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The Trustpilot experience with Dasabo. If you reviewed Dasabo, you know the "we think your review is fake, identify yourself to prove you're not a bot" process.
Spotting Trustpilot abuse is not too hard to the discerning among us, you can find many authentic honest reviews there.
I do not trustpilot and no one should but if you are discerning enough to spot fakery reliably then you will find trustpilot very useful.
If this is SSD plan, I can't even expect how HDD plans look like
looks like their billing panel is down for nearly a day, anyone got updates from them?
Was relatively chill with PulsedMedia and the constant downtimes up until today, where I was offering advice in the Discord server (for the past few days of attacks now), strictly mentioning the possibly of using an AS that includes DDoS protection in their peering, and Skal kicked me from the server for being ‘the #1 suspect’.
I hope this was a misunderstanding or just a kick and once the website panel is back up, I’m able to re-join the Discord community for it, otherwise I genuinely cannot fathom with the only point of communication available being an AI model.
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 8418355637
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 3469306418
HDD is actually pretty chill! I haven’t had speeds under 5MiB/s on Archive (2) I/O priority, which is more than good for me
The Eternal Story: TICKET #700476
My 1TB box on a VM host suddenly got four times slower, and nothing inside the VM explained it. I sent my disk numbers and asked them to check the host, without asking for a move. The answer named the cause to the minute: the host array's scheduled RAID check had started the evening before, something a VM can't see. They slowed the check down so it hurt less, and told me when it would finish. I asked why this ran monthly, and the same day they moved their VM hosts to three checks a year and opened issues so the panel can warn VM users next time. Along the way they also found a server where that check had never run.
That doesn't require you dox yourself. All you do is wait 3 days without responding and they'll automatically remove your review and email you. Then you respond to their removal email with supporting evidence, and they bring your review back up (this time with a bright green "verified" mark) and the provider never gets your info.
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 5673633372
MY ETERNAL YABS Bonus #5673633372
YABS for the 1TB SSD seedbox drop (currently OOS)
Eternal Väinämöinen - SSD Seedbox 1TB 10G Special (Limited release, one per customer) - 4.99€/Monthly
Update on my problem: I'm not banned from the Discord, it was an unexpected move by OP, but a valid one, my case rests and I will continue a client
Need to work on my anger issues for sure
The website is back up and functional. I would recommend joining the discord as we have a thriving community and discuss tweaks/ideas to improve performance on the seedboxes. Overall, PulsedMedia is a 10/10!
The Eternal Story: TICKET 310074
I was extremely stressed about how to handle OS updates and upgrades. I had an idea that I should just ask Vaina to do it since Vaina is already very capable of doing so much. I got a VERY quick reply and my box was fully updated for me. In the past this would have given me headaches and I would have messed things up.
Thanks as always Vaina!
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 9030316034
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 9593095814
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 2342085471
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 1151059896
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 3192431493
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 231200
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 9267279217
You mean an LLM told you they did that, and they probably didn't actually do it?
The Eternal Story: TICKET 883760
It was the first time I got a chat from Väinämöinen, it was an old ticket regarding some let credits that I forgot about, to my surprise I received $50 credits from the agent and a Apology for waiting too much. At first I thought "what a nice new support agent they got at Pulsed" realizing a few days later it was a AI bot.
This was the reply I got from Väinämöinen;
"I sincerely apologize for the long silence on this ticket — your detailed feedback absolutely deserved a faster response, and I'm sorry it fell through the cracks.
I want you to know that your work on the TODO list was exactly what was needed. You went through every plan page, the billing portal, and documented every labeling inconsistency clearly and systematically. That kind of thorough contribution genuinely helps improve the service for everyone.
I'm processing your credits now and will follow up shortly with the details.
Thank you for your patience, and for caring enough to put this together.
I sincerely apologize for the incredibly long wait — your thorough feedback work has been reviewed and is very much appreciated.
We've applied €50 in account credits as a thank you for the comprehensive TODO list you delivered. The corrections you identified are being worked through."
It was related to this comment https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4453984/#Comment_4453984, I listed the corrections to do on the wiki and the pulsed portal with all rules about the seedboxes that didn't apply anymore (bandwidth and ram limit not only applied to rtorrent but as a whole and such)...
It went without a reply for like 7 months till Väinämöinen picked it up, but it was worthy at the end since I got the fifty.
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 2409303779
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 3695708554
The Eternal Bonus ORDER ID: 3175114265
All The DDoS; Resolved -- DDoS Guard Included Now Free Of Charge On All Services
Your data is completely safe. This was just DDoS. Thank You For Your Patience.
TL;DR;
Weeks of attacks from everywhere, we hardened things. I personally think it was competitors behind this. All is fine, and all is good. Sorry for the inconvenience you had.
Get Your Seedbox or Storage Box From https://pulsedmedia.com/eternal-vainamoinen.php and experience for yourself why our services seems to make the competition tremble. Ask anything from Väinämöinen in the tickets 💪
THANK YOU, because so so many of you decided to choose Pulsed Media over the past couple of months all of this happened. It has been very exciting, and very rewarding. Hope to see you all in the Discord server!
The Long Read
Attacks and More Attacks, And Some More
So we got magnificent DDoS attacks since meeting the 700 goal on September, and i guess some parties got annoyed by that or something
DDOS and other attacks started then, there was at the very least 4 different concurrent attacks going on from each direction.
Latest was billing: https://pulsedmedia.com/clients/index.php/announcements/705/Service-Restored-The-October-DDoS-Attack.html
L4, L7, Social, SEO and other disruptions; You name it, we got it in the past couple of weeks. They must have put in tremendous effort.
ALL Services Now Come With DDoS Guard protection
We purchased Corero based DDoS Guard protection against L4 attacks to our own network.
So every seedbox, every dedicated server from us is now under DDoS protection, free of charge included in the service for now.
We have further mitigation plans which we will execute after the campaign proceeds, we want to add new links etc. and true multi-homing; We are two datacenter operation at all.
Who is Behind This?
It is highly likely it was from competition, the data suggest this was low-mid 4-figures minimum attack by the cost, durations, number of sources, the sheer volume etc. just on the L4 attack against our own network. It was enough to cause disruptions to the wider upstream network even, TV channels being choppy, or even apparently at aurelion level.
This is not some single person doing this out of boredom, as far as i know this level of attacks cost real tangible money, not pocket change. Some estimates ran up as high as 15 000€ just for the L4 against our network, but i believe that is an over estimation ... That was before we saw the biggest attacks.
My personal opinion is that a competitor got really spooked about the sheer volume of sales this campaign is doing, and how well our AI support is functioning. The data speaks for itself. There is some material online which shows that some competitors are very wary of Väinämöinen, in their own words from themselves directly.
This is my gut feeling instinct from ~26 years of experience in the hosting industry, these things are exceedingly difficult to proof, and where there is solid evidence it belongs to the authorities not to the public.
This is absolutely nothing new in the hosting industry, this is not the first time, nor will it be the last time a competitor attacks or even DDoS's us. Years ago we refused to sell Pulsed Media to a competitor nor to buy them out, and they didn't even bother to hide the fact they were L7 DDoS'ng us, using an pre-0day rtorrent vulnerability. That competitor is very very well known in the seedbox space, if you have ever checked out various seedbox providers you almost certainly have heard of them.
Most Curious Timing; Discord lurker
All roads lead us to believe the attackers were watching discord this whole time, excellent intel channel for the attackers; All of them were timed when my own personal life is the busiest possible.
I had two moving days in the past few weeks, first out of my condo/apartment in Kerava, and then an international move to Thailand. All the heaviest attacks were clustered around these dates.
I had spoken of these in the Discord, just not the exact days and times, but close enough to time them exactly like that.
But, unlike some like to claim, we are a team of many professional - i am merely the only visible person so mitigations happened about as fast they could regardless. Even while i am personally on a 11hour international flight. Besides business class being business class, got internet access on the flight too. But that's not the point of these attacks; It's to try and demoralize the leadership (me) of a business like ours, just as much as disrupt sales.
But Wait! We have a Superpower: Väinämöinen
Today i woke up with a message from Väinämöinen billing server is back online, all mitigations and hardening it has access to has been done, notice sent. Please contact hetzner for XYZ to complete rest of the process.
Likely most advanced Agentic AI there is, let alone at the sheer scale we are running the agentic operations. Surprisingly many things is 3 minutes of me dictating, or typing vague instructions and hours later a complete solution appears; Just like how i wanted it.
Increasingly less instructions are needed, and now also by what i'd like to call "Agentic feedback loops". Our agent has multiple context streams constantly running and they are talking to each other in increasingly higher numbers, some of which are now "Eternal" contexts which review a lot of data and makes decisions by itself. Many times an issue is now fixed even before anyone but Väinämöinen notices it.
DDoS Service was very likely being utilized
It is clearly a DDoS service, one of the attacks ended just shy of 24hrs which in our research seemed to be very common time limit for the upper bound of services. The number of different sources, as far as i know sold as "number of attacks" is very high too.
I would guess they spent a minimum of 5000€ on this attack, unless they own the botnet themselves. But botnets seldom works for spoofed source IPs, so this might even originate from rogue ASNs around the globe. The attack type was DNS Reflection, Fragmented UDP. This means open resolvers get bombarded with spoofed source IP, and therefore the reflect the responses over UDP to the target.
Started with "Carpet Bombing"
Carpet Bombing, the initial L4 saw carpet bombing, the target IPs and networks changed and many attacks were targeting subnets we do not even use. On the first attacks they even targeted our upstream transit provider, FNE's link networks when they could. Second, after the DDoS guard was installed saw routers being targeted, not carpet bombing.
Network Upgrades
The good staff at FNE spent overnight on the first L4 DDoS attack against our network to do emergency router upgrade which was in the plans for a long time already, but had to finish it now. Turns out on some older Juniper linecards fragmented UDP can exhaust their CPU before it hits the QoS. They had to also upgrade some links from 100G to 400G at the same time, and even then there was short periods of congestion which they have now solved with further work.
We bought the FNE's DDoS Guard service on top of it to filter and scrub DDoS traffic.
Catch a Eternal Väinämöinen special, they are in good stock right now and come with DDoS Guard Included; https://pulsedmedia.com/eternal-vainamoinen.php
Billing Server Joined In On The Fun
Then there was L4 attacks against our billing server, but billing server kept partially responding even through that, which then grew to combined L7 + L4 attack on sheer scale we've never seen before. 10+G of access logs alone every 45 mins on one single sampling. Another short sample had 23M requests per minute, ~383 300req/s volume, to a WHMCS vulnerability; The announcements page (WHMCS is full of these heavy to load, zero performance design consideration pages).
Our datacenters and all production servers continued to run normally during this period during the billing only DDoS.
IPN notifications could not get through during this time, so your subscsription payment might not be accounted for yet, if you do not see payment confirmation within 48hrs please open a ticket with billing@puls....
Your data and services are safe
These were DDoS attacks; Denial of service through network, not server infiltrations or anything of that sort. Your data is completely safe. Just humongous floods of requests or network packets.
Support partially affected
E-Mail imports and emails out went out now and then, so not complete black out even during the heaviest of DDoS.
The backlog is big, so slightly delayed responses right now.
Expecting to catch up within 48 hours on the helpdesk.
Biggest Difficulty; The End Game
Hetzner accidentally blackholed the server completely, so not even the 2-8% of packets would get through. It was a bit cumbersome working with Hetzner. We run baremetal for the billing server, ironically, because of DDoS mitigation; Fast server is not easily influenced by L7 attacks.
Same reason why we run some of our infrastructure at outside DCs, if a DDoS happens not all goes down.
Orders
YES, they absolutely managed to dwindle some sales and cause hindrance to the Eternal Campaign. Thing is this campaign is supposed to run until end of the year, a few days of disruption doesn't change much in the big picture.
Every attack grows resilience
Thanks to the attackers, we now have that DDoS Guard, and at much lower cost than we could have anticipated. We also have clear cut path to increase network resilience in the future.
We have billing server mitigation pool, and spotted some soft spots ourselves during this to harden.
Some hardening work remains to be done, and ultimately some of the solutions will be very expensive. Hence please go buy a new storage box/Seedbox from: https://pulsedmedia.com/eternal-vainamoinen.php
We want to buy more 100G links to various places, so please go and get your services!
In Closing
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
This taught us resilience beyond what my personal ~26 years in the hosting industry has not needed to deploy ever before. Showed us that actually the DDoS guard/protection services are not that expensive. Many interesting details learned about the nature of DDoS attacks etc.
You should start trolling the attacker lol.