory or that you’ve simply changed your mind, we’ll happily give you a refund within 14 days if you’ve simply been trialling the service (i.e. you’ve not been saturating your connection sending emails during that period).
Our support usually takes up to 72 hours (often much less) depending on when you emailed us and how busy we are and in this instance it looks like you gave us less than a day to respond to your refund request before you filed a PayPal dispute to have your money refunded.
Whilst you’re well within your rights to do this, you’re no longer covered by our 14 day moneyback guarantee.
Before you file another complaint, please let me explain what this means. The 14 day moneyback guarantee is there to protect customers who for whatever reason, want to have their money back – we all change our minds occasionally or the product just isn’t suitable and we’re more than happy to refund any money you’ve paid. You don’t even need to give a reason for leaving – you’re still entitled to your refund.
When you file a Paypal dispute (despite the fact that you can have your money back at any time for any reason) we do always feel as if you’re trying to hurt us financially for no apparent reason because all Paypal disputes need to be defended or we end up with fines that are often multiple times the value of the VPS ordered (as in your case).
Even though you file a Paypal dispute against us we will STILL HONOUR our 14 day money back guarantee because we’re not interested in keeping money from anyone who’s unsatisfied with our service – it just means we need to improve in some way and we always ask how it is we can improve.
The difference is that once a Paypal dispute needs defended against it’s no longer dealt with in our billing system and now requires someone to review the entire case from signup all the way through to complaint to see if their VPS was being abused in any way or if this was fraud. This takes a lot longer.
Normally all refunds are made within 14 days (they’re usually completed in less than 3) if you email support and ask for a refund.
Before you filed your dispute, you emailed us regarding network issues. You gave us 14 minutes to respond. Unfortunately this isn’t really sufficient time for us to get to your email, check out your issue (perform any necessary tests) and get back to you.
As for the specifics of your case, I’ve looked at your email history and it seems half of your emails are going to our support address and the half to our billing address. I remember dealing with your sign-up but I’ve not been dealing with your support request. For anyone else needing support, please always use the support@ email address.
So back to your Paypal dispute. We’re compelled to fight these on the basis that we’ve done nothing wrong AND we still honour our 14 day money back guarantee (crazy I know) when we win. If we don’t fight these, not only do you get your refund (which we would still give you), we get charged for your dispute. This means that despite giving you everything we promised you, you’re going to get us fined for our efforts.
You can imagine that by this point we’re unhappy bunnies but despite this we file our defence and just get on with our day and have your refund ready for processing to be done before the end of the week (we can’t refund you immediately because we have to wait for the outcome of the dispute).
Unfortunately I’m then alerted to your lowendbox comment which now also needs addressed.
In the brief time you’ve been with us since you had access to your VPS (31 July, 2013 17:47) to the time you filed your dispute (1 August, 2013 09:10), received your first support email and replied, it’s been around 16 hours.
This is the basis with which you call us scammers.
I have to confess, we’ve been building OpenITC for years. We work hard and we don’t take advantage of any of our customers for any reason so I do find it upsetting when you not only don’t give us the opportunity to address any concerns you have but that you also take such an aggressive and angry tone.
We’re only human so if you feel we’ve got something wrong at least give us the chance to respond.
For whatever reason you need your money to be refunded IMMEDIATELY, you could have simply sent us an email explaining that you were in desperate need of your funds back and we would have done our best to expedite your refund but as it is, all you’ve done is delay the very process we set up to guarantee you’ll never be out of pocket.
I’ve spent all this time to investigate and respond as best I can because you’re not only hurting us financially but you’re also trying to hurt our ability to do business.
I’m sorry you’ve been unhappy with our service and I’ll make sure your refund is issued as soon as possible. I just can’t help feeling that you’re deliberately trying to make it as hard for us as possible.
Regards,
Dave
Not that long ago – it took A MONTH for you to even realise that you haven’t answered my emails: while I was your customer… I sent an email on 24.02.2013, and then again on 19.03.2013 – and you never replied to it – you simply replied to my next one, which I sent on 05.04.2013.
A month, and more.
Oh, and your VPS had terrible disk throughput: 10MBps is just awful – Quantum Fireball could do more 😉
You’re right – that wasn’t a proud moment.
I do remember the delay you had and I’m still sorry you had such a long wait. The fact that you did is a testament to your patience (which we’re grateful for).
It was actually that incident that resulted in us using this new support tracker. Embarrassingly, I had moved your email into the wrong folder so I thought it was actually being addressed when it wasn’t being looked at at all.
I don’t recall the specifics of the drive throughput or the offer that was on so I can’t comment on that just now but rest assured we’re making progress on ensuring support issues are no longer sent into the ether.
Everything abou disk specifics is well documented – just scroll up 😉 hint: #comment-106380
-first you said that I needed NOOP scheduler: didn’t help
-then you said that your VPS isn’t designed for Debian/Ubuntu (?????)
-and in the meantime – you were trying to convince me that I had 250MBps throughput – when in fact I had 10.
As I said: great web panel, also VNC: but, I was patient more than 2 months: didn’t work. I mean – when it takes for NGINX 5-6 seconds to load pure HTML 50kb size…
Definitely something wrong with Nginx taking so long for a tiny page.
I don’t recall claiming that the VPS wasn’t designed for Debian/Ubuntu but yes, I’m not trying to make any excuses for the support you received. It was well below par and for that I make no reservations in my apology.
first of all i am thankful to you for reply.
Thing is we needed server urgent and we ordered from you , later on found its network is not good which can hold on streaming apps like camfrog video chat.
Network speed was maximum 100 kbps.
Please once again check payment email and account email. Payment was done by my friends .
when you not replied after 24 hours [ not even replied in IRC] then he opened report.
you are collecting VAT from people. Foreign residents other than UK are not liable for UK tax.
I had already brought server from hetzner and it cost only 6 euro and they are located in germany and they did not levied VAT.
If you live inside EU, you must pay VAT.
I have to be honest, I ordered this offer and was very pleased with the service. I asked to pay a little more and have extra resources added and installed Windows 7 Pro (own genuine licence). The system is always up, responsive and works well. The network speed is usually good and I can use it by remote desktop and forget that I’m not using my computer in front of me. In fact, I’m using it no because the laptop I’m on is too slow.
I am using their service since 2009 . good or bad but i have never feel any problem , vps always up , good resources , i always buy something whenever they post such offer. Legit company i say
I’m also a satisfied customer and I’ve always found performance to be very good.