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Are you sure? Maybe people can still buy if they access Crissic website using IPv6?
Just like how some were able to access their VPS using IPv6 after you've "securely wiped" their data?
And yeah I've had a "little too much hash" today, would you like some?
I would love some hash! :-)
I don't know about the rest of the world but here in Australia we do not take kindly to being mistreated by companies, no matter how much it's over.
You'll find that it's not about Crissic anymore. Quadranet are the captain of the ship so anything that Crissic does falls on your shoulders.
In hindsight you shouldn't have made such a close relationship between Crissic and Quadranet assuming this was your plan from the start. You call it a brand but it was just an asset buy out.
I'll leave it here for anyone considering to sell their company to QuadraIPs.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/87257/wtb-sell-your-ipv4-space-and-or-your-company-to-quadranet-inc-get-paid-top-dollar-today/p1
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/89894/quadranet-acquiring-web-hosting-companies-of-any-size#latest
Honestly, they created tons of work for themselves by waiting to calculate refunds and created a shitstorm at them. In retrospect, they should have sent refunds on the 3rd, followup email (that probably would hit spam) on the 4th, pull the node off the internet on 5th and keep it internal in case they had to pull data for particularly vocal clients and then reformat it on the 12th. Would have eliminated all discussions about calculating refunds, portal access, words of wisdom from their possibly tech savvy but not pr savvy fearless leaders. Everyone gets their paypal and cc emails - so the whole argument of not informed would be moot. They could have ducked 90% of the justifiable rage.
My understanding is that Quadranet owns/runs a number of other small VPS companies. How can I be sure that a company I buy a low-end box from isn't anything to do with Quadranet?
I think we have to assume at this point that anyone they own could potentially be shut down at short notice. Even if you get the email notice (like many others, I didn't - fortunately I have offsite backups) then there's the inconvenience of moving everything... I'd rather not have to keep doing that unless it's my own choice.
Anyone got a list of vps/dedi companies operating out of quadranet so we can avoid those?
Any company can close at any time or eliminate brands at any time. Certain companies seem to be able to make graceful exits based on common sense, others not so much. When paying low dollars for services you will undoubtedly encounter more upheaval and change than if you went with better funded, better staffed, better planned competitors such as digital ocean, linode, azure, aws and its new lightsail brand who actually do thorough cost analysis and determine sustainable pricing. If however, you are looking to push torrents and email and "ISOs" at lowest cost - you certainly will be prone to constant industry churn - whether quadranet/crissic or the other vast list of brands that vanished.
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It's not that I never did backups, they just weren't as frequent as they should have been. Certainly I was at fault for my backup plan being imperfect, but I acknowledged that already. That does not mean I am to blame for this situation. I paid them for a service that included ensuring data integrity, and they deliberately sabotaged my data. Even if I did hourly backups, they are still to blame for a total failure to uphold their end of a bargain.
Imagine if you were a politician and you paid for body guards. You could go walk around with a bullet proof vest on everywhere you go, and maybe that would be best practice, but you were lazy and you didn't wear one. Now imagine one day your body guards decide they are sick of working for you, and they decide to shoot you in the chest and leave. Are you at fault for not wearing a vest? Sure, you could have done better, but that doesn't mean you are to blame. The person who pulled the trigger is to blame, and they are equally wrong regardless of whether you were wearing a vest.
I check my spam folder periodically but not daily. I will admit it is possible that some emails have been filtered to spam and I missed them. I checked my spam folder immediately as soon as they told me that they had sent the email, and it was not there. The oldest emails in my spam folder were from right around the day they said it was sent, so it's hard to say for sure whether or not it should have still been in there.
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They did not give notice months ago that this was going to happen. In August, they sent me an email promising to keep my service active until May 2017. This is the most recent email they sent me. Here I have a direct quote from that email:
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I stayed with them because I had only just purchased that service a few months before. They said I would be able to keep the service for the full duration that I had paid for. Why would I leave? In no way should the email in August have changed any of my actions until May 2017 when I was going to have to migrate to a different service.
The email I did not receive is the only email that supposedly notified us that services were being terminated this month. I did see a copy of the text from the supposed email in the client area of the Crissic website after I was directed to look there by the staff member responding to my ticket.
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I have received all of their emails in the past except for this single notice they claim they sent. I know this because I checked and read through every single email they have listed on their website. So it would be reasonable to expect that if they sent more than a single notice, maybe I would have received at least one. This is also why I mentioned additional contingency measures, such as keeping backups around after they took the servers down.
Have you refunds all of your customer? where's mine?
@nameman fair enough, given @dustinc last comment he is essentially confirming Quadranet are side stepping the issue and have no intention of holding themselves accountable.
If they allowed crissic to run independently.. they are still responsible for making that decision and accountable.
That said, they don't care, your data is gone, given Skylar's history of dropping customers without refunds none of this is surprising and I still will never understand why you trusted the brand to begin with or did not move immediately you were sold down the river.
Chasing a ridiculously cheap deal is fine, but you need to be able to read a situation and know when to bug out and move on.
I didn't have any problems with my services when Skyler owned Crissic. When I heard that the company was sold, I quickly made sure that I could restore my sites on a backup location.
Staying one step ahead saves you from a lot of stress.
Agreed no one likes being mistreated, but calling someone POS over 6 bucks of refund is basically bringing this to another level
Here is what bothers me:
Quadranet made an announcement saying that they were shutting down Crissic, but would honor customers' prepayments. Customers could run their Crissic VPSs until the prepaid terms expired. This is a corporate promise to its customers saying that Quadranet will honor existing agreements-in-place, even if it is not a profitable segment of their business.
A few months later, Quadranet reneges on its promise and decides to shutdown Crissic early. No explanation is given, other than Crissic was not viable as a business. Quadranet gives 30 days notice to all Crissic customers.
Quadranet shuts down Crissic technical support at the start of the 30 day period, effectively cutting off Crissic customers who may need technical assistance to deal with the impending shutdown of their VPSs.
Quadranet does a poor job of notifying customers. Many customers have posted that the first they learned about the shutdown was when they were suddenly surprised to find their VPSs offline.
Quadranet fails to plan for lost or forgotten notifications. Why didn't Quadranet anticipate that some customers would be caught unaware and would want to recover their data? In this forum Quadranet stated that they would try to help with recovery, but it appears that Quadranet planned to shutdown the VPSs without backups, and that the recovery offer was made after the fact. Furthermore, Quadranet does not guarantee that customers' data CAN be recovered, a further indication that they did not include backups as an important component of Quadranet's Crissic shutdown plan.
Quadranet offers refunds for those with prepaid VPSs, but requires customers to submit a support ticket to apply for a refund. Why must customers submit a support ticket? Doesn't Quadranet know the expiration dates on its customers' VPSs? Why didn't Quadranet proactively refund its customers' unused VPS plans automatically? Any reputable business would have done that. Did Quadranet hope to keep the money from customers who did not apply for refunds (or did not know to apply)? I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that Quadranet's policy of "Apply for a refund or we keep your money" is illegal in some places where Quadranet does business.
Quadranet's refund process is painfully slow. Quadranet had at least the same 30 days notification about the Crissic shutdown, and should have used that time to determine refund amounts for each of its customers in advance.
Quadranet is slow to respond to refund and other Crissic-related tickets. Some people claim that they were ignored entirely. How hard would it have been to acknowledge receipt of each ticket and inform the customer that it may take time to process it (or explain why Quadranet could not process a given ticket)? Once Quadranet made its 30-day announcement, it effectively disengaged from many of its Crissic customers, leaving them to wonder what was happening. We saw it in these forums.
-> Quadranet is clearly a reprehensible, dishonorable business. They do not value nor respect their customers. They do not honor their word as soon as it becomes inconvenient or costly. The explanations and rationalizations from @dustinc and @QuadraNet_Adam do not justify the behaviors that I described above.
Would I ever do business with Quadranet? No. Should you? No. If I were a current Quadranet customer, I would have started my exit strategy planning in early November, as soon as it became apparent that Quadranet was not going to keep its word regarding continuing support for prepaid Crissic customers.
To those who have commented that they have received great service and support from Quadranet, I say that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Quadranet has clearly demonstrated that they have no moral compass. Are you really going to wait until Quadranet does something equally bad to you and your businesses with little notice and terrible support? Burn me once, shame on you. ...
@emg Excellent post. Totally agree! It's not about 5$ remaining in a dying firm, but how they acted.
It does not, but postfix's logs were absolutely clean, nothing suspicious there. I did however see a series of suspicious log statements (up until they shut it down) with dovecot that could point to some kind of exploit. Maybe the dovecot lda somehow got tricked into running a script. I've been using dovecot for over a decade and never had it exploited, so it's generally pretty secure.
mail.log.1:Nov 27 19:21:14 mail dovecot: pop3-login: Disconnected (tried to use disallowed plaintext auth): user=<>, rip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, lip=yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy, session=<88NBIFNClQB2IAWj>
The suspicious part is that none of my users actually use pop3 anymore, plaintext is disabled and it seems like whatever that user=<> seems suspicious. I did not have an iptables rule in place that would have prevented the dovecot user account from making outgoing connections on port 25, I have since added that to my list of security measures...
I got my stuff out of Crissic while there was still time, but emg's post above looks about right to me. Quadranet now has a black eye, imho.
I wonder how long the queue for refunds are.
Have submitted a ticket on 14 Nov and still not processed
I got a response from them today asking to give them my PayPal address, as a 1 line response.
So people have an idea, my original ticket was made Nov. 9th.
The only odd thing is that the bottom of the email, where it normally says ticket status, says "Status: Отвечен" ... which is apparently Russian for Answered. I wonder why there's suddenly a language change. Everything else was English.
Mine appears in English but got the same email today and original ticket was logged around the 24th November
Subject: Refund
Status: Answered
Got response today! After replying with the pay pal email ID - I got this.
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Lets see when they actually refund the amount. Fingers crossed
Nobody there can write a script I guess.
Thank you!
These points begs a few questions:
HOW MUCH CUSTOMER MONEY IS QUADRANET KEEPING, PERHAPS STEALING?
What percentage of customers didn't bother to submit refund requests? How many thousands of customers does that translate to?
If Quadranet is "sifting through thousands of requests...", here is my back-of-the-napkin estimate:
Assumptions - These are wild guesses based solely on Quadranet's comment that they have "thousands of requests":
-> If 25% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests:
1000 * 3 * 5 = US$ 15,000
-> If 50% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests:
3000 * 3 * 5 = US$ 45,000
-> If 75% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests:
12000 * 3 * 5 = US$ 180,000
That is not "small change." I believe that they are breaking the law in some jurisdictions by not proactively refunding customers' money. I am not a lawyer, but I believe that in California, refunds of this type must eventually be turned over to the State if they are not collected by their rightful owners; the company cannot keep the funds. I imagine that they are too small and will escape notice.
WHY MUST QUADRANET PROCESS INDIVIDUAL CUSTOMER REFUNDS MANUALLY?
(Thanks to @willie): If Quadranet can't automate the refund calculation process, what does it say about Quadranet's overall management skills? Are they competent to manage their network and customer VPSs hosting?
Even though Quadranet tries to appear capable and professional, they are obviously neither, as clearly demonstrated by their appalling management of the Crissic shutdown.
I approve of this escalation.
I doubt they were $5 a month. Many were probably $15 - $30 a year. If $5 a month and they couldn't make it work - the company has bigger issues than just Crissic
Mine was $15/year. I suspect that's more typical.
I think mine was about $15-20 with 2 months remaining. Processing the refund will cost them more than the refund itself... all the more reason I guess
I revised the assumptions, based on the posts above - These are wild guesses based solely on Quadranet's comment that they have "thousands of requests":
-> If 25% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests: 1000 * 3 * 1.50 = US$ 4,500
-> If 50% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests: 3000 * 3 * 1.50 = US$ 13,500
-> If 75% of customers did not bother to submit refund requests: 12000 * 3 * 1.50 = US$ 54,000
It is still more than pocket change. If you trust the assumptions above, then Quadranet is keeping a significant amount of its customers' money.
An open question is whether Quadranet's policy (where the customer must actively request a refund) is driven by greed or laziness. Either way, it highlights Quadranet's questionable ethics, poor management, and terrible customer relations skills.
karma comes when ovh opens the new west coast dc
@emg considering the troubles they had with this acquisition (mutually parting ways with the staff member in less than a year, etc etc) They should have simply said we are closing in 30 days, expect a refund in 60 days, but pump out the refund on the day before they cut off service. They would have beaten everyones anticipated refund date by 30 days, everyone would get money BEFORE service cut (so they would know something is up - because noone complains about missing paypal emails- their deliverability is good). hence no massive PR hit and no need for all the BS about we are processing them there are a lot of them, etc etc. To me thats worth 13 grand to just dump the damn thing and not tarnish the surviving brand.