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extravm suspended all my vps without notice, what can I do ?
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The github user and the user here have the same profile picture. So I guess @MikeA could be correct about what the server is being used for.
Then it's just a case of whether it's for public or private use.
Ah, now that makes sense! Another mystery solved! Thanks
Yes, he was running public proxies based on his public script (unlikely only that). There is no denying it, and I was 100% certain of this when I suspended him. I wouldn't have suspended his servers if I wasn't 100% certain about this. He replied to the ticket earlier and accepted a refund and did not want to prove he was not using it against my terms, so nothing about his services will be shared here by myself as I can't. An international wire has been sent to him and he's been provided proof and a bank transaction number, as well as his VPS unsuspended for a day or two and limited to 50Mbps to allow him to transfer anything he might have on them.
Holy shit,a proper drama. What's tldr?
What makes you so sure it was a public client? Everything about that repo suggests it's designed for private use. Were you actually seeing wireguard clients from many different IPs connecting to this machine?
In any case, the wording of your messages in the ticket history that you yourself posted strongly suggests you were only speculating he was running a proxy at the time you suspended his machines. If you knew that for a fact, why wouldn't you have said so?
Also, there can be hundreds of IPs connecting and the use still be private, since he said he had many VPS, and I imagine he didn’t share those.
Unless Mike has a lot more information than laid out here, he couldn’t at all know whetever the use was of public/commercial character or not.
He accted irrationally, and according to my understanding, mostly with regards to the ticket, erratic.
You just blew it wide open. The name "jinwyp" is too unique and especially when broken down into the segment of people who would be installing exactly what @MikeA has accused him of doing, while still technically satisfying @jinwyp's excuse of just "using nginx" which the scripts you linked to specifically do install as part of their whole proxy setup.
So with that I'm happy to deem it a fact that @jinwyp violated @MikeA's policy and is due zero refund. The mistake here will now be changed to "ExtraVM should have terminated the user for violating policy." With that considered, even @MikeA's offer of higher or unlimited bandwidth might have survived just fine, it was only challenged by a policy violation.
So unless @jinwyp has information which changes this conclusion, fuck the OP and the host's mistakes have been reduced to the very minor "Didn't terminate the user when they should have."
Trying to summarise this in a single comment..
The full ticket is in here, since the full version wasn't originally posted by @jinwyp.
Any decent and competent business will just refund. It looks like @MikeA has done that, can you confirm @jinwyp ?
The whole client "abusing the network" is bullshit.
The only legitimate reason any host on LET offering Tokyo/Singapore location is to sell to Chinese clients for proxy, vpn purpose. If you are denying this, you are delusional.
The fact that the company in question is using that as an excuse is cringe worthy.
The OP could have been offering ISO for download using their "unmetered bandwidth", I'm sure the company will use the same "abusing the network" excuse.
Just take a L and say, "I f'ed up by offering unmetered bandwidth" and move on. Blame the client for your bait and switch tactics is deplorable.
I'm sorry but I never use my KR/JP/SG VPS(es) for those shitty purposes.
Asian VPS is meant to serve Asian customers, not to host some weird proxy services.
Why are they "shitty purposes" ?
Yes, yes should be sorry for calling them shitty purposes.
Yup, that's the whole point!
If they don't like the customer using that many resources, they should either:
1) Change it after the billing period is over (when the customer renews their services)
2) Cancel the service after the billing period is over
3) Just DON'T sell services at first with false promises
Please read the whole comment before randomly exploiting a single sentence. I have the same point as you do.
You are probably correct that @jinwyp violated the TOS, and I agree the current evidence seems to support that conclusion, but I disagree with your last paragraph -- especially the line, "the host's mistakes have been reduced to the very minor "Didn't terminate the user when they should have.""
There were a lot of mistakes made by the host, and maybe we'll disagree on what they add up to, but I don't see on what planet they constitute "very minor" mistakes.
The way the whole thing was handled was poor from the beginning, the sequence of events is here in this thread, and in the ticket, pretty clear to see. People can draw their own conclusions.
The way I see it, just because the customer probably was most likely in the wrong at the end of the day, doesn't automatically make how @MikeA handled the whole thing right -- starting from the beginning of the bandwidth changes due to his own error, which launched this whole mess in the first place.
However, in the end, Mike did refund the client, which is all fine and good considering everything that happened. But how we got here isn't so pretty.
Not to mention the inconsistencies, and let's not forget that Mike is very selective about enforcement:
So he's clearly admitting he selectively enforces his TOS, but in this case, it was costing him money because he made a mistake and over-committed himself on bandwidth. Which was.... his mistake. Not the client's.
This is still a bit of a mess, notwithstanding the refund. But at least there's that.
Admittedly, I can't really tell from that github exactly what the thing that's being installed actually does, but it looks designed for users to install a proxy for themselves.
If it was a commercially operated proxy, why would he be giving away the code to do-it-yourself? That would just eat into his revenue.
Or am I missing something obvious about what this software is designed to do?
Today we saw case of an unprofessional behavior of let-provider. Extravm needs to take an example from mxroute.
Next time any provider should immediately state the "negative value" as the reason for the any account suspension
it's a clear & respected cause on let to prevent all disputes.
100s of VPS, all pushing 20TB traffic, 10TB traffic, etc - sure, its for private use 😂
Let me guess - for him and his 10,000 family members? 😂
@NobodyInteresting, you surely guess a lot.
He also said that he actually don't need that much BW (in the same sentence where he mentioned 100 VPSes, but you chose to ignore this part) but it would be nice if host would honour a deal or something like that.
Everything everyone says here, aside from OP and Mike - is a guess.
I sure do though.
Ah, well theres that. Still hundreds of VPS as said per OP, and the high bandwidth usage (which is why he got suspended in the first place) - that paints a different picture.
There's something else you may overlooked. Prepaid BW wasn't halved or something like that. Host reduced it to the 20% from what was the deal. That's some drastic reduction considering clients already paid for it.
Anyway, he's refunded now, so it is what it is now. No use to guess and drag this further.
I didn't overlook that. I agree it is a shitty move that was made mid-term. But OP got refunded, since he was not satisfied, and got his VMs unsuspended to move data, so I see no harm done.
Perhaps next time Mike will have to think long and hard before dabbling with the unsustainable side of offers. It is a slippery slope, and many good hosts have sank due to a few poor pricing decisions in the past.
With all that said - i still don't think there was some evil thinking from Mikes side and I do enjoy my services with him :-)
Now, with all that being said - if this happens again in the future with some of his offerings - I will be the first to pack my bags and move. But I am not currently seeing a big red flag, just a mistake that was made, and by the looks of it - it was also rectified.
I think @MikeA should adopt the Japanese mentality and just say sorry for what happened.
Japan - whole staff apologize for raising their price of the Icebar by only 9 cents
@dusst Sounds like you need a slice of pie!
Are you asking @MikeA to commit sudoku?
Francisco
I asked Deep Thought what does this even mean and here's the Ultimate Answer
Note that it says that public and commercial use of proxy is prohibited.
If I was to download tens of TBs of media for my media server, that’s not prohibited according to the above.
Private in this context must mean not shared with any other entity, and commercial not sold to any other entity and not used for any commercial purpose (eg. for a company that try to cop shoes at drops).
Considering the above, high bandwidth usage and even hundreds of connecting IPs in no way, at all, prove that the above terms wasn’t respected.
@jar I’m fully aware of the high-quality offerings that you undoubtedly offer, and I’m honestly impressed by what you’ve built and with the path that you’re heading, but I can’t say that it dosen’t leave a mark on me when you consider it a mistake the client wasn’t suspended sooner.
There’s no proof here, not a shred. There’s speculation, and in the argument that he was running a proxy the above speculated leaves me to agree, he probably was using the VPS as a proxy.
However, how Mike enforced this and how he communicated with the client being the reason bandwidth had to be capped, clearly, the reason for this becoming even remotely what it is now, and the ticket at it’s first stages reflects this too, is that Mike didn’t like that a small portion of a bandwidth that he already limited the client to, a huge decrese from what at purchase was agreed upon, was used.
Every plan having 20 TB was agreed upon, with the huge decresse in bandwidth later on, even reflecting upon existing, pre-paid, services - one would imagine that the new much lowered limit would be respected by the one imposing it - it wasn’t. Mike figured out later that the usage probably was a proxy, after giving the client a mere 24 hours to pack his stuff (and, again, not even respecting the terms imposed by himself).
Then there’s, in addition to a series of events of Mike setting rules he himself later decide to not follow, hence why I, in the above, wrote that I find the way this was handeled erratic, the not-so-important in the overall context yet clearly demonstrative of this behaviour, is that he promised a refund before even checking if he could provide it.
Most importantly, and what I was on about in the beginning of this reply, is the fact that no rule-breaking is speculated upon, even by Mike himself in the ticket. Are the proxies publisheed anywhere public or commercially used/sold? I have yet to see any of that.
Finally, had this been Online for example (or Scaleway now I guess), everyone would be kicking and screaming in pure rage. Sure, Mike had a good reputation on here, better than Online, but changing terms mid-term, when they did it, was border-line illegal, and when Mike does it, it’s the weskest of arguments against his behaviour.
A good way to solve this situation, after the huge bandwidth limitation:
”Hi, first of all I just want to make it clear that you are in your rights to use the bandwidth that your plan allows you to. Also, I’m sorry for limiting it, I didn’t plan accordingly the market of the location in question and if the newly imposed limits have effectively made the VPS worthless for you, I’d like to offer a pro-rata refund for the time left of your service from the day that the new limit was imposed.
However, and while you have the right to use your allocated bandwidth, the usage has to be according to TOS. I’ve analyzed the traffic and can conclude that you’re hosting a proxy that use many TBs of bandwidth a month.
According to our TOS, a proxy is allowed, but public and commercial one’s are not.
Therefore, please answer the below questions to the best of your ability and do so within 7 days to avoid service suspension.”
@Mumbly This drama inspired me. A feature suggestion to your host NoUptime: ”AutoBoot”.
”Just like the AutoBoot feature a certain provider advertised on LET, but much improved, instead of automatically booting up the VPS in case it goes down it automatically boots your sorry ass of our network in case we want to.”
If I paid $39.99 for 12 months of cPanel webhosting and on month 8 I was migrated to SPanel, do (or in my case, did I) I have a right to object? The communication was honest mentioning cost savings for the provider and a number of other enhancements that did not make a difference for my use case. At the end of the day I purchased 12 months of cPanel webhosting. Full disclosure, I did not contact the provider, but did not renew at the end of the 12 months.
The user’s GitHub was found with quick spin up scripts that do exactly what the host thought the user was doing, and on top of that they do install Nginx which the user tried to say was what they were doing, and we all knew it sounded weird.
@MikeA may not have known for a fact that the user violated policy earlier, but I’m comfortable now saying that I do. You’re welcome to deny it but the GitHub account shares a unique name, same profile photo, and “just using Nginx” doesn’t generate that kind of traffic. The user’s scripts do install Nginx though. The user tried to lie by omission. I’ll bet everything I own on it, are you willing to put up the same bet that I’m wrong? You’d lose, this is a slam dunk case and you know it.
The only reason to doubt that we’ve put it together based on that GitHub account, combined with the refusal to state a use case other than (paraphrased) “I installed Nginx,” is a desire to see a different conclusion. Personally, I don’t give two shits who wishes the conclusion were different or why. My opinion changes with the data I take in, not how anyone feels about it.
The host should have terminated the user sooner for violating policy. It’s the job of the host to know that they are violating policy, and it’s extremely clear that they were. If the host didn’t know they were, add that to their list of mistakes. You can gaslight yourself on that all you want but I won’t fall for it. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and when you photograph it the pictures look suspiciously like a duck, it’s a damn duck. Follow the data.
Before the GitHub was revealed I stated @MikeA was in the wrong, so I don’t want to hear any of this shit. My opinion is observed in this thread changing with the data.
if he has taken this stance from the get go it would probably be "alright". but his initial position and reasoning was weak and that's apparent.
of course providers have their position to consider but general public and prospective customers would form their own opinions as well.
that being said this would not affect most customers so this is just another drama for fun and laughter.