New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
cociu - hostsolutions.ro - NETSILVANIA | Move your services!
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I don't say that he can recover. I say that I do not exclude that option and think that the chances are not all stacked against him.
From what I know anything storage related seems to be his Achilles heel. The current case isn't his first disk related problem. My assumption (not knowledge, just an assumption wrt HS) is that 'reliable storage' and 'cheap' don't go together well, at least not at his level of know how (there are ways but those are clearly beyond his horizon), so what did/does he do? Raid 5(0) or 6(0)? That's relatively cheap but it's likely to kill him if one or, way worse, multiple disks fail. ZFS? That doesn't really change a lot.
And that's what I see/assume now. Something made a few disks blow up and then two things happened: (a) it went "infectious" that is, a few (initially) bad disks tore down other disks with them, possibly due (in part) to a panicked quick "rescue" action without proper analysis, and (b) the (not at all) good old resilvering and fsck loop
That said, some facts favourable to him still hold: He has his own, let's call it tier 1.5 to tier 2 data center, he gets el. power very cheap, human resources cost is low in Romania and, most probably importantly, there is a market for super-cheap VMs and, so it seems, no competitor capable and willing to take over @cociu's market niche.
As for his business model and his business skills being weak I submit that he started from almost zero and now has about 10 or 15 racks (my crude guess) full of customers. That quite powerfully contradicts the "weak business skills and/or model" hypothesis.
I'm not sure whether I/we should be happy about his eventual return but it seems not unlikely to me.
Belarus reminded us how much video confessions can prove, if you didn't learn it from China and many others before.
Depends with what are you comparing. It is more expensive than in India or China, does is mean VPSes in India or China are cheaper? US is notoriously expensive regarding labour as well as Italy or France, yet they have some of the cheapest offers, some even free.
Does it mean labour at Oracle is free since they offer a free tier? Or at Google?
"Non-household electricity prices in the EU highest in Germany (EUR 0.18 per kWh) and lowest price in Sweden (EUR 0.06 per kWh) in the second half of 2020." says Eurostat.
In Romania it is about 9 cents, maybe a tiny bit less if you are really lucky and negotiate very well (excluding taxes).
I would certainly be happy, he makes things interesting and the price of lowenddrama is very low.
I do not think he will return. So far it's obvious we don't want him as provider here, so there is no point for more popcorn drama.
The only problem right now is the current services to be back up, or refunded. At the end of the day, customers must come first.
A lot of the hosts on here would be similar though... Look at the number of hosts that are using (or even deploying 'new' servers with) 8+ year old Intel E3 and E5 processors. Most other providers have much better communication when their servers fail though.
Maybe. I think chances are higher than 50/50 that he'll be back. 2 simple reasons: He serves LET well (as in "creating drama and clicks") and there still is a high demand for super low priced VMs and he seems to be the only one meeting that.
Btw, while I'm sure he's losing customers (and deservedly so) I guess at least 70% and probably even more than 80% of his customers will not leave. My guess is that the real (major) harm created is that people will be mistrusting his storage offers. His non-storage systems seem to rarely have had downtime and if so then not for long. As far as I could reconstruct the HS / @cociu history all major problems/downtime/clusterf_cks were with his storage stuff .
This. A big part of the community looks for some VM for occasional use or for a set and forget kind of setup and price is the only criterion (besides the obvious minimal specs needed). There are also the ones with regional requirements, redundancy, CDN etc which can be done very cheaply.
Any kind of host will do for the majority of them and cociu ticks a big chunk of the boxes.
He can come back if he manages to solve the mess.
There is a market for this and if cociu fails, then someone else will fill the void and i prefer the devil I know.
You are not brightest star in the sky mate. Your fanatizm denies you to accept the truth as it is. The man took money, the man does not provide services for taken money, the man does not communicate. There is a facts and there is your
fanatical point of view.
Profitability is not the problem. It's that people previously use only a portion of the disk, either backup solutions or torrenting. But now one can easily fill up all the space with Chia (already mentioned by other providers on LET who offer storage VPSs), people don't run Chia on VPS to profit, just to cover some cost with spare space they have.
The cheap storage cociu is offering relies on LET style idling, so that oversell is possible, therefore profitable. Now that tide is turned as people are filing up their spaces with Chia, this clearly becomes an "unsuccessful" loss leader, with men's effort and added hard disk cost pools in just to meet the increasing demand and a dissatisfying result out. A smart businessman at this point would have just killed the storage line, not offering "one free year".
I claim refund my order via paypal and i win.
So this the end.
Time for all costumers to involucrate cociu's paypal with forced refounds.
Does the @TimboJones approve this move?
I doubt there's very much in this world that TimboJones does approve of, except the important things in life like whiskey, weed and black sabbath.
No, it does not.
I could setup a new hosting business and fill 10 or 15 racks, this requires very little business skills. Just get shit up and running and get the money to pay for it by selling pre-paid and lifetime. The problems only starts when you have 10-15 racks full of customers demanding service, but you have no money coming in since they are all pre-paid and you already spent that money. So, you make some crazy offers with more low-priced pre-paid just to get some money coming in to keep shit running. And next month you have even more customers, but still no money. Repeat.
This is a weak business model, this requires no skill, and this does not work in the long run. This is cociu. Granted, he have managed to keep it running for a surprisingly long time, but then again he uses a perfume company for billing and is awaiting trial in a court of law, so my guess is the end is neigh.
So, 31 pages in, and I'm supposed to believe people gladly pay for services they do not expect to use?
Name- Ponzi scheme
This is not only morally wrong - it's a crime. Taking money under false pretense.
That Ponzi scheme would fail in 3-10 months, perhaps a year, hence the term "summerhost". He kept it going for much-much longer, maybe even learned something in this time.
But, yes, it does look like this is the end and I am sad.
Not just. They will gladly pay for something they CANT use.
@cociu you motherfucker - any update on the involucrated drives?
Even if I do not totally disagree with that definition, in cociu's case I would not call it a pure scam. I think that a scam is something designed from the beginning to trick people out of their money.
I do not believe cociu has the intent to scam people, he is just clueless. I don't personally know the guy so I could very well be wrong, but I get the impression that he does not consciously true to fool people, it's just that he has absolutely no business sense and his long time planning is non-existent. He gets himself into trouble and just does whatever he has to do to survive for the moment, even if that means even bigger troubles down the road. I'm not defending the guy, he has no place running a business, but I just don't think it's completely correct to call it a scam.
He can blame language, misunderstandings, bad luck, exploding ups's and involucrated drives or whatever he wants, but in the end it will blow up in his face and leave his customers hanging, and that's a fact. I for one will never defend this kind of businesses even if their intentions are good, because in the end the ones that suffers are the customers and the low end community as a whole.
That's something that could cause the collapse of the big players as well, though.
Heck, even DO or Vultr would have a hard time if they had involucrated drives! Good for their customers that their chassis protect the drives well enough for now, but how long will it last?
If DO or Vultr got involucrated drives, it would only be because the chia virus was spread via vampire bites.
Man, I really hope cociu doesn't get bankrupt/deadpooled.
I found something interesting, it seems an involucration was already under way in April...
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3219876
That "netup" was apparently replaced after it involucrated 23 or so entire nodes...
So how long till HS is officially classified as a deadpooled host?
Hostsolutions is the best hosting provider in Romanian. All other hosting companies are run by little girls.
FTFY