-
Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
Hostrail Gone!
- Thread starter JJW
- Start date
Fe-Hosting
New Member
Yes it was posted on WHT...
But didn't they open in like 1998? Did anyone get a hold of the owner yet? I seen his username online on wht..
Good Luck.
But didn't they open in like 1998? Did anyone get a hold of the owner yet? I seen his username online on wht..
Good Luck.
Seraphim
Active Member
Saw that coming. Back in April they had a fairly major outage with their VPS nodes- all of their nodes were experiencing load related problems caused by the amount of overselling they did. That's what wiped out 321hosted, and caused intermittent outages for me as I rebalanced my clients onto the Xen VPSs I had purchased elsewhere.
Seems like they never did fully recover. The VPS from them I had at the time disappeared a few weeks after that outage because with 321hosted gone the billing system it had been paid for through had vanished. I later noticed the IP having been reassigned to someone else, obviously they didn't miss my business nor make any effort to get me to cut out the middle man and continue the service.
Good thing I bailed when I did though. This is why when running any kind of service even on your own hardware, make backups and don't put all your eggs into one basket.
Last edited:
Fe-Hosting
New Member
That's right. in fact with 2checkout we do $1.00 for like 1 more IP. it cost about $0.78 for that $1.00 so think about it. But they where thinking get about 100 of the $1+/mo and be okay with cheap servers. overload cheap servers and see what happens. I also seen they got free IP's off LSN not sure if it's right or not but that could also do it.
-
Seraphim
Active Member
Ultimately, it wouldn't have been worth the time.
Getting in was fine. The reseller I used had near-instant activation, I was up and running with the basic framework of my standard loadout within a few hours.
Then I started running into the effects of the overselling. The machine was sluggish, management scripts were hanging with load reports in the 20-30 range. A few support tickets later it got moved to a different node, which smoothed it out for the most part- although they did continue to have intermittent outages for whatever hardware-related reasons.
And then the April meltdown hit. It was supposed to be a normal hardware upgrade with some software updates. But by the time all was said and done, all of their nodes were down for several days. When they finally came back up, they were so unstable and grossly overloaded that it was pretty much unusable. Unloading data from the VPS took several days of constantly retrying and retrying, even staying up to early morning to take advantage of off peaks in the hopes of better transfer rates and less timeouts. If I had timed myself getting everything off that troubled VPS to pay myself for it, I'd have spent more getting off of it than I had in the entire time it was online.
Ultimately the outages took out 321hosted, killing off the billing system I had been using to pay for that VPS. So good thing I jumped ship when I did, because not long after that it stopped responding entirely and I can only assume was deleted. Eventually I was again presented with a ssh login at that IP, but none of my user/pass combos worked so I can only assume the IP was reassigned to another client.
All told? This was a doomsday waiting to happen. I do hope everyone else had backups.
WebIntellects-R
Member
So aggressive you are! It might be a real trouble for all those people you have just called bastards. Wish you luck to be successful, but, I believe there is something like Karma, you know.
As for the hostrail... It is just an example on how companies may not stand the competiton of hosting world.
Oh come on WebIntellects...
Competition? It had nothing to do with competetition. HostRail had no competetitors. The problem was that his service was unsustainable. The servers were so heavily overloaded that there was no way it could work.
As for the clients...sure, you have to feel bad for some of them, particularly the ones who didn't know what they were getting into, or the ones whose hosts used HostRail to offer hosting. But a lot of people knew what they were getting into. They were buying VPS servers for $1, knowing damn good and well that is isn't sustainable. I have no pity for those people at all.
Competition? It had nothing to do with competetition. HostRail had no competetitors. The problem was that his service was unsustainable. The servers were so heavily overloaded that there was no way it could work.
As for the clients...sure, you have to feel bad for some of them, particularly the ones who didn't know what they were getting into, or the ones whose hosts used HostRail to offer hosting. But a lot of people knew what they were getting into. They were buying VPS servers for $1, knowing damn good and well that is isn't sustainable. I have no pity for those people at all.
Fe-Hosting
New Member
Same here. But you must feel bad for the users who had no clue and could think you can get a VPS for that cheap and think it will run for ever. it take me back to the 250free.com issues they had. I just hope they had backups are where able to get them before servers gone poop...
It had nothing to do with the cheap VPS - they simply had no idea how to run a company.
Actually, it had to do with both. You cannot offer VPS's with the resources they were offering, at those prices, without severely overselling the servers. I haven't looked at their prices in some time, but I would assume the numbers don't add up to even pay for the cost of the servers.
wswd: Either way you want to look at it, if they were selling at such a low cost that they couldn't make a profit, that means they have no idea how to run a business/company.
deanhills
Active Member
