Ben from RackVM sent me another awesome offer for the LowEndBox readers yesterday. Similar to their previous offer but requires yearly pre-payment. For £20/Year (~USD$31.28, or ~USD$2.68/Month) you can buy the following OpenVZ VPS package using this ordering link and promo code LEB-YEARLY2.
- 512MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
- 30GB storage
- 300GB/month data transfer
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
That’s right — 512MB OpenVZ VPS for less than 3 bucks a month, if you are looking for a VPS in France. Do read our previous threads on RackVM. There are mixed-but-mostly-good reviews on this company.
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LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
@NOName
I doubt Bens ISP would tell LEA any info, however it is easy to tell if hes using a home or office connection.
That’s the problem, with so many data protection laws it’s very hard to track someone like Ben down, btw 91.216.93.247 is still up so There must be atleast one VooServers dedi still online.
And now it’s not!
Just had a thought, it’s quite likely that Ben had each one of these servers on for a month and then claimed on the 30 day money back guarantee
Theres a lack of transparency and reputation checking for low end vps providers.
Too many fly by night operators like Ben out to scam people.
Tempted to start a site to properly review VPS operators so this kind of situation can be avoided.
In the meantime theres not much to do but hope Paypal sides with the customer for a change…
http://www.novaloca.com/property-details/18950?search=true
That address has to be fake as well. If you alert nominet, they will make sure he puts correct details up there, otherwise they can take the domain down. (or so i’ve heard)
Just noticed…
Reverse Whois: “Ben Harper” owns about 68 other domains
Email Search: xenuk1@gmail.com is associated with about 21 domains
I wonder if any of his other domains have valid address details?
RACKVM is very very bad guy. чтоб ему гореть в аду сцукованину.
@NoName: Anon already thought of that :-/
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/rackvm-20-gbpyear-512mb-openvz-vps/#comment-8776
@Aubs I guess he did, didn’t see it. mybad =-[
My VPS is back up and running with the same IP as it has always had.
http://rackvmcontrol.com/ is back up, but none of the other sites is up and can’t get to http://openvz.rackvmcontrol.com/ either.
$ uptime
21:20:59 up 3 days, 15:21, 2 users, load average: 0.35, 0.28, 0.23
Anyone know how I can find out which node I’m on?
@Aubs – What’s your IP? You can blank out the last digits but the first bit we can at least see what DC you’re at.
Francisco
@Francisco Dias:
Is this enough?
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/rackvm-20-gbpyear-512mb-openvz-vps/#comment-8763
My IP is in the 178.33.*.* range. Still shows as
Hostname: 178.33.*.*
ISP: Ovh Systems
Organization: RackVM Providing low cost vps servers.
using http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/178.33.*.*
One of my French servers just came back via SSH and claims to have been up for over 15 days (i.e. since I bought it). The IP is 178.33.8.* Other two are still down (French one 178.33.27.*, UK one 91.216.93.*). Is Ben getting things back on track? rackvm.com and openvz.rackvmcontrol.com are still down.
Mine is up now !
3 mins uptime
UK03 Node
OVH FR DTC
178.33.28.x
I guess we’ll have to wait and find out, but in all honestly, I doubt many people will still want to use the service after the events that have unfolded after the last few days. Plus there’s still the unexplained fake details etc… So I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
Yes, clearly, I am tarring my files to copy them to another VPS.
I bloqued payments on Paypal and filed a dispute about RackVM
Phil you seem to be correct. Mine wont allow ssh access, it immediately terminated the connection when you enter the password.
I can however access sites still pointing to it.
My 178.32.70.xxx VPS (that in France) is again accesible via SSH and shows an uptime of 16 days.
The 2 VPSes is have with them in the UK (91.216.93.xxx for both) are still not accesible via SSH and don’t respond to pings either)
In the recent XVPS thread there appears to be some connectivity issue with OVH in France. So maybe that was the cause? But whatever, if you see your VM coming online, grab your files and run as fast as you can 🙂
Although I do have Ben’s IP addresses I do not think I should disclose them here. Yes he has an UK IP address from a local broadband company.
And sorry guys I think I am partly responsible for this fail. Head stopped working when I see things too good to be true 🙁 I also got a VPS there which I paid 6 pound for, although it has nothing but work files that I used to write the previous tutorial on Git/Trac hosting.
Not your fault LEA. People should be responsible for their own actions.
Before spending any money on anything people should really do their own research about the past and future of a provider. If they didn’t bother, they clearly weren’t that bothered about losing the money. Personally I’ve taken advantage of a couple of offers from here that I just can’t imagine are sustainable for he provider. Perhaps they’re loss leaders to build up a customer base and get themselves some reviews, or perhaps there’s a less acceptable reason for these packages being so cheap, but if any of my VPSes go down I won’t be too bothered. They’re cheap and do the trick right now.
There aren’t many providers I’d be happy to pay a year up front with…
I don’t think it’s LEAs fault at all. I only risked $8.56, and I knew there was a possibility it wouldn’t last. I have automated daily backups, so there’s no data loss for me, and I wasn’t using it for anything critical anyway. I realize that’s not the same situation for everyone, though.
From my support emails with Ben, I don’t get the feeling that this was intentional. I don’t know one way or the other but that’s just my feeling. I hope Ben is ok. If he knew things were ending, it would have been nice to at least get some kind of notice, though. Even 24 or 48 hours would have helped many people, and if I’d known for sure they were closing shop, I would have wiped my data off before it went down, and gotten DNS changed earlier.
@David
You hope ben is ok?
He is a fraud!. chances is his whois address is invalid. Phone number invalid… shall i continue? Any company that hides this information is clearly insane and should not be trading.
This is what i have to say as a competitor aswell as a rackvm customer.
@Daniel, yes I hope Ben is ok. Maybe I’m too trusting, but I’m working under the assumption that he didn’t intend for this to happen, and something unfortunate happened. If it’s largely a one man show and something happens to the one man (accident, in the hospital?), then the show may stop.
Yes you are correct david, but not in this case as he has actualy been replying to tickets he has also sacked his staff.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=6990146&postcount=63
@LEA It is not a connection problem with OVH, I live in France and I have access to a direct peering with them. The first thing I tested is the connection.
My VPS (node UK03 I think) does not show 16 days uptime, but 11 hours as of now.
Mykeul
Living in France and your ISP peering with them doesn’t matter if it’s an internal OVH routing problem. Not saying this is the case with RackVM, but that’s what XVPS attributed their hour or 2 of connection problems to.
OVH/Kimsufi is fine. i have a few boxes with them myself.
Again, internal problems wouldn’t necessarily affect every part of the datacentre. I doubt this is what’s happened to RackVM mind you, the guy just sounds like a scammer.
Hi Guys,
I’ve been in touch with Nochex and they’re going to try to get in touch with Ben. If he hasn’t replied by Monday, they’ll take further action (i.e. offer me a refund).
I’ll let you know how I get on.
And who is Nochex? And will they refund other VPS customers of Ben too?
Nochex is a method of payment like Paypal. I’d imagine that if you paid via Nochex, they’d refund you too. The more people who complain to paypal/nochex/whoever, the more chance there is of all-round refunds.
@Dirk If you paid by credit card (which was only available to UK customers), the payment was processed / arranged by Nochex – essentially you pay Nochex and they pay RackVM. This means that for UK credit card customers, Nochex is the first port of call (see your credit card statement for their number), followed by your credit card company.
They were really helpful, so we’ll see how it goes.
Not in the UK…but in Belgium.
Paid parts with PayPal and part via Google Checkout.
Disputed opened with both, paypal directly closed it as it was not above real goods. However if they receive a lot of complaints we still might get a refund via Paypal.
@Dirk, I’ve claimed on paypal many times for VPS issues, so I don’t know why some people say that it doesn’t work, I now have 2 cases open since yesterday, still open and waiting for response from Ben, if no response auto refund. Lets see 😉
@NoName: this is what I got back from Paypal, less then 1 hour after opening a claim with them:
“Our investigation into your claim is complete. As stated in our User Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a refund. “
@Dirk
Perform a chargeback, it may piss paypal off but you will get your money back.
@Daniel: you mean via the CC company? To be 100% honest I can’t request a full charge-back as I received about 1.5 months of service on the 12 I paid for (that’s why I “only” requested a partial refund too).
Well personally i would request the full refund. As he has failed to even provider 3 months. Or find yourself a new Host that you can trust.