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I agree communication has been a mess, - If it would have been sufficient to avoid the situation with PayPal - after reading how people use PayPal disputes on this forum - sadly I doubt it.
I can only try to imagine the pressure of having to first try to recover and then having to scrap a big cluster - being responsible for peoples data.
I respect the efforts put into trying to doggedly work through it and set up replacement services.
I am actually one of those now having a fresh well working - but sadly now shortlived - new VM at Hetzner.
We have all - me included - lost considerable time to this.
I do feel his communication is what has let most people down.
I know a lot of people weren't happy with the email about new services when they didn't have a replacement VPS yet, but as someone who did I was interested - and replied to the email with some questions. This is still unanswered - I can't give them more money for services when the sales email isn't replied to lol.
I hope they continue and pull through and plan any future offers, but we'll see.
I was really disappointed that my CA storage servers (non-CEPH, I think) also went down (many weeks after my DE server went down). If I had known that would be the case, I would have more aggressively pursued an alternate storage VPS option much sooner.
I'm also wondering if the refunds that may (hopefully) eventually come are only from Jan 20 onwards or backdated from when the server(s) went offline. Despite my replies to all of his emails asking for customer replies, I never received any email back nor any replacement server.
I think it would have been better to clearly cut losses at the point the first financial issues arose. state clearly that's EOL for the product and hit the damn refund button for all affected users as fast as you can, to avoid further disputes/chargebacks/fees.
imho much better than burning more money on the try to get a replacement ready. sx61 even without raid ends up in at least 3€ per TB with an IPv4 per VM. not really going to work while still having to struggle for money for the rest of the customers and more disputes coming in.
instead word of getting refunds could have helped to keep users trust and patience. working power could have been spend either for extra income or to stabilize the rest of the business instead of setting up nodes and storage VMs while other non-storage services are dropping out...
sad to see it going down this way, I hope he gets the refund money ready quickly and out to the people to at least keep what maybe left of his former good and honest reputation...
... And here I'd passed up the HostHatch 1.5TB special, too ...
Offer has been extended until end of today if you're still interested
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2593342/#Comment_2593342
go grab it while you can! good value for the money, network and disk is quite fast so far :-)
I just did! No time to think, just grab and go....
You're the kind of person who sues because someone hurt your feelings, aren't you?
That's very LET of you. HostHatch has been pretty nice to use-to date.
If hurt feelings were the criteria of chargeback for me, card companies would have barred me by now due to the number of times that happens. This was a faulty product for me ever since I bought it. The platform was never stable, one of the random reboots rendered the fs corrupt, wasted a lot of time in rebuilds, moving data on & off multiple times, vm migrations, providing him feedback on the recurring "issues" when he would actually reply back to a ticket after a couple of nudges. I refuse to be a guinea pig for his CEPH debugging. Have better things to do.
So caz you failed to comprehend:
I very well know that shit happens, business decisions go bad. But then a honest provider will just bear the losses and move on. ZXHost having lost all credibility for me, I actually have much respect for the customers here who have shown much more patience than desired and still waiting for a final resolution. They might just turn out to be the ones who will end up getting "hurt" more in terms of time & money than the ones who were able to and have chargebacked already.
@dbman Shit sucks, I get that. Hell, I was almost hit by this, but I wanted a "larger than one person" warm storage config, so I didn't. Yes, you're angry. Yes, you wasted/lost time and my god the world revolves around you.
What you don't seem to realize is that he CAN'T refund right now because several people have already charged back, and PayPal locked his account. It's pretty much that simple.
If you do so, and actually manage to get your funds back, congratulations- you've had some free service and are also adding an extra ~$40 dickhead fee upon what's already a lost cause. If you contact PayPal and ask them to refund you, it's likely to be easier on both yourself, other clients, (and Ash).
The more people who force chargebacks through their creditor vs PayPal causes PayPal to superficially inflate that already-extended-period that they'er going to not only hold his funds, but any people who ARE patiently wading through this mess.
So, basically, when you chargeback, you're making it more difficult for everyone- it's not like you're just fucking over Ashley who did you a disservice of thinking he could provide a product which failed.
No matter how many times you tag him, he isn't going to turn up here if he doesn't want to face the music. Time4VPS was doing it much before him. They did raise the prices later but those who bought it cheap still have it at that price and its 100 times more stable than this junk (probably due to the I/O limits they place). He was neither the first, nor will be the last to jump on cheap storage-vms bandwagon. He just couldn't do it right.
My new VM is just set up 7 days ago...
Which is why I haven't done it yet. As he is supposed to refund everyone in this month as per his announcement, I will hang onto that thin thread. But unlike you I have no grudges for those who have chargebacked. A provider who shuns his customers like he did, deserves it.
I am still counting on that pro-rata refund he intends to do.
Those who actually got fucked in this failed venture (and I don't believe its Ashley alone) should not have to justify their steps to recover what they can. Neither money nor time grows on trees for them and both are limited in nature.
It's not totally symmetric. Ash's situation is of his own doing unlike ours, it's true; but but he's in it a lot deeper than we are. Those of us who bought that 3 year plan were either naive or greedy or both. I don't think I was naive so I must have been greedy. That means if I get some of that $100 back I have to think of it as a lucky break.
So you saw a nice offer from a established provider and bought it and now feeling guilty concious of greed? If you didn't plan this out for him, how are you or we supposed to know that its inevitably gonna fail? Getting your money back for service not delivered is your right and not some grace of god.
I was greedy in sending in money for an offer that was obviously on its face not realistic. If someone buys what looks like a realistic, sustainable offer and gets hosed, they are entitled to some sympathy. If they send their money to a nigerian prince in exchange for 25% of some huge mythical transfer and then they whine to us about it, we'd laugh at them.
This was somewhere in between. It had a shot at being workable but it was clear from the get-go that there might be a problem (not a deliberate scam, but the usual signs of a distressed business having a fire sale to keep the lights on). So yeah, those of us who went into it with our eyes open can't act too surprised.
I've been informed that all non-LET plans with ZX are carrying on as normal.
Not sure if that affects many people on here though...
Hey all I joined in just to ask this but people are complaining about doing chargebacks and I just wanted to know how much or a general idea of what you think is an acceptable amount to request a charge back? I know storage was super cheap and I had been using zxhost since early 2015 but I paid $822.76 USD in october because the service came back up and I wanted to renew but since then it has been down.
You charge back the whole amount and you deserve it.
man i havent had enough coffee yet to tell if you are trolling or not
I hope this gives some reality check to the host's sympathizers here about how much money he will end up running away with in case he does not issue those promised refunds.
Yeah I see people saying things like 40 in this thread.. I have paid each year in full and it was a damn good deal and Ashley always responded but recently the responses have been short "this was a problem on the OVH side" and nothing more. Then CEPH died and it took a while to get a VPS back up but he did it so I thought things would be fine but I guess I was wrong.
I am not trolling. You chargeback the whole amount since service is not rendered / available anymore.
A few more comments while I'm here.
You all seem to know a lot more about where your servers are hosted and what is going on with them. I haven't received any emails from ZXhost since the September Customer Offers. Didn't get the email about CEPH, services being restored, discontinuing services, nothing. I also had no idea which DC or Provider my setup was actually in.
My payment was through paypal but funded with both paypal balance and credit card so that should be fun getting a refund for.
I had other ZXhost services such as a web hosting package that no longer show in my dashboard. They are still active as of now and I am using them but should I be finding another host for those as well?
Realistically speaking, it is unlikely that you will ever see any money back. His paypal account is probably already frozen.
Now, if you chargeback via CC, then you risk losing your own paypal.
The end of line? You are out of luck and out of nearly a grand. By filing a dispute with paypal though, the host will have less of a chance of getting the account back.
I just hope you learned something from this fiasco.
Oh look. Upon opening a paypal dispute my zxhost ticket gets reopened immediately.
"Hello Andrew,
Hope you had a good new year.
Just received your PayPal Dispute
You should have received an email stating that due to a hardware failure at OVH we would require to reinstall the VM for you.
I haven't heard from you since, sorry I haven't had the chance to reach out to you directly.
If you can let me know the OS you require I can get the VM rebuilt for you and extend your renewal date due to the downtime you have expirence.
Again sorry for the lack of communication have been very busy and relying on mass emails to keep users up to date however seems some users have not received these emails sadly.
Thanks,
Ashley Merrick"
I just want plex back because I don't have cable lol
Personally, at this point, I'd push for money back. From the way it's been happening, while the guy does try, he is failing.
He claimed 99% of his customers are up & running while the reality looks like 99% of his customers are down.
Money is written off as a business expense because I had backups and apis run through it so I'm not that torn up about it.
My options for DCs are
1/ OVH France
2/ 23Media
3/ Hetzner Germany
So it looks like he got his account settled with 23Media but I assume Hetzner is the best choice here?
He stated that he would have some hetzner storage servers available to push to other people's hetzner accounts without setup fees. Might wanna go for those yourself.
I have waited three months in Good Faith for @AshkeyUK to refund me my money and now I am over my 6 months so cannot even file a paypal dispute and of course @AshleyUK keeps closing my ticket for refund without any response.