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

However over time LowEndAdmin grew tired of the kids “plotting their next pump ‘n dump” on LEB/LET, and this was a deciding factor for him moving on. In this time “A Trio” of us was left with LEB/LET, and we have been discussing ways privately that we can make this a better place. LowEndBox is not LowEndStartup, and while we always want new providers and new competition, we also want to be promoting providers whom have a proven record, or are of a higher percentage of being around in six months to a year.

To assist in this we have added some basic new rules to accepting LEB offers:
* Using a nulled WHMCS grants you a lifetime ban on LowEndBox and LowEndTalk.
* Hosts posting offers are not to use Private WHOIS data on their domain

I invite you also to join the discussion on LET as well and suggest what other safeguards you would like to see. LEB is a place for quality, not quantity, it would be better that we promote 10 hosts who are still in existence in 12 months, than 25 hosts who have all disappeared in 3 months.

We will start taking offers and new plans from Friday 3rd February for posting on LEB, and will work towards a dedicated “DeadPool” page as some are already looking to return post-Christmas.

We are clearing the backlog in Moderation and Flagged comments, posts, spam etc. So if you see anything that you believe is in breach flag it, and after Friday you should see a quicker, more timely response to flagged items.

Some Background…

1^st of February 2008, I took on the moniker “LowEndAdmin” and a picture of an old VIC-20, and wrote the very first blog entry “Hello World“. It has since been quite a ride over the last 4 years. I was a lone blogger back then. I worked as a software architect for a financial software company, and had some general amusement in the world of hosting and virtualisation. A low cost VPS where you get root account + total control was a niche that I rarely saw people writing about, back then at least. So I started blogging about low end VPS hosting with a monthly cost capped at $7/month. I was on the hunt of some cheap servers for my spare time projects at that time anyway. I was looking for servers that were cheap enough so that the cost of hosting can never used as excuses not to get my hands dirty with ideas.

Fast forward 4 years.

LowEndBox.com is quite a different beast these days. It’s often mentioned in other webhosting forums (hmm, I meant WHT). It’s one of the top 3 results when you search “cheap vps” on Google. Rather than scanning through offers sections on WHT, low end providers are jamming my inbox with listing requests every single day. It has built a hard core community over here and at LowEndTalk, where hosting related topics and other non-sense are often discussed. It even endured some nasties. Big thanks for the community for not forsaking the site when it was in trouble.

Just Don’t Have The Time…

However it seems that I’ll be the one deserting the community here.

Despite the apparent “success” of LowEndBox, for the past year it has become more of a liability to me, rather than an enjoyable blog, let alone a useful asset. The amount of work involved in posting escalates. The ever enlarging dead pool means it takes more time to investigate all the n00b providers who sent me requests. Writing dead pool posts itself is actually mentally disturbing, by just thinking about all these scams in the hosting industry. And technical posts? Regarding to fine tuning services for low end systems? These became few and far between, as most people are here just for the cheap “too good to be true” VPS offers.

A blog that was originally set out to help me getting started to work on my side ideas became a big project in itself, where it sucks up valuable time where I could actually do some “work”. This was more of the case over the last 12 months, where I transit from being a faceless employee of a large corporation to being the boss of my own startup. For those who have worked in tech startups you would know how much time your own business demands, not to mention I also have family and church commitments. I often post on LowEndBox way pass 12am wondering, “hey why am I still posting here?” I just don’t have the time.

Nor Enjoying The Community…

Okay. I have to say that I got to “know” some great individuals over the last 4 years on this blog, although “know” does not go beyond a few email exchanges. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with some of you.

At the same time this community is also filled with teenage hosts plotting their next pump ‘n’ dump, and scam artists planning how to defraud a provider. Blogging here for 4 years forced me to see a lot of dark side of hosting business. Many are also quick to shot down a competitor, and people don’t hesitate to label others “scammers”. I too might be at fault here for being extra sceptical and cynical — but I have to admit that it does not make a community enjoyable.

And guess how much that motivates me to keep on writing here? Not much.

Staled Growth of The Websites…

With me severely lacking in time + motivation, unfortunately that it’s the community that suffers. I have to say that LowEndBox actually did not grow much in 2011, in terms of number of visitors and page views. At the same time I know there is so much you can do with a hosting oriented community.

But I don’t have time. That again draws in guilt because I know how much useful this website can be, if I have the time to code these new features and extra functionalities, if I have the time to be more interactive with other community members, if… The websites remain stale because their owner don’t have time nor enough motivation to grow it. Not cool.

I am Taking an Exit…

So, I decided that that’s it for me. I need to move on. Moreover, it’s not just reducing responsibilities and asking for extra hands. I want to be out of here, completely. Just don’t want to think about “I wonder how LowEndBox is doing” when I am taking a break after a long day at work.

I got a few options here.

• Mark Pilgrim-style infosuicide by just shutting down all the sites and replying HTTP/1.0 410 Gone. We will just wake up one morning and LowEndBox is no more. And life moves on.

  Probably not the best solution — even I would agree with that. Although I can see it as an attractive option when nothing else works.

• Sell the sites on Flippa to the highest bidder. This site fetches just ~USD$500 per month on the ads so I guess with 12 to 24 months valuation people might pay $10k for it? Seems to be a small chunk, but at least there’s something for me after blogging here for 4 years.

  However, I think it might not be the best outcome for the community. Whoever buys the site you’ll be sure that they’ll want to have ROI. I don’t want to think about what will happen when the new owner just wants to squeeze every bit of revenue out from this site.

  But then again, (1) everything has a price, and (2) never say never.

• Pass on the baton to the chosen one, to whoever is worthy, or just to the “people”, to the community. “Here is the key”, hmmm I mean the domain EPP code and my root password, take control and let the website be what it meant to be! Grow it, and continue to benefit to the el-cheapo hosting community!

  I guess this might be the preferable outcome. However, whom should I pass the websites to? Who is willing to take up the responsibility? Many are willing to put up their hands I guess, but who would the community trust? A hosting company with lots of insider knowledge? A veteran leader who knows how to manage a community? A carefree college student who has lots of time on his hand? Hmmm. Probably not the last one.

Okay. I have now spelt out my intention and will just let the discussion roll from here. I will try to answer questions in this thread and keep people updated. If you wish to contact me directly, here is the email address: contact@lowendbox.com.

Updates

Thanks for all the people who emailed me their offers. I have already decided on the outcome — I will pass the baton to one community member who has already formed a team to move the sites forward. Announcement will be made in the next couple of days when the dust settles.

• 256MB guaranteed/384MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage
• 3TB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Servers in either Nuremberg Germany or Chicago IL. This is actually worse when you compare it with previous offer given by Andrew, although the ordering link still works on that. They are now a part of a bigger company also means that you might be able to get phone support, and VPS might actually moved to migrated to their own facility in the future. Well, recent review wasn’t so positive. Maybe it’s just the migration pain, but hopefully things will become more stable.

• 128MB guaranteed/256MB burstable memory
• 15GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Servers in PhoenixNAP in Phoenix AZ (test IP: 174.138.175.114). Jolly Works Hosting is based in Philippine and was founded in March 2009 — makes them almost 3 years old. Looks like they are trying to aggressively grow their customer base with this yearly plan. Being 3 year old and relatively good track record I do hope it’s not an attempt of pump and dump :)

• 384MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 300GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• 1x IPv4 + 1x IPv6 address
• 2x vCPU cores
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Coupon code LowEndFirstMonth also gives you 80% off the first month. Payments can be made using PayPal, credit card, mail-in cheque or money order. Servers are housed in CANIX3 in Montreal CA (test IP: 199.167.128.10) and they have been running their own BGP (AS14442) since April-May 2011. Being part of Media Hosts they have been in business since 2002.

• 128MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage
• 1Gbps unmetered bandwidth
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

There’s a bit more info on the same offer posted on WHT. Nodes are located in either Los Angeles CA or Scranton PA. Servers themselves are connected to 1Gbps ports, although what you might eventually receive depends on a lot of other factors. From section 9 of their Terms of Services, they would contact abusers if a VPS is slowing down others. They have been around for more than a year now.

If P2P, IRC and public proxies are forbidden according to ToS, what other applications would you use such VPS for (1Gbps unmetered but only 128MB guaranteed memory)?

• UK/AT – XEN/OpenVZ mini
• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 100GB/month data transfer
• £4.25/month Xen (Direct signup link)
  £3.50/month OpenVZ (Direct signup link)
  

• USA West Coast – XEN/OpenVZ mini
• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer
• £4/month Xen (Direct signup link)
  £2.50/month OpenVZ (Direct signup link)
  

Servers in either Manchester UK, Vienna AT or Fremont in West Coast USA. 20% VAT is payable for those in UK/EU. Both PayPal and Google Checkout are accepted. Also note that provisioning is currently a manual process which can take up to 12 hours wait. According to CompaniesHouse, Castlegem Ltd has been registered since 2008 and they are boasting 1,400+ customers according to Bernhard. Bernhard was from Austria running the Progipark team that has been doing business since the ’80s, and been on the Internet since 1995.

They do have funny DNS server name. Fartling? YouNaughtyMonsters? Geez…

• 512MB guaranteed/768MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage
• 200GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

PayPal only. They own their hardware, which are colocated with HostDime in Orlando FL — see Nick’s data center hunting thread. Yes, it’s the same Nick who used to run RackMountain, which he sold it 2 months down the track. Lots of informative comments in the old posts there so do check them out. Anyway he is back! RhinoRack.net is a new venture that he has only recently started.

We’ll see how long this one is going to last.

• 256MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage on RAID10
• 500GB/month data transfer
• 2x vCPU cores
• 2x IPv4 addresses
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Signup link here. If you pay yearly it will get discounted to $30/year. They take PayPal or Google Checkout. Servers with PhoenixNAP in Phoenix AZ (test IP: 199.30.48.138). IRC and legal P2P are allowed. ico7 Network is based in UK. Domain has only been registered since May 2011 and wasn’t trading until November so pretty much a new provider. Any one knows about these folks?

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.

• 256MB memory/256MB vswap
• 20GB storage
• 20Mbps unmetered bandwidth
• 2x vCPU cores
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Payment in either PayPal, Google Checkout or AlertPay. Servers with SingleHop in Chicago. Do note that they are doing firewall white-listing on allowed ports for incoming connections (See comments from previous offer), but you can use support tickets to get them to open ports for you. Domain has been registered since November 2008.

• 2048MB memory
• 50GB storage
• 2TB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Direct signup link, and servers are with ColoCrossing in Chicago IL (test files here). Chris is away at the moment so thanks to Jeremiah for setting this up. ChicagoVPS has been around since October 2010 and has been providing great services here.

• 128MB memory
• 2.5GB storage
• 20GB/month data transfer on 40Mbps
• Xen/Custom VM

Servers might get deployed to their old datacentre, RapidSwitch in UK (test IP: 95.154.254.253), or their new datacentre (which I can’t seem to be able to find info about). As I have previously stated, they have been on LowEndBox for more than 3 years now, and XenVZ have been in business for more than 4 years. They have much expansion recently with new racks in a second datacentre in UK and became a full RIPE NCC member. They are using their own control panel integrated with their own billing system. It’s not pretty but very functional. I have actually been a customer of XenVZ for about a year and was very happy with their service.

While their servers have 100/1000Mbps ports, “LowEndXen 2012″ is port limited to 40Mbps to ensure fair distribution of bandwidth. I doubt you need more though, since you’ll easily chew up your 20GB monthly quota. For those looking for higher plans, I found their Christmas offers are still available with 512MB Xen VPS + 250GB/month for £3.75/month. Some other points that Sean wishes to mention:

• Since these are rock bottom price, no technical assistance beyond control panel provided by them, i.e. you are on your own once you are on the command prompt.
• Be considerate when you think about asking for refund, especially when providers are already having tiny margin on these plans.

• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage on RAID10
• 150GB/month data transfer
• 1x vCPU core
• Xen

PayPal is the only available payment method. Their servers are with BlueSquare in Maidenhead UK, according to their About Us page. On the same page they also stated that they use HP Proliant for servers and LeftHand for SAN storage. Michael disclosed that VMHosts provide “True Cloud XEN infrastructure” without any specific details. OnApp maybe?

Domain has been registered for 18 months, although “VMHosts” does not exist in CompanyHouse. Michael seems to be a seasoned IT solutionist though. Reasonable ToS — no IRC, no torrent, and no dodgy Perl scripts.

• Linux-128-Yearly
• 128MB memory
• 5GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer
• $10/year — Direct signup link

Throw in $5 more and you can get a plan that’s much more useful with burstable memory.

• Linux-192-Yearly
• 192MB guaranteed/384MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer
• $15/year — Direct signup link

For their OpenVZ VPS plans with 512MB memory or more, you can also use coupon code STOCK0 to get 40% off recurring discount when you pay annually. For example 512MB OpenVZ plan would be $43.20/year after the discount.

Servers with Limestone Networks in Dallas TX I believe. 123Systems has been in business for almost 2 years and have lots of offers previously listed here.

Welcome to 2012! Michael from ThriftyVPS sent me this on the first of January, asking to have his services listed. So here we have it. Their Xen PV plans start at $6.25/month. Direct signup link here.

• 256MB memory/512MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer on 1Gbps
• Xen/SolusVM

They support Google Checkout, PayPal, AlertPay and 2CheckOut for payments. Unlike a few months ago when they were simply reselling BudgetVM’s VPS, they now run their own servers with Netriplex in Asheville NC (test IP: 74.112.172.54). Domain registered in June 2011 makes it less than a year old. They seem to have fixed WHMCS verification issue from last time, and main site is now sitting behind CloudFlare. Still, WHMCS is un-themed and it has a weird web site design — whole page is just a big lousy-compressed JPEG file with image map to handle the clicks.

• 512MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage
• 700GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Their servers are located in Kansas City MO with, hmm, Joe’s Datacenter, which you can find the test IP and test files on their website. I suspect most Kansas City offers here are either with Wholesale Internet or Joe’s DC. You can google “Joe’s Datacenter” and read all the reviews, although I think the chance of these guys going to the dead pool would be a lot smaller than any other provider which I have listed over the last week simply due to its size.

Well, that’s it! I can hear the fireworks starting in the background so I better get ready welcoming the year twenty-twelve. Happy new year everyone!

• 512MB memory
• 25GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps port
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Direct sign up link here. On the form it says “Located in Missouri” which I presume would be in Kansas City MO, where many other Missouri-based offers are. Interestingly SSL was half-working in their last month’s offer, but is completely borked this time. Those are E3-1230/1240 nodes with 16GB RAM and RAID10 drives. Check their last two offers for their background + comments/reviews. Here is one provider whom you don’t really get to see on main stream web hosting forums (WHT), but advertise on HackForums. It might be the type you are interested in, but walk with caution (especially since it’s still a pretty new provider).