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Dead Pool August 2010 – DiverseWeb, ErectVPS, HostCadet, VPSSquad and More…

Damn. I think I am going to take a while writing up this post. What month was that? August? Or Hosting-company-droping-like-fly month? Here we go…

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: 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. 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.