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Exactly
Yo are we talking about dexter in lowendtalk from now xD. I love dexter show.
I approve.
One of the very few non-anime shows I enjoyed watching
For me its the fact that I can talk to vps providers themselves so that can help in creating better understanding where big companies might fail but to be honest this is a double edged sword so I am gonna go with companies which might be a bit more expensive but have good reputation
I really like upcloud even though they are on the more expensive side of things as they got both good support and some autoscaling and other things, hetzner/netcup is the best option for let people or racknerd/dedi
One thing I wish more let companies should do is that if you create payments in upcloud, you can buy a server and then use it per hourly and when the payments -> credits. You can still turn the credits -> payments mostly for 30 days.
I feel like its a must to prevent any scam and something which I am willing to pay more for if they allow refunds of credits.
To be honest, just don't get credits or triannual deals and only get yearly deals from people whom you can trust otherwise to be honest just use monthly deals from normal providers
This is a good remix of the blood theme if you are interested. Definitely worth a listen.
Honestly can you give me a quickrundown of the whole situation, I only got to page 20 and its an hour or two but the way I am seeing is that lewis/eric are scamming? Can you give me a tldr from page 20 -40, any new information. Because I might create an article about it, the whole situation is extremely messy tho.
Someone please create a single message which can try to summarize the whole situation (No mind if it can be long) for new people who are interested in the drama perhaps.
Imagine if dexter was a lowendtalk user and he got scammed by lewis xD
One can always go with big players, but the idea is to support competition and the small players too. One day these small players can grow and become big. We have seen this on LET too, where small players became big. It is not the fault of consumer that a small business wants to turn into scam.
You are probably right, but this is low-end. We are looking for the hosting in the basement, the small player, the underdog. We want to see that passion of starting up a business with low resources. For example I don't want a service from OVH or Hetzner, instead I want to help multiple small players with the same amount of money. I want to see honest people who start with a small server in the attic or basement, because I want to give money for that passion, even though it is just $7. In the end: we are all humans, while competition through hard work is always good for economy.
Welp I'm not really that invested in this drama myself
I 100% agree and understand your opinion.
Thanks for providing your opinion and nuance to the whole situation but I have a simple question that I thought when I wanted to open up something related to hosting which does feel shot down because of lack of funds or whatever. I did find the idea interesting tho so I will ask you
Why is there not a single non profit hosting company which offers low end hosting. Non profits can still have people make salaries. Like personally I don't mind working for a fixed amount of salary or such with a cap and such.
Another idea is how do you guys get cheap hardware in the first place, people must have good contacts in the IT industry perhaps but if hosters can get cheap hardware, I don't understand why a hoster cant ask for hardware sharing itself and then host something very bare minimum with something like incus + vms or proxmox.
Sir you are a veteran. Tell me one thing but why can't we have proper lease of hardware + colocation bills split between multiple parties in a transparent manner so that they cant back out. This is better than scams, Why are we not creating more indie solutions but rather every host ends up as a virtualizor + whmcs/ whole website copy pasted that you cant trust.
I genuinely wonder if something can be done in the industry where a non profit can be established since honestly I feel the same as you do too but its hard trusting sometimes if a new company establishes and I only know of very few players which I trust after seeing this post and they exactly aren't really lowend but I feel like they are sustainable.
Well neither am I but I am just interested as to whats the community's opinion right now. It feels like people believe that they are scammed so is there any ways that they can get refunds.
The whole situation feels like a trust me bro right now and people are forced to trust but there are severe questions of integrity that I think something like velox media is going through, the way they respond (from what I can tell) and just about everything.
Things could've turned less disasterous than right now if they had better communication but I don't see that from 1-20 pages of comments. This took me an hour or two to read but did someone lose their money itself and got screwed by not having servers either or whats really happening? I cant really understand the whole situation. The context is one massive cluster of jargon.
There are multiple low-end providers offering free service if that's what you mean. Some that come to mind are NanoKVM and FOSSVPS.
With regards to software used, one has to use the standards when it comes to secure payments. Unfortunately licenses are paid usually using WHMCS and Blesta.
I don't understand what you mean by non-profits. You mean payment for service to break even? Or you mean for profits going to some good cause for humanity? I believe this can be done, but if it is too cheap, it will become a magnet for abusers eating your support. The selling point would be transparency with regards to income and charity donations, while keeping the prices not too low.
Well, currently most have a free server provided by „Eric“, as they have no contract with him. There‘s like zero trust for most people and we don’t know if „Eric“ already abused his powers by getting all customers data, personal from the client portal or the data on the servers. Also it’s a huge problem that data is in US now, rather than UK and GDPR legislations are not followed.
The problem is that there are currently no active contracts and the data ownership question, not that a server is down. Even tho there were a few downtimes here and there already.
So regarding gdpr legistlations and etc., what do they mean and how would they impact an average customer of velox (not that I have one but still)
The problem what feels to me is that for these yearly/tri-yearly deals. Lewis got the money and eric got none so he has no incentive to support and he's already saying that he's in loss and he already talked about how he might have to do something about it plus his tone and everything makes me feel like he has no incentive to support the yearly deals when lets be honest, it will cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars only to get a brand which is tarnished and he has been asking for a 1000$ or smth too
I am worried about the servers downtimes too so dont have much hopes up when we see things logically
Also can you elaborate what you mean by active contracts. And I suppose that one cannot refund these deals correct so the people who brought in are a little stuck with them and so would chargeback helps in these situations or what would happen?
https://opengovuk.com/company/SC654503
In veloxmedia case (after Lewis started offering unsustainable deal), no.
If you're speaking in broader topic, such as legal issues, resource (bandwidth, i/o, cpu, ddos) with other hosts, yes. But then, you could dispute it with the card issuer, paypal, stripes, etc. Until they don't stand on your side
All things considered, it's practically gambling. Big providers could charge premium because the benefit of keeping things running smoothly outweigh the benefit of taking a exit scam (rug pull). The reason people choose lesser known hosts is because their value proposition is price competitiveness.
Don't. There's reason why hosts sometime are trigger happy, it's a huge pain in the ass.
Take for example, Matthew prince. One day, he woke up and decide to change the ToS, and kick the costumer. Despite he have uphold his stance because of ideological reason.
>
We don't know the exact detail of his transfer. It could be the IP or RAM/NVME.
Lewis said he configured the server to have high density of NVME and RAM. And this was before the storage and ram inflation. So, I could speculate that the RAM pool has worth beyond the couple grand bill Eric said. So, it has to be at least 2TB, probably 10-20TB to make this worthwhile.
There's no exact answer. It's more or less similar to why people choose their job.
I know this sounds unrealistic, but I judge host by their swarm
I don't understand but if people chargeback, it would impact lewis and not eric. But it feels like eric is willing to bank in a few thousand dollars to stay but that is still unprofitable and no way eric can get profit so he will shutdown and probably after people chargeback so like, at that point, what's gonna happen is a person who bought the server wouldn't be able to do a chargeback either
And there is always the issue which is feeling to me about who contains the data of credit card information or similar. If eric is unable to make this loss making machine into anything remotely resembling profit, he has incentives right now to do nefarious things
And we still don't know who eric is or his full name or his LLC that much if I am right or similar, correct?
The whole situation is fishy af, at this point people gave benefit of doubt but they are still unable to explain the situation smh
Yea no I don't know, The whole business is extremely intensive and the rewards aren't worth it imo due to the saturation. As you and default say, its a mix of gambling-alike (look Ma, I got a really good deal haha) + (I am supporting smaller providers [ideological reasons])
Please tell me one thing but in this economy, why are people incentivized to do low end hosting perhaps. Like someone can create an vscode fork xD and then get billions in funding and profits and here you have to do all these things and invest so much money to get investments.
It feels that there are only two proper ways that one become lowendhosters:
They already have a job in this industry or have a business
They got some really good homelab or hardware (but it seems that veloxmedia alike rented hardware themselves so that point becomes moot too)
I said this to default as well but although yes I know we won't be able to get 7$ deals but what stops people from grouping together to buy one large server and then colocating?
Like the reason why I think homelabbing can become moot sometimes is that I don't really want to serve public hosting websites from people's homelab, the risks just aren't worth it.
I think what most websites do nowadays is provide compute in complicated ways instead of vps and have more offerings (in railway, people pay for only the consumption that they do etc) and lowendmarket is usually dominated by people already in the industry for many years etc. , maybe I am going offtopic but it would be interesting to hear about financials of lowendproviders and in how many years they achieve it, I feel like cloud is getting more and more prominent nowadays which definitely might hurt lowendproviders or the reason why those providers have to transition to lowend too.
Maybe I am getting from the point of veloxmedia but some incentive structure definitely makes me feel as if something can perhaps be done to stop things like veloxmedia from repeating but to me it feels like they probably wont happen.
I had joined the discord to read more, and I saw that the owner just posted this 15 minutes ago with his full name (supposedly) and other info.
I haven't figured out yet if I should initiate the chargeback for my 3-year prepaid plan. It was a super cheap 30gb ram deal. I guess I'll continue watching this thread and hold off for another month or so and reassess before the black friday chargeback window closes.
For sure, I'm backing up my data and will be ready to switch over to another vps if this one deadpools.
Posting this here as the most recent comment by @VeloxMedia said they're done with this thread and won't be reading or replying.
@whynotlearn , I will reply later
Thanks for the information
So, this confirm. The resource @VeloxMedia has are worth the hassle, even if Lewis Edwards flee with the prepaid money.
There's 2 possible outcome:
So, it's up to you whether you want a refund or continue with Eric.
Hosting business in one way or another is more similar to airline business than railway. It's highly competitive market with two type of service: full-service and low-cost carrier. I'm not going to the details but even plane could be leased, then re-leased again. And the barrier to outsider is considerably high. But, people could bootstrap by doing charter business.
Why people do LowEndHosting despite all of the struggles? Perhaps because they already have the knowledge and it's a honest way to bring food to the table. Even Lewis was an employee at multinational car rental company.
As for why people can't just colocate, it's because finding friends who want to rent with you is a hassle. All the roommate drama, which is avoidable if you pay extra money per month.
any tldr of this thread?
Many things are said there. Plus details like e.g. what exactly does he mean by "the data"? Besides why would he, a us-american citizen care about GDPR? Plus chat screenshot can be faked.
Kindly note that what he actually said was that he doesn't want deals on which he loses money. Quite different from "only want the customers that make the most profit".
For a start we are not judges and this is not a court room. We are but LETsters and maybe customers. Of course we can have and speak our opinion but we should keep its weight in mind.
More importantly though we do not know what exactly was transferred, by whom, and how. So why speculating or even judging? Based on what?
Don't get me wrong, I'm also not happy about how this whole thing was handled and evolved and, yes, maybe some rules or even laws were broken, again MAYBE, we do by far not have enough solid and relevant information to judge.
Is "everything started falling apart" really a fact? No, it is not a fact.
You (and many others) seem to fail to see the very basis. Transferring hosting operations quite invariably creates problems of all sorts even under best circumstances. Mainly for the involved parties and more often than not also for customers.
"Positive" example: @Clouvider taking over (friendly) the company of Anthony Smith a couple of years ago.As far as is known (and I remember) Anthony, a provider well respected by many here for some reason didn't want to or couldn't continue to run his hosting operations and Clouvider was ready to "integrate" them into their operations. Both are Brits, so it all happened in simple legal constellation (as opposed to e.g. from UK to USA). And it indeed seems to have worked smoothly, at least as seen from outside, in particular by us LETsters.
BUT: I did not take Clouviders offer back then, among other reasons mainly because the "new" price was about 50% higher than before. Maybe that very fact, the low price was a major factor for Anthony's decision to hand over his operations (and/or customers, and/or company, and/or whatever) to Clouvider, maybe not, Idk but it seems likely.
In this case here (Lewis -> Eric) however things are way more complex. For a start the transfer is not within one jurisdiction but across continents. Also both parties involved are far less well known, plus ...
All in all, however, almost all "problems" are imaginary and or "gut feelings" or whatever. The - very few - real and tangible facts are not problematic, at least not so far. The servers are largely running (even a day or two of downtime would be but a minor hiccup in such a transfer and at this period of the year), one or a few such "hiccups" (in Freemont AFAIK) were taken care of and at least most of the servers there are running again, some locations (e.g. London) seem to experience no or just minor problems (also taken care of), plus there seems to have been a DDOS attack on one or a few locations, but that's not Lewis' or Eric's fault.
Most of us seem to have accepted Clouviders +50% price increase and maybe that is an option Eric should consider as well that is, offer those with untenable (for Eric) prices to either cancel and get a refund or to pay more and keep their server. I for one would accept and pay, although my VPS is not super-cheap and likely covers its cost.
Whatever, I have nothing major to complain about so far. Sure, I'm not happy with some details but why should I care about Eric's identity details while what I really care about is on the good side, my VPS is running and Eric is taking care of it staying that way, even during the holidays.
Was just looking at the site again… The purchase vps and purchase hosting buttons from veloxmedia.co.uk now take you to hostiko.com??
Login page goes to pandahost.co.uk
Login has always done that
Hostiko is a webhost template quite well known
Anything from the template he hasn't changed points to hostiko.com, Pandahost was always a thing for the client panel
hmm ok lol
The facts are simpler and far more damning than you suggest:
The "Refund" Issue isn't a technical glitch; it's a compliance failure.
In any legitimate business transfer, the inability to process refunds for existing customers is a massive red flag. Claiming "access issues" to a payment gateway while continuing to collect new revenue is not a "hiccup"—it is a total breach of financial accountability. If the legal entity changed hands, the liabilities (refunds) moved with it. If they didn't, then this "transfer" is legally void and qualifies as a fraudulent bypass of consumer rights.
"Uptime" is measured by SLA, not by whether your specific VPS is breathing.
The "fact" is that a significant volume of users across multiple locations (like Fremont) have documented sustained outages. Blaming an unverified "DDoS" without providing a professional transparent status report or mitigation logs doesn't change the outcome: a widespread failure to deliver the contracted service.
Bottom line:
We aren't here to play "sympathetic insider" to a botched handover. The moment the provider claimed they "couldn't" refund while "could" take new money, the narrative of a "friendly, professional transfer" died. Everything else is just noise.
The Clouvider example actually proves the opposite of your point. When a professional provider takes over, they don't just take the servers; they take the responsibility.
He told us explicitly that he reads the stripe mails that are intended for Lewis.
That is a crime in UK law, but like I said, whether is ever a legal issue for him or not is up to Lewis.
When did I say we were judges and that this was a court room? That's right, never. However the 2 statements above are both correct statements. He has, by his own admission, broken UK law. Will he be prosecuted for that? Almost certainly not, but that doesn't make it any more excusable.
Just read the thing you're quoting. I was specifically talking about the e-mails, and in the original post I made about it, linked to the actual post where he admitted doing it.
It's pretty clear cut if you know the existence of the appropriate laws and know that he's stated that he's done things forbidden by those laws.
Here's why.
No matter where he is, if he is doing any of the following he needs to care about GDPR
I'm a customer in the UK on a UK server (Packetstar, Fareham, Hants). As such all those things apply
Any US company meeting the above criteria should be particularly concerned that they have consent to collect data from EEA/UK citizens and residents. Which is opt in, not opt-out. That rights to access, rectify, erase and port data are respected (that is my right to do those things, or those of any other EEA/UK resident, not Velox Media Inc's), there is a designated data protection officer that can respond to Data Subject Access Requests and is responsible for data in the organisation as a whole, that transparent up-to-date data policies are in place. These need to be GDPR compliant, that all data breaches are reported within 72 hours. Fines are regularly given for not doing those things, as well as the ones below.
All data needs to pe processed in line with the Core Processing Principles (Article 5), which cover things like lawfullness, purpose limitation, data minimisation, accuracy, integrity and accountability. Records must be kept and data can only be transferred outside of the UK if the country it is being transferred to has an 'Adequacy Decision'. The USA kind of has one under the 2023 "EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework" and the "UK-US Data Bridge", but its tied to specific frameworks and under constant review. Partly because the USA is awful with data protection on the whole but too big not to give data to.
Velox Media would have to comply with this framework and self certify with the FTC before they can even touch data from the UK/EEA. It would have been up to Lewis to ensure that Eric was an active, certified participant on the Data Privacy Framework and UK-US Data Bridge or that contratual clauses and Transfer Impact Assessments were carried out before handing over the data. That said, the US Importer (Eric) is also liable for data protection once the data has been handed over, but Lewis bears primary responsibility.
Both can be fined up to 4% €20 million of their turnover and ordered to stop processing EEA/UK data with individuals having the right to recourse under national laws if data is illegally transferred. Mata was fined €1.2B fine in Ireland for illegal transfers.
Amazon, LinkedIn, Uber, Google and TikTok have all been fined hundreds of millions of € under GDPR.