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I would not consider it "harsh" at all. If anything, people have been exceedingly patient with OnApp, to a fault. OnApp has shown absolutely no legitimate intentions whatsoever, constantly making unmet promises, shady business decisions, and eventually strategically leaving the stage every time the discussion gets too "hot" for them.
They've been screwing their (paying!) customers for well over a year now, to the point of negligence. How is this not deserving of constant public criticism?
Well your entitled to that vary rare, badly informed and short sighted point of view
Joined January 3
2 comments total, both defending solusvm, not saying it.... but it would not surprise me either at this stage.
yes, you've exposed me. I'm the owner of onapp and just want to make clear that my company is actually not as worse as another company. That is a very uncommon way of marketing but anyway you got it. Brilliant!
onapp just released a massive update for solusvm.
1.18.05
Type
Note
Security Fix PHPMailer has been updated
If you are only on the 1.18.x branch you have a lot more to worry about then that
Do you mean not posting on LET often enough? Honestly I don't understand why they post here at all.
Because a lot of their customers and end users talk about them here and they also advertise their services here?
Shit just became shittier...
It's not so much about the frequency of posting, as it is about when they post. Any time criticism arises in a discussion they are a part of, they make some hand-wavy marketing statements. Then when criticism and/or skepticism continues, they stop responding in that thread entirely.
I don't expect them to continuously post on here. I do expect them to face criticism honestly and give useful, actionable answers. They don't.
do we have any other options at the moment than just wait and hope for the best?
Few businesses here use or ever would use OnApp. Few businesses here would use SolusVM if there were a viable alternative. A lot of businesses here are waiting for a viable SolusVM alternative to magically appear and will do absolutely nothing useful to make that happen.
To me it appears as if they're interested in buying competitors to eliminate viable alternatives and the only software they're interested in developing is OnApp. The odd post asking people to wait a bit longer because something big's coming costs nothing and does a bit more to deter alternatives and keep the cash cow ticking along. Getting into a substantial debate (or flame war) is a lot of effort for no reward.
This is only how it looks to me. Maybe I'm wrong. In their shoes I would probably not post here at all.
And I still don't really understand why not. I've suggested multiple times in the past, in multiple places, that with reliable funding - even if it comes from multiple providers working in tandem - I'd be able to work on CVM full-time instead of the bit-by-bit work I can afford to be doing now. People seemed quite happy about my work on CVM, but were seemingly unwilling to work towards getting it funded.
So once again, the same offer is still open: if people want a reliable open-source alternative to SolusVM and friends, and have it developed on a schedule, with actual hard guarantees on supported features, and timely bugfixes that actually fix the issues... I'm still available for this, and still willing to discuss funding options that involve a collaboration of multiple providers
(As for starting a Kickstarter or similar: There's not really a point to this, since it's unlikely that anybody outside of LowEndTalk would be interested. I'd just end up losing a significant cut to the platform, with no benefits to either me or those funding the project. It'd also make requirements and funding a lot less flexible. I'd much rather discuss it with people directly.)
Well now, who knows, I might be interested in VirtKick. Always good to have a solid company behind a product.
Hi Guys, one of our clients forwarded this thread to me
Feel free to ping me directly ([email protected], I am travelling right now, so will not be visiting this thread frequently) if you have questions regarding the Virtkick deal.
We haven't sorted out all the details yet, but I'd be happy to answer any questions I can.
D
I know the OnApp guy was here once and said that they had a closed 2.0 beta, but that was months ago...can't find it on LET search. I told him he should pick a few big hosts from LET and have them take a crack at it and share their views, reap some marketing rewards...of course, that never went anywhere.
@Clouvider mentioned a closed beta as well in this thread: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/72503/where-is-solusvm-v2/p1
When is Solus 2.0 coming out?
To save you some time and work, I took the liberty to compile a list of questions from this thread:
Given that you're "happy to answer questions", there should be no problem with answering them right here in the thread... right?
Welcome to the issue Virtkick had. You have all these large providers bitching and moaning about how they all hate solus and can't wait for a replacement but refuse to put a single dime towards a community project.
Virtkick delivered on their product in the end and while it has its issues, it was going to be opensource anyway so those few things would've been addressed quickly.
Francisco
Which was a lie because when it came to a deadline they had to push things out at least 6 months because the product didn't actually exist. You can lookup some of @AnthonySmith's posts on either here or WHT and he documented it all.
They have no reason to put any time into either project because...who's going to rise up against them? @joepie91's about the only one around here mentally duranged enough to go through the annoyance of writing a control panel for free knowing full he'll never see a dime out of it.
I mean, Justin from BlueVM did a panel and while we all (myself included) broke his balls over things, yet he still rolled it out and made it insanely cheap (like $1/m per node or something) and he got none? Almost no one? paying into it.
Even development wise 95%+ of the commits were from himself.
Francisco
Wise words as always @Francisco
Even if one person could write a great panel. What rational, revenue producing company would use it? So you are talking about needing a company with 5-6 people to write, maintain, and support a panel. (not 6 people on call to answer tickets on an as needed $2 per ticket basis - but full time staff). So what kind of revenue would such a company need?250K per year? 400K per year? Say 250K at 2.5/m per node you'd have to hope and pray for 8,000 node market penetration. The realities of this are quite difficult. Even if you say 125K a year you are looking at 4,000 nodes. The viability of the model is suspect, given the entrenched players. So it would take more than a few LET providers and a single programmer. I don't see it happening without a true VC supported model to pay for an appropriate attempt at market penetration as the software is only one aspect.
Why?
@joepie91. Who will provide support at 2 in the morning when the primary developer is sleeping? Or will support only be during a M-F normal business hours schedule? Who supports on weekend? It is a financially not so prudent move to risk a end user company on a new product with a skeleton staff until product is proven and has less issues than current available option.
@OhMyMy - that's the idea behind it being OSS, that way the community supports itself ideally.
Lets be real, there's been a half dozen panels over the years and all of the paid ones either flopped or never reached market. While @joepie91 and many others could finish it, I don't see them wanting to take on the headache without some guaranteed long term revenue.
Francisco
Offering 24-hour support, while being a mostly reasonable point (I will get back to this in a moment), doesn't explain how you end up with "5-6 people". On a crunch schedule, that'd be 2 people. On a tight schedule, it'd be 3 people. On a looser schedule with some room for sick leave etc., it'd be 4 people. None of those meet your "5-6 people" count - so where do the other two (or more) come from?
As for being a mostly reasonable point... for anything other than maybe "how do I ____", 24 hour support for a panel is not really a realistic expectation nor a necessity. Issues are typically not going to be triaged, reproduced, patched, tested and deployed within under 48 hours, so the extra 8 hours to wait before the developer wakes up aren't going to be that big of a deal. Note that I'm talking purely about software here, not about SaaS.
On top of all of that, it being an open-source project means that a community can grow around it, especially to take care of the more trivial questions being asked. You seem to be assuming "running as a commercial company" as an operation model, but that's not what I have in mind, and I suspect that neither do some of the other people who are playing with the idea of writing a panel.
At this stage, I honestly don't think the bar is set very high. SolusVM/OnApp has an effectively two-year support response time(!), and all the other options seem to either have very obvious quality deficiencies, or unreasonable requirements ("you can only use this as a hosted service").
I wouldn't necessarily be looking for long-term revenue. As long as my bills are paid somehow, I don't particularly care how. Whether that's by being paid for working on CVM, or being paid for other projects and working on CVM in my spare time, either is fine with me. Nowadays I generally follow a model of "paying me to do work gets you priority and a deadline, filing an issue on the repo doesn't".
@joepie91. 168 hours in a week. 40 hour work week = 4 people for 24/7 coverage. Main programmer gets run over by a truck- better at least have 1 skilled backup. marketing cant spend all their time on support or writing code- better have at least one marketing person or you start either restricting growth or dev or support. Hence you do get to 5-6 people easy unless you start trimming back expectations substantially. Or your growth to a sustainable number of nodes gets compromised.
This is not a valid assumption in eg. startups, where work weeks are often considerably longer until things get going.
Fair point, but far less relevant for an open-source project than for a proprietary one.
I don't see why a marketing person would be needed here. With the current state of things, any reasonable alternative is going to practically market itself, especially if it's free to use. Again, you seem to be assuming a commercial company.
Growth isn't the goal. Having a decent VPS control panel is.
Great.
The community as a whole, on here especially, were given a shot to support VirtKick to roll out their product. They ran the kickstarter for over a month and in that time they made...$8000 or so? Not even half of what was needed to get off the ground.
All of these brands that play "big show" could've rolled the whole project outta their warchests without blinking an eye yet if they did, they went stingy and offered a few hundred bucks when their Solus bills are $XXXX/month. Now they're sitting around crying about how shitty Solus is and how there's no competition to it.
There's been a few other panels that tried to launch and...well, there's virtualizor and that's it.
Right now there's @DETio but he's no where to be found since the IP hijacking ordeal. For all we know that was the main bankroll for his development budget.
Francisco
Well I bought a Virtkick package/license (the $19/mo one) around 24 hours ago and it hasn't been delivered yet. I don't know if that's normal or because of the OnApp acquisition.
No that is not our source of funding - our development is still quite active, here's a look at our latest progress:
If anyone would like to request a demo to test the platform themselves, please contact us here: https://virtengine.com/contacts.html or by shooting an email to [email protected]