Shady Lil Practice At Softlayer

Are Xilo.net Shady

Dec 20, 2008

I've had an account with them for a while, needed to close the account, and am having to hassle them constantly for any response. I spoke with their Billing support team and they were helpful and said they would close it - only they suddenly stopped replying - and three months later it's not closed and i'm still getting invoices.

- Has anyone else had a problem closing an account with them?

- Does anyone have any tips to get them to finish the job they started? (It can't be THAT hard to cancel an account!)

The fact i'm being blatantly ignored by Billing and fobbed off when I send tickets to normal support ("we will talk to a billing manager" etc - which i'm now thinking is maybe BS?) is making me paranoid they've turned from a proper company into somekind of scam. The 'unpaid inovices' total keeps going up (with the insult of additional late fees) what happens if I just don't pay? Considering I contacted them to cancel months ago AND I got a response promising me it would be done!

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Buyavps.com Shady Business Practices

Jun 2, 2008

Last September, I subscribed to a VPS from buyavps.com to test how WHM and some of our accounts behave if we upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5. This was concluded towards early November, but I left the VPS subscription active, thinking later on we might have other cases where I would rather test a server-wide software upgrade in a VPS first.

A couple of months later, in January of this year, I indeed had such a case where I wanted to test something again. After a couple of unsuccessful tries, I opened a support ticket about accessing my VPS, thinking maybe I wrote down a wrong password or whatever.

Imagine my surprise when support told me my VPS account does not exist and asked me whether I have been actually paying for one, then asked me for a transaction ID. This although I had an active subscription at that time, paying monthly for the service.

Actually the subscription just billed again right while support sat on the ticket, writing me this response. After that shock, I went and cancelled the subscription, but I already lost another month's payment. I demanded the money back for a period I was charged for at a time when there was clearly no service any more, plus the period before at the end of which there clearly was no service any more either. Support said they'll forward my ticket to billing, and that was the last I heard.

Still having faith in the company, since it was to my knowledge Tina's company (she was the reason I went with buyavps.com in the first place), I decided to wait for a few weeks for the refund.

After that came months where I forgot about this issue, recently noticing only the e-mails again. Still having faith in Tina, I sent her a PM here on WHT so that she could look into this issue. To which she answered that she sold her part in buyavps.com to another company months ago.

At that point, I sent off another support ticket to buyavps.com, where several people asked the same questions all over again, just to say in the end I am not entitled to any kind of refund. At which I got pissed and told them they stole my money and do I really have to come to a public place to tell the story?

Well here I am - knowing the industry I am not very surprised at how they took my money and provided no service for it. For this, they deserve to be named here and serve as a warning for potential new customers of buyavps.com.

However, I am extremely disappointed in how you can't trust even prominent people of this industry with good reputation any more. I signed up to this service because I trusted the person who ran the company, all payments went to her Paypal account, and at the time this whole fiasco happened she was still (part-)owner of the company. Shrugging it all off is not what I expected.

p.s. I have a number of e-mails for proof and further details if desired, just wanted to keep the size of this post within limits.

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VPS Best Practice

Nov 4, 2008

Anyone have any input on best practice for running vps servers it seems that there is a grey area when it comes to different configurations.

Ive seen so many
OpenVz
Hypervm with openVz
Virtuozo
Vmware

way to go about running a vps server and or servers and recomended configurations for each type.

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Routing Practice

Sep 6, 2007

Our colo has two carriers, call them A and B. I have discovered the colo provider is round-robining traffic out it's two carriers on a per-packet basis, not per flow.

Assume we want to reach destination IP a.b.c.d.

%> traceroute -q5 a.b.c.d

Results show that at the hop leaving the colo's border router, some packets transit Carrier A and some Carrier B, to the same destination IP, during the same traceroute.

Is this a routing Best Practice, or am I correct in thinking this is the Lazy Man's way of load balancing across multiple circuits, multiple carriers? BGP route selection does not seem to apply here (i.e., either Carrier A or Carrier B but not both at the same time).

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Best Practice To Administer A Website

Apr 15, 2009

Do you access your server remotely (RDC) and administer your website or do you use SSL from any machine?

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Best Practice For Web Hosting On Your Own Server

Jun 27, 2007

I am currently web hosting my own site (at home) through port 8000 using firewire. My activation is by invitation only. This means that I have to manually activate you before you can post on my board. I do this for security reasons and plus there is no need to invite the outside world. However, anyone on the outside world can view the site. The url is in the form of xyz.abc.uvw.rst:8000/forums/ where xyz.abc.uvw.rst is the IP address and 8000 of course is the port.

In order to make my site more secure, I have also changed the admin dir so that you can't just url to .../forums/admin/ and then start typing in passwords.
In addition, the version of my board is hidden and html is disabled.

I believe that I am secure but I would like to know other best web hosting practice methodologies that will allow me to be even more secure, particularly in the case where I am hosting on my own computer in my own home.

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Conduct Or Legal Operating Practice

Jun 29, 2008

I have a ethics and legality scenario I would like to pose here. This is to be considered a fictional scenario and any similarity to any real company or person is unintentional.

COMPANY X has colo racks in DATACENTER and hosts a client named COMPANY Y. COMPANY Y also hosts 50 small web sites on cpanel and 40 VPS servers on their linux VPS node in exchange for a discount or other compensation. During the month of may and COMPANY Y's bill raises from being 3000 past due to over 12000 past due to various reasons including purchasing of hds from the DATACENTER using COMPANY X's account, tech work dont by DATACENTER for COMPANY Y needed also billed to COMPANY X's account, as well as BW and rack costs. Seeing this alrming bill by the end of May COMPANY X begins putting pressure on COMPANY Y to pay some invoices as no payments were received during the entire month of may and COMPANY X is also having a hard time paying DATACENTER due to not being paid by COMPANY Y but makes efforts to pay 25% of the outstanding bill in June.

Near the end of june COMPANY X has had enough and arrives at the datacetner to attempt to move theritr clients off COMPANY Ys hardware so they can suspend service of COMPANY Y completely. On the visit COMPANY X brings 2 new servers in and begins moving clients of their over and COMPANY X notices this action and begins to suspend and remove access to all of COMPANY X's clients. COMPANY X then decided to power off the boxes of COMPANY Y and removes drives containing COMPANY X customer data for offline recovery. and because they beleived the DATACENTER might be untrustworthy enough to release hardware fromt heir rakcs without their permission. The drives were for as much colatteral purposes as for recoverying customer data. They then pack the drives in boxes and a bag and leave the datacenter having spent nearly 20 hours working and head on a long trip home and signs out of the data center in front of various techs holding the server parts and tools.

Upon arriving back to their office/home

They were informed that the removal of the HDs was not allowed byt he datacenter because the account was past due and it was discovered that several drives with cOMPANY X's clients were left in the datacenter which COMPANY X now wishes they had remembered to get. DATACENTER is furious and demands the account be paid in full by a fixed time or the entire colo will be cut power. COMPANY X scrambles to find others to help them and another major client who has alot at risk decides to help and a payment of $7160 is made to DATACETNER but it came in a few minutes past the deadline. DATACETNER had suspended servuce, and cut power but stated they wil return service shortly. Shortly after this it is discovered that several servers belonging to COMANY X and two other companies who were supsended in the same day were not int he rack anymore. DATACENTER accout rep responds with the following message in ICQ/AIM .....