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X4B Review (2020) - Stay away!!
OpenSource
Barred
Hello everyone!
Today, I'd like to tell you a few words about my experience on X4B. Based on the title, you kind of already assume how it'll end up being...
X4B in numbers:
Support: 1/10
DDoS Mitigation: 9/10
Network latency (in Europe: UK, Netherlands, Germany - tested on 3 different hosts): 3/10
Panel: 10/10
Ease of use: 3/10
Explanation:
Support:
If you ever experience any issues with their service, bugs on their end, or anything, just anything you'd have to contact their support over, they'll in 99.9% of the cases tell you to fu** off (in a nice way). They are rude and never willing to help. An hour of work is billed at $40 (or more) (if I remembered correctly). But the problem is not just that I don't know how to setup their service - I do! But they are trying to make me pay to fix bugs on their end... Unacceptable behavior. I sent them multiple traceroutes, pings, my provider name, they could've used their looking glass to fix the majority of the problems! Even after all that, they are telling me that I need to send them additional info but didn't even tell me what info... As an addition, WHATEVER I DO IS a PROBLEM WITH MY CONFIGURATION, NOT THEIRS! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? I'M NOT A BEGINNER WITH THIS STUFF, I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR OVER 2 YEARS!
DDoS Mitigation:
Excellent, no need to talk much on that part. It'll protect you from 99.9% of the attacks with pretty much no bypasses. It'll block everything from website attacks, DDoS attacks, any other UDP/TCP attacks on any OSI layer up to game exploits and MC bots... Just incredibly well made!
Network Latency:
Worst in the industry. Expect your latency to be at least 15ms higher, but maybe up to 40, with jumps from 30 (on origin)ms to 100+ms when connecting to X4B. And what did their support do about that? Take a guess:
A) Change routes and optimize ping further (as I'm routed to the UK instead of the Netherlands POP XD - from Serbia)
Contact their partners and peers to see what can they do to fix the problem
C) Tell me to fu** off and did absolutely nothing
Panel:
1000000/10. You can configure every single rule, do anything you'd want... From ReverseProxy configuration for L7 up to L4 rules. Anything that'll work on packet inspection filtering from WireShark, works on X4B. Possibilities are outstanding.
Please, due to the mentioned reasons, even tho the interface is great, as well as DDoS protection, it's not worth your money as you'll most likely end up with an incredible latency increase, with no further support from their team.
Screenshots of some of their other reviews:
Now, take a look at this autistic response:
Even tho I responded with so many details in the past:
Like wtf... Anyways, please let me know if you had such experience with them 
Comments
@SplitIce
Without meaning any offence - and not excusing their blunt reply, your screenshot there doesn't detail what the actual problem is. I'm guessing you're routing from somewhere in mainland Europe via London to somewhere in mainland Europe, but you didn't explicitly say that. It's better to send MTR reports as text rather than images. I'm not too surprised they struggled to provide you any assistance based on your image, personally I'd have needed to ask for a lot of clarification before being able to investigate anything further.
I hate customers like this. Nobody told you to fuck off, you're just whining about added latency. No shit.
Also, newsflash, pings vary for many reasons. You're showing your inexperience.
So what is the problem in one sentence? What is it exactly that you expect them to do and the result? That's the best way to end a support request. You asked them if they could do anything and their response wasn't inappropriate.
I think I understand where this comes from now. Their product is very customizable to different needs, and unique in implementation. This means that it’s very likely that customers routinely can’t figure it out and assume it’s a problem in their end, and I’d guess that 999 out of 1000 times it’s not. Trying to stay competitive while dealing with the threat of what feels like continual customer incompetence can be frustrating beyond measure.
No judgement of it either way, just understanding various perspectives has value in many ways.
I have no bad experience with those guys myself, however, you wont get help if there is no network or hardware issues on their end. You are on your own.
$40/hr is cheap and the service itself is really cheap. If you want to use a budget service like theirs, you need to adjust your expectations. Nobody is going to change routes for a customer paying $10/month or so.
X4B is indeed terrible! Your screenshot indicates significant PEBKAC errors in their systems!
@opensource calling something an autistic response never leads to complaints being resolved in your favor, nor does "WTF". You even said netcup had a "stupid system" based on another individuals post. And had interesting comments about a different individual. If you are trying to reach a solution for something (your DDOS attacks it appears), kindness and professionalism - even when you desperately feel aggrieved and abused would probably get you closer to solutions and assistance from a bunch of smart people on this site. Many here actually like to solve hard problems and if phrased politely they will keep chipping away at issues to help people resolve them.
Gee, what a 180.
As far as I was aware you were agreeing with us, that this wasnt a route for us to fix. Our general policy is not to screenshot/quote our customers replies, however I've vetted this one to contain no details you have not already provided in your screenshots (it's also a courtesy not provided by you).
I think my reply given to you in reply 14 was pretty detailed all things considered. The fact that the ticket is 14 replies strong and you are still yet to point out the technical nature of your issue.
If you need us to work out the details that you should have opened the ticket with in the first place then we are going to need to access your backend server at a minimum (and possibly more). Taking this on is a management action. The engineer time time do this is not included in your service cost. We do offer to provide this service at less than "cost price" to help our customers (cost before ~8% paypal fees, bad debt, service execution risk and overheads e.g time spent scheduling and job overrun).
Of course you could provide us with an accurate diagnosis / troubleshooting result. With that illustrating ANY issue on our end we would of course take action (or if not an issue on our end provide any general advice if we had any on hand).
You havent done this, or provided anything from which to work from yet.
We try to to make adjustments regardless of customer size, however there needs to be clear case for improvement. I tested a few alterations on a testing range for this customer, however did not get a major change. 17ms of his problem is that his ISP transits out of a neighbouring country (Romania).
Our policy is also in this ticket as it was explained to the customer:
We still havent got all the details that were requested to perform route adjustment from this customer (although partially our fault for not specifying explicitly that screenshots were not acceptable, having clarified and not received that however....).
The customer is aware that we don't have the required information (textual format mtr/traceroute), and why textual format is required. As we havent received the correct details no route adjustment has been made. Due to the customer thanking me and closing the ticket I beleived no route adjustment was necessary, something that meshed with my analysis.
LOL.
Blaming the provider for your fucked up ISP. Good job my man!
Please note that this is just a part of many responses I made… You didn’t see my whole conversation, but just one little part of it.
You’re right. I acknowledge that and will do it that way. Don’t even know why I sent it in png format.
That may be right, but I was extremely frustrated by the way they managed to replay. “It is my responsibility to come to them with diagnosed issue”, what’s the point of support than? That sounds more like a kind of issue tracker or something…
I’m at least sure it has nothing to do on my end…
It’s $20 a month (and could be significantly higher if I actually managed to use their services, while unfortunately I wasn’t able to do so). The thing is I expected some kind of support even for $20-$40 which I was planning to give monthly on X4B - at least the service to be working after I executed their script. If it does not, than they may have to rethink the design of that script, or explicitly say that it may not work on every single server and provide some kind of troubleshooting steps. As for support, if they did not plan to do anything for free, it should be specified on the purchase page, where we should have option to pick between basic and advanced support. At least I would’ve know what to expect.
First of all, if an issue is with an ISP, than you shell consider contacting them directly. As instance, Tube-Hosting did that with 2 Serbian providers in order to improve routes and lower latency. They received a reply in less than 24 hours by our ISP operators and they changed their routes, even tho Tube is on the same, or even smaller size than X4B - you gave no effort on contacting SBB and just said that you give up and it’s an issue with my ISP that you can not solve - everything is fixable, if you just want to put some effort into it, like writing a 5 minute email
That’s why I closed ticket. I knew you don’t want to investigate this further or contact them or optimize routing. Also, you mentioned Telekom, that has acceptable 50ms latency, but with significant packet loss. Players from Telekom on our game servers were regularly kicked, while on some other unpopular providers were not even able to connect (at least not through X4B GRE). That doesn’t automatically mean that it’s an issue with your service, but you’re just willing me to submit more information, while not even telling me what exactly info to provide, nor how to gather it.
On papers X4B looks like execute our script and everything will work system, but in reality, it will conflict with 85% providers - I tried it on 4 different hosting providers with located on different parts of Europe, with players and customers joining our game and test servers from both Balkan and Europe, but to my surprise, players and customers from the Netherlands have higher latency than us, from Balkan.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if you now say it is all caused by poor configuration that I executed your script on all those hosts, which most of them were clear install of OS, with no firewall rules and no any filtering software and that it may even be the issue with 95% of all ISPs in Europe that they don’t support your filtration methods. It’s totally not that X4B is incompatible with most providers and their networks, along with large amount of unpopular ISPs being dropped or maybe your script having possible issues itself. At that point, for this service, I see paying for 1-2 hours of support setting up all themselves carefully, custom for each provider, as a must have.
As for netcup system, I said my opinion on what their customer mentioned - if the system is indeed like he described, than it is stupid in my opinion, no? Do I have to say that everything is wonderful, even if it’s not? I don’t know what’s the reality of it tho as I never had an opportunity to try their services.
And as for the mentioned individual, what did you expect me to tell him? Do you think it’s right to pay $140 for 32GB of DDR3 ram and 2010 4 core cpu?
I'm going to make this simple for you.
Your issue apparently (includes latest reply) includes:
- "incredible instability"
- "often kicking the majority of players"
- "regular ping spikes"
- "poor connection overall"
- "and often timeouts"
99.9% of the time this is a customer backend issue. None of these are necessarily supporting a bad route scenario (what we attempted to execute with you for the first 14 replies), it would certainly be an exceptional bad route case if it was. It is not possible for us to troubleshoot a customer backend issue from our end.
== Option 1 ==
If you wish to complete the "bad route" troubleshooting process start by providing the details requested initially that you have not provided (a textual format MTR/traceroute). After receiving the information required and repeatedly requested we will make a detirmination as to whether this is something that we are:
a) Able to adjust (in whatever method); and
b) Willing to adjust
We are not going to be contacting ISPs (something that is a final stage action we may take) having not completed the initial investigation steps.
== Option 2 ==
If you wish to complete troubleshooting as to the issues I have extracted from your responses then either:
a) Provide technical readouts showing your issue at a technical level. What this is is up to you, it could be anything from a pcap, MTR or even replication instructions (that can be performed with standard tools like telnet).
b) Purchase management and have an engineer perform your setup correctly and if possible test it for the issues presented (if you are able to provide clear replication instructions).
As it stands you have not presented a single technical readout or finding supporting your problems here, so short of testing every aspect of our network in regards to your service (something that would require hundreds of not thousands of hours) there is little we can do. We can not investigate "incredible instability" on the basis only of those two words.
== Option 3 ==
Because I want this closed and your matter relates to a game service and client thats free of any unowned licence.
I'll setup a Debian/Ubuntu Linux Minecraft server with DigitalOcean or Vultr Amsterdam and a tunnel installed on your service.
I'll verify this from Australia via a VPN to Amsterdam. When this works (Minecraft is actually a test case we used for TCP filter verification during the last upgrade) you stop opening support tickets and deal with your "issue" yourself as we will have exceeded our support obligation to you.
Alright. Please setup a digital ocean Minecraft server with the tunnel from my service (not all ports are tunneled, so you can feel free to choose any port that’s not open). If I still get latency issues and ping drops on it, while I’ll make sure to invite more players to test, we’ll be able to move forward to diagnosing what further to do (see if there are routing issues, contact ISPs or similar). Please inform me about the IP of the server on the mentioned ticket.
Best Regards
I’ll also provide you with the required info as soon as possible.
That's a useless reply. You didn't respond to either of my questions.
@SplitIce fire this customer. It's a time sink that won't be satisfied because the problem isn't you. He has no appreciation for your efforts.
I've been connected since end of yesterday to start of today via Surfshark VPN to Amsterdam. Aside from Steve getting bored in his hole in the ground it was an entirely uneventful night free of any "incredible instability", "often kicking the majority of players" or "often timeouts".
I also had a ping running (from the minecraft server, over it's tunnel) the entire time. Output (up to window length) below:
https://paste.ee/p/xBMa5#p42p73argrGTMHrB8FIGVpUAQDUVRKWu
No "regular ping spikes" or "poor connection overall" there
You are welcome to do your own testing until I forget about it, close the PuTTY window or for whatever reason close down the server.
Option 3 is now complete, marking the end of any support obligation to you as agreed. If you require anything else please contact us for management, or (preferably) hire someone else.
There were no specific efforts put into fixing the issue. I know what a support can look like, and I’m sure X4B support is the low end one, I’ve used more than 30 different providers in order to evaluate the largest possible amount of them and figure out what is the best possible one for my needs. I love experimenting with that stuff. X4B is just another experiment, cuz it looked great (at least on paper). They are allowed to fire me and refund the amount they are holding for the rest of the billing period, I’m not using it anyways besides for L7, where even L7 reverse proxy is not working ideally. Besides, I’m most likely not the only one having problems with them, there is a large amount of people that would agree.
Thanks, but may I have the server IP I required sent in the ticket (or here)? The IP being pinged is a private network.
It’s worth mentioning that if I connect to Germany VPN, it works great, but from my hope network, it’s far from it
Gee last I checked over $50 of engineer time spent trying (and failing) to just extract basic details from a customer (A MTR) was quite a bit of effort. One might say an unnecessary amount of effort.
If that didnt result in action being taken you can only blame yourself for wasting that time given to you.
I explained the nature of the tested IP explicitly.
Unless you are refering to your filtered IP is in your account, and honestly if you don't even know that what have you been doing?
Right after you pay for the engineer time being wasted here, and in your ticket.
Anyway. Option 3 was very explicit. Bolded the pertient points.
There are none that have opened tickets currently. And I can't find a single ticket like yours in recent history. I cant really tell what your issue is though, it appears to be everything yet supported by nothing.
Having nothing to work on still, we remain unable to do anything even if we wanted to allocate you more time. Although why we would do that? You wasted all the time and good faith you were given.
@OpenSource Everyone on this thread seems to think you're the problem though. Surely you must be right and everyone else is wrong?
Anyway, ISPs having terrible routing is nothing new. You're in serbia so it's probably normal to not have optimal routing. In east coast US, you could be right next to a datacenter and the ISP could route you to nyc before the datacenter. Where I am, datacenters can have 150-160 ping to london but my ping to london through my ISP is usually 350. Nothing new here, and it's not their fault.
@SplitIce is way too nice and patient.
@OpenSource
Before vomitting over engineers first learn the basics of the field. And when an engineer asks you for a mtr in text form then bloody do as asked rather than cluelessly calling the other side incompetent while you yourself utterly fail to properly respond even to quite simple requests.
This thread is actually giving me more faith in humanity.
OP, remove screenshots with your personal details.
Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I managed to connect to the mentioned Minecraft server and experienced the SAME issues. Here is a video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e_gS0YizFNc (watch until the end)
As you can see, I've got dragbacks and continuous issues as well as huge latency.
I've sent the traceroute to the ticket, in textual format, so we may be able to keep on working from there. At least now we know that I actually know how to setup the system and it is an issue with a large number of ISPs from Europe.
Everything I said is purely in comparison to the competitors. Never had such huge latency and lagbacks.
You have two roads that lead to the same place. One is faster, one is slower. You’re blaming the car for taking the slower road. Everyone else is telling you to blame the driver.
If a competitor has a better route from your location and you’re not using them, you’ve identified the source of the problem. They probably cost more and that bothers you. I wonder why they cost more, if they have a better upstream path from your location.
Maybe if you help these guys figure out the difference between the two, they can identify a way to provide you with a better route and a higher bill.
I watched the video and saw the suboptimal experience.
Instead of blaming network latency, you should redesign the app to accommodate high latency networks.
The first direction is to perform some prediction in the client side app.
Effect of user input can be rendered immediately, and then reconciled when the server response arrives.
The second direction is to switch to a peer-to-peer network.
You can use global-scale UDP multicast to achieve communication, and avoid the centralized server.
This way, users in the same continent would not need to connect to a server in another continent.
Please talk to your ISP regarding enabling multicast, and start a "no multicast hall of shame" if necessary.
Ahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahah… Just after I thought this can not become more absurd, it just did. Do you seriously want me to redesign Minecraft and Spigot server?