GOOD NEWS HiFormance Alternatives

wardmundy

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For development, I certainly share your enthusiasm for Digital Ocean. We also use Vultr regularly for the same reasons you've stated. The financial consideration comes when you decide to use one of these platforms as your permanent VoIP home. Then the cost is about 4-5 times what the Bleeding Edge providers offer. That buys a lot of redundancy. Personally, we use Vultr for a 3CX server, one Incredible PBX server, and our OpenVPN server. No hiccups ever and backups are automatic. We supplement those servers with nearly a dozen of the Bargain Basement VPS offerings for testing (them and us) plus a dozen or more servers running at CloudAtCost just because we love water torture. We've also been very pleased with OVH which is lower cost than D.O. and Vultr unless you add backups which are extremely pricey.
 

krzykat

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I half joked in their comment section about using them for mining bitcoin. They did not seem to care about that at all.

I can promise you that Vultr does. I had a server that had a bad service running and was hitting CPU of 100% for a couple of weeks, and when I went to add a new server, I was told I couldn't as it looked as if we were mining and I had to clean stuff up before my account was unlocked to continue growing.
 

geopeterwc

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Another one bites the dust! This time, Alpha Racks.

Both of the accounts that I had with Alpha Racks in their LA data center went dark around 5pm PST on 5/16. Can't get to the installed iPBXs, the VPS Control Panel ... can't even log into the user panel to open a trouble ticket!

A little research this morning suggests that the two main players at AlphaRacks were Dustin Cisneros and Adam Ng from QuadraNet. Adam/Dustin were fired from QuadraNet ... possibly for running a side business on QuadraNet servers and as QuadraNet employees, much of their QN time was being spent in support of their AlphaRacks and related services?

See https://bit.ly/2Hqcdej and https://bit.ly/2WbCF3E for more details.

I experienced significant reliability problems with the first AlphaRacks account, and it was curious to see that only two names would respond to trouble tickets. Eventually the issues were resolved, and I went on to acquire a second account with them. Both of my AR accounts were reliable (enough) to give them an 8 out of 10 rating ... until the apparent shutdown of services yesterday. Fortunately, the services that were installed on these two accounts were only of minor importance. But ... it's a time-consuming task to recover.

It's possible that this affects only the Los Angeles data center, and there's more smoke than there is fire. And to paraphrase the great philosopher, Forrest Gump: "Cheap servers was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

So, moving on ... this time to hopefully, a more dependable VPS?

/Pete./
 
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kenn10

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It may be coincidental but my Hosting73 VPS began having intermittent problems this morning. It would freeze for 30 - 60 seconds and then resume. I rebooted several times and analyzed performance and my VPS was using very little CPU time. This went on for a couple of hours but seems to be resolved now. I suspect the host server was oversubscribed or having issues. I put in a ticket and have yet to get a response.

You better believe I've just done my Incredible backup and copied it to my PC.

I've had good luck with Hosting73 so I hope this was just a glitch and not another provider suddenly shutting down. If they go dark, I still have my secondary server running on VULTR for fail-over.
 

wardmundy

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Hosting73 is one of my favorites, too. Hopefully just a one-off issue.

If you're feeling lucky, check out the $49/year offering for 5 KVM servers. Here's the LowEndBox writeup on the SparkVPS offer. We've had good luck with our OpenVZ VPS from them but see the warnings at the end of the LowEndBox writeup. Others haven't been so lucky.

May 17 Update: If you’ve got a little money to burn and really prefer KVM servers as opposed to OpenVZ platforms, then you’ll be hard-pressed to ever beat this deal from SparkVPS. You can build not one but up to 5 KVM servers for $49/year with the same flexibility as the other offerings above. You get a bundle of 5 IPv4 addresses, 8 CPU cores, 6GB of RAM, 100GB of SSD storage, and 1Gbit port speed with 10TB of monthly bandwidth in your choice of Dallas or New York locations. Open a ticket after you sign up for an extra month of service at no additional cost. That makes the monthly cost of each of the 5 KVM servers considerably less than $1/mo.

D6zBMbqXoAEfL2g.jpg
 
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shetu

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Any update for alpharack? I need new vps. This time i am looking for kvm vps. Link of sprakvps goes to openvps deal. Is this provider kvm offer end?
 

geopeterwc

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I received the following "response" from AlphaRacks "Customer Relations" this morning (5/20) in response to a trouble ticket from Thursday (5/16):

We are aware of an outage and ask for your patience. It appears that our datacenter / network upstream is facing a route issue which is causing downtime for some customers. We appreciate your trust and patience and are working as diligently as possible to restore services.

We are just looking further into this matter for you and will be delivering a prompt up to you as soon as we can. This could take up to a couple of working days, but we aim to have this incidence concluded as soon as possible.

We are further in correspondence with our datacenter. Also if you've detected that our site is being slow its due the fact we are receiving a high ticket load.

Compensation will be offered in the form of SLA credit to SLA.

Thank you for your patience.

Kind regards.
--
Allison Tarver
Client Relations

If this message is to believed, there may yet be a light at the end of the tunnel. But there's still no life in my two VPSs with them. Not much patience left at this end.

/Pete./
 

KNERD

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I received the following "response" from AlphaRacks "Customer Relations" this morning (5/20) in response to a trouble ticket from Thursday (5/16):

We are aware of an outage and ask for your patience. It appears that our datacenter / network upstream is facing a route issue which is causing downtime for some customers. We appreciate your trust and patience and are working as diligently as possible to restore services.
We are just looking further into this matter for you and will be delivering a prompt up to you as soon as we can. This could take up to a couple of working days, but we aim to have this incidence concluded as soon as possible.
We are further in correspondence with our datacenter. Also if you've detected that our site is being slow its due the fact we are receiving a high ticket load.
Compensation will be offered in the form of SLA credit to SLA.
Thank you for your patience.
Kind regards.
--
Allison Tarver
Client Relations

If this message is to believed, there may yet be a light at the end of the tunnel. But there's still no life in my two VPSs with them. Not much patience left at this end.

/Pete./
It is much worse!

I am glad I shuttered my service! From just a few minutes ago!

After over a decade in business we regret to inform you that AlphaRacks is officially closing its doors. Given the recent outage that exceeded the provisions and financial capabilities of our disaster recovery plan, AlphaRacks will no longer be providing services. We were a budget focused VPS provider, which did not leave room for additional options financially within our disaster recovery plans.
 

geopeterwc

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@KNERD, I filed a claims a few weeks ago with PayPal for the total amount that I had paid for two accounts with AR. I received notice from PayPal earlier this week that my claims have been approved for the full amount. Though I'm frustrated by the failed services, with no functioning backup ... at least I'm 'camping happy' now. Thanks, PayPal!
/Pete./
 

wardmundy

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Another one bites the dust. File your PayPal chargebacks today for AlphaRacks charges since Dec. 14, 2018!
After over a decade in business we regret to inform you that AlphaRacks is officially closing its doors. Given the recent outage that exceeded the provisions and financial capabilities of our disaster recovery plan, AlphaRacks will no longer be providing services. We were a budget focused VPS provider, which did not leave room for additional options financially within our disaster recovery plans.
We have contacted various different VPS hosting companies to attempt to establish a transfer agreement that is in accordance to our privacy policy. In addition, some of the below providers have reached out to us offering assistance / credit for our customers.
Below are other budget VPS providers that should provide you with a suitable new home for your VPS needs:
We would like to thank our customers for a great decade of your Business and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Sincerely,
AlphaRacks Management.
 
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KNERD

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Another one bites the dust. File your PayPal chargebacks today for AlphaRacks charges since Dec. 14, 2018!

I am sure they have already shuttered their bank accounts to prevent this, unless PayPal will just bite the bullet on the loss for this.
 

wardmundy

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PayPal covered all the refunds with HiFormance so I would expect the same this time around.
 

shetu

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I got email from PSK Hosting. Is there any way to retrive data from old vps or unsubscribe psk hosting?
 

KNERD

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Alpharacks has already shut down.

You unsub from any email the same way you do all of them; unsub
 

AndyInNYC

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shetu and pete - your data is GONE. No comebacks. I moved to flipperhost for my email server and (unfortunately) my backup was 2 months out of date. So much for April and May.

Andrew
 

krzykat

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Wow, reading all this carnage ... I would like to grab a decent low cost alternative to use for failovers ... I like the pricepoint of the SparkVPS ... but will it die in 2 months?
 

wardmundy

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FYI: All of our requested PayPal chargebacks for AlphaRacks hosting were resolved in our favor with payment in full. Some stretched back to late December, 2018. So... it's worth your time to open chargeback tickets.
 

wardmundy

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New SpeedTest results from today's testing of low-cost providers. Today's TIP: anyNode is not only a steal but also provides OVZ7 which means you can deploy ipset to block entire countries from your server. Works very much like a standard KVM platform.

ProviderRAMDiskBandwidthPerformance 7/15/19Cost
HostedSimply*2GB25GB5TB/month753Mb/DN 651Mb/UP$15/year
HostFlyte1GB30GB2TB/month229Mb/DN 162Mb/UP$15/year
Hosting731.5GB25GB2TB/month786Mb/DN 167Mb/UP$14/year
HostBRZ1GB20GB3TB/month276Mb/DN 105Mb/UP$15/year
SnowVPS1GB15GB2TB/month384Mb/DN 362Mb/UP$12/year
SolvedByData2GB20GB2.5TB/month299Mb/DN 140Mb/UP
2CPU Core 2GB swap
$15/year
WelcomeHosting KVM (LA)1GB25GB1.5TB/month319Mb/DN 367Mb/UP$21/year
CrownCloud KVM (LA)1GB20GB +
Snapshot
1TB/month192Mb/DN 38Mb/UP
2CPU Core ¼G swap
$25/year
Naranjatech KVM (The Netherlands)1GB20GB1TB/monthHosting since 2005
VAT: EU res.
20€/year w/code:
SBF2019
BudgetNode KVM (LA)1GB40GB RAID101TB/monthAlso available in U.K PM @Ishaq on LET before payment$24/year
FreeRangeCloud KVM (Ashburn VA, Winnipeg, Freemont CA)1GB20GB SSD3TB/monthPick EGG loc'n
Open ticket for last 5GB SSD
$30/year w/code:
LEBEGG30
anyNode OVZ7 (Miami, Seattle, Las Vegas)1GB20GB1TB/month526Mb/DN 388Mb/UP$12/year

We would NEVER recommend CloudAtCost for reasons most of you know, but we had thousands of dollars invested in their junk so we went ahead and upgraded to their new V3 platform. We've been pleasantly surprised by the results for the past several months. Here were today's numbers: 78Mb/DN 522Mb/UP.
 
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