Dead Pool August/September 2011

Just a quick note on yesterday’s outage here at LowEndBox. It was a DDoS (yes, again!) and the VPS required a reboot to get back to shape. LowEndBox.com availability issues can be discussed on LowEndTalk.

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?