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Guess who's back? ClubUpTime!
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Guess who's back? ClubUpTime!

NickPNickP Member
edited November 2011 in Providers

Well I guess there at it again this time... Site is back online and with a notice -http://www.clubuptime.com/openletter

===========================================

Dear past, present, and future Club Uptime Clients,

Club Uptime started in 2005 as HostTDS Internet Services as a small company with local roots based around friends and family. Over the period of six years, it grew into a company with multi-national presence in both infrastructure and clientele. Unfortunately, at the beginning of August 2011, everything took a turn for the worst leaving Club Uptime in financial troubles and a large number of clients inconvenienced with our VPS and Gameserver platforms being closed permanently.

After several months of planning, preparation, and close attention to detail, we are ready to re-open the doors of Club Uptime, but this time in a new light. We will no longer be directly focusing on the hosting industry, but we will be focusing on Hosted Services, or SaaS platforms.

We have decided to go back to our roots and re-visit uptime monitoring, but with more of a twist. Bringing Club Uptime back as an uptime monitoring service that offers more useful options than many of the competitors is exactly what we felt was a great way to get back into the industry.

To our previous clients: We greatly apologize for the inconveniences that may have occurred. Club Uptime itself was an amazing company with outstanding reliability, stability, and uptime. We had some of the most positive reviews and a large, strong client base to support our platforms. Unfortunately, the financial issues of a subsidiary game server provider affected the financial stability of our main VPS service, causing a great deal of frustration to all of us.

To every past client, we are offering one free month of service with our monitoring platform with a 25% recurring discount afterwards. Whether you were a client at the time of our closure, or you had left previously for any reason, you can claim our offer. If you still have not received a refund, we will soon be bringing a web page online for the explicit purpose of helping expedite the refunds left to be processed. Everyone will be notified once that process has been completed.

It's been a long journey, and it's certainly not one that will soon be forgotten. We have hit some bumps in the road, but we will continue to move forward and bring our many collective years of knowledge, expertise, and experience to the table to make your lives even the slightest bit easier.

Thank you,
Matthew Rosenblatt
CEO, Club Uptime LLC

Brian Gonzalez
CFO, Club Uptime LLC

===============================================

What are the thoughts going through peoples heads about this?

«1

Comments

  • Looks like there not using SoftLayer this time, as the site is hosted at BURSTNET. So maybe there is a chance for them to last?

  • fanfan Veteran

    Hmm, burstnet this time.

  • NickPNickP Member
    edited November 2011

    @fan said: Hmm, burstnet this time.

    >

    Just maybe they have a chance, but I don't know if they will last as there past may catch up with them pretty soon.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    As I mentioned on WHT, I find the choice of burstnet interesting considering they had quite the pissing match with them on WHT.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 1NickP
  • Can't really say they're back if it's not in the same industry, but great for them. Don't think anybody was waiting for another uptime tracker though.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @ztec said: great for them

    For sure :) If they can find a way to run their service at a nice net positive then go for it. If this is just another chance to try to get back into hosting, though, that'd be lame.

    Francisco

  • Well that's a good return imo. And I don't think they are planning on getting back to hosting at any point soon because if they where they would simply get funds somehow and start it. But I think a low price will attract more customers, though, current pricing looks more targeted at only some of dedicated/high end/managed customers. That's a trap some other monitoring went into. But taking into consideration that things are still at early beta, so it might be something else eventually.

  • Dear god how do people get away with stuff like this. They shouldn't be allowed to start anything back up until they have compensated everyone they let down. Especially under the same name!

    Thanked by 2drmike AuroraZ
  • Go59954Go59954 Member
    edited November 2011

    @VMport said: Dear god how do people get away with stuff like this. They shouldn't be allowed to start anything back up until they have compensated everyone they let down. Especially under the same name!

    AFAIK, they are one of the rare honorable and responsible providers out there (if there's anyone else :p) , they refunded everyone, and didn't disappear/run with money from anyone.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @Go59954 said: AFAIK, they are one of the rare honorable and responsible providers out there (if there's anyone else :p) , they refunded everyone, and didn't disappear/run with money from anyone.

    Er, no.

    There are many people that haven't been given refunds, infact there's a guy waiting on a half year on his 1GB XEN (so a fairly expensive plan). There's quite a back/forth between him and his own staffers over who really put in the work to get things only for 72 hours amongst many other things.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 1Ash_Hawkridge
  • Reference link in case folks are scratching their heads:

    http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/clubuptime-openvz-vps-256mb/#comment-33032

    Hmmm, and how did we all miss this:

    http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/clubuptime-openvz-vps-256mb/#comment-27429

    :)

    Thanked by 1Ash_Hawkridge
  • jhjh Member

    I would be very surprised if they can make a success of ClubUptime with their existing track record. IMHO they would have been better off with a new brand.

  • @jtodd said: IMHO they would have been better off with a new brand.

    Yes they would have been better off with a new brand, although they claim not to be in the vps hosting industry. I guess they really liked the name -- I can see that for a monitoring service.

  • To be honest though, glad Matthew and co didn't do what Brandon and his motley crew have done. Clubuptime at least made sure clients got the chance to get their data.

  • MrAndroidMrAndroid Member
    edited November 2011

    I remember Matthew Rossenblatt saying to me he wouldn't trust anything worth over $10 stored at BurstNET on MSN.

    Apparently their the worst company on earth,

    But surprisingly he used to host SolusVM for CU there.

  • and he hosts CU on a cheap budget VPS there rofl

  • SpiritSpirit Member
    edited November 2011

    @net said: To be honest though, glad Matthew and co didn't do what Brandon and his motley crew have done. Clubuptime at least made sure clients got the chance to get their data.

    Matthew had nothing to do with that. He dissapeared that time just like Brandon now.

  • I still didn't get a refund...Guess since they're announcing they're back I'll pester them about it (paid yearly in April.).

  • It seems like he has some heart for the name/reputation of the company and i am sure that he is trying to prove that he can do it unlike others who just form a company name and sell it off for the money (or run away with the money for that matters).

    You can see the difference when a person launch a company with its name at heart rather than the $$ in the mind to just make a quick bucks. Maybe second chance is what many might give but i doubt there will be a third for him.

    Just a share of my thoughts =). Not flaming or anything. Cheers

  • Uhm, wow!.

    He is likely starting this up to fund the refunds that he is in debt over... after he gets done refunding everyone I bet you $100 that he will start up offering hosting services again because in his mind he made it right with his customers.

  • @Corey

    I like that theory :) Kind of had the same thing in my mind.

  • @Corey

    you are mean =x

  • I would be very surprised if they can make a success of ClubUptime with their existing track record.

    I wouldn't be surprised. We've seen it before. Too many people don't do basic research and just pick on price.

  • Spoiling the market rate constantly is never good and sustainability will be always questioned. VPS market is like an epic warzone, many bravehearts charged forward and died on the battlefield =x

  • Nah, shared is worst. You guys really have it easy in this field.

    When you get new signups from refugees from three different providers who go down in the same day....

    Thanked by 1Infinity
  • @Daniel: We're using BurstNET for a few things in the final release: Our main services won't be launched on the BurstNET networks, and our pollers are with other providers such as Linode.

    @Spirit: That's a bunch of bullocks being posted around by previous staff who have an issue with me. In the end, I can show cell phone records which have over 80 hours of conference call time logged over a period of five days. I was very much there. I was actually on a vacation at the time for my anniversary, planning to propose, and I couldn't because I ended up stuck working in a hotel room. I dealt only with my business partner Brian and Softlayer. During that period, I didn't once speak with my previous staff at Brohoster: I let Brian deal with them. They were being extremely rude and weren't even willing to speak to me politely. I just did what I needed to do.

    In the end, had I not been a part of it, it never would have happened. Mostly because I'm the account holder and no one else is verified to use it, but also because I'm the one with the executive contacts at Softlayer.

    Brian did manage to get them to bend and agree to 72 hours rather than just 24 or 48 (i forget at this point), finally, at one point while I was asleep however. He does deserve a MASSIVE amount of credit.

    @Corey: I'll take a wild guess that you're the Corey that was spamming our facebook pages in as rude a way possible... Either way: No, we're not getting back into VPS hosting any time soon. If we do, it will be a VERY long time from now and we'll only cater to specialty markets. I have no intentions of going after the general public for hosting services: Our current plans are for SaaS platforms only. We had several that we were working on before Club Uptime closed it's doors, and we're going to finish and launch them over the coming months.

    Someone else commented that we're using this to help fund the refunds that are left: That's completely correct. We're currently using BurstNET to help aid with that, as well. As we have a lot of account credit and pre-paid services there for annual packages (which we initially purchased for data backup to back our stuff up when CU closed), we've decided to use what we have at our disposal. The software we've written is extremely light weight and we can run it on nearly any platform that can compile C and run a web server with php.

  • @clubuptime If you do indeed go through with more refunds I'd be impressed. I signed up annually for a VPS in April, and didn't really get much from that... Would be nice to get some of that money back.

  • @Kairus: That's why we put up the clubuptime.com/refunds page. In a week or two (or once the form stops being filled out), we'll compare it to our list of refunds and charge backs that we have from our merchant providers. Then we'll start issuing the refunds as we get money into our hands.

    Everyone who is owed money will be refunded. We're not in it to take money and not provide a service: Every last previous client will receive a refund when justified.

  • Good to see that ClubUptime owner is responding to all these queries. From a provider to another, thats respectable effort you are making here, wish you all the best in your new venture too. Cheers!

  • drmikedrmike Member
    edited November 2011

    Good to see that ClubUptime owner is responding to all these queries.

    I mean no disrespect and I actually agree with you but let's wait until some of those refunds start getting paid before we start singing their praises, shall we? I hate to lump them in together but this sounds just like w2 did and we all know how that turned out.

    I do hope and I think you are better than those folks though.

    edit: Plus don't forget the LEB 'Up' Curse. ;)

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