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Softaculous/virtualizor web down?
silicomnet
Member
in Outages
The site has been down for hours, and it's not possible to add new licenses. Does anyone know what's going on, or if there's a status page?
Comments
I believe this was caused by a BGP hijack that targeted their license server and was serving phishing in it's place from softaculous.com. It's back now but it did last a few hours from what I seen.
yes, main website is up and down but license server fail
Resolving files.virtualizor.com (files.virtualizor.com)... 162.55.80.8
Connecting to files.virtualizor.com (files.virtualizor.com)|162.55.80.8|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2026-08-30 00:41:10 ERROR 404: Not Found.
Very interesting. That feels like a state-backed threat actor.
You don't really need a state conspiracy to justify defective network configurations. Everyone believes you can keep a network up and running and secure with youtube and udemy tutorials. In reality you kinda need real-life hands-on experience more than youtube.
You can't really be all-in-one like instant coffee and still be effective in all areas. Unfortunately they don't seem to be too good at either. Only Softaculous was kinda good as a product; the rest I wouldn't trust to use.
Plus PKI, ROA and ROV.
Yeah, that's why I said is not too hard to screw up a network; especially if you're just rolling the dice hoping for the best. Don't really need gov implication to f*ck things up.
If you do use their control panel, it’s highly recommended to disable auto updates because of an unknown source of update servers
In the year of our Lord 2026 there's no reason to be paying anyone for a VPS control panel.
If you have no software development experience, I recommend doing some youtube videos, online courses, just to understand how things "should" go together. You don't need nitty gritty, but learn the concepts.
From there, just pickup Claude/Codex and build something. Don't turn it into some 200,000 line monster in a language no one uses. PHP Laravel is excellent to develop in and ~all the LLM's handle it well. It has great guard rails that prevent a lot of stupid things from happening.
Building something that can do everything you need from SolusVM/Virtualizor is a couple weeks or less. Just make use of something like Fable and its going to knock it out in no time.
Really. You're choosing to use software thats either effectively abandonware (SolusVM), or something that has proven time and time again that its not good software (Virtualizor).
You don't have to live like this.
Francisco
https://www.virtualizor.com/blog/security-incident-bgp-hijacking/
This is a pretty weird take from you unless you're just talking about SolusVM or Virtualizor. There's other VM platforms out there for small-medium business besides the few always mentioned on LET. It should just be suggesting to use a platform from a more competent company than Virtualizor. Suggesting everyone with no experience to go vibe code their own virtualization platform for paying customers is crazy. Using Claude, etc to code stuff can work great and I obviously do it myself, and I'm competent (I recently replaced Pterodactyl with my own), but I personally can't imagine coding a whole virtualization panel/platform and calling it day like some people here do. I pay a lot for Virtfusion and I'm happy to right now. Of course I've thought about it and I could probably replace it if I really wanted to but I'm paying for the peace of mind and for someone more experienced (with real development skills, not a vibe coding skill) to handle that part.
Tell me, how close to a 1:1 is your Pterodactyl replacement? I bet its 1/10th or maybe 1/4 the features that are in Pterodactyl because you don't need the vast majority of them.
The same thing goes for ... every SAAS product. Every VPS panel, every billing portal, etc. No one is using every feature of these systems, most are only using a few bits.
If you go into it with 'what do we need' then you find the project is a lot more manageable. A little bit of planning goes a long way. Keeping track of what features you should turn into a component since its a repeated pattern, etc, throughout saves a shit load of time and tokens, and you don't have to spend a lot of time working to get things consistent.
Building/replacing a VPS panel is one of the easier things to do with an LLM, especially if you're just trying to become a 1:1 of Solus or Virtfusion.
For shits/giggles I had Claude build one on 4.6 medium so we could manage things easier at NameCrane and it took a couple days to get something that could do ~most actions. It had a full IPAM, Cloud-Init, Libvirt, a NoVNC console, multi interfaces and addon storage (not 'block storage' but addon drives). Literally 2 - 3 days.
I intend to start over now that I have a much better codebase for it to base from in our Hetrix replacement and I expect it to take maybe another couple days to get something we can flat out replace Proxmox with. Will it have HA, SDN networking, ceph, and an optional sunroof? No, but we don't use those.
Francisco
🤦
Hey it's an awful take but your code quality output from this setup is probably at least identical or better than virtualizor's
Why is it an awful take? Do you seriously think Webpros/Blesta/Softaculous (the entire companies and all their products) are still writing every line of code themselves? Hell no. They're ~all heavy into LLM dev. Even Virtualizor's blog post is 100% AI generated.
Have you seen the newest cPanel skin? It is quite literally 'draft #1' of every Claude Code interface and i'm not even kidding.
If you have a pretty set idea in mind of what these panels need to do, and you aren't bolting crap on for the sake of bolting, you can build just as good as those firms.
The big slop issue we see on here with all these 'cpanel replacements' is they start adding features that should ~never be in here, like docker management and all that crap. Why is that in a shared hosting panel? Just keep it within scope, write good SPEC's, and you'll be fine.
Francisco
Even if they are, they are still actual programmers who aren't just watching YouTube videos to get a "feeling" for how software works and then vibe-coding a security-critical framework.
LLMs are great tools. They're wonderful for code auditing, for creating templates, for helping to come up with improvements. But only in the hands of actual programmers who understand what the code is doing. Virtualizor, apparently, are just bad programmers, AI or not.
My brother in Crane, you should see some of the decompiles that came out of SolusVM when they were getting hacked/exploited every week or two. Let me explain.
SolusVM had a spot where you could reset a VM's root password. They passed that string unfiltered, straight to a setuid root binary. You could literally do a password of ;'shell shit here', and it ran as root on your portal panel.
Their fix was "well we stripped ; from the user input".
Slop isn't some AI invention.
Francisco
I agree with that 100%, but now AI allows people to create slop much more efficiently (just like it allows real programmers to program more efficiently). Just because some programmers suck doesn't mean you can generate secure code without being a programmer.
Yeah I am fully aware. My problem with this is that I genuinely do not think anyone at Virtualizor is competent enough based on the last year of history to be able to write acceptable specs, write acceptable prompts, or review anything output. The average host is similar in terms of being able to review.
OK, so why pay them instead of just....covering your CC plan the host likely already has?
You & @forest would have a point if it was proven the code quality was better in these projects, but it objectively isn't.
Maybe I am wrong to think this way, but its just not really worth it.
Francisco
It's not "shitty programmers vs vibe-coders". It's "good programmers vs vibe-coders". Of course you can find a programmer who does worse than GPT-2, but that doesn't mean that it's safe to vibe-code your way to a secure panel.
The fact that there exist some programmers so bad that even AI slop is better has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you can (or should even try to) safely vibe-code a secure panel without being a programmer.