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ThriftyVPS - $6.25 256MB Xen VPS in Asheville

Updated February 2012 — Hours after I posted their January 2012 offer, they went offline and replaced with a parked page. DODGY!

ThriftyVPS Welcome to 2012! Michael from ThriftyVPS sent me this on the first of January, asking to have his services listed. So here we have it. Their Xen PV plans start at $6.25/month. Direct signup link here.

  • 256MB memory/512MB swap
  • 10GB storage
  • 250GB/month data transfer on 1Gbps
  • Xen/SolusVM

They support Google Checkout, PayPal, AlertPay and 2CheckOut for payments. Unlike a few months ago when they were simply reselling BudgetVM’s VPS, they now run their own servers with Netriplex in Asheville NC (test IP: 74.112.172.54). Domain registered in June 2011 makes it less than a year old. They seem to have fixed WHMCS verification issue from last time, and main site is now sitting behind CloudFlare. Still, WHMCS is un-themed and it has a weird web site design — whole page is just a big lousy-compressed JPEG file with image map to handle the clicks.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

25 Comments

  1. That’s the most intricate image map I have ever seen…

    January 4, 2012 @ 7:56 am | Reply
    • NickM:

      I feel sorry for you, maxexcloo, for having seen enough image maps to actually be able to make that distinction.

      January 4, 2012 @ 8:21 am | Reply
    • Gary:

      Man, that is horrible… :o

      January 4, 2012 @ 7:32 pm | Reply
  2. lj:

    love the site layout lol

    January 4, 2012 @ 11:24 am | Reply
  3. Even being a poorly-compressed jpg, still looks better than our website :)

    January 4, 2012 @ 1:19 pm | Reply
    • littleguy:

      I see what you did thar!

      January 4, 2012 @ 4:26 pm | Reply
  4. So I guess my future as a web designer looks dim lol. Our old site was a wordpress site, and I was not happy with it and kind of felt like an easy way out. Originally the template I used had a ton of slices and pages loads felt like they took forever. Getting a designer to do it right is on our list of things to take care of, but its not high on the list.

    Also I wanted to thank low end admin again for listing us.

    January 4, 2012 @ 4:02 pm | Reply
    • Kairus:

      At least center the image!

      January 6, 2012 @ 12:48 am | Reply
  5. Get your website coded! ;)

    January 4, 2012 @ 7:15 pm | Reply
  6. Jon:

    Cannot ping my virtual server. http://thriftyvps.com/ fails.

    January 6, 2012 @ 4:15 am | Reply
  7. Dano:

    Wow…it seems like they packed up and headed for the hills, or they may have decided that the 1and1 hosting default landing page was a better front end design. This maybe a dead pool candidate :/

    January 6, 2012 @ 4:38 am | Reply
  8. Jon:

    I dunno, but I’m about to dispute the charge on my credit card. Good thing I used AmEx through the google checkout.

    January 6, 2012 @ 6:51 am | Reply
  9. Haha! The best listing in a while..short and sweet.

    January 6, 2012 @ 2:24 pm | Reply
  10. This domain name has just been registered.

    What exactly is going on with them?

    January 6, 2012 @ 5:58 pm | Reply
  11. Jon:

    They decided to disappear, or their provider shut them down. Whether on purpose or by accident, clearly they are not in business anymore. I emailed the contact on the “whois” of their domain yesterday, but no response. What is unsettling though is the lengthy “happy new year” email I received from them LAST WEEK about the growth of their business and their expansion into Europe.

    January 6, 2012 @ 11:08 pm | Reply
    • Rich:

      “It’s a new year and we value you as a client and we do look forward to continuing service with you. As you may know we started off selling vps service as a reseller of xen and openvz services from two different companies. Since then we have tripled our footprint in Asheville, NC and we are looking to expand to the west coast and Europe. A company is built by its customer and we would not have come so far without you. If we are doing something right, please tell a friend, leave reviews. With your support we can grow more and we can offer more products, at lower prices. If there is something we are not doing right or you have any suggestions, please let us know. We value your feedback and you as a valued client. Again thank you and have a happy new year.

      The staff at Thriftyvps.com”

      Just posting this for reference.

      January 7, 2012 @ 12:12 am | Reply
  12. Mike:

    I’ve been doing some searching and found that thriftyvps.com’s owner has put in a fake number, address and email on the whois database for his website. It seems the information that he lives in Tampa, FL is correct however. Here is his real address from what I’ve been able to deduce.

    Michael Juarez
    6202 N 44th St
    Tampa, FL 33610-3926
    Age: 30-34
    Associated: Terra Juarez

    I’ve been unable to find a free service to lookup his number thus far however if anyone wants to pay 95 cents here is a link (if you do please give us other ex-customers his number). http://www.whitepages.com/name/Michael-Juarez/Tampa-FL/4x5xx2w
    If anyone wishes to pursue legal means of reimbursement and bring this guy to justice please see this under “Internet Scams”: http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/reporting.php
    I’m giving this guy til the tenth to give us some sort of information regarding what the hell is going on before I file a report myself, it would help however if others did as well to speed up this process.

    January 8, 2012 @ 5:07 pm | Reply
  13. Mike:

    Apologies for the double post. Additionally I’ve contacted the support center at the Immedion Datacenter in Asheville, NC. (1-866-270-6000) Although they could give me only limited information I found that the datacenter was running fine. I asked the support guy if he could tell me whether there were any issues with the IP: 74.112.172.54 (the thriftyvps.com test ip address which I found here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1112598&highlight=thriftyvps). “Test IP 74.112.172.54 (Located in Asheville, NC)” Due to legal reasons he could not tell me anything specific but said he could ‘theorize it might be a recent configuration issue on part of the owner’. Other than the link above I’ve also found this thread relating to thriftyvps if anyone is interested: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=7891482&posted=1#post7891482 Apparently the poster for advertising thriftyvps (oberon — http://www.webhostingtalk.com/member.php?u=354149) was active yesterday. Perhaps we’d have some luck contacting him there? Note: the profile says he lives in Angier, NC however upon doing a few searching I’ve found that is either not true or no longer true concerning Michael Juarez.

    January 8, 2012 @ 5:42 pm | Reply
  14. Chris:

    I wouldnt of even listed them… You knew their fate, what they last a week?

    January 11, 2012 @ 2:05 pm | Reply
    • Dano:

      LEA couldn’t have known the “fate” of ThriftyVPS, and always reminds readers to be prudent when selecting a provider. From reading the description, it seems they were listed a few months ago on LEB, with about 6 months of total business time when they requested to be listed for this last offer. I was curious and wanted to grab one to try it out, but couldn’t convince myself to buy a VPS from a provider that couldn’t even create a simple html site.

      January 13, 2012 @ 12:48 am | Reply
      • Chris:

        Exactly Dano, for your last few words is the reason why I said, I wouldn’t of even re-listed them here after the situation of what happen the last times they posted here and all the clients that got screwed over or lost their data or money, I wouldn’t of allowed them to be re-listed to be honest, but then again, I’m not LEA and he’s made this place successful, so he must be doing something right. But I wouldn’t of even tried them if they got bought out or re-launched owned by a much bigger company that we could count on to provide a good service and not worry about it everytime I go to sleep if ima wake up and they be offline or if I just lost all my data and files.

        I also just don’t go buy random Virtual Servers from companies that I don’t do my own little background check on, and with LEA’s inputs theirs plenty of providers I won’t even take the time to even look at or waste my time with, maybe send them a comment or read up on the discussion with the advertisement but that’s about it, took me awhile to even trust or want to try BuyVM; I think I finnially went and got one when they became top provider of the year the first time I think, I don’t remember to be exact though, I wended up grabbing 3 VPS from them, 2 $15/yrs, and one 512mb that I don’t even use really, I don’t have nothing running or even think I have them booted up, the $15/yr ones lol… I just grabbed ’em to try em out and I believe I still got like 8 months remaining on each of them, I think I might just let ’em go to a friend or someone who wants ’em if that is okay with them… who knows.

        But, even with everyone’s feed back about them it still took me awhile and follow LEA’s comments and discussions from them being listed before I gave ’em a chance and they’re not too bad. But places like this that, I mean the hell, have a huge problem few months ago and then come back with a IMAGE website, not even a real HTML site…. That right there would send me to another provider, and they pricing and offer isn’t really anything special, There’s so many providers offering the same that I wouldn’t waste the dollar on ’em.

        /2cnts
        -Chris

        January 13, 2012 @ 2:10 am | Reply
  15. Anyway. This is the exact email I received from “Michael Juarez”:

    Its been a while since we were listed during noob provider Monday. Lol

    We are still around and have tripled our footprint in Asheville, NC Netriplex. For the new year we have just added an a la cart vps plan were you can pick the ram, hard drive, bandwidth, and cpu core count. And these start at $5.25. And we still have our xen-pv package 1 with 256MB Ram / 512MB swap 10GB Hard Drive 250GB/month data transfer and 4 cpu cores. For $6.25 Also all of our plans come with 1gbps ports standard.

    Thank you again for considering listing us again

    I am getting half a dozen similar emails from various providers everyday, and I believe I’ve actually received at least one more prior request from Michael between this listing and their previous one. So I thought, well they have survived 5 months so maybe I’ll give them another chance…

    And bang. Two days later they’ve done a runner. Arghh.

    Anyway. Searching the domain of Mike’s email “avalontechs.com” turns up this BBB entry with phone number in there (different from ThriftyVPS’s WHOIS number). Maybe someone can give that a try.

    January 13, 2012 @ 7:00 am | Reply
    • Gary:

      Caveat emptor and all that.

      January 13, 2012 @ 2:44 pm | Reply

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