James from QualityServers emailed me a few days ago about a new cloud brand that they are launching sometime this month — UK Cloud. It’s very different from QualityServer/QuickVPS offers — it’s based on Xen and OnApp, highend processors and hardware SANs, DOS protection, etc. They even offer an SLA in the form of a promise — “Zero Downtime or Zero Invoice” — where you get the next month’s service for free if they can’t get to 100% uptime. It won’t be cheap though, and James has offered a limited beta deal. For £3.75/month (~USD$5.87) you’ll get the following VPS. Direct signup link.
- 128MB memory/128MB swap
- 2.5GB storage on SAN
- 50GB/month data transfer on 1Gbits
- 1x IPv4 + IPv6
- Xen/OnApp
Servers in the Synergy House in UK (test IP: 217.114.62.48). Quite a bit low in resources. However from the descriptions on the website, it looks like a nice setup with redundancy everywhere, and James said that it would “outperform pretty much everything on LEB”. We’ll see.
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I recently got an email from qualityservers saying that the old VPS’s will soon be phased out. For how long are the planning to support the old VPS’s?
As long as you keep it, we will maintain it. Although we are not planning to deploy any new nodes, we will keep the existing ones going.
I just got (last week or so) an e-mail from James saying they are going to discontinue this now. I *think* their cheapest VPS will go from £15/month.
Ah, shucks … I was hoping for more resources or less price-wise.
Anyway, this I know, James is proactive when it comes to support. I dont have a VPS with him anymore but when I had one, it was good.
Asim
If you need more bandwidth we might be able to agree something but unfortunately disk space is rather limited as we’re using all SAS 15K drives.
I guess it’s a choice: fast I/O bandwidth / speed or more storage… :-)
Unfortunately, this is the case however luckily there are a number of uses (such as small website hosting) which actually use a very small amount of disk space. Likewise, if you do need more disk space, we may be able to offer something larger (but slower) through our sister brand Quality Servers.
Are there any small OS available that would leave as much disk space as possible?
We use these tempalates: http://onapp.com/cloud/how-it-works/vm-templates/
what is CPU with this Plan ?
Hmm, Seems good “downtime under 10 minutes and planned maintenance” so 99.9 it looks :P
Taylor
That’s mainly to prevent monitoring system blips and hypervisor/SAN failovers affecting the monitoring. The uptime should be 100% almost every month, which is why we’re making that promise.
Just to let any potential buyers know, you only get 100mhz cpu with this lowend deal. I enquired about this because the lowest price vps on their website had a 300mhz cpu. Although James did say that you can burst the servers cpu, but I’m not sure by how much.
I’m not really sure what you can do with only 100mhz of cpu, its definitely out me off buying one.
Hi Rhys
100MHz is the absolute minimum that you can possible get out of this. The chances are you’ll get much much more than that as the hypervisors are using dual E5620 processors and are are limiting the number of VPSs per hypervisor server.
If your VPS is ever running slow, contact us by ticket, telephone or live chat. We’re here to impress with this new line of servers :)
Thanks for the reply. This platform looks really interesting but I can’t afford £3.75 a month unfortunately.
Has anyone got one of these to provide an IO test and bandwidth test?
Btw, congratulations on the website design, its one of the best I’ve ever seen on leb!!
Thanks! Guesses on how long it takes to get ripped anyone?
Here’s one test. Hopefully the guys who have signed up can do more :)
100 mhz is enough to serve joomla to 5 people online. Seems like an awesome deal for 6$.
Your comment made me lol :)
Sure it’s an awesome deal.
BTW, it’s pretty good that they don’t give away their hi performance stuff for free: it would be the end of the good old VPS nodes :D
The price is coming up as £4.50 in the UK (due to 20% VAT) – is this correct? Just wondering as previously QVPS used to charge the same price regardless of location.
The price excludes VAT which takes the VAT inclusive price to £4.50.
Nekki
£4.50 is the VAT-inclusive price.
Wouldn’t it be better to start of on a 256/256 system offering rather than 128/128. A 128/128 doesn’t offer the chance to stress a system properly.
It may require a higher price, but at least users will know whether its worthwhile or not, unless you are targetting a different market.
You’re right but I was hoping to get enough people to receive a lot of feedback, which is why I selected LEB and hence had to stick to the $7 limit :)
sorry james wanted to be the first to rip it as you put it http://www.dmbhosting.co.uk/test on a more positive note i do alot of business with james and find his service second to none and as a provider myself can say james is a good guy in the leb community imho.
A few benchmarks (although they were run on a higher plan as Geekbench needs more than 128MB):
Geekbench: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/527003
DD:
Cachefly:
Beautiful design .. on the website
Compared to the competition in the UK, I find this deal extremely expensive for what it is, Even though they have this “Zero Downtime or Zero Invoice” it will carry such huge disclaimers that it wont even be worth the pixels its using!
This offer isn’t for everyone, but if you’re looking for something powerful and reliable under £4, from a company that answers the phone and won’t go out of business anytime soon then actually this is a pretty good deal IMHO.
I guess some people are getting next month free, since there was a 90 minute downtime today. :/
The router failure didn’t affect the cloud.
Ah, ok. :) I assumed at least some of the cloud had been affected, when it said:
“We are currently aware of connectivity issues affecting rack A10 (most services on our network).”
in the email.
As usual though, you guys had sent out the email saying you were fixing it before I managed to get a support ticket fired off, and it was fixed in a reasonable amount of time. Can’t fault you. :)
Here we go. IT STARTED!
Crap with old nodes started sooner than I expected. It’s not like clients with 10pounds/year plan would want to pay way more for some cloud thing.. James was increasing customets database drasticly last few months bombing us with more “special offers” than any other LEB host and now what are you thinking James? That we are interrested in something what we didn’t order?
I bet that sooner or later all non “cloud” nodes will follow that or another way to get rid of us.
There’s no truth in that statement at all. This isn’t a conspiracy – there was genuinely a hardware failure that we had no control over. The email you received was sent to our entire customer base, most of whom do not come from LEB and many of whom are on larger packages suitable for upgrades to the cloud at little extra cost.
For LEB readers, the general result is actually a free upgrade to Xen as we don’t have enough space on our OpenVZ nodes to replace everything lost, so we are using the Xen nodes as well. So actually, for £10/year most people will be getting something Xen based.
I would appreciate it if you could take back what you’ve said as it’s complete rubbish.
I thought I was just being cynical when I thought that, but if I’m not alone maybe its not me….
Look at the facts:
– A free upgrade to Xen means we’re losing money
– A free month means we’re losing money
– We were making almost nothing on the £10/year deal as it was
– I’m happily doling out the above, plus tech time to people on this £10/year unmanaged plan.
I really don’t understand why some many LEB customers are so cynical. We are genuinely trying to keep a happy customer base, hence the taking a loss to keep people happy where possible.
Future will show us. I will abstain from further discussion about that. For now!
Just had the email, No more old LEB’s just cloud. Got until the end of the month to move
I’ve posted here for LEB/LET users:
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/1045/qualityservers-announcement#Item_1
As I predicted and posted more than once here… (but James said NO, OLD NODES WILL STAY ONLINE).. heh
If you read the email you’ll see that I intended to stick to that statement, but did not anticipate there being this many problems
Yeah, sure…
A free upgrade to Xen means we’re losing money
It doesn’t seems so. Xen replacement seems half smaller. But well…
What do you mean? The spec is the same either way.
It’s not really important to me but no, it’s not :)
Node vz3uk
Bandwidth 200 GB
Disk Space 10 GB
Node xm10
Bandwidth 100 GB
Disk Space 5 GB
(I’m just saying not complaining)
btw. James, go get some sleep :)
Nearly at the point where I can call it a day :)
If you open a ticket I’ll get this changed as the spec should be the same.
James,
I can’t say I’m very happy with the situation, disgusted is what comes to mind.
After all the issues with VZ2UK you would think any sane provider would take at least one snapshot every so often.
Yes I have backups but that’s besides the point, it’s not a trivial task to get everything back up and running, so that’s my week before Christmas ruined (and possible another 100 or so clients) by yet another shocking provider, I really thought I had found a quality host and have been recommending you to pretty much everyone I came across, now I look like a complete tit.
Thanks Quality Servers/UKCloud/Whatever, I won’t be requesting a move until I’ve slept on it, and decide if the effort is really worth the outcome. This problem stinks of what happened to Rus Foster’s CheapVPS, and it just seems to be the norm nowadays for any fly by night provider. I have a client on my back wondering were his site is, and how quick it’ll be back up, so I better go and waste another week working.
I’m afraid I’ve just left ‘QualityServers’ (now UKCloud) after 3 disk failures (2 of which led to complete data loss of my VPS). James works tirelessly and deserves some credit but a failure to take backups is just unprofessional, in fact incompetent, in a hosting company.
Other than hundreds of hours of my time being wasted, I don’t have any particular complaints about the service – whilst it was there it was quick, support was good and certainly cheap. It’s definitely a one-man band though.
@ FuzzyOne & Andrew:
Two hardware failures are a pain in the arse, but it happens. I’ve had a few problems with my VPS over the months, but they’ve always been fixed quickly. For what we pay (not much, be honest), the service is good. Not perfect, but good.
Backups are your responsibility. If I lost one of my “production” VPSes, it’d be back up and running on a new box before the DNS changes had propagated. If it’s important enough to piss you off if you lose it, back it up. There are free options, but for ease of use I use Amazon S3. I don’t even make money from my VPSes. If I was hosting stuff for customers, I’d sure as hell be on top of backups.
@Andrew and @Fuzzyone:
I completely understand that you’re both disappointed and of course I would like to extend my apologies to you however it’s very easy to say ‘make a quick snapshot every now and then’ but when you’re responsible for over 1000 servers it’s not a small bill, and one which would definitely take us above LEB pricing for even a very small VPS, then of course we’d have the problem that people would rely on us for backups, so they wouldn’t make their own, and finally the problem that it would take several days to restore everything, so a lot of clients would leave anyway because of the downtime.
With our low end offers (the recent UKCloud offer is excluded in this), we’re not trying to offer the world for under $7, we’re instead assuming that you are ok to take responsibility for the upkeep of your own server in general and instead focussed on getting you as much disk space, memory and bandwidth as we could for the money. It’s foolish to buy anything at LEB, use it for something important and not make your own backups. LEB is LEB for a reason.
I would urge anyone who is using their server for anything important to consider the damage that incidents like this could do to their business and make their backups, read the fine print, and if suitable increase their budget.
Anyway, I’m as fed up of this as you are, which is exactly why we’re moving as much as we can to our cloud, where SAN is backed up to NAS etc etc, but then you obviously pay more and get less (resources), so it’s not for everyone. This is going to be brilliant for us as well as for our clients, as nobody has to deal with these sorts of issues.
We offered this as a solution to customers on VZ3UK and some people moved over but nobody from LEB. Why? Because people from LEB were aware of what they were getting for their money and were in general prepared. We’ve found that they’re basically looking for something cheap and cheerful, which is exactly what we were providing.
Ask yourselves this: If we would have charged 150% of the price you paid when you signed up, to cover clearly stated backups, would you have signed up with us, or would you have gone to a cheaper provider and just assumed they made backups somewhere, somehow?
If you would have, then maybe UKCloud is for you, if not then QS or something similar is for you.
The problem I see here is that you knowingly drasticly increased LEB clientbase in last few months with aggressive advertising just to raise your hands off LEB boxes after and suggesting us move to more expensive servers everytime you get opportunity. With all those special offers you said that you need money for future project. It’s clear now that future project was UKCloud and I wish you good luck with that but I must admit that you give us impression like we are ballast for you now. That’s not our fault.
I am predicting very bad future for all your LEB clients. Why? Because without managing of old nodes sooner or later all nodes will follow VZ2UK example and sooner or later we will stay out of place on non cloud nodes. Or you will invent something other to get rid of ballast which served you well to collect for UKCloud project.
@Heinz
We did that for 2 reasons: 1) to sell of all remaining space on the old nodes so we could remove the old packages from our website, 2) to raise money to build UKCloud. These were the only reasons, and I maintain that people who signed up under the QS brand will continue to get exactly what they paid for – nothing more, nothing less.
I’m not sure what you mean by “without managing your old nodes” – we monitor them and act accordingly, just like we’ve always done. We won’t be upgrading them though if that’s what you mean.
As I said above and it’s proven now you just used us to raise money to build UKCloud but now you’re kicking us out before end of yearly billing period.
I noticed when I chatted to you over the website you mentioned that it was still a “BETA” program offering-cloud, when is the official release/launch of the product? I noticed on the website where it discusses the BETA and it states that your “Zero Invoice for downtime SLA” is not promised during the BETA period is this correct?
What is your promised SLA to clients during the BETA period?
Cody
I’m going to extend the Zero Downtime or Zero Invoice SLA to the BETA period as well. With regard to a STABLE launch, it should be some time in January – we just need a bit more time to make sure everything’s running smoothly and then to do another big equipment order to finish everything off. That said, you should sees some service improvements between now and then as well.
For example, automated backups to NAS are currently testing and should be added permanently this week. The only real thing to do here is order a good NAS (I’ll be choosing one of two), and decide how many backups everyone gets: 1, 2 or 3.
I think James is so tired now. Not sure he have some sleep :) The new IP I have is wrong one need to correct.
Please open a ticket
This is the same ticket #102
This should be sorted, thanks.
Pls look into another ticker #168 for extend credit due to VZ3UK failure
I was on broken node and was offered a Xen, couldn’t boot or reinstall it, then moved over to an OpenVZ which works. I’m only (intending) to use it for a backup DNS server and VPN, and it works as it should. Thanks James.
No worries.
Its a shame VZ3 was solid and performed well. Can you give any details of what failed? Just out of curiosity. I was a bit pee’d off that it failed, mainly due to my TS3 users texting me at half 7 in the morning! Had it running again in a few minutes on another server and i’ll open a ticket to sort something out. Cant go for a cloud package tho sorry James, i was only on a £12 a year plan.
James
It crashed with ‘dead IO device’, and upon reboot the bootup sequence reported the array as ‘offline’ which generally means >1 disks failed though I’m struggling to comprehend this as we were monitoring the array status and last time I checked VZ3UK was completely healthy, though I wasn’t able to get in to the RAID utility to see full details.
Of course nobody’s expecting you to upgrade to a cloud package from that offer! If however you’re not up and running on another node yet, open a ticket and I’ll sort it out for you.
@Jtodd – I have 3 128Mb VPSs I want to combine into an Eliminator class system, together with the IPs. Is that possible? I wanted them for VPNs, but I don’t see myself setting them up any time soon. I don’t mind paying a few bob extra to take it there or to an even higher class.
Not really – our specials don’t work like that.
Why, will I be using more resources? Will it be costing you extra? Isn’t it all the same?
RIPE keep an eye on how many IPs we assign each server, which is what they use to decide whether or not to assign us more when we need them.
I need one for regular use, one for SSL and one for the VPN. I have opened a ticket on UKCloud to discuss it there.
Hi James, I am waiting for the job to be completed. It is a long time since I completed my end of the deal and updated the ticket. Some providers would have done the upgrade first and invoiced me after.
I see this bs about QualityServers/UKCloud discontinuing about 2000 customer VPSes on their old platform and would have to say its total bs. jtodd continually spammed these offers everywhere for their old platform and once he had enough $$$ from his spamming runs he has decided to deadpool his old company and not live up to the agreements he made with customers.
On LET he says that people whose “monthly fees were suitable” have been moved to to the new platform – it shouldn’t matter if they were “suitable” or not – jtodd made an agreement to provide service for whatever these people paid and should just suck it up and eat it for the rest of these customers terms. In fact I think he should be *BANNED* from here for taking advantage of this site to spam his offers which he DIDN’T LIVE UP TO.
Well at least he’s being honest and refunding people. Plenty of companies have just done a runner.
He can’t do a runner. He have abother brand (UKCloud) to care for. So what he’s doing is just manipulation in attempt to keep good reputation for UKCloud. He collected money with aim to create UKCloud and now when he did he’s kicking us out. I see nothing honest about that. If he woudn’t post announcement his customers would. But then he wouldn’t make that kind impression…
Sorry but I don’t see any manipulation, just unfortunate circumstances, realism and honesty.
Which part is honest to you? That you raised money from us to build UKCloud and immediately after you did that you’re kicking us out?
Hi
Are you even a customer or just a troll?
I am one of those you exploited with your QualityServers special offer to raise money for UKCloud and you abandoning now which means your customer.
Dino
Could you take this to lowendtalk.com if you have a genuine concern based on what I’ve said in the email? I’m answering questions there.
And in case you haven’t realised, I’m here mainly for the community.
No you’re not. You’re here to exploit community for your business. You spammed us so much with your special yealy offers on weekly basis only few months ago… with aim to raise money to build future project UKCloud. And now when you have UKCloud you don’t need, don’t want us. So stop telling us how you’re here mainly for the community while you whole time just exploited community to earn through QualityServers fast money for UKCloud.
No I think here is the best place for some commentary on you spamming this site for months with all sorts of offers that you aren’t going to be living up to. I would be very concerned to be signing up
with UKCloud now.
And ya, we know you are here for the community, to take advantage of it for months with offers that you aren’t going to be living up to.
@Heinz lets discuss this on LET and keep it there. Duplicating the same messages and same threads is not going to help anyone
@Asim, it’ll help, he wants to hide this over in LET that not everyone reads to protect the reputation
of his new UKCloud brand.
If I wanted to cover up the issue I would ignore it and let it sink. I’m trying to be honest, upfront and realistic here. If you have a genuine concern then please take it to LET.
I should point out as well that @LowEndAdmin reads both LEB and LET and it’s his call whether he wants to post our offers.
Why do you pretend like you could cover anything? Do you think that your 2000 or so customers wouldn’t notice that you terminated their pre-paid servers but you continue under your new UKCloud brand?
You’re here to kick us out with as less as possible reputation damage for UKCloud brand and this is it.
If he knew that you were going to take people’s money, build your new cloud brand and
then cut service off to customers you have decided you don’t need anymore he probably
wouldn’t have posted your offers.
I bet he isn’t too pleased with you now.
James,
The quailityservers ticket system seems to be down, how do I get a refund?
Michael
Seems to be up for me. Have you tried another computer?
Why are you not responding to support tickets? Sending emails to inaccessible domains is pretty pointless, so I have no idea what is going on.
Money is not my issue, knowing what the options are and recovering from both your and my shortcomings is. I have no reason to doubt your honesty but being seemingly being left high and dry does little to enhance your reputation.
WHat’s your ticket number?
Hi James
I have replied to your latest response.
Thanks.
and this is exactly why I said I would sleep on the offer of being moved after the last fiasco, congratulations you’re now just another run of the mill cloud company with sub-par loyalty to your customers.
So there you have it folks another Rus Foster in the making right before your eye’s.
If you have a concern please contact me and I’ll try and work with you – I value your loyalty but at the same time I’m not prepared to take a loss. Also FYI Rus Foster had very questionable ethics particularly with regard to honesty. I’ve been completely honest and upfront with everyone (in the hope that they could try and see our perspective here as well).
Anyway, I’ll jump on live chat now so I can address your concerns if you’d like me to.
Also bear in mind that loyalty works both ways please. We would generally expect customers who have had months or years of good service to try and work with us.
How, as you don’t work with us and lie to to us?
You’re broke.. and you can’t refund us yet, ok.. but why do you lying us how you have money and how we will be refunded in monday, then wednesday, then friday and again next monday and so on.. It’s nothing honest with your constant changing of your mind, in your lies, your delaying, etc… It seems like you’re uncapable to fulfil even one agreement or promise to your clients.
My refund came through yesterday…. :)