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★ VirMach ★ Black Friday & Cyber Week 2018 ★ RAID 10 SSD ★ OpenVZ & KVM ★ Check inside for offers! - Page 306
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★ VirMach ★ Black Friday & Cyber Week 2018 ★ RAID 10 SSD ★ OpenVZ & KVM ★ Check inside for offers!

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Comments

  • ben47955ben47955 Member
    edited December 2019

    Edit :

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  • Who's in the buff? Hello?

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  • hello @plumberg - have you been able to boot the "rescue" mode on your 128 MB critter?

  • @uptime said:
    hello @plumberg - have you been able to boot the "rescue" mode on your 128 MB critter?

    Nah. Not in front of a computer now. Probably tomorrow morning will post an update

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • uptimeuptime Member
    edited December 2019

    okay, I'm about to sit down for dinner so will be afk for a while too ... but I'll try to post a little walkthrough here of the fdisk / resize2fs / etc process later tonight, for the lulz

  • good morning

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @ZA_capetown said:
    good morning

    Is it morning already?

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • FrankZFrankZ Veteran
    edited December 2019

    @VirMach - I understand that there are options available on the SSD1G that are not available on the KVM-Lite/Flash deals, but is the VPS performance (steal, disk I/O, network) any different/better?

                              Thank you again for all the voodoo that you do.
    
    Thanked by 2pullangcubo uptime
  • French fries. I think I'm going to leave them for a while. Too much fat there.

    Thanked by 1FrankZ
  • @imok said:
    French fries. I think I'm going to leave them for a while. Too much fat there.

    2 words - air fryer.

  • @donli said:

    @ZA_capetown said:
    good morning

    Is it morning already?

    I don't think so. I only see the moon.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • FrankZFrankZ Veteran
    edited December 2019

    imok said: French fries. I think I'm going to leave them for a while. Too much fat there.

    I really like potatoes, French fries are good.
    I am ok with the carbs as I need to put on some weight.
    I am cooking Dorado (Mahi-Mahi) so not much fat there.

    Thanked by 2uptime plumberg
  • FrankZFrankZ Veteran
    edited December 2019

    imok said: I don't think so. I only see the moon.

    I see the moon too. Could this be a cosmic connection we have been missing.
    Is the moon a clue to another egg?
    At this point I am not sure that anything is really as it appears.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @FrankZ Where you stay, eating mahi-mahi?

  • FrankZFrankZ Veteran
    edited December 2019

    randomq said: @FrankZ Where you stay, eating mahi-mahi?

    West coast of Mexico. The seafood is really good here.

    Thanked by 2randomq uptime
  • VirMachVirMach Member, Patron Provider

    ben47955 said: Probably the disk is a issues too.

    Yeah I think this is the biggest lump of coal, the 1GB disk ones.

    Edmond said: I think the biggest limiting factor is most likely the bandwidth. If they said free internal networking at the same location, I’d do it but otherwise... Ouch.

    Probably second worst. I'm sure there are some use cases that rely heavily on processing power and memory and not much internet. Maybe some types of gameservers in a specific case playing with friends? I think specific types of websites could work too especially with caching/CDN. I feel a little bad about the low bandwidth ones for people that misread it. I think I saw one or two of these cases.

    dTQzBen8 said: Same here. After this attempt I won't buy(or only 1) < 192 MB RAM and 5 GB disk machines, it's a torture.

    Yep, anything under 256MB RAM and 5GB disk is a bad idea on KVM.

    floopy said: I hope virmach can continue to optimize the network in China and not be harassed by garbage customers

    We're really trying to achieve this and pushing ColoCrossing to get contracts with China Telecom/Unicom, but we haven't announced anything because we don't want people to buy services in the hopes that it will drastically improve until we're sure it's happening. You know how things can go, like IPv6.

    FAT32 said: The current official way to transfer services is fine but they hope that it doesn't involve the taking of photo ID because of privacy issue.

    This was in the works, trying to simplify it. We definitely know privacy is an issue, and honestly, we can't read Chinese so the IDs don't even matter. I assume many people already do not use their full government name.

    We ask for ID only because if anything goes south it's a pretty solid piece of information to make sure the account isn't just being hacked and transferred off, plus it seems to help with the payment processors. Actually, in most cases where a customer provides an ID we do not even get a chargeback. We could probably remove this requirement if Alipay is involved in the payment. Honestly, I feel like in the end though people will still do unofficial transfers to save that $3. Which is really really low when you think about the level of work involved, but I understand why someone paying $6 a year might be hesitant. That seems to be the second complaint. We just can't take that workload. We definitely already lose time/money doing it the way it is but at least the $3 is a good barrier where everyone doesn't request it. The fee becoming free means transfer work increasing tenfold.

    floopy said: Chinese are affected by taobao's refund and return rules, which allow people to return and exchange goods frequently.

    We have some understanding of this as we have customers that state it's their right and so on. There's definitely some similar sentiment in the United States, however, it just doesn't work at certain price points. We're working on automating the refund request process so it could be a little more feasible, but there's still other factors at play.

    We could definitely have a 30 day no question asked refund policy for everything, but then specials would definitely cost more and I'm 100% sure, again, a loud minority, would make it difficult when they forget to request it within 30 days and then want an exception made and we have to process it manually anyway. Then there would also be people that get encouraged to make multiple accounts and keep switching services. We've had people do that and then get upset we rejected their refund, after we gave them a courtesy refund, told them not to do it again, and they did it again. We could offer refunds to credit on connection/access issues in China or offer free IP changes (if it's automated) but then (some) people would burn IP addresses, and if there's any limit they would still dispute, complain, etc. We had this idea to just let anyone cut off service at any time for store credit, but then (some) people would get the credits, then dispute and complain especially if we even thought about, for example, removing the annual discount (two month free) when someone cancels halfway through. This already happens when people get additional courtesy refunds to store credit instead of their payment method.

    FAT32 said: In addition, a better way in their opinion to solve the changing of email address can be done by phone verification (2FA). It will requires the SMS code to change their email address. If they can't provide the code, then only a photo ID is required.

    It's complicated. There would still be cases where a hacker could just set the 2FA or someone sets it afterward just to do the incorrect way of transferring services. We'd have to have cool-down periods and other restrictions. Oh, and then we would still have to deal with the dozen(s) of people (probably even way more) that lose their 2FA.

    FAT32 said: Lastly, they hope that the transfer process can be automated with fees (such as fixed $3 per service + 10% of that service) or something like that.

    We hope a lot of things can be automated too, but this is probably further down on the list for development. It's also likely more complicated and there would be security concerns. I know we can do this to some level using the available API, but you never know with SolusVM and WHMCS.

    tetech said: Why not just completely ban transfer of Black Friday specials? If people bought something they end up not wanting/needing => too bad. If people bought speculatively hoping to resell for a profit => too bad. If people operated a "buying service" renting out bots => too bad.

    Well banning it won't help. It's already not really allowed to hand off your account to someone else but people do it anyway. The idea would definitely be to encourage it to be done properly.

    Unless we get rid of VPN usage (inconvenience most China customers) altogether this is definitely difficult to enforce properly without false positives. Even if we could enforce it we still feel bad punishing hundreds of people that didn't follow the rules if they were just incorrectly purchasing a service from a third party. Of course we can still do some enforcement but if we go full zero tolerance fees / closing accounts level that wouldn't be great.

    I suspect that the main effect of banning transfers is that people who legitimately want a service would have more chance to purchase it.

    If we do flash sales next year we definitely need to first have many more systems in place to curb a lot of the abuse automatically.

    ben47955 said: Please move your discussion to 2018 thread, thanks

    I can see how it can be annoying to have it bumped up, but hey, portions of the sale are still there to grab and this one post won't make any difference a few minutes from the other.

    (edit) Actually let's move it over because I'm sure there will be some responses.

    I translate back some main viewpoints from Chinese community which casued most quarrels:

    Asking for Hand-hold ID photo is an intolerable behavior, the worst, much worse than scalping.

    Okay, we'll work on this right now.

    Consumers have their rights to buy / sell products they purchased for, as well as modify E-mail address. Dealing with a reasonable price is not scalping, Virmach just make an extra profit from every PUSH action - Rules: Account >= 6 months, cost $3.

    We don't allow lower-tier support to do these, so that automatically brings up the cost. Since we have no form or anything for it, the process is definitely much slower than it should be and it's even worse if someone disagrees, asks questions, misses information, which makes it even longer to process. We have to be extremely careful doing these.

    I can absolutely guarantee you that we do not charge the fee for profit. Many people seem to think this is the case, but it's not. It's just not built into the cost of the service. We could do that but then everything costs more for everyone. I don't think it should work like that for some very specific situations. And again, if it's free, the number of requests will skyrocket. It's very hard to put a "reasonable" price tag on it when reasonable is defined as something in line with special pricing. At some point we offered support for $5/yr for packages and no one was interested and that's just for the above extremely limited/none level of support and wouldn't include any special requests. How account transfers started is our ballpark estimate, several years ago, for cost of support to fulfill a special request that took a small amount of time. It's ballooned into a much larger request, with higher support costs and we've still been able to keep it the same for most requests. These requests would be closer to $10 if we actually charged a reasonable price and $15 if we were actually doing it as a business with any margins. We are a US-based company. The highest level people handle these requests. Yes, if we paid everyone minimum wage then $3 would be fair, and if outsourced support handled these then maybe we might make a small profit if they could process it all under 20 minutes including all the communication involved.

    Some users argue that Virmach suspended their machine and costs them $25 because of resource over-usage after once warning. The reason of over-usage is because of under attack or compile runtime environment, they think these are rational use, Virmach cost $25 for no extra expenses on their own is too stingy.

    (I suggest Virmach to give users an extra chance to download all their data on machine, so they can choose to leave without purchase for $25)

    This is a case where the fee is closer to actually covering the losses we incur, on average.

    If you have a non-protected service and attract attacks, to the point where other customers are negatively affected, that's 7 days of credit for all customers on that node. That's higher than $25. For suspensions, in many cases where it's assessed a sys admin had to spend a good amount of time locating the abuse. It might have been multiple times for normal services where we can afford to give some grace. We still do not charge any fees for any automated actions, if it didn't take much time to process, and in many cases if the fee is assessed we can work with the customer to waive it. Many cases, we have to work with the customer for many, many replies to resolve the situation. It doesn't help that the customer is upset and spending most the time arguing instead of providing relevant information. Again, this takes time, and again, if we just didn't enforce/charge any fees in any situation then abuse would skyrocket because less people would take it seriously. People already don't to the point where they do not properly secure their service. We've had cases where someone's password is something like "Batman123" with no security hardening at all and we get yelled at and a negative review because the customer somehow though we are responsible for their service's security.

    Then for payment issues, we have to account for all payment methods, all disputes/chargeback and the time plus fees it takes to handle them. Not many people pay the fee, so it drives up the cost. If everyone who disputes actually paid the fee then obviously it would be lower (but that's obviously not realistic.) We have to submit a lot of evidence to win chargebacks. This takes a good amount of time. If it's a chargeback, there's also a $15-20 chargeback fee we get charged. Yes, in some situations, it might be less than $25 of work but if we did a variable rate it just wouldn't work. We'd then have to get into discussions with customers justifying how much time we spent on every case.

    And of course, we can build it into the price, but why punish everyone else for the minority of problematic users? And again, it's not "profitable" to us. We don't rely on people abusing and paying the fee to stay afloat. It's barely anything, but at least we don't have to constantly deal with problematic customers and (some) people will not be encouraged to be even more callous.

    lowendclient said: (I suggest Virmach to give users an extra chance to download all their data on machine, so they can choose to leave without purchase for $25)

    This is another misunderstanding. We get a lot of complaints where people think we are holding their data hostage.

    We have many cases where the customer did not purchase backup/restores. We do keep backups for free, but we do not restore them for free because it's not automated and takes a good amount of time. However for some reason people don't see it as us charging nothing extra at all to store it in case of a disaster, and instead see it as we should handle all their backup responsibility plus spend time to restore it for free at any time. Otherwise, we're somehow holding their data hostage. No, it was terminated, you didn't have a backup, the data isn't there, it's somewhere else and we have to do work to check if it's available, viable, and get it ready for you.

    Then if people are suspended for abuse, in some cases we can't just unsuspend them to let them grab data when (1) they didn't keep proper backups for their important data, (2) there might be malware that still sends out attacks, attracts attacks, spam, or might even have illegal content, or (3) we have to coordinate everything and spend time on support anyway while we're owed money for work we already had to do that we're not getting paid for (double whammy.) The $25 fee isn't for restoring your service/hostage money. It's a fee for us having to deal with the suspension, which we already did to a degree, and continue to do when you contact us.

    And then finally, if it's for a payment dispute, I'm sorry but if you didn't pay for a service, caused us to do more work to deal with the dispute/chargeback, and now you're contacting us for your data (more work) then we completely disagree with that logic altogether.


    Anyway, consider all this informal community talk. I think I'll leave it there.

    We're still doing fine and we don't want to upset anyone by getting into the specifics of how and why we run a business the way we do. So TLDR we're at least getting rid of the ID requirement. Maybe some others, if payment is Alipay.

  • @VirMach said:
    ...

    Hey @VirMach you're replying comments in 2019 thread but here is 2018 one, sure you're going right place?

  • VirMachVirMach Member, Patron Provider
    edited December 2019

    @dTQzBen8 said:

    @VirMach said:
    ...

    Hey @VirMach you're replying comments in 2019 thread but here is 2018 one, sure you're going right place?

    I wanted the core of the conversation to be moved here so we don't bug everyone who are just looking for deals. Since this one doesn't get bumped up. The single message doesn't matter much but if it's a few pages of discussions people might get annoyed.

    But I mean we both know the real reason is getting this to page 200.

  • FAT32FAT32 Administrator, Deal Compiler Extraordinaire

    I tried my best to explain things to the Chinese community to reduce the conflicts but I am getting a bit exhausted after looking at their responses. It is just ridiculous.

    That's why we can't have nice things. People just want to request for more and never satisfied with things.

    At least find me one, just one provider that is cheaper than VirMach's BF sales, I would say NO ONE can match this, at least the price.

    I should get a life instead because things are getting worse. I previously planned to help lots of LET providers to get on board to Chinese community but the amount of disasters make me wonder if it is worth it or not.

    I am not a PR guy, just a typical guy who do coding.

  • If it was easy to put square pegs in round holes, we probably would not have that expression.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @FAT32 said:
    I tried my best to explain things to the Chinese community to reduce the conflicts but I am getting a bit exhausted after looking at their responses. It is just ridiculous.

    That's why we can't have nice things. People just want to request for more and never satisfied with things.

    At least find me one, just one provider that is cheaper than VirMach's BF sales, I would say NO ONE can match this, at least the price.

    I should get a life instead because things are getting worse. I previously planned to help lots of LET providers to get on board to Chinese community but the amount of disasters make me wonder if it is worth it or not.

    I am not a PR guy, just a typical guy who do coding.

    Don't waste time on it. Your time deserve better things, like eggs.

    Hammers & walls are just better than explanation, for, well, those bad guys.

    Thanked by 1FAT32
  • Maybe allow transfers of special deals (and e-mail change) only after 6 months of usage. That should offset all the ticket-load during the no-holiday season and hopefully less users will buy to sell.

    It is hard to fight bots for a great flash deal and bots don't drive any hype/benefit to VirMach.

    Bad idea? I'll continue to give bad ideas ... we have to go to page 200 fast.

    Thanked by 1plumberg
  • Is that page 200 calling us from still afar?

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • VirMach said: Probably second worst. I'm sure there are some use cases that rely heavily on processing power and memory and not much internet. Maybe some types of gameservers in a specific case playing with friends? I think specific types of websites could work too especially with caching/CDN. I feel a little bad about the low bandwidth ones for people that misread it. I think I saw one or two of these cases.

    Does the additional bandwidth apply to flash sale services?
    https://virmach.com/terms-conditions/#tab2

  • @imok said:
    French fries. I think I'm going to leave them for a while. Too much fat there.

    I'd say consuming anything in moderation is perfect. Not the truck load of fries received

    Thanked by 1imok
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