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Yes we were told - and it is obvious that manual provisioning and setup would be nescessarry,
Has any refund been issued so far? I mean, other than those who paid through PayPal.
I wouldnt do it out of spite, but I am getting irritated because Im not hearing any information regarding refunds at all. I do not know what the plan is, I do not know what the status is. And I fear if I wait too long I wont get a chargeback because of fund reasons.
I wrote a ticket to request a refund. The refund issue is not solved yet, so having to reopen the ticket every 72 hours because it gets auto-closed is a huge annoyance.
Not correct - you are obviously entitled to a refund from the day of the CEPH crash.
Paypal do not care shit , and are more than happy to collect their fees.
If you took this to a court of law - I do believe they would acknowledge that starting to process refunds in January was reasonable, given the severity of the event and the restructuring needed.
Thank you , glad to hear that - and I DO appreciate your worries.
Well opening new tickets is probably not helping ..
Please consider this:
Looks like Paypal is blocked at the moment Papal is not going to cover refunds if they do not see a way of getting their money - you can be sure of that - so opening a claim is just going to add another fee to the list.
We are sort of all in this together - Our best interrest is for zxhost to be able to continue
us with new VM's so we get to keep them - and You to get your refunds.
If that is made impossible by chargebacks we all loose !
If ZXHost just communicated some information, all that guessing what is going on would not be needed. They are making things so much worse by keeping quiet..
I am not opening new tickets. I have had one single ticket. And it gets auto-closed if I dont write a reply every 72 hours since a few days ago.
I am considering this. Why do you think I havent opened a chargeback by now? Do you somehow think telling me that Im not being patient enough helps? I have been really patient. It just seems to get worse the longer this goes on. Continued no information and tickets get autoclosed now, making me feel like he is starting to give up.
Quite right !
However we should not overlook the good news - that new VM's are trickling in to those who said yes. - You might take that as non-verbal communication.
It seems many have read the book "How not to treat customers 101".
Oh yes - even especially large fat well staffed - companies who let you wait on the phone for ages before connecting you to someone who doesn't know shit or does not have the authority to actually help you.
@WSS - thank you we were in serious need of a gif invasion here :-)
@svmo that aint a gif.
@svmo have you asked for a refund?
I stand corrected Sir ! :-) - But where is EMMA ;-)
Now please please allow me to try to lessen your worries at least for the time being ...
You have been noticed by Ashley - so keeping an open ticket is raelly not nescessary.
Seeing tickets expired faster may be a healthy sign - Somebody looked at the system and said - I'm never going to answer all 5000+ (guess ??) tickets and most of them are probably pointless or can not be answered right now - so we need to cut the queue down to something that can be managed.
As long as we are noticing any action - it is a good sign ! - There is still life !
Now the ONE thing we CAN do - is not to make the situation worse.
This by not opening anything but strictly nescessary tickets -
and by - at least - postponing Paypal chargebacks.
I do realize You have more financially at stake than me - I still have to worry about whether it is worth the time to start filling my 1TB with EMMA gifs/png/jpg/.... ;-)
Were I a ruthless bookie - I might offer to buy Ashley's debt to you for 10cent/$ or similar.
I do honestly believe that we will see the situation being resolved during january.
So my advice is one of the following:
No - I have got a new VM - that is much more responsive than the CEPH one.
I actually joined Ashley - about a week before the disaster - so I could within the TOS have asked for a refund -
I noticed the effort being put into trying to recover - on the ceph-maling list and also the scope of the disaster. - As you can see from earlier posts.
My take on it was as follows:
Here we have a provider who actually care about and respect his customers data enough to put countless - unpaid - hours into trying to recover them. - The easy solution for Ashley would at that point have been to write it off - and either close up shop or saying too bad but our TOS dont give any guarantees against this sort of thing. - In place we see a hardworking businessman trying to salvage both his customers data and also his business.
Now that is qualities I respect and would like to see - Any provider can be good when things run smoothly - It is when trouble hits you will see who runs away and hides behind TOS - or who will try to solve the problem out of respect for his/her customers.
No provider I have seen not even Google gives Any warranty against data loss.
_So decision my 44€ + VAT - well I'm not going to go hungry if they are a writeoff
For Ashley it is his business - So i'm not going to be a dick and add to the misery by raising a dispute. _
I do not think using a Paypal chargeback as an insurance policy is the Right thing to do here
If things go badly I will take whatever refund may be offered by Ashley - but frankly keeping the VM is a far better deal.
sorry for the long reply ... but the full story may help you understand why I have put myself in Ashleys corner
Yeah fair point apart from suggesting he was unpaid
as it was paid for and don't think he was running the service for fun.
No of course not.
But the LET plan can not have much revenue. - and that revenue would have been spent several times over trying to deal with this situation. - It has even been suggested that the LET plans were less than sustainable. - Ashley is sole owner and get the winnings from the company. - If he has to put in more hours his hourly wage drops rapidly.
When things are running smoothly - almost everything is automated - so there is not much budget for support time.
Indeed selling Plex hosting or storage plans makes good sense since it would likely be long term customers, which would not require much support beyond initial setup.
Now if you have additional sources of income you can afford to operate that way, a number of small businesses starts that way. - Nothing wrong with that.
Of course you may make a quicker winning by renting a cheap server and filling it 3 times over with VPS's - then put an additinal number between the rack and the powersupply, - then change unsatisfied customers every month.
But Ashley have to my knowledge not oversubscribed his hardware.
You may try to do a bit of G... research on Ashley, always good to know who you are dealing with.
With such prices there really isnt any profit. Keep in mind all the costs involved. Thin provisioning should help but doesnt do miracles. But whenever you see a storage vps offer you always compare it to ashley and time4vps. See what has been happening. Maybe its just not sustainable...? It was your decision to signup for these offers. I get it, some companies are able to do it but that is just rare. I too considered purchasing a plan but the long time commitment was a no go. I even offered to pay monthly at a much higher price but it wasnt considered from Ashleys side. Anyway, signup for decent providers with realistic prices. Its more expensive but those need to pay for hw, colo, support and food on their tables.
Might sound weird to read this coming from El Cheapo but granted that I always think twice before jumping for such offers. Most premium vps I got arent within LET prices ("most, because ramnode and gestiondbi are just awesome).
Well I viewed the initial offers more like a way to initially experiment wirh CEPH ( the beta a year or so back ) and when i signed on more like selling off surplus capacity cheap. - and of course a discount for yearly payment.
Strange since his ordinary range offers monthly services:
https://billing.zxhost.co.uk/cart.php?gid=11
Well we are all a lot of miserly ElCheapo's here .-)
But I agree - if you want 24/7 response to tickets - and the security of a larger well founded company you have to pay the extra $.
So depending on your application you take a calculated risk - and accept the consequences in downtime in a situation like this.
The main risk with Ashley's operation is that if Ashley breaks the service breaks.
The thing about betting on CEPH has been debated earlier ... too complicated for small operatiions.
That being said - it is my impression that Ashley in the past has managed to provide good and not oversubscribed service - his 'regular' offers looks OK and carries a much more sustainable price tag.
Are the ZX plans of that type still operating and holding up ok? If yes, that's a good sign.
I wouldn't know ... Other services which were running at Hetzner probably are
Services which were running at 23media were according to @Falzo ' s earlier post switched off
Some may have been migrated like the LET plans to continue at Hetzner - but we dont know.
Setting us (the LET plans) up at Hetzner is of course a way to avoid some refunds but may also be a way to set up - or re-setup - an opreations base at Hetzner. - The Plex plans have earlier been offered on nodes like ours (i7-3770). - I do notice that we only seem to be 12 clients on the node I'm on (there may be more if IPv6 is firewalled/turned off) - for 32MB memory and 4x6TB hdd that leaves some room - add a couple of higher revenue plans and it would give a +not large but still not loss giving. - I'm making a guess based on what is on Hetzners standard menu.
If Ashley actually had some owned hardware colocated at Hetzner the situation might be better.
I do think that Ashley actually digging in and supplying fresh VM's is a good sign, also there has been a clear message that people would get refunded "as and when possible" - so no trying tho shirk here. - If you want a different example go read the Serverhand thread -
I do agree with @Falzo that no updates is the wrong way to handle this.
But neither of us are "the man on the spot" -
From my understanding of the severity of the blow, and the recovery attempted - I would be prepared to wait and see what january brings. - That being the timeframe originally set by Ashley, there may have been some financial plan behind this.
I have a couple of times thought it a writeoff and then found that things actually happened behind the scene - and hey - I now have a fresh VM.
I did want a custom deal. 30 GBP for 2TB per month is just expensive, there are plenty of sustainable offers at the given price point.
Yeah well, I just think that, cheap offers are ok while they're sustainable at least to cover the hw / colo point, if not that'll be very hard to survive.
I don't think that's the case, but I don't know a single customer that signed up for the standard monthly offers tbh.
I opened & escalated the case with paypal.
I paid up to Dec 2018.
2TB CIFS mountable storage is €9.90 at Hetzner. A tiny VPS is €3.90 on top of that. All in all way below 30 GBP.
Simply not work.
btw, access to detail of the vps management page is very much slow and I made several
tries on shutdown the vps but never got a respond. Actually the login session may be timed out then before respond feeds back.
the vps is always offline and could never boot up. The ticket sent was closed without response either.
Refer to the iso selection in vps configuration popup, it's weird the iso I upload never appears there and it jumps to the add iso page after clicking the iso-list button, same effect as clicking add-an-iso button.
When I tried to disable the rescue mode, it pops up a dialog saying the vps is locked and nothing could be altered. WTF.
Really don't know how to deal with this. Feel frustrated deeply.
The Virtualizor interface behaves a bit strange - you dont really know if you are logged on or not
Seems tickets now auto close after 72h? - see suggestion at end ...
'jump to the add iso page' - I saw that as well -
This might be one more symptom of the Web interface (controller) not being able to communicate with the node the VM should run on.
You mentioned at the start of this that your VM had gone 'dumb' - I never did fully understand what you meant by that - But if you meant sluggish/unresponsive - it could have been an indication of hardware problems.
So I would guess your VM host node have developed problems and is now offline.
Frustrated Understandable - you have been double unlucky - first CEPH now this.
Thank you for behaving with patience and restraint - please continue to do so.
I'm sure this will eventually be resolved and hope Santa will bring your VM back before christmas ;-)
As for advice:
Sure Ashley is doing his best to put things right - but apparently like Santa he is busy and works in silence ;-)
Do let us know how it goes ...
Are you Ashley's best mate?
Registered 19th November, right after service breakdown. Why he is so active now is quite strange to me. Especially, since those are LET packages sold months ago and he wasn't around.