BitVPS is very disappointed in how this situation was handled.

As one of the few 'real' listings on the exchange (real as in, we are a viable, BTC-making business that has been around for more than 2 years), it is sad to see our share prices tank just on the news of the exchange shutting down.

We *know* this could have been handled VERY differently to prevent the violent market reaction and knee-jerk selloffs of our securities.

We are still evaluating our options but have no finalized plans for our listing. We hope that we can make good on our original promises to our investors. We feel like we've been working hard to protect the interests of our shareholders and to see our share price tank so hard is very disappointing, to say the least.

The good news is that it's a buyer's market and we are taking advantage of this! :-)

We have no plans on going anywhere at the moment and will figure out a way forward.


Thanks,
-phungus

I wanted to post a reply here since we have not seen Namworld in a few days. We're very surprised that he's been missing, considering he's a very prolific investor on BTCT and throughout the Bitcoin community.

BitVPS is very disappointed in the BTCT changes. Our share price has tanked due to this news, and there have been no fundamental changes in our financial situation. We are doing better today than any time in the history of BTCVPS/BitVPS. We actually own most of our own equipment now and have been very busy internally investing in infrastructure upgrades including the procurement of redundant switch gear, more servers, better I/O systems, more disks and memory, etc.

Our dividends dropped this past month but only because we've been re-investing into our infrastructure. Thing is, we were PAYING dividends which is great for us. We've got profits to distribute!

We hope to find a way out of this situation soon but we're still evaluating our options at the moment. It looks like Havelock is our best bet so far but we've not committed to anything yet.

We hope to be in touch with Namworld soon so we can get his take on the situation.


Thanks for the inquiry,
-phungus

Boy, this is going to really piss off some Russian hackers. I wonder what the fallout will be... :-)

-p

For inspiration, check out this open source Java bot people are playing with:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109831.0

-p

Facebook is able to scale horizontally because of the way web services work.

MtGox has to run the trading engine all on one server. Did you see that they released the specs of the two machines they're using?

Facebook literally has many tens of thousands of servers. Gox has like 2 and only one of them can be the actual trading engine.


Language and library speed is the top priority in this context.


-p

The only way to fix this is to get their rinky-dink trading platform off of PHP and on to a lower-level language and libraries.

And maybe even on a new platform...

-p

I just wanted to throw in that BitVPS has been around a long time now and we've got servers world-wide.

We can offer OpenVZ, KVM and dedicated hardware.

We've got automated billing and our admins are on FreeNode IRC #bitvps nearly all the time.


FYI, BitVPS.com changed ownership in December, 2012. We've now got 4 people running the show for better service and support!


Bumping this thread because this is a top Google search result at the moment. :-)


http://www.bitvps.com

Land and livestock.

Pretty quick, usually.

The four of us that are running the show are pretty much volunteering at this point since the company is not far enough into the black to support us. Sometimes it may take a day or so but we've been trying to keep up with the tickets.

Thanks for asking :-)

-p

Thanks for that, Giga!

-p

Wow, what planet are you from, again? :-)

-p

Yes, please don't let the delisting from MPEX taint your picture of BitVPS. We're still operating 100% and now we actually have the remaining information that we were missing from RG when he "handed" it to us.

Shareholders will be taken care of. The majority of the shares were still owned by the company or company officials anyway.

-p

Hey Mc_Lovin, this was definitely no experiment. We were a little hamstrung with no access to the hosting provider's portal or support. It took many hours but we finally were able to brute force our way into the panel and we were also fortunate enough to get hold of RG. He was still in possession of certain pieces of information that we needed to right everything.

The node had been up for 158 days prior to our announcing the outage. We thought it prudent to apply security updates to the box and then reboot it to try and solve the issues we had been seeing (unable to ping google.com, for instance). We most certainly were *not* experimenting, just trying to deliver a stable and secure environment for everyone.

I apologize for the delays. I believe that we now posses all information and logins for ALL of the BitVPS nodes, finally, as of today, Saturday 01/13/13. This after we took control of BitVPS before Christmas. We are definitely trying to make everything smooth and deliver better support than ever before.

Thanks for hanging in there. If you feel like you would like reimbursement for the outage, please open a ticket and we'll work with you.

Best,
-phungus

We finally resolved all of the issues with the Cal2 node and everyone should be up and working again. Sorry for the mess.

-phungus

Well, I spoke too soon. We're still experiencing issues with various VPS's on the Cal2 node.

We are working to fix the issue as quickly as we can and apologize for the outage.

-phungus

... and, everything came back up cleanly. We had to perform a second reboot though because some packages weren't installed properly. I made sure that they were and now the box is up for good.

Thanks everyone!

-phungus

Hey everyone, we're still having some trouble notifying everyone individually, and completely forgot to post here.

We've been having some issues with our California #2 node and are going to have to perform an emergency reboot tonight. We already posted about this hours ago in #bitvps on IRC but it should probably be said here too.

We'll reboot CAL2 at 09:00 PST on 01/11/13.

Sorry for the late notice here, we're still working on getting all our ducks lined up to make BitVPS the best hosting provider in the Bitcoin community.

Thanks all!

-phungus

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

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

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