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Whats the situation with Virmach?
trycatchthis
Member
in General
Virmach for a while was one of the best hosts with some of the best deals.
But they had a rough last 2 years.
Have they got their act togeather or is it still problematic?
Asking because I have a box I wonder if to renew.
Comments
5 years virmach is at the bottom, not 2. Disrespecting customers, 0 innovation, bs uptime. They are gone. Same with Ramnode. Those 2 are dinosaurs and should be sed'ed:
sed -i 's/virmach/hetzner/g' idle_list.txtThings have stabilised a lot compared to a year ago. As to whether to renew... depends on how good the deal you have is, and how important uptime is to you :-)
its really luck of the draw. i have one in AMS where it only when down once, and another for IP change. this i renewed but will forever be a test idle box.
had a couple of others in san jose, seattle....i don't recall any extended downtime.
so if you are on a stable node and the IP change has already been completed, probably good to go.
Can agree with this - also have a box in AMS which has been solid for a few months with no issues. Other locations haven't been so lucky in the past, but I think a lot of them have improved.
knows best.
It's pretty much on autopilot. I have no problems with my services, but also no answers to tickets. I will keep paying while it works
Virmach now charges for basic things like Port 25 and port 80/443 ($5 for each option). I bought an old Virmach subscription off somebody a relatively short time ago (so I'm grandfathered with all the features enabled), then Dedipath went down and they moved me from my Chicago node to a Miami node. Performance is ok though.
Support consists of opening a ticket and then whining about it at the dedicated thread on LES if it's ignored... For the pittance of a subscription fee I'm paying, I'm OK with that.
Uptime is good, performance is good. I'm going to start using mine as a backup mail server. One thing I can say about the new AMD servers is that they're a heck of a lot faster than Haswell/Broadwell. My 1C/1GB AMD provision is giving my "4c/4GB" Haswell system with a known provider here a good run for the money. I plan on dumping said Haswell provider here because they are knowingly overloading the nodes and I will not tolerate the slowdowns in CPU performance while they keep promoting their wares.
I say give Virmach another chance.
You know how you prevent bad behavior? By not enabling it. The fact people even bother with providers with baggage in such a saturated market blows my mind, especially a provider pulling some shenanigans like that.
This would be like Microsoft saying
"Thank you for purchasing an XBOX. Please note that the gamepads included will only have working sticks (no buttons) until you purchase the "enable gamepad" feature ($5/additional)
To purchase, use the controller sticks to highlight the "purchase gamepad" for 30 seconds. You will then be able to use your gamepad as usual to input your payment information. If payment is successful, you will be able to use your gamepad as normal. Please note, if payment fails, buttons will continue to be non-functional"
and then you saying
"Yeah - they were bad in the past.. now they're doing microtransactions, their support is non-existent, but the hardware is great! You should give them another chance!"
Sounds a bit ridiculous, don't you think?
Have you actually seen someone billed $5 for port 80/433 though?
Still VirmAche
It's not so much specifics that I was getting at - it was the guy's overall message.
Anyone can buy hardware and rent it out (awesome and shitty providers alike)
If the hardware is the only thing the guy is praising, recommend the hardware, not the provider.
I had 4 virmach servers. I canceled them all. My primary server was down 2 months with them. Between that and the multiple IP changes, one time completely unannounced, I couldn't take it anymore.
EU locations are fine i think. I pay 1$/m for this vps config:
2 gbps port/2TB BW
1 core Ryzen 9 5900x
15 GB NVMe
768 MB RAM
1300 gb5 single & multi core score.
I'm idling it for 4-5 months and down only 2 or 3 times and only hours. But US locations seems unusable.
If you have one box is and has been relatively stable, available, and cheap, and you haven't minded any location or IP address changes it probably doesn't hurt to renew. There are still some ongoing issues, but if they are not impacting you now, you're probably fine for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't recommend Virmach to the average new buyer unless you have a pretty good reason to want to do business with them however. There are lots of decent, and I'd argue better, alternatives now.
Hey, I'm just giving my opinion based on the convergence of observations... I only recommend them because a lot of providers here seem to be selling their overprovisioned servers here with impunity. I was sorely disappointed with Greencloud and how they treated me recently. At the very least, Virmach is currently performing decently and is priced well... And as the other fellow said, I don't know if they actually block those ports, I only saw them listed as an extra payment option in the order page.
Still you make good points.
I have one $15/year storage VPS with Virmach. Some ups and downs but was running fine for half year. Then suddenly it got suspended for no reason. I opened a ticket then got replied as "abuse". I asked again what the exact problem is. Because I only use it as VPN server. And I didn't even use up its 1TB per month limit. Then from there only silence.
So, all that I can say is that Virmach is a kind of zombie. No dead not alive. Just avoid them if you can. It doesn't look cheap as it is. Because you won't be able to just half of what you paid for.
Multiple people are currently on two Dallas server nodes and their VPS were part of special deals from Flash Sales and Black Friday, but these servers have been down for over 2.5 months without a clear recovery time.
Even though it's known that these servers shouldn't be used for important stuff, there's no estimate for when they'll be back up. If you ask about it in the forum, people get upset, and they just tell you to check the "network status" page for updates. If it's not there, they don't have any news. Criticizing their VPS and services gets you attacked by their devoted fans. Dealing with downtime and not being able to do anything about it, plus blaming customers and attacking them publicly, has made me decide not to stick with them even if they fix the services.
Virmach is not great for production due to extremely low support. However, it is good for testing or development or for something not highly important.
Currently I host the following with Virmach (each on different VPS):
I can't possibly say @VirMach is awesome or great, but it is somewhat good if one can get over the fact that Virmach should not be used for production.
If however one really wants to use Virmach in production, I am thinking on something like Kubernetes with automated cloud management to deploy small containers fast in case another Virmach server goes down - but this is way beyond my skills as I never worked with this kind of stuff (just trying to help with an idea).
Is this a custom script you wrote or is it a well known package. Also what BF deals are you looking out for?
ChangeDetection is on GitHub: https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
For Black Friday I don't have high hopes, due to bots and abusers stealing the nice low-end offers.
I'm afraid I will be able to provide a current report on @virmach's support.
Reason: my super-cheap small promo VPS (found here on LET) is suddenly "dead" (down). Trying to reboot it failed, trying to cold cycle it (powerdown then boot) failed too. VNC (of course) doesn't work with the VPS down.
So I "opened a ticket" - ugly experience. First they confront you with loads of "rules" and, at least from what I see, a plain ticket is not even available, only "priority support" (although I clicked on plain tech support. Those tickets risk to incur a $15 fee unless some conditions are met. It looks very obvious to me that they try hard to keep customer from opening ticket; I can understand that but IMO they went too far.
As my VPS is down and not bootable I guess that qualifies for free support within their rules.
Just sent the ticket. Will report back here how things evolve.
Perhaps the LET team could interview @VirMach in their next provider spotlight!
Problem solved.
Within a few hours, at the beginning of the weekend.
The grain of salt: way too much AI nonsense.
virmach was good.
I had 3 vm with them.
But support was too slow. I can't wait for 2-3 weeks to get a reply, even if someone throws a free vps, but here I was payin' them.
lately the remaining one vm node went down for weeks, and no communication from virmach ever!
so avoid virmach at all cost.
Exactly right.
I would second that .. their not worth the aggravation
So many ppl echo that the services are not at par... but in the end, many of those will end up renewing and buy more services.
Ditto goes for new users who would claim "thorough" research on any provider, but will slip up and just buy services as the prices are great and then cry here.
I had 4 vps from VirMach, when problems started, went down to single one which I use as backup mx/dns. Not good enough for anything else. Support pretty much non existent, no ipv6, no upgrade to debian12, ip changes frequently without any notice, downtimes/restarts I do not even count, etc, etc. Price on par with "quality"...
I had a VPS with them since around 2015 which was obtained thought a crazy BF deal here on LET. Over the years its been moved and upgraded several times until about a week ago when I found that I had a mail from them canciling my service. They also gave me a full refund (without asking) which was strange as I just paid not only two weeks ago. They have not said why it was canciled and while I have sent them a ticket to try and find out more, they have blindly closed it a few days later.
The only response I recieved was from their AI bot, which is really not helpful.
I personally have a feeling that the company is no longer running by the original owners or they just don't care any more and have started freeing up recorces ready for BF deals.
Anyways, I have no hard feelings with them, they have been great for years, I just am a bit annoyed and upset that they just don't reply and instead close tickets. Thats really not a good way to run a business espcilaly from one of your oldest clients.
Arguably, there are few things that happened that is out of Virmach's control. Colocrossing broke their lease, Dedipath shut down, Alibaba took back their IPs, etc. Virmach has not handled customer communication and support very well during it all. I too have a couple of VPS on those Dallas nodes caught up in the Dedipath debacle that have been offline over 2 months. If it were up to me, I would write off seeing that hardware again, and set up my customers on a new server pronto. The only positive I can think of is Virmach is cheap, and Ryzen is fast when the server is working. I've learned not to depend on one provider even if I'm in multiple locations.