I got a email yesterday from a company called clickandbuy.com saying that i signed up for their account and that i authorized AlphaRed to debit the account automatically.
I never gave AlphaRed or this clickandbuy to create or debit any account. Whats their angle on this scam? i don't get it.
I was a customer w/AR back in June for one month. I canceled and got my money refunded because their network was not performing.
I thought they were phony like the BlowOutHost person who scammed $140 out of me.
Their deal looked too good to be true, and just what I wanted and at my price. So after a week later, unable to find similar deal I decided to finally take the chance and purchase a server.
I got my server on 6/9 and it has been just awesome so far.
I saw an alphared banner the other day here on WHT, and checked out their prices, and WOW (Yes, I know the old adage...I don't need to hear it...)
I did some searching and read all about the drama that happened around them several years ago. I'm not interested in that. I want to know how they are now. Has the level of service gone up or is it still in the crapper?
Wow, I never knew I could waste so much time and effort on one company.
So as you can see this is not good.
I ordered their $20 VPS, and about 24 hours later I recieved the information regarding login. I logged in, and every button I clicked said Service not available. So I figured it was just because it got set up, so I submit a ticket and get a response that there is no problem.
2 Weeks later, I am submitting the same ticket. Same Response.
3 Weeks later I am on chat with them 5 straight nights, and different people keep telling me my server is overloaded and will get moved by morning. And guess what happens in the morning... "Service not available" for everything in Plesk. 20 Ticket reply's later, no support. Nothing works, so basically I got to the point I just demanded a refund and cancellation of anything service they tried to provide me.
I haven't even been able to successfully see my index.html....
They completely lied about every thing they did. It is the worst company I have ever dealt with regarding anything. Please dont make the mistake I have made.
I will keep you guys up to date on how long it takes them to cancel my service, and if they refund my money... If not they should be expecting a full inbox.
I am currently deciding between these 3 companies for a vps solution. They all seem to be solid and provide good deals. I would just like to know everyone's experience in terms of speed, uptime, support handling and stablility.
I'm thinking of getting a 40GB/2500GB VPS with Alphared. It'd be serving static files (~10MB each), and no dynamic content or files.
Support is not the most important thing (Yes, I read the older topics ) since it would be a secondary mirror for download only. However for it to be effective I'll need to be sure about performance & bandwidth allocation.
Has anybody ever used them for this kind of thing? Are you able to really use all 2500GB for the (relatively low) fee of $49/mo? And if yes, how is the speed per connection? 200K/sec possible during peak times?
I don`t know what will be with AlphaRed but for me current situation don`t look good and look like every day they can shutdown all servers without warning....in this moment cPanel licenses stop to work, alphared site is down, uberbox is down...somebody know more info?
I thinking to move all my sites to other host and still I don`t know where to move all...
I need 400-500Mbit dedicated BW, 6000GB on hard drives and few servers....also, I need stable network, true 24/7/365 support, good prices
In this moment I thinking about choopa.com but I don`t know much about them...to move all data and setup all I need few days and before I do that I must find good host...
I ordered 5 servers from alphared.com, I spent an entire evening explaining to their sales person what I required.
In the end I decided on 4 Duo's and one P4. All to be connected with a Gigabit private Lan and to share 10Mbit premium bandwidth. I was promised it would take approx three days for this to be setup.
One week later I was met with an apology that the price quoted would unfortunately have to be tripled due to a mistake.
I paid $3,500 setup. Its now three weeks later and I have NO service.
I follow up every few days and am promised the service will be up soon.
STILL NO SERVICE!
Today I'm met with ANOTHER email saying it will be 10 days to allocate me 32 IP's. Not to mention the mess that every few days I'm asking how I want the servers setup.
I have missed my deadlines, my current provider is still billing me, my clients are moaning that I"m doing nothing about our current providers issues.
Are there any decent providers out there? or is finding someone who is competent and does what they say a pipedream?
I am considering getting high bandwidth hosting from either alphared, choopa, or leaseweb, but before I do I would like to ask you which one would give me the best speeds, globally. Any other info that you can provide would be useful too. Thanks!
Also, if you can suggest another host for high bandwidth that is very reliable and has great ping results for the us, europe, and asia, i'd be interested.
A friend and I ordered a dedicated AlphaRed server, drawn in by the excellent pricing.
We were problem-free for a few days, until I noticed my irssi (IRC chat client) screen detach. I assumed I accidentally pressed something, and continued chatting. Then it happened again, and a few more times. I looked at the last people to login to my shell, and it showed that an AlphaRed employee had logged into both 'root' and my personal shell. The employee was reading my chat logs in real-time.
The AlphaRed employ did not only read my chats, but participated as well. You may find logs that here: pastebin.ca/raw/1057127
Some excerpts:
05:05:40 <@infid3l[eMo]> hm.. 05:05:48 <@infid3l[eMo]> =D i love finding hacked shells 05:05:52 <@infid3l[eMo]> especially when they're on my network 05:06:01 <@infid3l[eMo]> and then snatching control of them =D =D 05:06:44 <@lifelike> = d 05:06:53 <@infid3l[eMo]> so whats up ppl 05:06:58 <@infid3l[eMo]> sorry to break into your conversation =D
and:
05:08:00 <@infid3l[eMo]> lol=D 05:08:30 <@infid3l[eMo]> I guess infid3l wants the screen back 05:08:35 <@infid3l[eMo]> eh, i'll give it back. 05:08:41 <@lifelike> lol who u 05:08:42 <@infid3l[eMo]> I'm watching you =D 05:08:55 <@infid3l[eMo]> I'm Alpha Red's network admin 05:08:59 <@lifelike> looool 05:09:01 <@infid3l[eMo]> I run the network this box is on
I then realized that this AlphaRed employee thought that I had somehow hacked the machine and gained root access. This box was unmanaged, yet the employee did not consult the owner to verify that I was a legitimate user. When the employee discovered I had not hacked the box, he claimed that IRC daemons were against the AUP. Below is the only mention of IRC in the AUP:
``11. Clients running IRC daemon are required to take immediate action on notification of any botnet or suspected
DMCA activity on the server. Such action shall include immediately closing any channels related to such activity.
Clients refusing to take such action or provide access to Alpha Red to take such action will have all access to the IRC daemon ports blocked and may be terminated without further notice.'
When I made the employee aware of this, he claimed there were complaints made about the IRC server. When I asked what the nature of the complaints were, he said he was not at liberty to discuss it. I personally doubt there were any complaints, as the IRCd was completely legitimate and exclusive.
I talked to the employee via ``wall'' messages via the root shell for a while. When I mentioned how unprofessional his way of dealing with the situation was, he told me he had control over the network and he didn't have to be professional.
While talking on the phone the employee told me I should have notified AlphaRed about running an IRCd. Nowhere in the AUP did it say anything about notifying AlphaRed. The employee acted like it was common sense -- which to me, it wasnt.
With no evidence of illegitimate activity, AlphaRed still refuses to allow an IRCd to run on our box. Even though it was their mistake, we are the ones paying for it.
AlphaRed offered no apology, and only left us inconvenienced.
how many companies are exploiting the alphared fallout.
In a thread in the outage forums where alphared customers are trying to figure out what is going on, you have competition posting in there with there flashy signatures and telling them to go look at the OFFER forums where the top 5 posts have 'alphared refugees'.
It is an abomination to this community and completely irresponsible.
A company has gone down the drain, peoples DATA and possibly livelihoods has been lost and it seems the vultures have come to play, competition take over outtage threads acting as if they are giving some sort of advice but in reality are only trying to advertise there SIGNATURES which is a an advertisement. Can you say exploitation?
Is this what the world has come too? I am disgusted
Alphared refugee - bandwidth special bummer6666 Yesterday 11:22 PM by bummer6666
^^^^^^FDC ?
Quote:
AlphaRed Specials Rodney-E2
How many other companies are going to participate in the fallout and exploitation of people who have maybe lost everything?
The ANNOUNCEMENT thread in outtage forums is this [url]
Got posts like this [url]
Like this [url]
and EVEN WORST POSTS LIKE THIS [url]
Complete exploitation of one company's failure and members on this forum are completely taking advantage of the situation.
Reminds me of the shark/bankers of wall street taking advantage of every weakness they see specifically for financial gain. With the current economic crisis it makes me ashamed to be associated with the likes of these.
In what appears as an even bigger mistake by alphared and I would expect some legal action against them even more. Alphared apparently will be trying trying to charge for service while the billing system and everything else was down.
How were we supposed to cancel, pay or do anything if we didn't want the service? How can they expect to have people pay for service when some of us have already moved and paid for service elsewhere?
I had confidence in them coming back, but I will for sure continue to move away. They couldn't manage the company and expect us to pay for service when we had no option to cancel.
Directly from the chat:Me: This is in a general sense, are you going to be charging everyone?Jay Merritt: It would only make sense. They have been receiving a service and support.
What are the thoughts on that, you may have moved. But you may have some bills coming your way.
Its a video and picture sharing website for India.
In the first 1-2 months, I will need around 250GB storage and 2TB bandwidth per month. After that, I will need much more. I have no idea how much I bandwidth may need. So I may go to a 50Mbps unmetered bandwidth; to limit my bandwidth cost.
My budget is around $400 per month. I want to have server(s) in west coast as it will be closer to India.
I have narrowed down to FDCServers and AlphaRed; as they both offer unmetered bandwidth for cheap. I will start with metered bandwidth and then go to unmetered bandwidth when my bandwidth demands exceeds.
From Me to Support I noticed that my inodes are set abnormally low to 200,000 we just upgraded to VPS plan per lunars request at we are at 160,000 on second day of operation on new vps server. From Sarwan singh Jassi to siteadmin(ME) When you reach 200,000 inodes you will need to upgrade to dedicated plan However and Email from the sales guy states the following. We do not force upgrades do to inodes, we just increase your inodes as you need them. Server crashes occur all the time about 1-3 times a month. Do not use lunar
They also run the old 90's upgrade scam, they claim your script utilize high resources for php, mysql.
Their claim
CPU%: 3.15 MEM%: 1.70 MySQL: 0.9 Top Process %CPU 50.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 48.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 44.0 /usr/bin/php
After fighting with these people telling them that their server is configured incorrectly because we have load tested each and every script and that these scripts are used on 1000's of sites and the traffic we have does NOT warrent the useage they claim we went a head and upgraded per their recommendation.
So we get a brand new vps plan(see complaint above) and on the VPS server our usages look totally normal with proves they don't know what they are doing.
Directly from Pesky Plesk on the second day of getting our upgrade
CPU%: 0.15 MEM%: 0.19 MySQL: 0.2 Top Process %CPU 17.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 19.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 15.0 /usr/bin/php
They are scammer, we sign up with them and they ask us to submit credit card detail which we do.
Guess what , they use our credit card to purchase server for their own use, we contact them and they ask us to charge back if we wish, I think as they are now no longer need for the server
They are a scammer Scammer and poor DC will suffer a lost becasue I will chargeback all the charges for the server
May I Know is there any way to report this company (I am not in US) cause they must be punish for this issue
I'll tell you my story right now. I got the VPS and they charged me $60. The page didn't even look like a paypal page and I didn't know when I went through the order process that I have been charged. They accepted my payment even though they had the radio button that said first month a dollar. They even didn't have cpanel installed at first! They gave me the email and I had to contact them to install cpanel! They have this stupid contrat thing and they will take you to a collection agency for failure of the billing system that they have. It says DO NOT MAKE PAYMENT! but how can you tell? They are a complete total scam! The vps firewall was dropped for no reason during the morning. I asked why and they left the chat. They have good VPS if you got the extra $59 to cover the beginning.
EuroVPS company received the payment for VPS server and does not give me the settings finding different reasons for that and does not want to refund my money. ORDER #EV20380S Date 28-Mar-2009
That was 11 April when I last received e-mail from them saying that Accounts department would consider possibility of refunding the money to my paypal account.
I saw an offer from BoxVPS that was too good to be true. And in fact it was. It's been nearly a month since I paid for a VPS and still no service. My client login is disabled and they won't respond to requests for service or for a refund.
Simply stated - BoxVPS is a scam. Do not succumb to their offers, no matter how attractive they might seem. This is apparently just another in a long line of scams appearing with startling frequency on WHT. This phenomenom makes it difficult to give new hosts a try.
I am a very diplomatic person and I believe in doing fair business. This is why I've decided to write this post in your forums as well as my own and a few others. I want to share with the world our horrible experience with Server4you.de in hopes of saving the rest of you from their lies.
I am not one to openly bash people online but I feel the need to spare all of you from falling victim to this company!
In order to offer the most stable listening experience to all of you, we needed to add another European server. Doing a little research in Google, we fell on Server4you.de (a German company).
Here is an example of what they promote (in German):
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3400+, DualCore 64 Bit, 1.024 MB DDR2-RAM 1x 160 GB SATA-HDD Betriebssystem: OpenSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu und Debian Plesk 8.2 - 10 Domains Unbegrenzter Datentransfer (which means unlimited datatransfer) Kostenloser Support per E-Mail und 0800-Hotline
Before hand, we verified with them that the unlimited datatransfer package was accessible for streaming. Most companies don't allow this so it is always the first question to ask. They confirmed that there was no problem at all!
Well, after 2 months of service with them, they are telling us that we must limit our datatransfer to 75GB/day or 2TB/month. You might think that this is already a lot but this is standard for most dedicated servers and this suddenly makes them pretty expensive (even for North-American standards). Note that European bandwidth is known to be significantly cheaper than North-American bandwidth.
This was one of the few times I've had to sign a contract for hosting. So for the next year, I'm stuck paying for cheap/mediocre quality bandwidth that's suddenly not even unmetered anymore! I would walk away from them if I could (contract or no contract, I don't care) but since we're outside Germany, they made us pay for 12 month in advance. So if I want to get anything out of that money, I have no choice to use their low grade bandwidth.
Basically, consider yourself warned! Don't do business with Server4you!
They actually disconnected our servers without warning or even messaging us because we had apparently reached this new bandwidth quota which had never been mentioned in the past!
Yesterday I got a call from addr.com (caller id read AFTERGEN INC. tel: 409-938-0691) The man with the Indian accent of some advised me that my webhosting has been active since 2001 and he said I owe them $750 or so. I told him I haven't hosted with them since 2001. He advised me that they the hosting account has been active since then.
So I tell him that you waited 8 years to call me? He said well "we couldn't get in touch with you at your hotmail account". Yea but still 8 years to call me? He tells me that I didn't cancel hosting with them.
I know for a fact that as soon as you don't renew hosting with addr.com or any other webhosting service, they will give 1 or 2 weeks to pay or they will delete your account. Then I said I won't pay them a dime! He tells me that he can give me a discount. Can you believe this scam? I hang up the phone on them.
SO NOW I OWE $750 to addr.com for past fees and they are claiming that I never cancelled hosting with them and I didn't notify them.
Before I got into web hosting business, I too, searched the whole World Wide Globe for a good web hosting company. And like many fall for some scams and learned from my experiences. Here are some ways you can tell a web host that is not safe. Sign-up Page isn't secure.
Request a server IP to ping. This way you can figure out if the company is on a VPS, Reseller or a computer in someone's apartment [Reverse IP Check]
Unlimited Everything (well back in the day it was part of it until Yahoo decided to go solo) Company website itself goes down.
Can't find any of their representatives online (e.g. forums, blogs).
Doesn't have a Phone Number to reach.
Private Domain Registration (would you really send your money to a unknown company's PO.BOX address?)
Lies to you (e.g. Gives you 1 TB Bandwidth, but if you use up 50 GB and they close your account)
Asks for SSN/EIN for security purposes (hmm... complete B.S)
Doesn't tell you exactly how they protect your data, how secure the server is and so on. Asks for your PayPal Username & Password on their website (also known as phishing) Do a WHOIS Search and check how long they have been on business. (added by maccrazy)
Those are just some of things I found in a scam web host. I am sure there are many, please feel free to share your story and precautions you take.
webhostingpad has terrible service and disconnnects its phones when it has technical issues. Dozens of people have been victimized by this company and lost business thanks to their incompentence. They give all web hosts a bad name--please get the word out!
TagBridge is by far the worst company to get involved with. I purchased a VPS and they said in a support ticket 5 hours after I bought it that it will be setup in a few minutes. 24 hours later I cancel and request a refund and I went with veritynet.. 12 hours later my VPS was made and I still have a cancellation request in place which they ignored. It has been a week now and I'm still attempting to get a refund. Jamie blocked me on MSN to avoid my conversation. I talked to a friend of his and everytime has asks Jamie for a refund jamie doesn't respond. HORRIBLE SUPPORT. Now I have a VPS I have no use for, that of which I canceled 12+ hours before it was even MADE and they refuse to message me back regarding my refund.
This will be posted EVERYWHERE till I get my refund. This business is a scam and I don't want to be involved with it anymore.