Now, dead pool for January 2012…

Atelra

Current Status: Timeout

Atelra has been listed on LowEndBox since almost 2 years ago, and prior to that the domain has been registered since 2005. Their death was reported in August 2010, however Rob continued to post offers at WHT until November 2010. I presume it died soon after-wards — and that was more than a year ago. Their website was finally turned off in January. Welcome to the dead pool.

Cripperz Prodigy

Current Status: 500 Internal Error

We have Singapore based Cripperz Prodigy listed here since June 2011, offering low cost annual plans like $15/Year or $10/Year. That suicidal offer might actually have caused their death. Starting December 12 last year their servers at Datashack can no longer be contacted (read on the comments for the discussions). Their website remains intact until 21 January, where now it is just showing 500 Internal Error. Ghost town it appears, and dead pool it goes.

I thought Haas was a nice guy over the last half year — maybe I was wrong (which often been the case here, unfortunately).

Forever Hosting

Current Status: cPanel Login Page

Okay, the irony here. Forever Hosting is dead, forever? They were first listed in October 2010 and I wasn’t expecting them to last more than a year anyway. Well, it had a bumpy ride but survived the first year — just. It started offering cheap $20/year 256MB OpenVZ servers towards the middle of 2011, and things started to get rough after that.

Kazetech

Current Status: 403 Forbidden

Zulkhairi from Kazetech first got me to list their offer merely 4 months ago, offering OpenVZ VPS from CoreSite. Didn’t have a good start when caught running nulled WHMCS. He did send me another 50% off offer in November although I never got a chance to post it — doesn’t matter now I guess. Here is a related thread on WHT. Looks like he has done a runner.

NordicVPS

Current Status: Website timeout

Report of NordicVPS‘s death might have been greatly exaggerated in the past, the inevitable has indeed finally happened. As of 24 Jan 2012 their website no longer connects. They have however been offering on LowEndBox since May 2010, including chasing after the $15/Year offers in Fremont/San Jose that have conned many here. I ended up having to publicly state that I will no longer post their offers here. Hopefully not many here are affected by their demise.

PREFIBER

Current Status: MySQL Error on Website

Currently PREFIBER‘s website is showing “De database verbinding kon niet worden gelegd”, which is Dutch for “My database is totally f**ked up!” and that message has been on their website since 12 Jan so it can’t be just a glitch. That has been just shy of a year since they first got featured here. Looks like it’s going to stay in dead pool for good.

Rizie

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

I first posted Rizie‘s offer in September 2010 where they are offering OpenVZ VPS offers with Wholesale Internet and BurstNET. They had some exclusive offers for the LowEndBox, had a quiet 2011, and then I got forwarded this email last month, where they announced they are shutting down. However they have promised pro-rata refund — which I hope all their customers have received theirs. Their website stopped resolving at the end of the month, and that’s another provider ending in dead pool…

ThriftyVPS

Current Status: 1&1 Parked page

ThriftyVPS? Hmmm. They should have been renamed CraftyVPS. I posted their first deal in August last year, which was nothing more than a reseller. Michael emailed to convince me later that they are no longer a n00b and have got their own servers. So I posted their offer on 4^th of Jan. Within hours their website was offline, and then got replaced by parking page. DODGY! A relevant thread on WHT and Michael is still active there — look out for more scams.

LowEndAdmin

Current Status: Retired

Finally, we are coming to the end of this blog post. I am here sending “LowEndAdmin” to dead pool. It has been a fun ride over the last 4 years, but for various reasons I will not be able to carry on.

I am leaving LowEndBox and LowEndTalk to “Chief” + his team of helpers. Not necessarily trio I heard, and the team includes some long time members, experienced moderators and people with industrial knowledge.

I might still visit LowEndBox/LowEndAdmin every now and then posting off-topic rants. After all I still run a few websites and budget VPS hosting is still of great use for me. I won’t be contributing much though — will just be like most of you — a regular member.

Chief + team will also soon take over the email address I have been using over the last 4 years to receive spams posting requests. If you still wish to contact me as LowEndAdmin, feel free to use the following email address:

LowEndAdm@gmail.com (Note: It’s Adm not Admin as the later has already been squatted)

Signing off.

^D

IPAP.co

Current Status: 502 Bad Gateway on CloudFlare

Yes I know that they should been in dead pool long long time ago but their website was working all the way until a few days before Christmas. I guess by now everyone would have hopefully recovered from the scam there. IPAP.co was first listed here last February, and I think the final nail in the coffin would be their $6.99 2GB offer that was just “too good to be true”.

LeetNet Hosting

Current Status: Website timeout

LeetNet Hosting was first listed in June last year with their 1337 currency — they were the first (and the only) provider accepting Bitcoin and only BC on LowEndBox. However they ended up having issues with their upstream provider, and self-declared dead pooled in September. Not sure whether it’s also related to how unstable the exchange rate of Bitcoin was.

QualityServers

Current Status: Redirect to UK Cloud

So James did the rebranding of QuickVPS to QualityServers in December 2010. A year later he rebranded again to The UK Cloud. However, this time not only website gets redirected, customers on old services are also to be terminated due to hardware issues. UK Cloud is quite a different service than QualityServers so there won’t be any straight forward migration. Lucky that we still got quite a few nice UK-based low end providers that are of great quality.

RapidoVPS

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

RapidoVPS was first listed here in December 2010. Less than a year later the website is no longer resolvable. According to this comment they are now “RoadLayer.com”, although they haven’t even bothered to redirect the old website. Would you trust this new company? I think not.

SiSVPS

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

SiSVPS was listed here 6 months ago, boasting “12 years of combined experience”. Unfortunately their business sounded fishy right from the beginning with probably Nigerian operation. Maybe they believed that the world is really going to end in 2012 so they turned off their site on the last day of last year…

vpsVIBE

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

vpsVIBE came into scene in June 2011 selling 512MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.95. Like how it has been commented in this WHT thread, it’s just another pump and dump scheme from those who previously ran AlienVPS (bailed out by WebRulon) and GenVPS (bailed out by GigaTux). Don’t you worry that they have done a running — they’ll probably soon respawn in yet another low end VPS provider somewhere.

Upcoming…

Some that are currently showing dead since the beginning of this year.

• Forever Hosting — sounds like false advertisement to me. Forever hosting that lasts only a bit more than a year?
• ThriftyVPS — they did have me fooled. Finally convinced me to list them again, and a few hours later they were dead.

CPanelHost.me

Current Status: CPanel Account Suspended Page

I first listed CPanelHost.me more than 2 years ago when they were reselling BurstNET’s 512MB Linux VPS product for $5/month (listing BurstNET’s resellers is something that I no longer do here however). Somehow a keyboard duet erupted between “Mike Miller” of CpanelHost and “Robert” in the comments, which got escalated to potential legal threat against LowEndBox.com. That’s indeed a sure way to never get listed again on LowEndBox.

It appears that the whole business died sometime in 2010, as there does not seem to be any activity on WHT. Domain now owned by Russell of WebRulon/AlienVPS.

eNetSouth

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

I guess most people here would have known the story. I listed eNetSouth Cloud’s WHT offer here back in July 2010. A nice deal — $5.99 256MB VMWare VPS in Chicago on some premium hardware. Brandon has since been providing the LowEndBox community some exclusive offers on their VMWare platform, and offered to host LowEndTalk community a few months later. Earlier this year Brandon launched eNetSouth site for SolusVM-based OpenVZ/KVM hosting. Finally in October he offered this too good to be true deal, which sparked the collapse of his VPS hosting business. A month later, and they were gone — leaving many customers VPS-less.

I won’t go down to more details on what has been going on, except to confirm that Brandon has indeed done a runner.

HostMonkey

Current Status: CPanel Account Suspended

HostMonkey was first listed on LowEndBox in August 2010 by the same guy who ran a dead pool host before. A few days later they offered an exclusive offer for LEB community, and 2 months later business sold to webRulon. Like CPanelHost, its website was also turned off last month.

MountSpot

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

When MountSpot was first listed here in August, it was targeting an interesting niche — low cost VPS in the South Asia region where there is no other competition at this price range. I guess now it’s obvious that they were competitor-less because they were just not sustainable. They were listed for sale on Flippa, but don’t think they have sold it as WHOIS is still pointing to their Hong Kong-registered business.

Nixhost

Current Status: 502 Bad Gateway

Nixhost.co.uk was first listed here merely 4 months ago, and when questioned about legitimacy, Ben assured us that they “are not going down the drain”. 3 months later and they are dead, with CloudFlare showing gateway error (i.e. the actual box hosting the website is no longer up). Sometimes you gotta love how quickly the LowEndBox community can kill a hosting business.

PrestonHost

Current Status: Redirecting to BigBrainHost

LowEndBox first listed Singapore based PrestonHost in May 2010, and it appears Faris had sold the business to BigBrainHost last month. Looking at how well Brian has been running BBH these days it might be a good news to all the PrestonHost customers.

SlickWebHost

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

SlickWebHost first emailed me in May to have their OpenVZ plan listed, Their servers got suspended by their provider (HostNOC) in November due to abuse, as reported by the admin “Claudiu Amarandei”. They can’t afford to bring the servers back up and have decided to end the services there.

UptimeVPS.co

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

Ken from UptimeVPS emailed me in August to list their Xen VPS plan. Problem started right from the beginning when he could not resolve the routing issue. They then moved to offer OpenVZ services instead with very cheap annual plans and 3 EUR 1GB plan. Issues started happening in October (which Ken claimed fraud as the culprit) but things quickly gone downhill in November. Their domain, “uptimevps.co” stopped resolving on 14 Nov and that spelt the end of it.

Vazapi

Current Status: AdSense for Domain

Vazapi was the new venture from the ServerMinds/Graxis in 2011 (after they sold BuzzServers and Zabogo, both were also featured on LowEndBox in previous years). Not surprisingly it also faced the same fate, as Vazapi got sold to Netrouting in July 2011, and all servers migrated by August. I guess Netrouting has just turned off the hosting for the website in November, and it’s now parked on AdSense.

VPSBB

Current Status: Website not connecting

VPSBB was 123Systems’ attempt on offering simple minimalistic VPS plan on a simple minimalistic website. 123Systems is still kicking, but VPSBB website was down since 14 November. Andrew has forgot to transfer the hosting once last year so I am not surprised that he might have fotgotten again this year. There’s probably no point of having a separate brand anyway.

VPSCheap.info

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

VPSCheap.info was first listed in September offering $1.50/month VPS in Scranton or Phoenix. They had a rough ride right from the beginning with services going up and down. They finally did a runner at the end of October, and their domain stopped resolving in November. Well, Erez still runs CheapDomainNameDot.com and the website is still up there. Not for long I guess.

ZazoomVPS

Current Status: Website timeout

Daniel first got me to list his ZazoomVPS hosting service in June offering KVM on SolusVM, and by the time it got sold in September it has got some pretty happy clients. Daniel decided to move on to get into tertiary education, however it seems he had sold the business to the wrong person as neither the website nor the VPS host nodes have their bills paid for.

Upcoming…

These are the hosting providers who are currently marked as down at the moment. Likely to be in Dead Pool December 2011.

• Ethelite Hosting — Bad Request at the moment with their website.
• LeetNet — Website timed out at the moment. I guess the BitCoin bubble burst might have something to do with it.
• RapidoVPS — Website showing account suspended. Down report at WHT and looks like a runner here.
• vpsVIBE — IP address not resolvable for now. It’s the ex-GenVPS + ex-AlienVPS team doing another round of scam?

That’s it from last month. I’m still busy and won’t be posting much for December.

Byte Bistro

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

Byte Bistro was only featured on LowEndBox in August, offering 512MB Xen VPS in France for under $7/month. Two months later they are dead and Fionn posted this lengthy response on why they have decided to terminate the services, blaming on data center (OVH turning off their sevrers) and blaming on LowEndBox (for sending them too many clients).

Do take notes though, those future low end provider wannabies. Too much initial growth and many clients might not be a good thing, especially when your support staffs are not equally scalable.

CheapestVPS

Current Status: Redirect to Cingular Hosting

CheapestVPS.org was first listed on LowEndBox in June. The plan wasn’t really interesting — 128MB memory, 100GB/month data OpenVZ VPS for $5.95/month. Kunal promised some new discounts for their anniversary. However it seems they were trying to sell it off (together with BuddingHost) soon afterwards with just $3,600/year revenue.

DediSRV.eu

Current Status: 403 Forbidden

Jake from DediSRV first emailed me their offer in April this year. £2.50/month gets you 128MB Xen in UK, which is not bad at all. However they seem to fall into the “UK teens” category here and their website reported 403 at the beginning of October. I actually failed to find any complains here, on LowEndTalk and on WHT, which shows not many people actually took their offers.

Fiber Firefly/TinyVPS.ca

Current Status: Domain parking at Sedo

Part of the fallen Kerplunc network of providers, Fiber Firefly, TinyVPS.ca and SuperBytes has been turned off and moved to become parked domains. See related discussion on LowEndTalk.

Fiberhead

Current Status: Website timeout

Albert Horyza of Fiberhead contacted me on 20 September to have his VPS business listed. It got listed on LowEndBox 2 days later (with 256MB Xen for 5 EUR), but website no longer works 3 weeks later. I have no idea what caused the quick death — they were still advertising on WHT at the beginning of October.

Gidux

Current Status: cPanel default page

Gidux was first featured on LowEndBox in January this year selling some pretty “low end” stuff — 128MB memory and 128GB/month on 16Mbps for $5.95/month. Felt sorry for sleddog for defending their pricing. At the end of the day, expensive and low-spec low end offers do not necessarily mean the provider is doing the responsible thing. They might just rip off people more before doing the runner.

J-Solutions.org

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

J-Solutions was first listed in August, managed by a Finnish student Jonne. It did not start well — lots of issues with their website and nulled WHMCS scripts. The post was taken down for a short period of time (discussed on LowEndTalk), but I put it back after removing his Facebook link. Them disappearing after 2 months is again not surprising. Hopefully not many people are affected.

Nix Communications

Current Status: Business closed

Martin from Nix Communications was probably one of the better Canadian providers out there — cheap servers and good support. However in mid September he suddenly decided to close down his business. Such a shame, but the take home message is still the same — do take your backups, multiple times a day, to at least 2 different remote locations. Anyway, I am assuming what he said is true, and he put his health on priority over his customers — good decision! And all the best.

UKDirectHost

Current Status: Website under construction

UKDirectHost was first listed in May 2011 listing 256MB OpenVZ VPS for 4 GBP per month. It featured an all Flash site at first — probably didn’t win him any iPhone/iPad friends. His connection with the black hat stuff didn’t help either. Website went down on 5^th of October, but it came back up soon after. However it has been showing “Under Construction.” for the last month or so, which is even worse than an all Flash site. My guess is that they are not coming back…

Yottabyte Networks

Current Status: Domain parked at GoDaddy

Michael Long of Yottabyte Networks managed to get his site listed back in July, but with FAIL stamped all over the place. He emailed me in September telling me that they are still around, but appears to have kicked the bucket in mid-October.

Zombie Pool

There also exist a few providers that still have their website running, but are as good as dead. Zombies or Vegies pool?

• eNetSouth — A lot of people are still waiting for Brandon to reply their support tickets. Unfortunately the quality of service went downhill since their last deal, to a point of almost non-existence :(

• HostD8 — Website down since 5 November.

• Nixhost — Website down since 1 November.

Yes, a long list I know…

And yes. I am here to confess that I missed last month’s dead pool post. I did raised it in the forums, but forgot about it after the first week of September. I am also apologising for my lack of involvement here and at LowEndTalk (that site has pretty much been set and forget for me, unfortunately). Things have been busy…

Anyway. Besides the legendary Steve Jobs, let’s see who else are in the dead pool.

CurlHost

Current Status: Connection timed out

CurlHost was first listed in September 2010 offering $2 64MB OpenVZ VPS. Later in October they started selling Xen VPS, and their last offer, a LowEndBox special, was posted in April this year offering Xen HVM with 512MB for $6.50. However from the last few comments here + comments on WHT, it looks like “Prakash Shrivastav” had done a runner.

Interestingly Francisco from BuyVM warned me about them back in October last year, and I’m surprised that they have lasted that long.

EdgeVPS

Current Status: Sold to ThunderCloudGames

So Travis, a few weeks after selling HostLadder, started up EdgeVPS, who was about to have “a great run with it”, and had hoped to be the next BuyVM. Well, a few months down the track, EdgeVPS was sold to ThunderCloudGames, which is a division of CyberLynk Network, Inc. This kind of pump-and-run seems to be quite common on LowEndBox — build a large customer base with low price, sell it to some other company, and then restart the process again. Pretty much fitting into Daniel’s description of Travis here.

MyResellerHost

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

MyResellerHost was first listed on LowEndBox in March this year, although Mark Pammesberger emailed me in December 2010 pretending to be a customer of MyResellerHost. Their first offer came with 250GB of storage at $5.09/month, but surely that’s not sustainable (evidently from all the complaint comments rolling in). They then had a hard drive crash in August, and finally closing its shop in September.

Pluggr.info

Current Status: Domain expired

Pluggr.info was posted last October as an interesting alternative to low end VPS. Instead of getting a small share of a big iron, you pay $4.50/month for a SheevaPlug dedicated server with a external hard drive attached to it. It did receive some good responses… However, as far as I know, Alex has moved on from KWD Services to form PlugBucket, and the domain “pluggr.info” has just expired. No idea what happened, but I hope those who got the plug there still have the service.

TropicHost

Current Status: Under construction

TropicHost should have died back in June when its website shows just a directory index page. Then it got replaced with an “Under Construction” page that says “Prepare to be surprised……. In ~30 days (~08/23/2011)”. I am indeed surprised that it’s still off-line.

Volt-VPS

Current Status: Hosting Account Suspended

Despite someone claimed VPS is still working, Volt-VPS‘s home page has been showing cPanel’s account suspended message for more than 2 weeks. With its linkage to previous failed VPSRocket, again I am not all that surprised about it ending up in dead pool again. It’s main backer WhiteLabelHosting is still in operation.

W2 Servers

Current Status: Website offline

Okay. I know this is loooooong dead, but somehow someone finally put a bullet through that zombie in September. W2 Servers‘ website (which was hosted on Amazon EC2) stopped connecting on 23 September — no one is paying the bill I guess. Anyway, here is an informative blog on the whole saga. $24/year for 512MB OpenVZ VPS too cheap? Maybe, but I guess whatever touched by Lyron Fosters is determined to fail anyway.

Not So Honorable Mentions

There are still a few VPS providers that I have not yet been able to identify whether there’s any vital sign. To many they are pretty much dead, but (1) they still have their website/ordering system running (2) there are still people claiming that their servers are working. So

• iPAP.co — dead? Some people are still having their free VPS that iPAP have not bothered to invoice. Any news on these guys?
• OneDollarVPS — there are people reporting that their VPS have been resurrected with a new IP address. Still up?

And the one that have gone off-line in the first week of October:

• Byte Bistro — they stated that they are closing down for good. Dead pool for October.
• DediSRV — 403 on their home page since 2 Oct. Judging by how many emails I got from Jake trying to get me to list their offers since January this year, they must be pretty desperate.
• GenVPS — connection timeout since 6 Oct. See WHT report here.
• UKDirectHost — website is not resolvable since 5 Oct. Another those non-redundant NS fail, or maybe the fault was deliberate, i.e. doing a runner?
• VPSVibe — connection timeout since 6 Oct as well. John sold AlienVPS to webRolun to start VPSVibe. Maybe he is hunting for a new buyer again?

That’s it for the last two months. Need to run for the meeting now so I’ll fix up errors in 2 hours after you guys done the proof read :)

AvailableVPS

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

AvailableVPS was labelled as “knocked semi-unconcious” in last month’s dead pool post. I guess someone has finally pulled the life support from it. They would have been labelled dead in March when they moved all their VPS customers to SetupLink. Interestingly “admin@availablevps.com” has sent me new offers as recent as 9^th of June. Website was no longer resolvable a month later, and they announced that they were selling the domain over here.

Sorry for those who signed up to their $14/year 128MB OpenVZ VPS last September — lucky if you have received half of the service.

LogicIdea

Current Status: Redirect to ClientCentral.info

Problem for low end VPS providers — if you give too much resources, you are likely overselling and everyone gets bad performance. If you give too little resources, no one is buying from you. I guess LogicIdea falls in the later. $5.63/month for 64MB OpenVZ instance with 30GB/month data — I doubt they get many takers. However they still seem to be hanging there, as LogicData has now rebranded as Zingiri. VPS is no longer available for odering.

SuperBytes

Current Status: Brand closing down

SuperBytes was one of the original low end VPS provider, offering 64MB OpenVZ boxes for $5.10/month ~3 years ago. It’s one of the Canada-based Kerplunc sites, who will continue their VPS hosting business with their other brands — TinyVPS and Fiber Firefly. From the website it says “SuperBytes is no longer accepting new sales. All current servers will stay online and operating normally.” which is good to hear.

Upcoming

There are definitely some upcoming dead pool candidates for August. Some are already dead in fact, although I’ll give them until early September to see whether they’ll respawn.

• ClubUptime — their website is no longer resolvable as of 3 August. We all know what happened, or maybe we don’t. It did have pretty good response at the beginning offering cheap Softlayer-based VPS, but things went downhill this year. Discussions on them can be found at LowEndTalk with Matt chimed in. From the look of it there is still much to say about it.

• SimpleRack — Cody said back in May that he is buying the site back and getting ready to relaunch. A quick WHOIS shows that he is indeed the owner of the site now. However the “count down” on the website has been showing a string of ZEROs for a very long time now. Maybe they should declare themselves dead?

• TropicHost. Their website has been dead since 5 July showing “Under Construction!!! Prepare to be surprised……. In ~30 days (~08/23/2011) :-)”. That’s almost 2 months of downtime to prepare for the “surprise”. Won’t surprise me if they end up in dead pool then. I’ll keep my eyes open.

That’s it for this month. /me getting back to work now.

AccurateHub

Current Status: Redirect to ComfortHost.net.

AccurateHub was first listed on LowEndBox in August 2009 — an Australian business selling 128MB VPS for $5/month. I have no idea how it ended up being part of Foroquimica SL in Spain, who manages ComfortHost.net and has also launched SpotVPS with $15/year VPS. Sounds like it’s just a re-branding.

AlreadyVPS

Current Status: Website Down

AlreadyVPS first appeared on the scene with a newly registered domain name, reselling HostRail’s VPS with 2x markup, from a self-proclaimed CEO high school student in Taiwan, running some shady named forums, etc. That did not take him long to close the shop and ran. However “Legend” tried to cover it up by claiming to have deleted the site carelessly, and gave out promo code for pre-ordering services that never turned up. That’s “dodgy” written all over the place.

And a few days ago I received an email from “ktrhost.com” asking for their VPS to be listed ($5/month 128MB OpenVZ). Email was signed as “Dan Mark”, but the “From” field says “Legend Chen Chen”. I’ll keep an eye on that one.

BreatHost

Current Status: IP address not resolving

You know that if they did it once, they might do it again. Sebastian, who previously ran SynHost (dead pool December 2010), started BreatHost soon afterwards, and also created a separate brand “GerVPS” for his Germany low end box (although I did not post his deals there). Things start to crumble down at the end of May (see this WHT post), and their website no longer resolves on 21 June. Looks like Sebastian is a serial entrepreneur here so do look out for his new ventures.

Burst Networks

Current Status: Redirect to Dedicated Servers.

Burst Networks in Australia (yes, not to be confused with Burst.NET in Scranton PA) released some low end VPS back in 2009 when AUD was still below USD. Apparently it got sold to DedicatedServers.net.au and is no more. Well. Congratulation to whoever making a tidy sum doing an exit. We are just hoping to see more cheap VPS in the Asia Pacific region. Any Singaporean/Malaysian providers here?

G&Z Host

Current Status: Redirecting to Domain Parking

El Salvador based G&Z Host started okay with $6.95 256MB Xen VPS. However I have only realised that they are no longer in business when their domain expired, and then subsequently picked up by domainers, who now redirect to some domain parking site. Even on WHT gnzhost’s last post was in November last year. Maybe the service has long gone? Again, WHOIS privacy = no accountability, which I might as well assume it would soon fail at the end.

HostRail

Current Status: IP not resolving

Okay. What can I say?! HostRail was first posted on LowEndBox in October 2010, boasting some cheap plans and long history. Whole thing went crazy when it offered 256MB VPS for $1.20/month and $1.05/month — cheap price made probably by Limestone Networks’ previous lax IP policy. I have not actually been tracking the issues as I’ve never owned a VPS there. Do check previous posts and this WHT discussion thread for more details. Rumor is that it’s now redirecting to HostingAddicts.com (private WHOIS). See also HostRail’s Facebook page for more web hosting opera.

VPSLix

Current Status: IP not resolving

VPSLix is another VPS hosting “company” that did not have a good start. New domain, half-finished website, nulled WHMCS, putting the host up for sale the day after the LowEndBox post… Their website stopped working on 2 June. Interestingly their original WHT offer is no longer viewable, and the Yahoo Answer link I posted on the blog has now been deleted.

Upcoming…

These are currently down at the moment — maybe for July’s dead pool?

• 30mb.co.uk — they have not been offering cheap VPS since February (pretty much soon after they were on LowEndBox). However their website has also stopped resolving since 4 July. Going?
• HighVPS — sold to OSHS (who now has VPSDC featuring here) in June last year. Looks like they are closing up the brand?
• TropicHost — been showing an index page for a few days. No more?
• W2Servers — they should have been in dead pool for a while. No one is getting any service — although their website is still up taking orders. Looks like the drama is still going on and I’ll wait and see.

That’s it for this month! No more post from me today and I’ll see whether I can squeeze in some offer posting over the weekend.

GigeVPS

Current Status: Redirect to ThrustVPS.com

GigeVPS, started by Jacob Wall after acquiring HostLatch, post their first offer on LowEndBox in July 2010 offering 512MB OpenVZ VPS for $6.95/month in Orlando with HostDime. That did not last long, as Jacob then sold it to ThrustVPS in August 2010. Rus maintained the brand for a while, and then started redirecting it to ThrustVPS last month. Meanwhile, Jacob has moved on to his enterprise cloud solution. Pricing there is a bit enterprisy as well so probably won’t see him again here :) All the best.

HazeNET

Current Status: Redirect to ThrustVPS.com

HazeNET were first featured on LowEndBox also in July 2010, and being probably the very first VPS provider offering 1GB OpenVZ VPS under $7/month, based in Kansas City. Colin was quite responsive at the beginning (like most provider owners here), but after another 1GB VPS offer around Christmas, he disappeared soon afterwards. It was then purchased by ThurstVPS, and has been redirecting to Thrust since May. As of Colin — no idea where he went.

IntelliServe

Current Status: IP not resolvable

IntelliServe posted their WHT offer and picked up by me early last month. £2.39/month 256MB OpenVZ VPS in an interesting location. Even more interesting — owner (as seen on his Wikipedia page) is a professional boxer. Anyway. Looks like professional boxing might be better for him. It went on sale a few days later and then not selling again. He off-loaded to someone else according to WHT, but that does not stop their website cease resolving on 26 May.

NoVPS

Current Status: cPanel default page

NoVPS‘s customers now indeed have, hmm, No VPS, since its website is now showing cPanel parked page at the moment. In fact, as their last post on WHT was from November 2010, they could have been in dead pool back then. $30/year Xen package wasn’t too bad, but I think it might have been a scam with no intention to be a long running business right from the start.

Plasawebhost

Current Status: Website account suspended

I posted offer from Plasawebhost just before Christmas after getting emails from Anto. $6.49/month 128MB OpenVZ VPS would be on the “expensive” side of scale overhere on WHT. It does not really translate to stability I guess. Their website is now showing “Account Suspended” message since 29 May. No one was whining and yelling as I guess not many people would have taken up the offer. Anto is still posting on his Facebook though so maybe some one can poke him with an inquiry.

SitePenguin

Current Status: Website offline

SitePenguin‘s first offer was featured here almost 2 years ago. $4.99 for 128MB OpenVZ VPS — even on-par with some of today’s offer. They are also one of first few offering exclusive deals to LowEndBox readers. Then read the stories here. Yomura took over, ran it for a while, and finally pull the plug of their website at the end of May. Yomura’s other brands, Delimiter, is still around. XVPS is “under new management” and will be coming later this month.

veVPS

Current Status: Redirect to VolumeDrive.

veVPS — first post March 2011 with 1GB OpenVZ VPS for $7, hosted with VolumeDrive in Scranton. At least with our statistics, the reps coming for a fight on LowEndBox usually won’t have their business for long. It is now redirecting to VolumeDrive’s contact page, which I guess it’s VD’s way to say, “hey if you get scammed by these people, contact us!”. I better stop here, as I know someone might come out yelling “HATERRRRS!”

V for VPS

Current Status: cPanel default page

V for VPS was first posted here in January. $4.99 for 384MB OpenVZ VPS in Chicago. Their Netherlands Switzerland server had spam-related issue, and the owner “Mike” basically just disappeared since March. Website went to cPanel default page on 6 May, and I think that’s the end of it.

On the Watch List

These are the providers that might not have died last month, but are on my watch list for next month’s dead pool post.

• SimpleRack — Cody is trying to buy the site back. They are waiting for a new look, but the count down on their website has already reached 0…
• VPSLix — down since 2 June with hosting account suspended.
• XVPS — under new management. So Yomura sold it? They are coming in June 2011. We’ll see.

That’s it for this month!

321 Hosted

Current Status: Domain not resolving

321Hosted was first listed here in November 2010 offering $4.75/month 384MB OpenVZ VPS in Dallas, but their domain as well as all their servers went off line on 14 April. More information on WHT, and apparently they have been reselling HostRail, tried to sell the clients, and turned out to be a fraud. Sorry to hear that Justin from HostPolar was defrauded. It appears that his other website, AFreeWebHost.com is still online. We’ll keep an eye on your future venture, Mike :)

BoltHub

Current Status: No longer selling VPS

BoltHub‘s offer was posted on LowEndBox in March 2011, offering 768MB OpenVZ VPS in Germany for $6/month. Started by a Singaporean minor who wanted to run this service for 2 years. Too bad it folds after 2 weeks. All VPS clients have been transferred to MyResellerHost, whose website has also been going up and down like a yoyo these days. BoltHub.net is now a ghost-town forum with less than 100 posts. Another page of adventure for the young Soon Keat?

GarmanOnline

Current Status: No longer selling VPS

Garman Online — R.I.P. Patrick first emailed me their OpenVZ VPS offer in July 2010, had a dedicated server fiasco in November last year, resurrected to offer KVM VPS, but then “a series of unfortunate event”. See comments in this blog post. To this day I still have no idea what actually happened.

GarmanOnline.com is now back online but is no longer offering VPS hosting. Patrick is still a valuable member of LowEndTalk community (although I’m not sure whether he’ll be back though). A man with charisma and possibly good technical skill. But sometimes to succeed you also need business sense + luck.

HostLadder

Current Status: No longer selling VPS

HostLadder first stated here with $6.49/month OpenVZ VPS in Kansas City, with 256MB memory and 100GB/month data. Their focus seems to be on MineCraft, and I wasn’t sure whether they were serious about general VPS hosting. It happens that Travis, the old owner, sold HostLadder a month after and then started EdgeVPS.

UuberHost

Current Status: Redirect to HostD8.com

It appears the UK-based UuberHost is now redirecting to HostD8.com. UuberHost was first listed in October 2010, offering $5 384MB OpenVZ VPS in Germany. Looks like their “team of dedicated individuals” have decided to move on, to apparently a new provider “WebHostSaloon.com” from WHT user’s signature, although that one is still not online. The “good review” has now moved all the sites to a BurstNet box in LA.

HostD8 is US based, however there’s no low end plans so won’t be considered here.

VPSRocket

Current Status: Default cPanel Page

I wasn’t too optimistic when I first posted about VPSRocket back in March this year. $4.10 128MB OpenVZ VPS wasn’t that cheap, and Scranton is already populated with other offers. Nevertheless, Mark made a promise with money back guarantee. But I guess that doesn’t really matter now, as the website has been showing default cPanel parked page since 11 April. You can still find Mark at volt-host.com, but that offers only game servers not VPS.

That’s it for this month, although I am sure there are some that I have missed. There are a few that I have been tracking but never posted their offers on LowEndBox. Until next month…

JBoost

Current Status: Home page showing directory index

I first posted about JBoost back in November 2010, who are the reseller of BurstNet at discounted price ($1 cheaper than Burst retail). I guess reselling VPS packages does not really put you in any advantage in this cut-throat market, and selling it cheaper than Burst just cuts the profit margin even deeper. See this WHT thread about what happened, but it’s good that all clients are transferred over to Burst so I guess no one has lost a server. “Personal reason” was stated for the exit, although I wondered what happened to their 15 in-house employees and office.

Others

Okay. There was only one whose home page cease to work (my definition of in the dead pool). However AFAIK there might be others who have gone out of business or got acquired. For example

• HazeNet — they surely look dead from comments in their last post. Then they got acquired by Thrust::VPS. Still running on their old server so I won’t mark them as dead yet.
• VPSTree — they have been like a ghost ship for several months. Home page and the servers are still up, but no one responds to anything. Even cancelled VPS still gets going and going. However it looks like it’s gradually falling apart. Maybe we’ll pronounce it dead soon.

That’s it for this month :)

The Server Experts

Current Status: IP not resolvable

Looks like being in business for 9 years, having a 6 year old domain, being the first fan for LowEndBox on Facebook — these ain’t enough to avoid the dead pool, especially when you stated upfront that you owned your own private rack and hardware, when you are in fact just a BurstNet reseller. The Server Experts first came into the scene selling exactly the same plan as BurstNet — $5.95 512MB OpenVZ/vePortal VPS — while denying that they were reselling. That’s just low, and we all hated to be lied to. Whatever, welcome to dead pool 2011.

Plus Hosted

Current Status: IP not resolvable

Plus Hosted featuring its “goatcx” website (picked up by Francisco) first appeared on LowEndBox back in November 2010, selling 128MB Xen VPS for 3.15 pound. It did not get much interest here, and then in December it changed hand to someone in Ireland. Andrew, who initially started PlusHosted, is now working for ClubUptime.

VPS Squad/VPS Under 5 Dollars

Current Status: IP not resolvable

Websites for both VPS Squad and VPS Under 5 Dollars stopped resolving on 19 February. I guess “dead pool” is not a strange land for them, as their previous incarnation, Alien Media House (AMH) Network, also went to dead pool in October 2010. Vladislav commented on 28 Feb that “the owner of VPSSquad has left the VPS business without prior notice”. More information can be found on this thread in WHT, but basically they haven’t paid their server bill, and have their domain hacked. However it is great to see various upstream providers helping out strangled customers.

Anyway. Google around and it is not too hard to find out where Mr. Watson’s address and phone number.

VPS Royale

Current Status: Domain parked

We first featured VPS Royale back in November 2010 with their launch offer. $4 for 512MB VPS with 50GB storage + 10Mbps unmetered bandwidth was a pretty good deal at that time. Too good to be true indeed, and throughout February there has been reports of dead service. Their domain was switched to AdSense for Domain on 28 February, and looks like Conner has done a runner. Conner still has his address on WHOIS though (provided that it was valid in the first place).

LaxHost

Current Status: Domain expired

LaxHost went way back to January 2009, offering 256MB OpenVZ VPS for 5 bucks a month. Not much response back then, and I see no further offer from these guys. Maybe it has long dead as my script does not pick up parked domain that well. For now the WHOIS shows “RENEWAL HOLD” and the website goes to a parked page. Anyway. One less for me to track.

Elite Data Hosting

Current Status: Parked domain

Elite Data Hosting first featured here in April 2009. Terii was the sysadmin then, sold the hosting business to Server-Logix, and two years later they have decided to fold this domain, and migrated all the plans to Server-Logix.com. So not strictly a “dead pool” provider, but Elite Data Hosting is now no more.

Meanwhile, Terii has moved onto another project. Annoying website design aside, wishing him best of luck.

That’s it for this month. I know there are some that should probably be described as “zombies” (i.e. vpstree.com) and some have been knocked semi-unconscious (availablevps.com, nordicvps.com for example). I’ll put them into the deadpool when they are verified as dead.

Brad’s Hosting

Current Status: IP not resolvable

Brad’s Hosting was first featured in LowEndBox.com with their $6.95 95MB OpenVZ VPS back in August 2010. Wasn’t really an impressive offering at the beginning. Their website moved a few times, and later on Brad the CEO commented that they are moving to SingleHop in November. It did happen on 6 November 2010. On 12 December they put the WHOIS privacy mask on their domain again, and their IP is no longer resolvable by 6 January. Brad’s WHT account is currently disabled so I have no idea what happened to them. Nor do I think they have many clients anyway.

CloudStatic

Current Status: Blank page

CloudStatic tried to pull a quickies back in Christmas time in December. “Anthony Santos” emailed me their offer on 23 December (if that’s his real name), and by 21 January their website is already down showing a blank page (yes, in less than a month). IP hasn’t changed, and their current server is now owned by “ReadyWebSpace.com” a newly registered web hosting company owned by “eFlipDomains”. Message on WHT says they have been taken over, but somehow I don’t have a good feeling about this. Watch out for them respawning elsewhere :)

HostPenguin

Current Status: Blank page

We first looked at HostPengiun back in 2009. $6.95 for 75MB OpenVZ VPS and only 5GB/month of data — pretty bad offer even 1.5 years ago, and right now it is showing a blank page. Looks like Matthew is now focusing on PogiWeb instead. I can’t really work out the reason for rebranding (probably someone who has read more news on WHT can share with us), but HostPengiun is established on a 2007 domain whereas PogiWeb is pretty new. Maybe “Penguin” is preventing Matt from selling FreeBSD or Windows hosting?

HostVillage

Current Status: IP not resolvable

First post about HostVillage was from June 2010 with their $2.49 LowEndBox specials — which turns out to be a confusion as they merely wanted me to pay to review their hosting. Anyway, they subsequently offered a few more offers, and even purchased one advertisement spot (which is hopefully cancelling soon). They moved the website to Linode on 9 Jan (on a server announcing itself as 文胜利.com), and then on 19 Jan their website stopped resolving. Here is another example where age of domain name cannot be trusted — they are sitting on an 11-year-old domain!

NWABytes

Current Status: Empty website

Again here is someone I first reported on 6 December, and now the whole website ceases to exist after less than 2 months. NWA Bytes was offering 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $6.39. “Kevin” has lost the .com version of their domain to domain squatters so he settled on the .net domain. Now he appears to have lost it again — after 4 IP changes since early December, his website is now showing an empty page. Claimed to be in business since 2005, hmm maybe not.

Other Deal Hosts

There are some others that have reported dead by the tracker in January 2011, but might have died long before that. Some are showing “coming back soon” messages although I doubt they will be resurrected.

• ChilledHost — BurstNet reseller that currently has “Account Suspended” message on its website.
• DigitalLinux — original website is long gone I suspect and now just a small page with an email address.
• Jones IT — only reported on 10 Jan 2011, and now showing the “coming back soon” message on the website. Moving datacenter according to Justin, but can’t keep the website updated?
• RapidDuck — Daniel was 15/16 back. As of “RapidDuck” experiment — well hopefully no one got burnt by it.

I am pretty sure there are more dead providers last month. I am flat out at work so might have lost track a few. Post them in the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.

SynHost.eu

Current Status: Website down

SynHost.eu was started by Sebastian back in 2009, who now runs BreatHost. It got sold to Internet Gateway South Beach back in March 2010 (whom does not seem to have good reviews on WHT). The website went up and down like a yoyo, and I think igsobe finally decided to shut it down on 30 November.

Interestingly though the domain is still registered to Sebastian on EURid. Hopefully his new venture would be more of a success :)

SolidVPS

Current Status: Website under construction

SolidVPS was first reported here on 7 November, reselling BuyVM’s OpenVZ VPS in Fremont that was $5/year more expensive than what BuyVM has offered (+$2 setup fee as well!) They sound pretty much dodgy right from the start — a .ORG domain with WHOIS protection. Not to mention stealing another company’s web design. It went down on 5 December and came back with an “Under Construction” website as it is under new management. Yeah right…

Other Changes & Upcoming

My scripts also picked up some changes:

• IT Experts Ltd now gets redirected to itexperts.mu, which makes sense anyway as it’s a Mauritius company.
• QuickVPS has been rebranded to QualityServers. Same group of people running it I believe, with more diversified products.
• TropicVPS website went down for 2 days, and just got back up on a new IP and a blank website. Look out for them next month.

That’s it for this month, and don’t forget to tune in to LowEndBox in 2011 for more cheap VPS discussions.

ConnectSwitch

Current Status: Redirect to OpenSource Hosting Solutions

We first started looking at ConnectSwitch back in December 2008 — almost 2 years ago. It was a pretty good plan back then. £3.95/month with 128MB OpenVZ hosting in UK. It then went on to offer OpenVZ VPS in Germany. Sometime down the track it ot sold to OpenSource Hosting Solutions (who also owns VPSWOW and HighVPS). And just a few days ago OSHS decided to permanently redirect the website to their own, which spells the end of ConnectSwitch brand.

WebSpaceDepot

Current Status: 403 Forbidden on home page

I first blogged about WebSpace Depot back in November 2008 on their 128MB Xen VPS offer for $6.93/month. I wrote about my investigation on their history:

WebSpaceDepot looks like a reputable company — been in business since 1997… Looks like a rather solid choice when you compare it with many failed VPS companies that I’ve reported before.

Ha. Wasn’t I WRONG! Soon after I wrote the blog entry a commenter came in to report his/her bad experience with the company. It sounds worrying as there appears to be some internal issue there. Then last month they moved their DNS to AfterNIC — a market place for domains. I guess that is the end of it. A bit of waste for a domain that has been around since 1997 though, which I am sure there will be a queue of potential buyers if it is indeed going to the market.

Upcoming…

SynHost.eu has been dead for a few days, but from their past history they do seem to go up and down regularly so I am not writing them out yet. Maybe we will see it finally marked as dead next month. Maybe :)

BlazeVPS

Current Status: Hard Drive Failure page

BlazeVPS raised to “fame” when it first introduced the $10/Year 128MB OpenVZ VPS + promising 4 different locations in US & UK back in July. These guys are getting a lot of attentions, and a lot of negative comments as well on WHT and on this blog. It did not take long for the empire to fall apart (if it can be called one in the first place). Plugs got pulled and boxes got taken down in all their locations. And finally their website disappeared, and replaced with a tiny note:

BlazeVPS has recently experienced a hard drive failure in one of our Server Nodes and our SolusVM Master server and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. This server crash has affected our company and we have lost all backups in place including for our Billing System.

Okay. Billing system gone. I guess that’s the end of this company.

StriveHost

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

Consider StriveHost only released their “launch special” on 13 September, by 7 October their domain is no longer resolvable. Quite a few problems picked up in the blog post + comments. No explanation either why they are down (although the user who posted the offer on WHT is still active).

RentaVPS

RentaVPS was first featured on LowEndBox back in August 2009, offering 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.95/month. By October 2009 it was sold to Yomura Holdings — Giles’ UK-based company that also collect other hosting companies such as Delimiter.us and XVPS.us. Then on 24 October the web server starts dropping connections — that’s after the website moved to a UK server 2 weeks prior. Is Yomura Holdings dropping the RentaVPS brand?

Interestingly both Delimiter.us and XVPS.us are not connecting at the moment. Yomura Holdings used to have 4 ad slot on LowEndBox and now it is down to only 1 (ironically showing RentaVPS.net). Anything happening there?

And a few others…

Two providers that I have never posted their offers on LowEndBox have appeared dead as well.

• Akisoft — first spotted by John in the RackVM post. $15/year 128MB OpenVZ VPS back in September 2010. It may or may not be Ben from RackVM, but it does not matter anyway as the IP address for their website is no longer resolving on 26 Oct.

• LoveVPS — Tom notified me in this comment that the guys behind BitEntity (who was in dead pool last month) has moved to LoveVPS.com. And continue the tradition of BitEntity it went off line without a trace within the same month. Hopefully not many people got scammed.

Until next month :)

BitEntity

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

BitEntity was only less than a month ago when Brandon and Tim contacted me to have BitEntity listed on LowEndBox.com. $5.99 for 256MB OpenVZ VPS from this UK operation. Then on 24 September its DNS stopped to resolve the A entries for their website. Not that surprising actually from the comments as our community members can smell the kiddie host from miles away. After all what do you expect from those advertising on a Habbo forum?

GrandiosHost

Current Status: Apache directory listing page

GrandiosHost was first featured last year with their $6.95/month 128MB Xen VPS, and it seems the ownership has changed to HostDime back in July — that was when Jacob acquired HostLatch.net from Adam (of VPSLatch.net currently). I have only recently detected it when the site starts showing just directory listing page. With GigeVPS’s recent sale from Jacob to NetIntelligence/ThrustVPS — it does seem that customers are just goods traded between providers (aren’t we?!!)

Host Gigs

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

I posted about Host Gigs back in January — a BurstNET reseller that sells VPS at dealer price than BurstNET. Not really a recipe for success I guess, so it almost went into dead pool in April. Somehow managed to come back up in mid-May, only to die again soon afterwards. I have only detected the IP address not resolvable last month but they could have been gone as early as July.

HostLambda

Current Status: Redirect to Google

ibnefahim at HostLambda was a permanent reader of LowEndBox when I first wrote about his hosting business back in August 2009. $3.99/month 128MB OpenVZ box later on discounted to $32/year. Unfortunately his permanancy on LowEndBox does not extend to HostLambda, nor is his yearly plan customers can fully enjoy what they have paid for. Their website really struggled back in May. They have also gone up and down according to the tracker. They have died before September, but it was only detected this month that the domain was showing cPanel default page. Now it just redirects you to Google.com. FAIL!

Indeed, be very careful when you purchase yearly plans.

Host Our Web

Current Status: Sold to Servarica.com

Don’t believe me when I said that Host Our Web “looks like a legitimate business”. Currently on the website it displays a simple page stating that the VPS customers have been sold to Servarica.com — not because of financial difficulties, but because of “lack of time”. That sounds like an excuse when you run the operation from your garage in your spare time and suddently you have other commitments like exams. $5/month 200MB Xen VPS was a good deal and Servarica’s $60/month 256MB VPS is not.

MrWebServer

Current Status: Redirect to HostRail.com

MrWebServer first appeared on LowEndBox in January 2010 with $5/month 256MB OpenVZ VPS (a BurstNet reseller from the sound of it). It was then sold to Constantinos in Cyrpus in late June, which turns out to be HostRail. It did not do too well anyway as the reason for the sale was expense > revenue, i.e. not the best way to run a business. It is now redirecting to HostRail’s website. HostRail has also previously been featured here. However their WHT account is currently in “suspended” state. Hmm.

Nixism

Current Status: Web site offline

When I first wrote about Nixism here in July 2009, it claims to be a 3 year old web hosting company. 2 months later to got sold to an individual, and then another month later it got sold to HostDime. $5/month 128MB OpenVZ VPS didn’t do too well I guess. HostDime then shut down the server that hosts the website last month (similar treatment to GrandiosHost?) Talking about confusion, the original owner is now running HostMonkey.com that got featured a few times on LowEndBox.com, providing VPS in the data center of… HostDime!

Rack VM

Current Status: IP address not resolvable

Ben from RackVM would probably be rated as the top con-artist here on LowEndBox. Starting out in May offering humble 128MB Xen VPS for 2.80GBP/month. The offers then got better — especially those exclusive to LowEndBox readers. Things started turning sour when they stopped accepting PayPal as payment method back in August. Their servers started going off-line one after the other — and eventually their last batch of servers at VooServers in UK were shut down and their website was no more.

Not sure how many people actually took Ben’s offers but I think it must be huge, as RackVM posts have longest discussion threads. I was also affected as I too fell for their 6GBP/Year 128MB OpenVZ VPS. Oh well. Money spent and lesson learnt.

Upcoming…

These providers are categorized as “half-dead” (zombie providers would be an appropriate name I guess). If they stay dead for October you’ll see them listed in next month’s dead pool post.

• BlazeVPS — currently an empty website saying that they have experienced hard drive error.

DiverseWeb

Current Status: Domain not resolving.

DiverseWeb came in to scene back in May with their pre-order of 128MB VMWare virtual servers at 2.5 GBP/month. Who would pre-order a VPS package?! But they did go live in July with their ESXi — which I did not know you can resell. Anyway throughout the course its website has migrated many times (SingleHop->Wholesale Internet->VooServers UK->HostNOC), down a few times, and disappeared into the void on 30 August.

I normally won’t write off a provider that quickly as 30 August was only a few days ago. But their representative at WHT, fast_fusion, is now denying any involvement with it. FAIL!

ErectVPS

Current Status: Domain not resolving.

ErectVPS, an UK based business, was somehow inappropriate named, and it offered 512MB OpenVZ VPS from Joe’s Datacenter for $6.36/month back in April this year. It did not take them long to close down the shop. One of their customer received their close-shop notice in early August. And rather than removing the website on 27^th as stated in the email, the domain ceased to resolve on 10 August. FAIL.

FastRackServers

Current Status: Redirect to BigBrainHost.com

AngiHost was initially featured on LowEndBox back in June, was a reseller of Virpus and did not know about the relationship between SliceHost and Rackspace. So 3 months after it launched its VPS-reselling business, it got sold to Brian at BigBrainHost, who at the moment is still hosting all the VPS clients in Kansas City. Hopefully all clients are still in good hands.

FastRackServers

Current Status: Domain parked.

Fastrackservers was only featured on LowEndBox 2.5 months ago featuring a pretty generic website and 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.95/month in San Jose. WHOIS info of the domain gets masked on 30 August, and now the domain is parked with NameCheap. Interesting the bikers forums at the original Take2Hosting IP are still up.

FiveBean

Current Status: Redirect to BlueMileCloud.com.

I have actually been a customer of FiveBean for 9 months, and while I was there it has a great service. Ryan was a great guy. Which is probably why BlueMileCloud bought them earlier in August. Their $6/month 128MB OpenVZ service has been quite stable, while not the cheapest on the market. So yeah, not exactly in the dead pool. BlueMileCloud is also in the low end market with their 128MB OpenVZ for $6.95/month — but with CSICO blades and EMC SAN. All the best!

GetMyVPS

Current Status: Blank home page.

GetMyVPS was launched on 5 August after posting an ad on WHT. Within hours their already-plain home page turns to a blank page. It turns out selling 128MB OpenVZ VPS in BurstNet for $3.95/month attracts more fraud signups than Stewart has expected. It has been down ever since — but he did mention that he might bootstrap it again, at a different data center.

Fastest fail, but at least he did the “right thing” (rather than hooking customers on yearly plans and then disconnect the server, like some might have done).

HostCadet

Current Status: Blank home page.

I looked at HostCadet back in May last year when they posted an offer on WHT for $5.99 Xen VPS with 128MB. Lots of content missing on their website and I just feel a bit suss about their operation. However they did manage to survive that long. Actually I have no idea that how long have they been operating, as I have only been notified when their WHOIS and IP changed on 12 August. It is now hosted on a cPanel server with a directory listing.

Lesson learned — don’t believe straight away if a host says “we are here to stay”.

Ostach

Current Status: Redirect to Vixile.com.

Ostach, an reseller of Virpus, was featured on LowEndBox in July for their $5.50 OpenVZ VPS with 384MB memory. They were GoLoad.org, moved to Ostach.net in Feb, and then in August got purchased by Vixile, another company that I did a bit of digging back in July. Well, all the best Adam for your next adventure.

Steadcom

Current Status: Domain not resolving.

SteadCom got sold to eTecc earlier this year and eTecc has finally turn off the tap on 17 August. The domain is now not resolving. A quick Google search on eTecc+Steadcom reveals not everything is rosy, as people have bad experience with the migration. Good luck to the customers who are staying back.

AMHNetwork

Current Status: Domain not resolving.

Australia based AMHNetwork was first featured here 12 months ago selling 256MB OpenVZ VPS in Germany for $6.50. It went up and down like yoyo over the last 12 months, which the VPS operation migrated to VPSSquad featuring multiple locations. On 25 August they have finally turned off server for good, and the domain is no more.

On the Dying Bed…

These are some that look pretty dead at the moment, although not “dead enough” for this month’s pool. If they don’t get resurrected in the next couple of days, we’ll see them in September’s dead pool post.

• RackVM — what’s going on here, Ben?! Okay. My VPS with them is still working, but others who have servers in Entanet and OVH have their servers down for couple of days — mine at VooServers is dead as well as their website! Their 6/Year VPS was the most commented post here and I have no idea how many people actually bought their low end VPS from RackVM (I can imagine, many). I’ll hate to write this host off. We’ll see how it develops in the next couple of days.

• VPS BB — Andrew! Your bargain bin host is not resolving at the moment! The webserver still works though — I can still connect to it via its old IP. Time to check whether the zones are deployed properly on your DNS…

That’s all folks. Hopefully there will be less to write about next month.

DataHostDirect

Current Status: Domain expired

I have only got notified when the domain datahostdirect.com has expired. It was first featured on LowEndBox back in September 2008, with an offer of 128MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.95/month. The domain expired on 12 July — such a good domain as it has been registered since 2007. It looks like Nick was trying to offload it earlier, and from his LinkedIn page he has ceased to be the owner of DataHostDirect LLC since Dec 2009. Moved onto something else better hopefully.

VPSRepublic

Current Status: Domain parked

On 6 July vpsrepublic.com has resolved to a different IP address — not to a different hosting server, but to GoDaddy’s parking farm. It was featured very early on at LowEndBox — July 2010 offering $3.50/month OpenVZ VPS with 128MB memory. Echoservers.com did bought the business back in 2008 and the domain is still registered to Jesse (owner of Echoservers). After almost 2 years on life-support it is now officially pronunced dead. I guess there is no point keeping a brand that is 2 years old anyway, although the offer was attractive even at today’s standard.

Zabogo

Current Status: Domain parked

Originally I thought Zabogo is going to be alright, as it is backed by Graxis which owns other hosting providers (dclayer, sharedlayer). But it turns out they all look very dead at the moment. The domain is now parked with ads. Sounds like the 2nd episode of Web Hosting Opera (previously featured on BuzzServers) wasn’t really a hit either. I can probably conclude that any new drama featuring “Jason S” would not go down too well anyway.

Anyone knows what happened to Graxis?

StrategicVPS

Current Status: Not resolving

Strategic VPS was featured here merely 3 months ago, and its owner has already pulled the plug on 8 July. Domain registrant’s web design company website is still there, but the VPS hosting website is no longer resolving. It was selling 128MB OpenVZ VPS for $5.91/month after the discount — not super hot deal for 2010

That’s it for this month! 4 declared dead last month but quite a few more being added to the tracker. Interestingly BreezeHost, who was on the dead pool last month, appears to be trading again although it has been “sold” to InoxHost. The same WHT account that is posting the offer — but would you sign up with them again?

GretzkyHosting

Current Status: Domain Parked

GretzkyHosting has first graced LowEndBox back in 2008, offering $6.95/month OpenVZ VPS with merely 96MB of memory. While I have not been tracking this particular host, it stopped resolving on 1st of June. It did come back a few days later, only to go down again on 26 June 2010 — this time it came back up on a Google AdSense for Domain page. I guess we have to declare it dead. I guess Snat is going back to write his blog rather than doing hard laboring job of running a low end virtual server company.

JunaWeb

Current Status: Redirect to HeHost.com

Now something more recent. JunaWeb only scored one post here as well back in March this year, for their $7/month 128MB OpenVZ VPS. The offer was a St. Patrick’s Day special and did not really last — nor has the provider itself I guess. Now when you navigate to JunaWeb it redirects to HeHost. HeHost’s VPS starts at $49.95 — definitely not the low end with the definition around here.

BreezeHost

Current Status: Redirect to InoxHost.co.uk

BreezeHost was also first reviewed in March on their sub-$3 OpenVZ plan with 256MB of guaranteed memory. The plan is “too good to be true”, and indeed it was! With over 30 comments on the blog post and most of them are against the provider. On 25 June the domain stopped to resolve, and on 4 July the domain came back, only with excuses blaming on their payment provider. It started with SoloManaged/LinuxManaged.com, and it ended up in the same pit. Clients are transferred to InoxHost.co.uk, which is a lot more expensive.

Cohoster

Current Status: Website offline

Cohoster was only reported on 14 June 2010, and on 17^th the website went down. Came back up for a small period of time on 21^st, and have been offline ever since. Maybe $6.40 VMWare packages are just unrealistic? I certainly am keeping eyes on other VMWare based providers if it is the case. Either way, a total FAIL.

TheVPSGods.com

I have actually never posted their offers on LowEndBox. When I first saw their offers on WHT back in early May, these were too good to be true. However the way they spammed WHT looks quite suss so I only added them to my tracker, but never bothered to re-post their offers here. The owner is also associated with DareDevilHosting, who was in our dead pool 2 months ago. It turns out only after 1 month the domain stopped resolving on 8 June. Multiple FAIL!

I think that’s it for the month. The “candidate” from last month, HostMist, did manage to resurrect itself + giving an exclusive offer to the LEB readers. Good on them! HighVPS has also been sold, but their website is still functioning and looks like you can still buy the same packages.

I also noticed that two providers have their websites parked over the last couple of days — Zabogo and VPSRepublic. Weird. One was backed by Graxis and the other one backed by EchoServers. We’ll see next month.

ReVPS

ReVPS came into scene in early January, when the domain was first registered. It was selling 256MB OpenVZ VPS for $5/month. The IP still resolves to somewhere in HostNOC. Still pings, but port 80/443 fails to connect since May 7. If you actually checked the original post, their entire website spelt dodgy, with mis-spellings and very bad geography knowledge. Another BurstNet reseller that we probably do not need.

FierceServers

FierceServers was first reported here back in February 2010, sitting on a relatively new domain (registered in November 2009). Their doamin stopped resolving on 10 May, and I guess their servers are probably too fierce and burnt all their customers’ virtual server as well. Here is one relevant discussion thread on WHT. Do note that they have domain privacy on their domain. WHOIS privacy something that is okay for small blog sites like this. However if you are a business dealing with clients on the Internet, it would be a big dodgy sign IMHO.

TheVPSNode

TheVPSNode came into scene back in March 2010, and they are reselling BurstNet’s OpenVZ offerings like many low end budget providers. They were doing it at the same price as BurstNet, and that does not seem to help bootstraping their business, especially after this scamming fiasco surfaced. The website thus has never been fully setup — nor were client’s VPS I guess. The company still appears to be registered so maybe it will comeback one day. Maybe not.

OneNetwork

OneNetwork got featured on LowEndBox again in late March 2010 — looks like we have more and more “very short lifespan” hosting providers recently (although some people would prefer to call them scammers). It lived on a 13 year old domain — but then the age of domain does not really tell you about the history of the current registrant. There were DNS issues with domain, so on 28 April it decided to not resolve at all. The website did come back on 8 May, showing that it is currently out of business. Did people actually have a business plan when they start?

Linux Managed

LinuxManaged.com gotta be one of the biggest joke — asking/advertising for pre-order of their VPS products when their website was in development. At the same time emailing me multiple times to have the site featured on LowEndBox, and then sockpuppeting on WHT with fake recommendations.

I guess no one is surprised by the out come. Their website was NEVER finished, and the domain is currently not resolving. The IP address is still live so I tried to connect to it, and the browser brought back RoyaleHost.com on the same IP. Maybe there is a part 2 in this story?

That’s it for this month! There are some other providers that look half-dead which may appear in next month’s dead pool.

• HostMist — Showing emergency page since May 24. Will they finally bring back their website?