Umisoo hosting of Bitmaintech Antminers

[superbull]

UMISOO is running their business as usual and i'm still running a bad S4 as usual, I shouldn't have paid 3.3 bitcoins for the miner boxes and place them in UMISOO this is the biggest mistake i have ever made in my bitcoin life, i wish i should have invested more in AMHash cloud rather than buying my own hardware.

[superbull]

Have been struggling for 8 days finally they are manged to resolve the issue, firmware upgrade to stock version 20141016 wtf.
Both miners are now working great at ghash with correct hashrate

[huffdaddy5]

I am still trying to get my issues sorted out. I brought Bitmain into the email conversation, which got a quick and apologetic response out of Umisoo, as well as an assurance from Bitmain that they would ask Umisoo to take a look.

Umisoo didn't do anything that fixed the issue. Eventually after reading this thread I found out about changing the difficulty, so I pointed them at Slush's pool with 2048 difficulty, and one of the units is hashing at 2 TH/s finally. I think they had to reboot it to fix one of the non-hashing boards. No one at Bitmain or Umisoo suggested this, it was only through suggestions here that I decided to try changing the difficulty.

My other miner is still not hashing at any pools I set it to, even though the graph on Umisoo's website shows that it is. I keep explaining this to them and then they keep saying they will look into it, then nothing changes and when I follow up they say that it looks like it's working and they will look into it. Then repeat. I've asked them now to provide a screenshot of the unit hashing at a pool not a graph from their website, to prove that it is hashing. I had set the units to Eligius to demonstrate this, since stats are public, but I don't think it got through.

I feel like this would be much easier to troubleshoot if I had web or SSH access to my machines but they I don't know if this is a service they provide.. I've asked them a couple times but they haven't responded to my question...

Bitmain has been responsive and easier to work with, as I've come to expect from all my dealings with them. It's not that Umisoo is unresponsive, but just that communication is very difficult, and well, they don't really appear to know what they are doing, or to pay attention to what is actually happening with the units...

Sounds like my experience with Umisoo. Just a little over 2 weeks with them now and 1 of my 2 S4 miners seems to be dropping 1 hashboard and is only hashing at 1.4TH/s. The first time this happened they said it was a PSU issue, then they said they replaced the PSU with one that they had and I was back hashing at 2TH/s. Then about 7 days later the same issue has came up again and I'm only hashing at 1.4TH/s, which of course had to occur at the worst possible time with ridiculous rental prices. I've emailed them and this has been their responses.

##First incident and suggestion from Umisoo on 12/8 (this is laughable because I'm not sure how this advice was supposed to help considering the only access that I have to the miner is to configure my pool settings and see their reported hash rate.)
"Hi,  The reason why your machine doesn't work well is because the power isn't  enough.Try again please and contact with me immediately if my advice doesn't work.Wish my advice could help you."

##Most recent incident
Me - 12/16 00:15 UTC
"Hello. My miner id xxx is having issues again. This always seems to happen after I change my pool settings. Can you please reboot the miner?"

webmaster@umisoo.com - 12/16 14:00 UTC
"Your question is received and we will deal with it as soon as possible,please rest assured.Thank you.Have a good day."

Me - 12/17 05:14 UTC
"Thank you for checking on it. Have you found anything out?"

webmaster@umisoo.com - 12/17 05:22 UTC
"Not yet,because we have many customers every day,so perhaps there is some time to your turn.Please wait patiently.Thank you."

Glad to know that I'm not important... Now 16 hours since their last email and no response and I'm still renting out a miner that is only hashing 1.4TH/s.

For the record my other miner has been hashing at 2TH/s most of the time but has recently dropped to 1.9TH/s. I wish I had a way that I could just submit a request for a hard reboot every once in a while.

At $130/month for hosting, I'm really wishing I would have just paid the extra shipping and had Bitmain mail them to a US hosting company.

[eightcylinders]

Agree with all the comments here.  I have 5 S4's hosted at Umisoo.  I would have dozens more, but it really does seem like a startup operation and I want to see more stability before I put a bunch more on there (on the retail side; Umisoo has been doing its own hosting for a very long time).  There are some major advantages though.

Here is hoping that Umisoo is reading this thread!  I would spend a lot more coin there if these issues were fixed.

PROS:

(1) Cost is cheaper than any alternative I have found (for co-location, not cloud which is totally different), especially when factoring in the price drops that are being phased in.

(2) While not perfect, Umisoo is the only service I know of that will allow you to change your pools without a support ticket.  GAW used to provide a similar interface, but they have since moved on to pretend mining.

(3) Shipping from within China to China cheaper and faster versus sending to U.S.

(4) Email support is responsive in my experience. 

CONS:

(1) Lack of clarity on costs and invoicing.  You basically deposit BTC and they draw against the BTC for hosting fees.  However, there is no invoice, no record of the deductions, no transaction history.  You have to trust that Umisoo has it right, or else spend a lot of time checking (for the record, I have not seen anything strange yet).

(2) Monitoring system doesn't work (as others have noted).  Credit for downtime appears to be based on the faulty monitor.  So essentially no credit for downtime without email complaints.

(3) Lots of problems that appear to relate to the S4 (firmware upgrades needed, manual set to 2048 diff, and power supply failures).  These do not seem to be unique to Umisoo BUT Umisoo takes a bit of time to handle. I suspect they have many thousands of S4's, probably with hundreds having the same problems.... so they get to you when they get to you.

(4) No trouble ticket system.  Everything is email based.  Very confusing when trying to solve multiple problems with different miners.

[huffdaddy5]

Among other issues with Umisoo. Apparently their entire website is down. I even emailed them a couple of hours ago asking why their site is down. My miners appear to be still be working properly, but I have no way to check on them or change my pool settings. https://www.umisoo.com/

This brings up their biggest issue. Monitoring. It's not existant. It's basic infrastructure 101, when you have thousands of servers, you implement some sort of monitoring solution. Either custom software or 3rd party. It would not be hard to build a simple script to scan all the miners on a network, pull their activity, load it into a report, and setup metrics to alert against. I've done this with Powershell before, not complicated.

Hosting is more involved than just providing power and making sure you're connected to the internet. You must have the infrastructure in place to support thousands of servers. I have no idea how they keep up with emails as their only way of communication.

Suggestions for Umisoo if you're monitoring this thread.... right....
1. Write your own monitoring. Query your database of miners (sort by miner type, loop through the list and query the the stats via cgminer, etc)
2. Create a ticketing system. Both for customers and automated alerts.
3. When you're monitoring shows an alert, create a ticket.
4. Take care of the tickets in the order they are created.

[huffdaddy5]

Just another example of poor customer service from Umisoo. You can only blame so much on poor communication. The fact that I'm even having to try to communicate with them, is an indicator of a poor hosting company. Isn't the saying something like "You know your IT dept is doing there job, when you don't even know they exist"? Something like that.. Yes I work in IT. I'm a SQL database engineer for a large corporation, so I know about SLAs, which is why this frustrates me. Are they like this with all of their customers? I'm seriously worried that they won't even ship my miners to me, because this will be my first and last month of hosting that I pay them.

I really hate ranting, but I just want others to avoid Umisoo if at all possible. Could these issues be why Bitmain took them off their order site as a shipping option??

Here's the full email thread.

----------------My Last Response------------------------

Why can't you compensate me for my miner being offline for 6 hours, when you did not give any notice?? I had a contract to rent out my miners. If I had known about the maintenance, I would not have rented my miners out during that time. Plain and simple. When you perform "maintenance" you always give your customers notice to let them know that their service will be interrupted during a specific time. This seemed more like you lost power to an entire rack of miners, and you are blaming it on "maintenance. "

If you can't host my miners 24/7, with proper customer service to let me know when you will perform maintenance, then can you please just ship my miners to me so I can host them myself. I'll be more than happy to take them off your hands because you all seem to be to busy.

Also I will quote you about compensation for an earlier email. "Of course, we will compensate the losting time via prolonging the time.Thank you."

I will also note that your email that you sent about "maintenance" came 5 hours after my miners first went offline.


From: webmaster@umisoo.com
Subject: Re:RE: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 16:48:37 +0800

hello,dear
I am sorry to tell you that we can't compensate you 0.06BTC
Becuase it is a common step to maintain the mines,it is normal,so we can't give you this fund although we understand your mood and emotion.Sorry.Thank you for your understanding.

Date:  Thu, Dec 18, 2014 03:19 PM
To:  "webmaster"<webmaster@umisoo.com>;
Subject:  RE: Kindly Reminder
 
The miners are back up and running now. Both miners are also running at full speed now. Thank you very much!

Just to be clear, the miners were not running slow, they were offline completely for 6 hours. See the chart attached. Your ghash charts on Umisoo at first glance look like there was no downtime because you just skip any data points when the miners are offline.

As you can see at my rental rate I lost 0.06 BTC for the 6 hours I was down because I had to give the renters an extra 6 hours of rental time for the downtime. If you could compensate me 0.06 BTC at 17jgFqktNuDarMij7pV2E7KeempMcpefAC it would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

From: webmaster@umisoo.com
To: chrishuffman5@hotmail.com
Subject: Re:RE: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:44:55 +0800

Hi,
You misunderstand us.We mean that we are maintaining the mines,so the power is off somewhere,which causes the  miner works slowly,this is the most accurate  explaination，so please rest assured.
Thank you.
Have a good day.

webmaster

Date:  Thu, Dec 18, 2014 01:55 PM
To:  "webmaster"<webmaster@umisoo.com>;
Subject:  RE: Kindly Reminder
 
How does a mining pool maintenance effect my hosted miners? Also its not by chance that both miners went down at the same exact time.

I work for a Fortune 100 company in their IT department. I know how data center's operate, so please don't play games with me.

If you don't have the resources to host my miners, then please just let me know so I can host them somewhere else.

When my miners are back up I'll send you the bill for my lost time. I'm currently making more than 0.24BTC/day with these 2 miners by renting them out, so please understand my frustrations.

Regards,
Chris

From: webmaster@umisoo.com
Subject: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:05:00 +0800

Attention please!!!
Today we are  having a mining pool  maintenance.Perhaps there is something wrong with your miner.But we can't monitor the situation of every customer's miner.But everything will recover in the afternoon today.
please forgive us for the inconvenience brought to you.Of course, we will compensate the losting time via prolonging the time.Thank you.
Have a good day.

[deeneendo]

Great! All of a sudden, my miners go offline because apparently I owe over 2000$ hosting fee for a little over 2 weeks! Also, hosting fees per day on their site are equal to the value of the device! Major cockup! I am losing money because my miners went offline during a betarigs rental and now I look bad in front of my renter!

I HOPE YOU FIX THIS ASAP AND REFUND!

[ciceanu]

Great! All of a sudden, my miners go offline because apparently I owe over 2000$ hosting fee for a little over 2 weeks! Also, hosting fees per day on their site are equal to the value of the device! Major cockup! I am losing money because my miners went offline during a betarigs rental and now I look bad in front of my renter!

I HOPE YOU FIX THIS ASAP AND REFUND!

Same here! Paid 7 days ago for a month hosting and they just took my miners offline saying that the hosting has expired. WTF!

[D35TR00]

My miners just went off-line as well. All of a sudden I owe Umisoo almost $2,400 USD!! WTF is going on??

[superbull]

S4 restored somehow the pool info were defaulted to 10.x.x.x with UMISOO username, i manually changed the pools to my preferred settings  and now see the hashing rate is only 1.8 not 2.0 i used to have. C1 is still down.
What a mess in their coding wtf.

[Bananana]

Just wait 1-2 days before panicking, its Christmas and no body is working. So its time for hacker to attack...

[superbull]

UMISOO hosting fee for a S5 is now only USD1.99 a day, planned to buy more S5 to put in UMISOO, who wanna joint me to get the bulk discount of qty 52 from Bimaintech?

[ajw7989]

I was debating to buy some S5s with Umisoo but people seem to have a lot of problems with them. Is it only the S4s anyone have any other miners with them without problems?

[superbull]

I don't know but i will give S5 a try, anyway UMISOO said they should able to lower the fee (<USD1.99 a day) for this bulk deployment.
Made a fortune in AMHash1 trading during the crash in Havelock yesterday just exactly recovered all my lost with the fucking Hashie, i'm losing confident with cloud mining...
I'll go for the bulk purchasing myself.

[nreal]

What did happen December when Paycoin mining was on, I suspect umisoo hired our miners and refund our fees
Happened to mee too 

Anyone who wants to buy 1 s4 hosted at umisoo, not sure does my balance 176$ include if trading the miner??

Miner has been bought December 2014, reason im selling is that s4 cgminer is configured so that its not too good with p2pool (--queue 8192 - it should be something like 80) producing alot dead shares. They told me from bitmain not to worry when i bought it and told that someone at umisoo can change the setting, it was a big joke.

But it works with ghash and Ckpool - so if interested tell me what you are offering for that s4.

[deeneendo]

very unstable conditions at Umisoo lately, miners going down intermittently without notification, and now an announced downtime of already over 3 days. Big letdown. Would not recommend them anymore.

[deeneendo]

I got royally screwed by UMISOO: they have cancelled hosting without warning and will compensate using antpool PPLNS, and "replace" my miners with hashnest Hashpower (1:1 conversion). At least I will not have to bother with their abysmal support anymore. Cnuts!