Bitcoin Forum

Update: I'm so pissed off at these guys, seriously, im trying to set up my stuff so that I dont need to rely on them anymore and 3 weeks later there is another outage.  12 hours down now, they don't know HOW to get it back online.  Fucking pissing me right off.

------------------------

Just a head's up, I have had HORRIBLE experiences with BitVPS.  Like, servers randomly getting turned off, pretty much having outages every month or so for extended periods of time, and the service is now becoming entirely absent.  

My server which hosts Operation Fabulous has unfortunately been down for 24 hours now.  Once it comes back online, we are moving to another host immediately.

I opened a high priority ticket as soon as it went down, and 24 hours later, NO RESPONSE from James.  I did get a message from someone else who works there, but they said they were not able to contact James either.  No one knows whats going on.  

This isn't the first time this has happened.  This has happened in 3 datacenters of theirs, numerous times, but I am shocked with this 24 hours outage.  Most it has been before is 8 hours.  I think 5 minutes is unacceptable.  They don't care at all.

DO NOT USE BITVPS.

You must not be aware, James doesn't run BitVPS anymore. It has new ownership.

Anyway, thanks for the hit piece. Happy customer here.

Same here with CoinBr.com hosting, the vps is completely unavailable since before yesterday 19:00 UTC. Fortunately, as we manage the servers responsibly and make proper backups, we were able to get it back online outside bitvps (so far except charts) awhile ago.

New ownership as of when? 

I got an email from someone yesterday who is trying to figure out which datacenter my server is in, and he's trying to get ahold of James, and he's responding via james@bitvps email, like..  did this happen in the past few days?  James was emailing me steadily even 6 days ago, did this happen this week?

Very sorry to hear that your services have been affected due to our Swiss outage.. Phungus, Naimjies, and I represent BitVPS as the new owners.

I am working tirelessly to recover services to our affected customers and hope to have this accomplished very soon. I am very sorry to hear that you will be leaving Bitvps and I understand your frustration. The transfer of ownership is nearly completed and I can assure you there will be no more hiccups further down the road.

Again I apologize to all affect customers. You will be credited for server downtime.

Best,
arij

Please do what you can to get things operational.

All I have ever asked for is to pay my bill and have my server online. 

With BitVPS it's like every month or so there is a massive outage and it leaves me scrambling to find another host ASAP because opening tickets is basically worthless, I asked James if there was any possibility to have a server and not have to worry about it, and he said the only solution would be to close my account and I could move elsewhere.  Pretty much exactly those words. 

If you could restore some faith in that company, that would be fantastic, but please just find my server and possibly move it to the california datacenter, I have had the least problems with that one (but there still has been issues).

The biggest issue here is that James (RG, rapeghost) got a new job as a senior admin for another hosting company. I believe he's been doing that for many months now. He has said that he's been working 65+ hour weeks for a long time now and I think BitVPS has suffered because of it.

We all realized that BitVPS was going to tank if we didn't organize some sort of effort to keep it going. This is what we are trying to do now. The only problem is that we only have half of the information to run the business. We have logins for most of the servers, but we do not have all of the hosting-company details, lights-out management credentials, logins for third-party services, etc. We are essentially trying to fight with one hand tied behind our back.

I am truly sorry for your horrible experiences this week. If I were you, I'd be mad too. I've had to deal with bad hosting in my career as well. I really do want to bring what I know to the table to make this service the most successful that it can be. The whole community benefits from a reliable, Bitcoin-backed, automated VPS service with fantastic support. This is what we're going to give as soon as we have the tools to manage it.

Thanks for hanging in there.

-p

I think BitVPS owner should reimburse all loses caused by outage of his service.

Daily Bitcoins had received about 0.5 BTC from the Operation Fabulous each day before this accident and I assume I have moral rights to demand refund from the BitVPS operator.

And that's just one client.  Basically, everyone on the network who has an operation fabulous ad banner, their ads arn't displaying, and their pages arn't loading.  It's a DISASTER when their pages don't load, and if they remove the ad boxes, we like, lose clients over this.  Refunding me partial of my hosting fees is not nearly what the effect of damages caused by the lapse in service. 

And this isn't the first time.  Why on earth are servers getting turned off?  Last time it was 8 hours downtime because James literally turned our server off as if we didn't pay and we did.  Then wasn't responding to tickets.  If you are too busy at work to respond to tickets, then why are you going and turning servers off?

And the incident in Amsterdam, where the datacenter owner was found to be not trustworthy and we had to do an emergency switch to the switzerland DC?  And then the other incident in switzerland where the DC owner was holding your payment hostage?  And we are still in switzerland?  And the other incidents in cali, like if that's a brand new server in a brand new DC, and the bills are paid, why are servers going dark.  WTF I'm so glad there are more people involved over there, I wish I had a vmdk file of the entire server on a regular basis so if something goes wrong I can do something about it. 

Just switch providers until BitVPS can get their act together.  I've heard excellent things about Site5.

The Switzerland DC is *not* being helpful at this point. We now have the contact info but they apparently only have one technician who is apparently not doing anything. Our server seems to be up, in fact, I'm not sure it ever got turned off. The networking is broken and so far they haven't fixed it. We keep asking. :-P

I apologize once again. I'm not sure what else to say.

When we get this straightened out we will look into alternative Euro providers. If we can't find any, we'll bring them all stateside and migrate everyone.

-p

I have been using bitvps for about 9months now and have only had 1 outage. The outage was probally 8 or so hours and i was informed of it and told i would be credited. I dont think i was ever credited but thats besides the point. Just wanted to make it clear that not everyone has problems

Can we avoid the international datacenters altogether?  The cali DC seems pretty stable, the only problem was human error on James' part, but that's in the past now, I thought amsterdam would have been a great place to host the server and he needed to move us to switzerland, I guess I misunderstood the company's structure and I thought you guys actually had hardware and I got to choose where the VM was.  Put OpFab wherever you think it will be reliable and it should be like a 'set-and-forget' scenario, so I can actually start figuring out this ridiculous database software and start developing the site?  I have way too many things on my mind than to do than worry about this.  FIX IT.  Call them again.  If you have access to the server, get the raw file and move it to cali.  Let me know if the IP changes.  Shouldn't be complicated.

And I'm sorry if I sound distraught. 

When I opened my 'high priority ticket' yesterday, I simply said 'The opfab server is down, please fix!' since everytime I would scream at James it wouldn't seem to help my situation, and I would be nice for a change, and my tone got harsher as time went by, like seriously 1 hour is crazy and 24 hours later not hearing why, is just outrageous.  So that's why I had to publicly post about this and I'm SO GLAD I did, because before I did, I knew NOTHING.  Just darkness.   

I've been on the cali dc since they got it and have had no downtime whatsoever.

The only downtime in the cali dc was James shut my server off.  I had my bill paid, he just shut my server off.  I opened a high priority ticket immediately, he didn't respond to it for 8 hours, and the reason was he just was at work and decided to go around turning servers off for those who didn't pay their bill.  Mine is always paid.  He was too busy at work to respond to tickets, but not too busy to turn servers off.  Wow.

I don't think avoiding international would help, bitvps had same problems in US before. And they being in switzerland was actually a reason why we have chosen it, a big advantage for us to have frontend nearby with only 15ms latency to other parts of the coinbr.com system. If everything went to cali, we'd have to look elsewhere.

https://operationfabulous.com/ IS UP!

w00t! 

Mclovin,

I'm so glad that your service is restored. We had a heck of a time getting the Swiss DC to respond to us.

We do have hardware, we rent dedicated servers and are SUPPOSED to have full lights-out mgmt capability. In this case, it seems the Swiss DC had a lot of wrong info recorded in their portal system, were testing the wrong server for connectivity, and were being UN-responsive on top of it. We never did actually talk to someone on the phone, the phone number just rings and rings. We finally had to open up a bunch of chat windows and hound the crap out of them until they fixed it.

We do apologize for this outage and we'll work with you to credit you if you'd like to stay with us. We completely understand if you have to go, however.

I hope we can stay in Switzerland. It is nice having an internal option.

Thanks a bunch.

-p

Bumping this thread to hear how things changed for the better or worse. And to tell how my story with them went so far:

Since less than one week I have a VPS at bitvps. The $20/month one.

The first IP was blacklisted. "Danger! Scammers ahead", so I requested a new IP.
They gave me a new IP some days later. Meanwhile my developer setup tomcat, database, frontend frameworks and some custom code. Both kunagi and my app was running. As per my requirement, those should come up after a reboot, so I rebooted. Not only my stuff did not come back online but neither sshd or ping. My server was dead. Their management console works with a JAVA applet which rises 10 red flags with me, so I straight gave them a second ticket to fix their server (and meanwhile asking my dev if he might have touched anything that might kill the server).
They said the network stack was broken and they could give me a new server with a backup of my old server. WTF? Seriously? Also they suggested to use the console, so I setup a virtual machine with a free java which failed to run any applet after don't know how many hours of work but anyway …
Two days later they informed me that my server was back online. I informed my developer that the server was back online and as all my attempts to start my stuff on that server were in vain, I asked him to make stuff come up on reboot.
His analysis was that stuff doesn't work due to the lack of a loopback device and asked me to fix that. I assume this might be fixable on our own but shouldn't be like that in the first place, so to not mess with their network stack, this is ticket #4 now.

Ok, so they got the server back online with a loopback device. Hooray. Unfortunately rebooting doesn't work again.
As I really don't want to run some shady java app on my pc where I have bitcoins, especially when the shady java app comes from a shady bitcoin-aware hoster, I set up a virtual machine to use the management console.
If, after logging in successfully, I try to do the most basic stuff, namely an "ls", it disconnects. I made up something even more basic: "# hi" which "works" but "ls" kills it again. And again.

Fuck how do they have even one client????

Give digitalocean a try, i've been happy with them for a while now.

I assume you are talking about this (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing). Yeah, looks neat. Is the management console some java app or can I log in using a normal ssh in recovery mode? … doh. They don't accept bitcoin :(

Oh, they look really promising! Asked them to accept bitcoin :) Thanx for the pointer.

Thanks to joesmoe2012, I am a customer at digitalocean now. I asked them if they would take bitcoins and when they said they wouldn't and after I learned about how big they are, BITVPS got back to me after this most recent 15h down time.
James sincerely apologized for the trouble this one machine has and offered to give me back my money and provide a new server for a full year free of charge.
I honestly don't think they use this java console to steal my bitcoins but they could (if I wouldn't care to sandbox it) and that is not ok, so for now I appreciate the compensation but still can't suggest to the general public to give them a try.

If you put an unencrypted bitcoin wallet on a VPS you are begging for an employee or exploit of the hosting company to fleece you. Learn from Linode.

This might be offtopic here, but what happened with Linode?

Nothing...they're around, alive & well.  No plans to accept bitcoin, however :(

Let me ask the question another way, what did grifferz mean with "learn from Linode."?
Have they made a public statement against accepting bitcoin for their services?

Their control panel was cracked allowing attacker to go through the list of customer servers, looking for ones that might have a bitcoin wallet on them, reboot them in single user mode, alter root password, boot them again, go in as root, find unencrypted wallets, send coins to selves.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-228000-stolen-from-customers-of-hacked-webhost/

Do not put unencrypted wallets in places where other people can access them.

It's trivial for a VPS provider to look at unencrypted block devices, which means it's trivial for anyone who hacks the VPS provider to do the same. Scanning for things that look like bitcoin wallets is a quick and effective way to find valuable things.

lol sorry, had completely missed his comment.


And thank you for clarifying :)

I'm not worried about my unencrypted wallets on their server. I'm worried about my encrypted wallets on my client. With this Java applet to access the management console they have read access to the file system the browser runs on and that is why I made sure to let that be a virtual machine.

(I'm not sure how security models changed but like 15 years ago I made a java applet and was *shocked* that all it took was a self-signed applet to access the full disk of whoever used my applet. Flash asks for permissions. Java apparently not. How can that be?)

I don't use their java ssh console to access my machine. With DO here's the steps i take

1) login to their website (with ssl of course)
2) create virtual machine
3) Password and IP is emailed to me, i then login with SSH
4) update your OS, enable firewall, change ssh port, disable password logins, and then do whatever it is you need to do.

As others mention, any VPS or shared hosting environment is no good from a security standpoint.

I just use OSX's built in terminal to ssh to my VPS's though, I don't -ever- use their java ssh console.

This only works as long as the machine boots and starts sshd but what if not? This "what if not" happened 4 times in the first week I was with them. On my other servers I go to the web console and click on recovery boot and can ssh into the recovery console but with them this is only possible with a java applet.

BitVPS is the WORST HOSTING COMPANY ON THE PLANET.

Downtime, lack of response, piss-poor connectivity.

Their servers go down randomly and they could care less.

thats why people should pick me :D