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We've placed it on backorder now as there's about 2TB free space left and some space opening up daily. There's also a new (larger) server coming in on 2/26.
Not everyone knows that TrustPilot's business model is meticulously built in a way to force businesses to give them large sums of money to succeed.
And then here's their plans:
So their plans basically come out to 55 cents per review request you can send out per month. I'm sure there's an Enterprise "discount" but I doubt it's much. Imagine tacking on 55 cents per order just to request customers leave you a review. This is exactly why more "premium" brands who can afford to bribe TrustPilot are rated higher.
We tested all this out once. We got something like 5-10 reviews a day when we displayed our review button on the billing area. When we displayed TrustPilot, we got a total of 0 reviews because no one wants to register with "TrustPilot" just to leave a review. We did invite 100 people (as permitted) this month and we got five reviews that range from 4-5 stars. So based on our math above, it'll cost us $11 per genuine review. Unfortunately, as a result of us not being able to afford this, most the reviews are still people who are extremely mad, usually over breaking our policies.
Here are the most 5 recent negative reviews we've received:
I'll do it for $7.
That’s like a full year of Black Friday services.
Well, thanks for the interesting convo. Decided to use @VirMech. Price wasn't a problem for me as I'm just looking to save some data from my old server while moving it to the new one, and probably keeping it for like a month or two at most, I could've paid like a overpriced vps if it worked lol.
Edit: Dunno what "backorder" means on their system but hopefully I can get the vps asap.
Hope you're okay waiting a week and a half -
Well, you did threaten to suspend me for 100% CPU usage on an idle server (though I'm not the one from that review). Some ticketing later, it turned out that your monitoring script had somehow misreported the usage.
I understand that a company your size needs heavy automation to survive, but when that automation decides to falsely send strongly-worded emails to customers, that might do more harm than good.
What ended up driving me away as a customer though was the lack of IPv6 (and also any prospect of ever getting it).
Service-wise, Virmach was "reasonable", I'd say. Not above and beyond like some other (even cheap) providers on here, but it was a cheap and solid VPS with average support quality and response time.
Would probably rate as 3/5 if I'd bother with Trustpilot and the like.
Now for BudgetNode, which was also recommended on this thread: Don't. I strongly advise against it.
Part 1: human reasons: Ishaq, the person who runs BudgetNode, has demonstrated a complete absence of morals and conscience (by abusing his LET moderator privileges for personal financial gain). He was caught eventually, didn't even issue an apology.
Part 2: technical reasons: their network in Amsterdam has about a one-day outage every two months, usually because their upstream is trigger-happy nullrouting ranges for DDoS or spam-blacklisting.
Independent of that, they had a public leak of customer data (back when they acquired Piohost) and it took them four days to close the hole after they were informed of it (where "closing the hole" = "changing the MySQL root password"). That's just terrible.
As space opens up, we place new people on existing servers. Otherwise, the new storage server is scheduled for 2/26. If you ordered a 500GB or 1TB plan, I would anticipate a delivery date between tomorrow and 2/26.
There's currently room for a 500GB plan, so if you're the next in line and have a 500GB package it should be pretty soon.
I understand that a company your size needs heavy automation to survive, but when that automation decides to falsely send strongly-worded emails to customers, that might do more harm than good.
While there may be some false positives, since the launch we have severely improved the system. We even have a secondary script to throw out any possible false positives. The system completely ignores the first offense, sends a warning on the second. If you believe it to be an error (extremely rare now), this is a perfect time to contact us before the third warning (shutdown) and then suspension (which we waive most the time now.)
The review was a recent one, and the customer in question was definitely running a resource-intensive script.
He's still a customer of ours. The VPS was never "locked down" (it was powered off) and we clearly did not run virus checking programs in the background. The customer said he found a virus on the system, so for some reason that translates to us planting a virus and then running a virus scan on his VPS. Just to clarify, after reviewing the ticket, he was shut down for high I/O usage, and he was "only" running a search engine scraper. The high CPU was unrelated to the shutdown.
It seems none of Virmach’s support operators know about stock information & estimated delivery dates. They just put “Waiting for Sales” for any inquiries without an update which is pretty annoying. Unfortunately I don’t have the time till the 26th for delivery so I’ll just move on to a different provider and request a refund.
BuyVM seems solid, still looking into budgetnode? openvz.io is also tempting.
I have several non-storage Virmach plans from last years' BF and am ok with recommending them. They have various limitations (ipv6, cpu usage unless you get a high-cpu plan, etc) that are disclosed up front, so take those into account when buying. The storage plans sound nice and I've noted them as part of my obsessively following the topic. We'll see how the stock levels look after the 26th, of course.
BuyVM's upcoming slab storage product has everyone waiting eagerly but it is still a ways from availability from what I can tell. Their older storage plans work fine and have tons of cpu, but as pure storage they are on the expensive side by today's standards. People who have them will supposedly get a nice upgrade to the slab plans once those come online. Slabs will still be connected to the internet through 100mbps slices though.
You have better options in EU than in the US, generally speaking. Someone mentioned MrVM in Lenoir NC a day or so ago but I haven't tried them:
https://clients.mrvm.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=36
1Gbit.
We'll have the nodes prepped for 10Gbit connectivity if we need to opt for it.
Storage fabric is looking like 40Gbit infiniband. Still have testing to do, will be heading to Vegas in a couple weeks.
Francisco
Shiet, I've heard around the slabs and really want them as those will help me out tremendously right now. But I need the storage to be online like asap so unfortunately I'll be paying a bit more for the storage vps's..
Interesting, but most of my work is around the US so I don't even have EU on my radar.
Will have new Storage in Dallas next few days if you are interesting? or if you are need urgent i can set up in 30 minutes and moved you later with our new nodes.
No idea what there is to apologize for. I was offering writing services for LEB hosts and many were happy with the arrangement. ColoCrossing used to charge $1250/month for priority posts for providers, do you have a problem with that too?
This was resolved and we haven't had an outage recently. Additionally we don't even offer storage services in Amsterdam so this is irrelevant.
That was PioHost only, don't word it like BudgetNode was affected to make your comment seem more appropriate. And how do you know what measures were taken? It sounds like you have more inside information about this than anyone else and from what you've said it seems like you tested the login, too?
Well if I understand what this is about, it sounds like the issue was lack of disclosure to readers? Whether hosts are happy with it is a completely separate matter.
If you remember anything about the CC/LEB/LET acquisition saga then you'll know that yes, plenty of LET members and ex-members had (and maybe still have) big problems with CC about its (at the time) undisclosed hand in LEB/LET operations and content decisions.
I'm not too worked up about this but as a general matter I think people will be happier if you always tell them up front what is going on. Like if you write a post for XYZ host, include a note in the post saying you wrote it in cooperation with them. Otherwise it has aspects in common with shilling.
I don't currently have any Budgetnode storage servers but of course as usual, I see everything ;-). Sadly the promo has expired but it's still a decent offer even without it.
Perhaps. Although it wouldn't have made a difference to readers as the providers were not given preferential treatment in terms of the text/wording. I simply wrote the submitted offers and queued them behind the already ready posts and scheduled it. If they wanted another they had to wait 1 month minimum like everyone else.
Anyway, let's stop derailing this guy's post.
Many people simply left and never returned to any community.
Francisco
That's precisely the attitude I was talking about.
I've seen a screenshot of one of those "offers": you worded it in such a a way to make it seem like the payment was mandatory (i.e. the provider wouldn't be featured on LEB if they didn't pay). Sure, you could have had perfectly noble motives and just happened to use an unclear description (repeatedly). Needless to say, I don't believe a single word of that.
The last outage was on 2018-01-16. Our definitions of "recently" may differ.
If you've managed to fix some underlying problem, that's great and I look forward to seeing how it goes.
Someone sent me a dump of my name, email and postal address, and billing history, along with a link to a Pastebin with the PioHost database password (that Pastebin is where I'm taking the original leak date from).
That was all the evidence I needed.
There was also some, shall we say, "lively discussion" on the LET Discord, which eventually died down when someone announced the password had finally been changed.
The leak happened after PioHost's assets were officially sold and transferred to the control of BudgetNode. My notification about the breach was addressed to PioHost support, but eventually (four days later, as I said) answered by a BudgetNode representative. The official statement/post-mortem was issued by BudgetNode.
I think it's safe to say that this happened under BudgetNode's very own eyes.
That's one thing I agree with you on, actually.
Still, I think it's important to lay out the facts about the various incidents at some point, which should include both your and my information (and ideally that from others who have witnessed the leak unfold first-hand).
I'm not one for dedicated drama and bashing threads, I just call things like I see them when I see them.
BudgetNode...I'm not sure
but
Virmach is NOT reliable and should not be trusted for anything production equivalent. There would be many who would disagree but having been with them for almost 1.5 years, I can surely say their service is mediocre and more over support is always latent (and unhelpful at times). And if you come here to report, all "LET masters" would bang on the fact "for the price you pay" it is an excellent service. So... decide accordingly!
And we weren't informed about the paste until the day we took action. So your claim that it took us 4 days to do anything is false and misleading.
As you can see, I'm not just spouting made-up figures.
Edit: I've received additional information about this. Please see my correction below.
Sorry to disappoint. Lower-level agents do not handle communication with the datacenter so they often do not have any information other than what we provide them in terms of delivery estimates. Even our estimates are not fully accurate, which is why we do not usually communicate them to customers.
We're trying our best to go back in stock and remain in stock but all our services have had an overwhelming level of demand in the last 60 days.
Sometimes when people share their vague negative experiences, they may be valid as I cannot look up and review their experience, but I personally reviewed all your tickets as I promised when you requested support via LET private messages.
I understand you're upset that you were suspended, but that doesn't equate to us being unreliable. In addition, when services are suspended, usually a system administrator has to take a look which does result in a longer wait. This does not mean all our support is like that, and being with us for 1.5 years, you should know that.
I actually reviewed all your tickets from the start (from when I personally answered your sales ticket in 2016.)
You were initially warned (and not suspended) on the first nullroute by the datacenter, due to high number of packets. You replied by stating that you do not send e-mails. Remember, for this entire time you never verified any mail volume with us and said there's no mailing. I offered to block the port if you're not mailing, to prevent a suspension, and you stated that you do not want the port blocked. Then the suspension occurred later.
This is where you finally requested to increase your threshold from an estimated 100 emails an hour to 300 per hour. It was already on a high limit, and you finally were suspended for sending out 2,048,000 email packets per second.
We specifically prohibit high-volume mailservers and all of this was explained to you in detail on the first ticket before you signed up. We let you know that from the start, and you were upset you got suspended after a warning. I still don't understand how that translates to us having mediocre service and support for 1.5 years.
Just had a private conversation with @Ishaq: apparently that other person's notification didn't arrive (not sure if they didn't send it or it just got lost due to technical problems).
Either way, the first confirmed message to BudgetNode was as late as June 25th. According to Ishaq, the passwords in the paste were changed pretty much immediately after that message; it was only the public announcement that was delayed until the next day. (Which seems reasonable.)
Apparently I was misinformed on some parts here.
It's still a messy business, but apparently not as badly handled as it looked to me.
so you set a limit on mails per hour, but suspend on packets per second? where is the sense in that and how do you tell that the amount of packets relates to any number of mails that's breaking the limit?
I too had this question in mind but I assume hopefully correctly that the packets per second value would equate to a much higher threshold than 300 tickets. Maybe @Virmach can clarify and confirm what is being explained.
It's estimated but quite lenient. Most customers can limit their usage better in terms of the number of emails and can easily count the emails, so it's best communicated in these terms. In some instances, we use other measurements that may include actual number of emails per hour. It all depends on if the datacenter is taking the action, and the virtualization type. There are of course, some false positives for specific uses, but this is why we do not suspend on the first instance (to allow time for communication.)
If a customer contacts us for pre-approval on mailservers, it will usually be more thoroughly discussed.
So sending out an email burst around Christmas and birthdays with a large Santa Claus / invite image to all my friends could raise a flag. Because I would not be the only one doing that on a family vps.
@EricLimaB - one more possibility to consider might be Lunanode - can resize (both grow and shrink) mountable volume at $0.03 / GB / month (with hourly billing) - so best for flexible storage in range under say 200 GB, yields relatively competetive cost for quality service with Toronto and Montreal for Canada locations. So you can start by funding account with $5 and take it from there.
For lower cost with larger sizes (ie 250 GB up to 1 TB) definitely check with @SpeedBus (that is, CrownCloud) in Los Angeles, @SpartanHost in Dallas (might find coupon for 40% off) and @VirMach for Buffalo NY.
(Point of reference: today happened to notice decent speed for a single file transfer from SpartanHost Seattle to VirMach Buffalo - 765 MB took 43 seconds = 140 mbit/s)
Also ...
@Abdullah (HostHatch) occasionally has deals for 250 GB (or more) storage in Los Angeles
@Awmusic12635 (Subnet Labs) might still have deal on annual payment 150 GB in Seattle
I've been really happy with experience using all the hosts mentioned above - all seem to be pretty solid value and service for LET budgets. I'm probably forgetting a few others that you'll find on https://www.lowendstorage.win but these are as good a place as any to start based on what you seem to be looking for.
Thanks for the mention, 40% off coupon is "KVM40" bringing it to $3 per 250gb per month.