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100gbps shared Ryzen 9950x-powered VPS soon by Macarne - anyone know them?
davidobrik567
Member
in General
They've been actively posting on X/Twitter:
https://x.com/macarnellc/status/1876404213347180692
"We are very happy with our AMD Ryzen 9 9950X VPS line. Each node has 100G uplinks and is performing very well. It will soon be available in Amsterdam, but is already available for testing now."
Don't know who their main customers are, but appparently they're present in multiple countries and leasing both inland + submarine dark fibers from EU<>US, JP<>US. Similar scale to GSL/CDN77.
Quick look on their ASN... doesn't seem to have many/major downstream AS networks.
Comments
YABS from their tweet:
https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/yabs/macarne_limited-8c-16gb-20250106-7bb75f
I'd be extremely careful choosing Macarne...
I have spent days checking their company history and the company owner, Arne Ruhnau.
Arne has done some pretty bad things in the past, he once had a fake online shop in 2005 where we stole around half a million EUR.
Fake Shop: https://forum.geizhals.at/t355890,2838823.html
Muly Scam: https://mulyscam.blogspot.com/
The downstreams are 90% his own companies, he says he is an investor, visits Dubai and other countries multiple times per year.
He had a Twitter account back in 2020 where he constantly posted about his trips around the world, how much money he has etc..
People started making fun of him: https://x.com/search?q=fipsyfip&src=typed_query
And if you search long enough, you'll find a connection between Arne and fipsyfip.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search?q=arne+ruhnau
You can find his name in a lot of companies, he was born in 1982, go check for yourself.
Regent Luxury watches, online gambling, etc. together with Rene Kubitza, who also had some weird companies back in 2010.
All of his companies except Macarne are dissolved.
It's quite obvious that Macarne wastes hundreds of thousands of EUR monthly for all their infrastructure and faking their downstream count with their own companies.
I'm not saying that Macarne is a bad company, but the history of the company owner is worrying(MAC ARNE, get it? It's his name, ARNE)
Yeah I agree. They're operating similar to GSL/CDN77's (what @davidobrik567 said) scale but with no known downstream customers.
Both GSL & CDN77 have VPN companies with them, even Australian ISPs are using GSL for transit. but macarne...?
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/91685/safehousecloud/p1
safehousecloud was another project from Arne and Rene
Interesting research, thanks for sharing. What is the game plan here, you think?
They’ve obviously sunk a ton of money leasing space and transit across the globe, on top of hardware purchases. Connectivity/transit is their main business apparently, but they don’t seem to have any (real) downstream customers. Maybe we can’t judge just from that, who knows.
Perhaps they just have enough funding to go big right from the get go and sustain themselves until they secure all of the large contracts they obviously need?
Definitely an interesting company but like you said, a couple red flags here and there.
My startup Serverside.com recently finished a major expansion in Amsterdam along with a bunch of other sites. We have 9900X and 9950X-based machines with 128 and 192 GB RAM available in both New Jersey & Amsterdam, Chicago and Dallas soon. If you're interested, feel free to shoot me a DM.
Some nice snaps from our NY deployment: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jesse-schokker_exciting-news-as-we-close-out-the-year-on-activity-7274802998856282112-mcvF?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
According to Arne's other companies and which scheme they followed: Try to sell stuff and then close the company.
Macarne was founded in 2013 I think and their statements every year look really weird, they talk about Server Hosting in Frankfurt, but that was in 2020.
To be honest I'm rather skeptical as to what exactly 100Gbps means for a VPS on a single node without special passthroughs to the NICs using SR-IOV, and special system optimizations.
It's really more of a gimmick than anything else, there's no way people can run that number.
With traditional virtualization bridging, 20Gbps is likely to be the performance bottleneck.
The current gen smart nics based on DPUs from Marvell (which AWS Nitro is partially based on), AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA/Mellanox, can support up to ~1k VFs, enough to do PCIe passthrough, which is fairly straightforward for qemu/kvm these days, for every VPS on a single node. These DPUs are not that expensive (~$1k), esp. Marvell based ones. It's time for LE providers to adopt them.
You're right, however can this be automated?
In my previous attempts, I couldn't automate the IP address drop using Cloud-init
I've constantly been getting pushed his X.com posts on my account for some reason for a month or so, love the algorithm.. I've been dumbfounded every time I've looked through the posts and the net. By the looks of it he runs a massive global network, but has no customers. I'd close it and just think about how weird it all was every time... but I guess if it's by someone who's loaded with cash, it would make a little more sense. Will be interesting to see where it goes.
Looking at the previous comments, it just appears to be part of the layering process in a money laundering scheme.
There is so much more to this story...
Compare RETN(AS9002) with Macarne(AS64289), RETN has over 1000 downstreams, Macarne has 9, yet Macarne is #8 for Known Peers globally. RETN is "only" #15.
Just look at this picture, Macarne just doesn't fit in there, they grew way to fast to have the same "Known peers" status as Level3/Lumen
Go check Macarne's accounts from 2023 here:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08699684/filing-history
The statement's are total nonsense.
The same goes for his Company "Regent Luxury Watches"
That is a statement from 2022. How can you be doing some Luxury Watch business and then, two years later, you run a global network..
Why would you sell your company and then starting doing business again a few years later.
This scheme does indeed look like money laundering.
Quick facts check:
I have also done some investigations into Macarne earlier, and it seems like all the money to Macarne comes from, mostly south asian personnel, companies et cetera. There is also a web of randomly named UK LTD's by one of the cofounders of Macarne, maybe to move money, and weirdly rich foundations at the same time.
I would like to also note that I am a downstream of them (AS214809), and that they just gave me free IPv6 transit over an IX by asking. They are quite nice but suspicious at the same time.
Hi also a downstream (as215605)of em with 10g v4 and v6 free trial so far so good
But this sound like a huge money laundering scheme.