Update Oct 2011 — I know W2Servers should have been declared dead long long time ago. But their website finally stopped working on 23 September 2011. No surprises here. Another failed provider.
Via this WHT offer. $36/year 512MB VPS not cheap enough?! W2 Servers is now doing the same deal for $24/year, available in multiple locations as well. You get
- 512MB memory
- 20GB storage
- 10Mbps bandwidth
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
How they can keep the price so low is anyone’s guess. Servers can be ordered from Chicago, Scranton, Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles and Zlin (Czech Republic). Manual setup (for reducing fraud). You can check their Terms of Services here. Pretty strict policy on late payments and cancellation. W2 Servers is part of W2 Interactive, which has been around since Jan 2010 (based on WHOIS).
They did get some good reviews from their previous offer posted here. Although I’ll be afraid to post any negative ones after reading their CEO’s blog :)
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The Founder at LowEndBox
The original owner of LowEndBox known as LowEndAdmin or LEA for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource Low End Boxes. After creating the roots of the community that we know today, LEA stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.
Latest posts by LEA (see all)
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
I wondering if .cz Zlin DC still use .us FDC IPs? Any idea?
Mine seems to. US proxy with 5ms ping from Prague for $2/month :-).
IP address: 50.7.251.*
50.7.251.* is from United States(US) in region North America
Wow.. his bio is really promising..
You’re afraid to post any negative views after reading his blog, LEA? After reading his bio, I’m afraid to ever give the man money or even befoul my cache by visiting any site he’s involved with. I mean, honestly, I’d rather host with some incompetent hippie in Illinois with a track record of failure than W2… even after that hippie has lost my VPS. Twice.
I mean, Mr. Foster seems to take great pride in his work turning Burst, DedicatedNow, and HostGator into the sucktastic pits of despair that they are, like that’s a good thing, or something.
He should totally hire Vince the creepy Shamwow guy to do commercials for them, though. One brash sleazeball deserves another…
Ha. It was tongue in cheek. You’ll be lucky to get any customer “support” after reading some of the pages on his blog. More like customer “abuse” from the look of it — although some might argue it’s just one of the marketing strategy.
“700 VPS Servers online since jan 1
Yes, that’s right. Out of that only 8 cancellations. Can your VPS provider do that? :). At this current trend we will have over 4000 vps servers online by the end of the year.”
It’s kind a hard to cancell all those yearly pre-paid vpses I think :) I wondering if he will brag about this some year later…
From http://www.lyronfoster.info/bio.html
“700 VPS Servers online since jan 1”
“over 200 Dedicated Server and VPS Clients in the Month of January alone”
“Each of these 200 clients averages 3.5 devices each.”
Just ordered a VPS and pay via PayPal. Awating the VPS being delopyed. Will post my review once I get it.
it is too cheap,so I can not dare to buy it
It looks like all providers are getting into the “super” budget offers.
This offers looks good, though might give it a try.
I’m waiting on IPV4 limits to start killing off a lot of them.
Francisco
In my opinion you don’t really need to wait for IPv4 limits to start “killing” them off they either kill themself by not having a decent plan to keep the servers running in the long time or they just run out of cash.
I think the “general” idea of anyone that starts one offer like 15$ / year ( See: NordicVPS, HostRail ) is getting one dedicated server with 8 cores, and allot of RAM and put allot of VPS’s into one node and wait to see how it “works out”
Eventually they end up spending allot of cash and instead of having profit they lose cash.
With people like BurstNET charging like $0.40 per IPV4, :P
Where’s the Like button? :)
The efficiency of their is too slow, I have submitted a ticket to ask for move to another location, and it’s already past about 1 week, still not resolved. :(
These are the guys with the $25/mo Atom dedicated servers with 4GB ram. People on WHT are constantly complaining about poor network speed.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1016626
buyer beware, Lyron Foster is the president of the company and he used to run another company called ByteFortress / ServerSupportGuys and they burned a handful of WHT members a few years back. They disappeared into oblivion without any apologies for their actions.
…
They also claim to be a BBB member, but the BBB has no record of any of their known company names. Here’s a couple threads worth reading regarding how Lyron likes to run a business, definitely take a look before you hand W2 Servers any money:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=605103
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=605220
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=594344
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=618787
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=619133
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=608893
wow, thank you for the warning, i just curious about the provider, cause they give crazy offer that doesn’t make sense for me..
DONT GET SUED
Yea, I have heard reports that what they do is price it so low but only for a year prepaid and then don’t live up to the specs (slow network, slow io, slow cpu, etc.) and then you are out of that year prepaid, even though it was cheap for a year it is expensive for a useless vps… Not worth the trouble at all, I didn’t even bother trying it.
I have one of their vps in CO which is pretty good, but I ordered a new one in Atlanta over 24 hours ago that hasn’t been setup yet. Support has pretty much ignored me.
Darn.. the owner is so full of himself.
Yup. And that’s not a blog. It’s a “BS rant page”.
Gotta admit that I find it interesting that he was only with Hostgator for about 18 months and then they made him CTO. Something isn’t right there. Also when you google for that, most of the results are his bio floating around the net. I don’t see any releases from Hostgator themselves over his position. Not doubting that he had the position. Just wondering why there’s not more about him in it. Even the guy who runs EV1’s spam department had more press than this.
Poking around the hostgator support forums, I see mention of him on occasion and seems like more in a negative mention than a positive. (Although most support forums are folks complaining so that’s got to be taken with a grain of salt.)
Hmmm.. I’m still waiting my VSP being deployed. I thought it should be immediate if pay by Paypal?
You should read more carefully. It’s written above: Manual setup (for reducing fraud)
This host is realy good, i have running 4 VPS servers at this host, only 1 problem, thats the Zlin server i have 100mpbs but its only getting max 300 kb/s …. ( already contacted support about it 2 hours ago awaiting answer )
But for the rest they are GRAET
sound scary with the tos
Does anybody here knows a test IP for CZ?
Thanks :)
Yes, nobody knows xD
I found this 50.7.254.1 And ip for their colocation service. I guess is the same datacenter.
Others are here but nothing listed for CZ:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1017184.html
Try those addresses – it’s same DC.
http://lg.zlin.fdcservers.net/100MBtest.zip
http://lg.zlin.fdcservers.net/1GBtest.zip
As far as I know FDC .cz zlin DC use .us IPs not .cz which might be problem for those which require .cz IPs.
I have 2 VPS with them since January.
The specs are the same, first one, IP: 64.120.182.107/100mb.test
top – 23:48:02 up 8 days, 8:30
2011-03-22 (12.2 MB/s) – `100mb.test’ saved [104857600/104857600]
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 15.6473 seconds, 68.6 MB/s
Second one, IP: 204.45.213.120/100mb.test
2011-03-22 (5.65 MB/s) – `100mb.test’ saved [104857600/104857600]
This one is with too slow IO today :) till now – there is no such a problems.
(660 MB) copied, 437.002 seconds, 1.5 MB/s
If you want – feel free to test/traceroute/ping or wget (100mb.test is set on both with IP).
Sound like a lot “negative” feedack on this guy. I ordered a VPS 22 hours ago via PayPal but still not get it deployed yet.
I’m going to request for for a refund after 24 hours, accroding to their TOS. :(
I’ll be the first to admit that most of what’s written up there is about this gentleman’s presentation and past history. If you haven’t guessed by now, that means a lot to me. Seems like many companies forget what a first impression is.
Would I trust this guy with my data? Nope.
It’s been 24 hours since I ordered one vps from them, no reply, no vps. I’m disappointed!
What happened?
Submit a ticket to them. I just got mine after 23 hours after I submitted a ticket.
I got my LA VPS now. Let me share some information with it.
CPU Info:
Disk I/O:
Download Speed:
CPU only 1.4G? It seems they have said in WHT that the CPU is 2.6 ~ 2.8Ghz
I think the node itself is 2.93GHz, but the VPS being limit to 1.4GHz.
I’ve been with them for around a month now and despite there network speeds being somewhat poor, the overall performance really isn’t that bad – Especially for the price!
I’ve done a full review on my month with them if anyones interested,
http://awfullystupid.com/?p=29
AJ, is it correct?
Tbf that was a special offer I found on web hosting talk! It was only a 24 hour special I think. Made me impulse buy it! =P I have seen them make the same offer several times since though.
Ahh bum, I thought you wherw refering to the 10 / 100mbit part! (I got 100mbit) That’s meant to be $24 a year not a month though!
I buy 2 VPS on Denver and Los Angeles. It really has DDOS protection with 24/yr. our site publish latest China news and we was under DDOS attack from 2/20 .These days I moved from one service to another and I am really happy with W2.
It’s a getto black guy CEO… Of course
Hi,
I have signed up with these guys to give them a try, so far not so good. On checkout you can pay for extra options to make your VPS more powerful, so I did, I have paid (by PayPal) on the 23rd March about $29 in the end. I got an instant setup email, but only with the basic package, so at least I have ‘something’ instantly but its 2 days later now and my additional power/storage/bandwidth I have paid for still has not been applied to my account, I have emailed support on the 23rd about this and I have not heard from support :(
I am getting less impressed by the hour… Im sure if all you want is a basic low end VPS and you dont need support, you will be fine.
So now im looking into another provider….
Just wanted to update, it took 60 hours in the end from signup to get the extra services I paid for. So not too bad.
Keep in mind I was setup with the base package instantly so could login and host straight away.
Those who are expecting a $2.00/month VPS to perform like a $50/month VPS (or even a $20/month VPS) need to rethink things.
You get what you pay for. I actually signed up for this $24/year VPS (I mean, come on, it’s only $24 – my restaurant bills regularly come to more than this), and I’ve found that what everyone is saying is true: setup can be instant, but mostly it isn’t; support can be fast, but mostly it isn’t; and the server can be very responsive and fast, but mostly it isn’t. However, the VPS itself is very useable, if a bit laggy, and I’m actually quite impressed with what I’m getting for $2.00/month when I compare it to my actual mission-critical VPS that I’m paying 26x more for ($52/month) elsewhere.
Personally, I wouldn’t host anything critical with these folks, but I’m actually quite fond of having a test server or two lying around that I can try out new ideas and configurations or low-priority websites on. At $24/year, why not?? If they go belly-up, no big loss, I wasn’t using it for anything critical anyway and I’m out, at most, $24.
Hmmm… very tempted indeed.
But could’nt trust my 1 year payment for a company that is just started up, even tho if the owner have alot of experiences… especially if they arent that good EVEN if it’s cheap considering how much you pay monthly. but still… 24$ is not worth 3 month if it dies ard that time…
Hmmmm
Just purchased a year, they opened my account up within an hour! This is my first server/linux box so if there are any test you guys would suggest me trying I will gladly.
Just ran some quick test, almost identical results to Sei Kan.
System Benchmarks Index Values BASELINE RESULT INDEX Dhrystone 2 using register variables 116700.0 8637490.5 740.1 Double-Precision Whetstone 55.0 3349.8 609.0 Execl Throughput 43.0 2627.4 611.0 File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 3960.0 344924.7 871.0 File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1655.0 94557.0 571.3 File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 5800.0 684940.1 1180.9 Pipe Throughput 12440.0 586340.4 471.3 Pipe-based Context Switching 4000.0 184583.7 461.5 Process Creation 126.0 8694.8 690.1 Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) 42.4 3936.9 928.5 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 6.0 510.9 851.5 System Call Overhead 15000.0 449835.3 299.9 ======== System Benchmarks Index Score 650.7Ordered it a few hours ago, paid using PayPal, and still no VPS.
I understand the differences in time zones, but this just has no not happen.
Late update: I got my VPS yesterday.
Works like a charm!
I purchased a server from W2 back when it was $36/year (now I feel ripped off as it seems $24/year has been their standard price for quite some time).
For $3/month it’s performed great! I’ve been using it as a test server, constantly installing and testing junk before it hits any of my live servers. I also use it for random spur of the moment things.
I’m thinking about picking up another one for $24/year before their prices go up (they claim they will go up)
Over 72 hours now and my vps still isn’t setup.
My VPS was created immediately after my credit card payment.
I’m really happy with the service. I’m completely setup and running; CentOS 32-bit, Kloxo (with BIND, Qmail, Apache, Spamdyke, Spamassassin, & courier-imap running), and CitrusDB billing software. I’ve also got webmin running. Current configuration uses about 260 mb memory and 2.3 gb disk space. It needs about an extra 100 mb memory if ClamAV is enabled for email scanning.
Response times are good and no outages so far (knock on wood). I’m accustomed to having some burst memory, but so far living under the hard memory ceiling of 512 mb hasn’t really been a problem.
I’ll go on record as being a happy camper.
I actually tried to get a test IP/test file for a server in a specific location from them, non listed on the website and live chat was down so I submitted a ticket. they closed it without a reply.
Well I WAS thinking about getting another server through them, but if they can’t give me a test IP/test file then I’ll just assume that location has a really bad connection and I won’t get a server there, problem solved.
Been over 5 days now and I still haven’t received my VPS. I am requesting a refund.
6 days on Atlanta server, still nothing.
I hate to suggest the obvious, but is it possible that your spam filter is quarantining setup messages from W2? It’s just that the setup was immediate for my Dallas order.
No. I get all email from them, and I have one in CO. In my account control panel it still shows the Atlanta server as “pending”.
Anyone gotten a VPS in London and/or LA? Test IP/file if possible? Thanks!
I’ve been happy with my scranton server (It’s on burstnet, as expected)
LA: 173.208.107.248
http://173.208.107.248/10mb.test/
http://173.208.107.248/100mb.test/
I have one LA VPS with them. You can try mine.
IP: 174.34.140.253
@Jon
I created dummy files if you want to test the download speed.
http://174.34.140.253/10mb.bin
http://174.34.140.253/5mb.bin
Thanks guys, appreciate it! Ping and BW look good – even better than my VPS in scranton (http://scrtn.hn.pixelshelf.com/test if anyone needs a test there)
I did open a ticket asking for the same – as usual, you guys responded much faster than them – I’m still awaiting a reply on my ticket. If anyone has London that’d be great!
Has anyone else noticed that over 50% of their servers listed in their “server status” page on WHCMS are down as of this week? Not promising…
It seems they have modified the tos recently, and no support any refund now…
I don’t know if the vps ordered before this tos modify want a refund, how to do it? deny directly? or allow?
i now have 2 server with them. one in chicago and the other in london.
Seems to be running ok. have had it up for about a week now.
Speed and speeds soon pretty good.
Moved one of my old sites there to test as i didn’t care if it was down abit.
http://www.olsen-twins.org – chicago server
http://www.ukinternetreport.co.uk – london server. And all pings for the site from that server so not bad conenctions
When i click on order, it shows me these specs:
** W2LOS – Los Angeles ** 2.8ghz, 512mb, 20gb, unmetered 10mbit $24/yr
Is the 2.8Ghz Guaranteed speed or a shared processor ?
Cheers
Nick, you must be joking right? You think they place 8 clients per node?
FYI it’s 1.4 not 2.8. Not sure why it says 2.8
That’s exactly what i was thinking.
But when i check the cpu information, the actual CPU is 2.8Ghz Quad Core if i can remember well,
but the CPU that i’m allocated is just 1432Mhz , so yeah that’s around 1.4.
Just like the other packages.
They might have had an error in placing the guaranteed cpu speed with the actual processor speed.
LA and Zlin servers both said 2.8 the first time round but the other didn’t, , not sure why as well.
They have opened up all of the $24 512mb offers again, as well as Singapore back for standard VPS deals and Hong Kong based servers too, but these arn’t included in this batch of offers. The do have servers offered in Manchester (is that US or UK?) and Seattle which I don’t remember before
My VPS lost TUN/TAP suddenly and they have not been answering my support tickets for the past 3 days.
finally got my tun/tap back after 4 days
Ordered 12 hours ago, paid immediately with paypal. Still haven’t received any login info, and server status states like 60% of their servers are down. I think I want my money back and terminate my account.
I don’t know about PayPal. That may need to be done manually. I used a Visa card and the account seemed to be created automatically in real time.
You mean after all of the above, you went ahead and ordered one? Dang, you got guts.
I can’t even get their status page to load: https://securecustomercenter.com/accounts/serverstatus.php
I like to see the good in both people and companies. But, they failed me.
Anyways, after sending in a Paypal claim I got my money refunded pretty fast!
You can try and take the risk just like I did, but just make sure you don’t put your hopes up too high ;)
I’ve had an account with W2 in the Dallas data center for a month now. I haven’t detected a single outage, ping times from Vegas to Dallas are under 50 ms, and there seems to be plenty of cpu available.
If you want to take advantage of W2’s blowout prices I suggest that you signup with a credit card so the account is created automatically. I also can’t speak for any other W2 data center than Dallas, since I have no experience with the others.
I don’t know about their tech support. I’ve never needed it.
Can you share with us the datacenter for the Dallas IP? Thank you.
Here is my Dallas IP.
174.34.133.23
Another client satisfied.
damn for waiting 9 days for the loggin im not i don care about 24$
Test file for Los Angeles DC:
http://ulrezaj.f3n.org/test.10mb
May be something on my end or you;re getting flooded but doesn’t look too good. Started out very slow in the 45k/sec range.
I’ve signed up recently with LA VPS for $24/year, payment was quick, it was 27th Apr 2011, and I got payment settled on 28th (paypal). However, I’m still don’t get any VPS details, I’ve been in contact with their support few times, but still no luck.
on 3rd May 2011, I asked for service cancellation, and you can guess, no news from them. so far I’m not comfortable with the way the provide support, hopefully I don’t get scammed, this time. will keep you all updated.
@tommy:
I would advice you to ask for a refund through paypal (open a conflict in the control panel of paypal) and describe that you didn’t get your product.
I did the exact same thing by this company and got my money back in 2 days after that.
Is there by any chance a way to see the amount of refunds issued through PayPal for a specific company? I guess that’d be very interesting to see in this specific case, even more so in hindsight of the ‘over 2200 vps’ they claim to be hosting.
I bet that is private information of the company, but it would be fun to know if their claim is not completely fake.
Enough refund requests and Paypal would limit their account. That would be public.
Thanks for your comments, I’ve opened case for refund trough paypal. Hopefully we can resolve this.
Anyway today they remove my open ticket, don’t know why? Probably they want’s to remove some evidence.
That should get their attention.
Why are so many people having problems? I now have 3 VPS’s with W2 and don’t have any problems. Looking at getting a 4th soon.
Yes, there seems to be a contrast in experiences with W2. That’s why I’m asking people to post their data center and mode of payment. Maybe we can see a common thread with the problem accounts. That way we can have an idea of what to do, as well as what not to do.
Same here, have deployed 2 VPS’s with W2 absolutely no problems.
Also, whmcm I think people are expecting to see a email in from W2 it seems that yahoo is blocking W2 where other providers are not. But if you use the whmcm internal My Email’s you will see that the account has been created.
What payment method id you use?
LA, Dallas, and Denver.
All purchased using PaypPal.
All set up instantly.
@Hitswen:
Maybe I just unlucky this time, so far I run 5 VPS with various provider without problem like this. Most of VPS provider that I know, they simply inform their potential customer if a package is unavailable / out of stock.
W2 is different, they let people purchase, and even process my payment relatively fast. I’m ok waiting for few days (considering this is budget service), and open communication with W2, but they don’t provide any useful information to me. ex: no estimation when the server ready, etc.
today when I check my ticket, it’s gone. But I still got email correspondence from W2, when last time I open my ticket and every time they response to me.
So good luck with W2 services, and I’m enough with them.
Some of the test IP address below from Ubiquity Server Wiki we can use. I maybe wrong.
Atlanta, GA: 70.32.42.18
Chicago, IL: 69.147.227.178
Los Angeles, CA: 174.34.140.2
Seattle WA: 64.120.5.98
Dallas, TX: 216.6.226.66
I just signed-up for the Los Angeles data center using a credit card. The payment was approved, but the account wasn’t created automatically like it was in Dallas. We’ll see what happens now.
Interesting. As soon as I signed-up for the second account my VPS control panel became unavailable. It’s been almost an hour now and it’s still unavailable. It’s strange that I have had it for a month uninterrupted, then as soon as I signed-up for a second account it’s gone. No new account yet either.
By the way, my VPS itself is still online and web response is still very good.
If you are referring to SolusVM, I found that when I ordered another VPS they sent me SolusVM login details which was the same username as I had before, but a new password. The new password didn’t work but the old one did.
Is this the problem you are having?
Got this email from W2 4 hours ago:
vps-node1041 is currently experiencing a network issue that may affect your ability to access the VPS control panel.
Even if you can’t access the control panel, your vps is probably still running.
This outage affects only the access to the management control panel and a limited number of scranton containers.
Our engineers are working with the DataCenter to resolve this issue and we hope it’s resolved ASAP.
Must have been a coincidence. The control panel is fine. Their Hawaii business office will be opening soon, maybe everything is on track.
I opened a business office ticker asking when the LA VPS would be provisioned. I got a reply this morning. They say that there are no nodes available in LA right now. I replied, telling them that I opened a VPS account in Denver day before yesterday, so I wouldn’t be needing the LA account. I requested a refund. We’ll see how that goes.
I was gonna order a yearly one but all these recent comments make me rather nervous =/
It’s really a shame. Their reliability and server response is so terrific, but they seem to be dropping the ball on customer service. I just don’t know what to say about that.
just check stock @ http://lowendstock.com and try another low end yearly one!
Gotta love landing pages filled with affiliate links….
Especially when they are advertising VPS’s that cost more than what would be considered “low end”.
“If you can find cheaper vps anywhere else… buy it!” – will do.
Recent comments? You mean the previously ones didn’t raise any flags?
I signed up today for Dallas $24 a year and it was set up in just a few minutes. I used paypal. It is very very slllooooowwwww though.
Yes, PayPal seems to be the method of choice. I just opened a VPS account in Denver and it was provisioned immediately.
I signed up with them right before the Bonus ram/storage/100bmit upgrade expired. I knew they had some issues with some Yahoo email accounts but didn’t know that it was for all of them. Should have read this thread before signing up. Anyway, used Paypal for the Denver site and it was setup a few hours after signing up. Now the VPS is offline and they said that “engineering is looking into it”. I’m getting nervous since they weren’t answering any general support tickets. It wasn’t until I filed an emergency ticket that they responded. It seems to me that they do look at the tickets as it comes in but they only respond to the ones they want and leave the rest for a later time. Also, the guy who answered emergency ticket won’t respond or side steps my inquiries about the upgrades since they have not been provisioned yet for my account. Is that another red flag???
Denver is no better this morning. I’ve put in for a transfer to Chicago. They evidently worked on the Denver location yesterday afternoon and it was running well last night, but it was down when I got up this morning. I can’t get it to boot successfully.
The symptom is that the VPS either won’t boot at all, or takes a very long time to boot and doesn’t boot properly. OS reinstalls take 1.2 to 2 hours and still don’t boot properly. SSH access is generally not available.
My Dallas VPS continues to be very good. I was planning on using my Denver VPS as a secondary DNS server (among other things) to compliment the Dallas server, so I don’t want it to be in Dallas if I can help it. The intent is to have the security of an off-premise secondary DNS server. That’s why I’m willing to try Chicago.
There is something that can improve performance on these W2 VPS installations. I’ve observed a Broadcom device error was logging frantically at both Dallas and Denver data centers. Look to see if you have the following log file (in CentOS).
/var/log/brcm-iscsi.log
That file was logging an error once per second. I caught that log file when it had grown to around 150 mb in just a few days while I was setting up log rotation (there was no rotation setup for that log). Not only will logging errors once per second use resources on an ongoing basis, but that file can continue to grow and eventually consume your entire hard drive. At the very least, you should schedule some log rotation for that file.
To stop logging the error altogether, configure the iscsid and iscsi processes to not start on boot (they aren’t starting successfully anyway). When I disabled those at boot, then restarted the VPS, things really improved.
My LA VPS with them are extremely slow. Sometimes, I can’t even SSH in..
My LA VPS was provisioned today, evidently on a new node. They seem to be having problems in LA. They may still be configuring the node.
To their credit, they seem to have finally risen above their problems in Denver. It’s been running great all weekend.
I submitted a ticket today on my LA VPS and got a quick response that they were looking in to it. It’s running really well all of the sudden. Hopefully it will hold.
I think I should submit ticket to them for a migration now.
It was just down a little while ago, but it’s running like a champ again now. I’m thinking they were working on the problem. I’m optimistic now. If you can afford to, give it a day and see how things go in the next 24 hours.
I was about to order a VPS for a west-coast DNS mirror, but this part of their TOS made me see that they’re too expensive:
“We have a 0 tolerance abuse policy. Your account will be assessed an administrative fee of $10.00 for every abuse complaint received for your IP space or network devices.”
The majority of abuse complaints are false alerts caused by misinterpreted firewall logs. Paying $10 for every stupid admin out there is not within the budget.
I have received abuse complaints about
– my NTP pool servers where the client-side firewall dropped the response packets and flagged it as an attack, i.e. those who sent the complaints triggered the answers themselves
– my DNS resolvers having the audacity to use EDNS and/or TCP
– my services being IPv6-accessible. Yes, people enable IPv6, drop it in their firewall and then write “DoS abuse” complaints.
– many other sad stories
I’ll pass this one and look elsewhere.
I’ve got servers there for a few weeks now.
At the beginning most things were OK and support answered quickly.
But now i’ve 4 tickets open (3 of them for 2 weeks or more) and nothing is done by now.
Reverse-DNS should be changed since beginning, but is not.
VPS in UK cannot be installed with Debian 64bit and it seems they are unable to fix that nor provide me a transfer or some other solution.
Bonuses for special offers are also pending for more than a week now.
I wouldn’t recommend them after all, even if they’re really cheap…
I just tried ordering a few VPS’s on special, PAYPAL NO LONGER ACCEPTED!!! This is very scary to me. If they don’t take paypal anymore than that means they want your credit card to tack on massive abuse charges, etc, since CC chargebacks are 1000% harder than paypal disputes. This also answers an earlier question where someone asked how many paypal refunds they’ve had, evidentally A LOT, since they no longer take it, even though their FAQ says they do. That just took it a few days ago, not anymore though, they must be on their way down…
Here’s the email I got form them 8 days ago:
Dear Customer,
As a result of excessive fraud and abuse originating from paypal payments. We have decided to discontinue general use of paypal.
Paypal is still available as a payment option for well established customers. It will not be available in the sign-up forms, so if you wish to use paypal you must open a ticket to billing to request approval.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
I have used Linode, Rackspace, burstnet, spacerich, virpus before finding w2 interactive. I have provisioned 4 servers so fare 3 in us, one in london. I find nothing wrong with there servers once provisioned so far. I have done actual performance tests for retreivals from various monitoring locations around the US, and UK. Rackspace and Linode always respond faster, but w2 seems to be as good as or better than the other under 10 offerings. Be aware you get no swap space, and the busrt mem is almost useless, so order the ram that you will need worst case, for me I can fit my nginx and 2 jetty servers just in the 512k after a lot of tweaking.
Support is all backed up, but I have found there support to be ok, once they get to it. I have some refund requests pending, lets see how long that takes….
My Denver server has gone down twice this month. The first time it was offline for well over 5 hours without a reply to my ticket. Eventually it came back online though. The second time is right now.
I can’t even get to the control panel to start it.
I’ve got a Denver VPS with them and it’s pathetic. I’ve requested a transfer to a different data center. My VPS accounts in Dallas & Atlanta are excellent. I suggest that you request a transfer to one of those locations.
They had an outage with the control panel last night, as well as a power-related outage problem in Denver. Here is the outage alert:
“VPS Node 1041 + VPS CP are still down. This is due to a hardware failure that is currently being addressed by our engineers. At this time, we have been assured that there will be no data loss and our engineers are working to restore access to the VPS CP as soon as possible. This outage only affects your ability to login and issue reboots, reloads etc of your vps. It does not affect the operation of your vps that is hosted on another node in the cluster. This is unrelated to the Datacenter Maintenance going on in our Denver Datacenter. We have had to do some emergency rack relocations (power related) and some customers may have experienced brief outages related to this maintenance. We will send another note once access to the VPS CP has been fully restored.”
Ok so after months of fighting to keep my service online, poor support, late setups on paid for items, upgrades not being applied to my account as promised, I have filed a paypal claim against W2. I requested support after my servers were down for almost a whole day, but havent heard back from them. I then requested a refund, and again no reply. I sent tickets not only to their emergency tech support center, but also directly to the CEOs office. Nobody bothered to answer.
If you decide to host with W2, expect the following:
LOADS of downtime.
Piss poor support.
Slow servers.
Servers not as promised.
Upgrades and addons not being applied, even after almost a month!!!
DO NOT GIVE THESE CYBER THIEVES ANY OF YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY!!!
I ordered three servers from them, two in scranton and one in NYC
The first one was incredibly fast, I was impressed.
Couple weeks later, ordered another scranton. Slower than molasses in January. No response to tickets. Bonuses were not applied as advertised.
Saw the NYC DC available! Ordered one of those, never got provisioned — waited over a week.
Put in two paypal disputes for the NYC, and the slow scranton that never had the upgrades. Suddenly ALL the VPS’s were suspended!
No reply to any tickets or anything… Hoping to get my money back now…
I have 2 servers, one in Atlanta and one with Chicago.
I got the Chicago server first. It runs slow as molasses. It’s taken over 10 days to get TUN/TAP enabled on my Chicago VPS and still no answer. Over the weekend, I received an email saying they are working on SolusVM to enable TUN/TAP and rDNS via that control panel rather than filing a support ticket.
As of today, nothing. No change in SolusVM. Server runs on an AMD Pheonom processor with a very small cache! The server is down so I’m unable to paste a /proc/cpuinfo but I want to say 512k cache.
Since I was a customer already, I would get promotional emails. I received a $24/mo Atlanta VPS with upgrade to 1 GB RAM and quad Xeon. I signed up and the quad Xeon system is night and day compared to the Chicago.
My only issue with them is the low end hardware on their non-promotional system which is available to non-customers, the support and broken promises like the ability to enable TUN/TAP and rDNS via the control panel.
Also, if you have different passwords with two accounts – your password with your first account will override your second account. I contacted support about my SolusVM info being invalid, the tech sent me the info again, I replied it was invalid yet again and I ended up figuring out the password was for my Chicago VPS, the first one I ordered.
Oh and their support is 9 – 5pm CST but they claim 24/7 now and the enabling TUN/TAP plus rDNS via SolusVM will cut down on support tickets.
Don’t know why people just never got the idea of “what-you-pay-is-what-you-get”….For may be 2 bucks more (which is how much a cup of coffee cost), you can probably get a waaaaayyyyy better host :)
How do I know if I pay 2 bucks more I won’t get the same service (or even worse)?
I’ll tell you honestly, my VPSs in Dallas and Atlanta are the best VPS service I’ve ever had. If you get into a good data center you’ll be happy, and if you don’t they’ll migrate you. I’m happy with that.
As for getting what you pay for, I’ve from Las Vegas so I’m used to a different way of doing things. I let clueless visitors subsidize my lifestyle. My favorite prime rib dinner in Las Vegas costs $7.95. That covers maybe half the cost of the meal, while some clueless tourist unknowingly pays the other half.
Anyone having issue with their LA VPS?
My VPS getting slower day by day. My last test on disk I/O is only 4M/s.
Btw, my VPS is in node1117.
I finally gave up on L.A. I requested a transfer to Atlanta and am a happy camper now. I suggest that you get out of there as soon as you can. Don’t accept a different L.A. node. You need to get out of L.A.
After read your experience, I’m going to transfer now. They did scheduled a maintenances to fix the I/O issue, but really no difference.
Good! By the way, Dallas is also excellent. You might consider a transfer to Dallas also.
Do you have IP for both places? I need to choose the best speed to my place.
Dallas – 174.34.133.23
Atlanta – 173.234.141.35
@RFI Thanks for the IP! Dallas is faster to me.
Anyway, a quick update from me. I got replied from W2 support staff saying that my account has been “tune up”. Disk I/O is about >30MB/s and I’m happy with it. But suprisingly, I start feeling slow again after few hours. I done a disk I/O test and here is the result:
LA nodes need to avoid! Give up and requested for migration to Dallas.
I’m betting all of the nodes will be like that alas. When you sell 1GB ram for $2/m you need to oversell to the max to cover the bills (which people are questioning at this point).
Francisco
@Sei Kan, have your VPS migrated after you submit a ticket request?
@Francisco Dias
With this price, it’s impossible to believe they are not overselling. It’s pointless to sell high RAM VPS but not usable. I’m still prefer BuyVM for the price with very low of RAM, but performs good, LoL..
“w2servers” dedicated serves are so cheap and their service too. Server down 3 times in last 2 months. 1st time 20+ hrs then over 2 days (50+ hrs) now its been 3 days (when i write this comment). Open 3 tickets but no response. Worst hosting service ever!!
Already 4 days, no replies from them on my migration request.
I just got a reply about a migration request ticket. Evidently they don’t do that on weekends & holidays.
What’s “weekends & holidays”? Never heard of those terms….
my VPS on their chicago node has been down for more than 1 week. They answered finally answered my ticket and offered to setup anothet vps on another node. I agreed. That was 3 days ago.
now their site seems to be down: https://securecustomercenter.com/accounts/index.php
Are they in the dead pool now?
Their site works for me.
Ditto. Both the site and the helpdesk comes right up.
@Wing Loon
My migration request being ignored for 4 days. After that, I got reply for a not-related answer regarding performance issue on my current node and saying my VPS is online now. I replied, and waited another day from them asking me reason of migration. And now, I’m still waiting reply/action from them…
They seem reluctant to transfer, but I’m not sure why. I’m guessing that it’s probably less trouble to not transfer.
Stay after them. There is good service in Atlanta & Dallas if you can get a transfer. I’ve got production servers at both of those locations.
Finally they replied.
@Sei Kan, 4 days is acceptable. Mine going to 1 month on June 4, 2011. :(
how is 4 days acceptable??
Francisco
I’ve been trying to make a backup of my VPS. their central backup server has been down for at least the last 24 hours.
Is it just me or is their main website, as well as the “CEO”‘s blog down?
The nameservers are still online, granted both pointing to the same IP, but they know nothing of the blog/main websites entries.
Francisco
Both seem to be working from here
Both seems down from here
Must be a routing issue, still working here (UK) (and yes I emptied my cache)
Just means your ISP caches DNS for a long time, or maybe you’re using openDNS? Either way, the nameserver knows nothing of either domains so who knows what’s going on.
Francisco
Nameservers seems to be down/unreachable. Probably a DNS error.
Corporate Website reachable here http://173.212.214.237/
They must have “fixed” that because it just times out for me as unreachable.
Hmmm, just noticed the whois on that:
http://whois.domaintools.com/173.212.214.237
Look towards the bottom and you’ll see a mention of something called Paiol Hosting and how this IP address is part of their /29. I wonder if he’s working on yet another company or if these folks are just an innocent bystander.
Or I am just not have a clue as to what I’m looking at. :)
Folks interested in this provider may want to give these threads a read through:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1054133
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1035994
Bad uptime (I use one of the vps located in chicago), bad customer service (no response).
Time to change to an other vps provider.
Already 10 days. I get nothing from them for my migration request.
had 4 servers with w2servers.
2 in london
1 in zlin
1 in usa
for the first 1-2 months they were fine now all 4 servers have gone offline. no replys to a support ticket 4 days ago.
Scammers. Avode them…. I wish i had
My server in Colorado has been down for almost a week. Can’t even log into the control panel anymore.
Well I am losing hope. I have servers in these locations, LA, scranton, atlanta, and zlin and chicago. The last two have been down for a week. I have two orders that were placed months ago and were not set up because they were paid via paypal, and I did not have the cash, when the echeck went through it turned into a ticket, and those tickets have never been addressed. I have had response to a couple of tickets, but not resoution. Their recent emails all seem to be promises they cannot deliver on. They promised refund request to be handled by the 16th, I have little hope, but will definelty post if they come through. I understand startup pains but this is ridicoulous
^ forget about your servers lyron is a scam artist
I wonder if that pic in that “CEO blog” is really him… hahaha
Just received this email from them. http://pastebin.com/nmXgkj7V
I plan on asking for a refund since I can’t use my servers or control panel anyway. Doubt I will get it though.
They keep sending emails but never reply my tickets.
Try to get the refund!!!
Someone in WHT is (was?) offering a prize (a cookie??) if you are the first getting a refund of this morons.
a few days back a couple of my servers went offline, then a couple more, then today they are all offline.
No response from tickets, so DO NOT SIGN UP until I or other post some positive comments
What’s sad is that folks will. They did this time around even though many of us pointed out their previous history.
w2servers.com now shows “W2 Interactive” website, and I can’t find their hosting product anywhere. Interestingly under their Services page it states:
Interesting way to talk about themselves.
Sure they stand alone. No one wants to be near them. :)
And everything I read about them on their website was interesting. Amazed anyone gave them any money.
Would be interesting to know how he parted company with (I believe it was) hostgator.
Opened a paypal dispute, this is their response. http://pastebin.com/jT4p5BSs
Why are they debiting my account? And why in Euros? Closing my Paypal account and considering this a loss. Hopefully everybody else will avoid W2 servers and anything else Lyron Fosters the scam artist touches.
I think those are paypal response, CMIIW.
Looks like i lost my money there
spend around 200 dollars on their servers and did send alot of emails but guess what, No respond i think they are dead
They shutdown the site? w2server.com redirects to their w2interactive corporate site.
well, they’re pretty doom right now -> http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1057530
Interesting.
I wonder though how quickly he’ll be back up with a different company name. He’s done it before.
I also wonder why he did all that he said that he did without doing any background research and why he went ahead and took him on as a client even though what happened last time.
Of course this just makes it hard for those providers like myself and Fran and Quickweb and others who are busting our butts trying to give our clients the best service that we can.
As an aside, the w2interactive account on WHT is still not banned. I wonder why…
By the way, I don’t say that against Lee. He seems to have a clue.
I don’t think anyone who does business with this Liaron guy can be considered as having a clue.
I’m a sucker for low end boxes, and was tempted by his $2/month offers, but I never signed up
because he seemed like scum from the first day his offers showed up.
Just an update. My VPS with W2Servers in Seattle is down. Lost hope on them :(
I noticed it down about 2 pm yesterday afternoon Pacific time, then lost hope about 3 pm. I realized that the outage was too wide-spread to be anything other than an administrative outage. I bought a VPS from a different provider and configured it. The new IP address propagated by about 8 pm. Then I made apologies to clients.
When all was said & done, W2 Servers folding-up created about a 6 hour outage for me.
My VPS in Scranton and Dallas both went down yesterday with absolutely no response from support and they are still down. My VPS in Chicago with them has been down for weeks. No response to any tickets at all. Lots of apologetic mass emails, but no action.
I’m about a hair away from reporting this “company” to the FTC and my District Attorney’s office.
I suspect that this one will go down in history as a failed business venture. The only way the FTC or DA would have interest in this would be if there was some clear indication that the intention of starting the business was to collect subscription fees so they could take the money and run. Unfortunately intentions are difficult to prove.
They can show that they started a business offering a product of value, and that they services support tickets along the way. The fact that the business failed and clients lost money is not an usual occurrence. It would be difficult to build a criminal fraud case out of that. Business failures are far to common.
Will they investigate if the owner has a massive history of taking payments and not delivering services and shutting down and leaving without aword?
This isn’t the first time.
Showing a pattern is certainly evidence, but I suspect that a pattern alone isn’t enough.
Do it xD
This guys are… felons, delinquents, I don’t have words for all this situation. Sad.
I have the words.. but I don’t think this would get posted if I put them here. The last few emails Lying Foster sent to customers were very interesting, guaranteeing a refund if wanted, but those who stuck by him would reap the benefits of a premier service… no blog posts or emails after that…
I send around 10 emails
No respond at all, one of my tickets is 34 days old
lol lying foster @chris
wesley don’t expect anything from it. find a new host and move on.
I thought it apt. Wheres all the trash talk on his blog now? Maybe he’s busy eating some humble pie, or having another fight with his customers like the last post in his blog. Maybe he’ll do a world tour taking on ex-customers ‘south park/russel crow’ style? I doubt it. To coin an english phrase, ‘all mouth, no trousers’.
(Un)forgettable quotes from his blog include “Our demise is nothing more than wishful thinking of dying, competing brands.” Nice. Better still “I’ve played the devil’s advocate for some of the largest names in the industry and nobody is happy to see W2 Servers. Think of me as the blackops agent that they failed to kill the first time around.” OMG, Lyron IS Solid Snake! Hope his comms system isn’t running own his own VPS units though….
My VPS is just back up. I wish they do a better job now.
looks like he is at it again w2 home page for VPS is up again http://www.w2servers.com/hosting-deals.html
stay AWAY!!!!, do not get sucked in by the 2 dollars a month offer, but interesting he is now only offering 2 server locations
Bah, I think the temporary uptime is due to a data center error. Dead again!
Everyone who used paypal open a dispute against them, paypal will have to react if there are dozens of claims against them.
React how? Close their account? They’ll just open a new account under a different email address the next day.
yep opened paypal dispute a few days back, lets see what happens, also started CC dispute for the ones I ordered after they stopped accepting paypal (that should have been a clue I guess)
“W2 servers will be returning full force on 7/1/2011” as told on lyronfoster.info
We’ll see what will happen really!
Nah, they suck xD
oe!!!
The bio, at http://www.lyronfoster.info/bio.html, tells much about the threaten ‘full force’.
Received this email. http://pastebin.com/RpPSW8FZ
Still no reply on my refund request.
good news!!! I was successful in getting ALL!!! my money back, via CC claim, and paypal dispute
great!
long live the paypal :)
How did you manage to get paypal to refund your money? They just told me they would do something if more claims were put against W2Servers.
That’s what they told me also.
WOW! Give this girl a cookie! :D
I bought nearly 14 VPS here. But all VPS cann’t use for about 1 mouth.
The nearly email said all account will be open in 7/11/2011.
But they disappointed me again.
Any body has the same problem?
You’re asking if anyone else has had this problem? EVERYONE has this problem!
Really?
I guess I’m one of the lucky ones that got a VPS, but I also can’t get into the Control Panel.
I have 1 VPS with them. It is not accessible. I filed for a refund, no answer. The Control-Panel for the VPS is not accessible. No support. No refund. I guess then were just there to take some money and went off.
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