Short Rants « NullMind’s Lair

Twitter killing Blogs ?

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

I try to blog at least two or tree times per month, when something worth remember later on or worth mentioning, I dont blog for others, instead I blog for myself, on stuff I take pleasure reading years later and recalling on a specific event, situation or purchase.

But for the past year I have been using twitter as well, and it shows on the lack of updates on my blog, last year I posted 43 new posts (62 the year prior), this year, with 3/4 of it gone, I only posted … 7

Need to bog more important stuff

26.09.2010 Computers / Internet, Short Rants No Comments

Hosting Fraud .. whats the point ?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

I was looking thru our logs today for (VPS.NET) sales, and found out that in for each successful sale, our fraud system stops on average 7.5 other sales from going thru.

We have several methods of stopping the fraudster from gaining access to an account, and even so once a while one of them manages to get by, usually our post-sale fraud measures catch them within a few hours anyway.

While those numbers are abysmal, the real mind boggling fact is .. those few that do get by, they never do anything with their account … so .. what is the point ?

If people are going to try to buy hosting with a stolen credit card, you’d expect them to use it to further exploit other revenue streams, be SPAM or hosting fake baking logins, but on the cases that we seen go by, the accounts just sit there, a VPS is created by nothing is ever uploaded, or in most cases even accessed (using it to try and access other VM’s is also out of the question, we use Xen in a cloud setup, you just cant see who is around you).

So it begs the question .. why ? why would anybody steal somebody else’s identity and card details to buy something they never use ?

I guess for some people this is just a sick game to see how far they can go … unfortunately it is a costly game for providers, as they the ones who have to invest in yet more costly fraud prevention technology and pay the premiums for dealing on a high risk merchant market, of course those extra costs then have to be filtered down to the mass public who buys their stuff legit, AKA .. the rest of us.

So my advise, if you know anybody who steals CC info, dont bother reporting them to the authorities … beat them up instead, make sure to break a few typing fingers …

Yes .. I advocate violence towards a fraudster…

12.07.2009 Computers / Internet, Short Rants 2 Comments

Imitation .. not flattered

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

They say “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery“

But when the imitation is nothing but poorly modified a rip-off of your work, then I am not so sure the term still fits

This is our VPS.NET “Slider”, we are very proud of it, it conveys exactly what the product is and it’s sleek and sexy

This in the other hand is a blunt rip-off, made by a second grade designer who attempted to pass it as his own

Come on !!, if you are going to steal somebody’s design, at least dont murder it like that !!

24.06.2009 Short Rants 3 Comments

Pricing Wars

Friday, April 10th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the final pricing for VPS.NET .. this was not an easy exercise either, it took allot of work and study to determine what prices we had to set that where both attractive to customers while at the same time ensuring our product was profitable.

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But it seems that for some people we might have as well put a few prices on a cork-board and trow darts at it, where it landed .. that was the price.

It’s not that simple, when pricing a product of this magnitude (a Cloud) one needs first to gather all the costs associated with deploying and maintaining the product, then you need to account for the growth period (remember, one will deploy a cloud system that costed millions of dollars to setup, but you will have 0 clients that first day .. with $0 revenue incoming), it takes months, sometimes years, to recuperate initial costs, while at the same time you have staff and ongoing expenses that ned to be meet as well.

Not, if you compare the traditional VPS market, a traditional VPS provider will buy or lease a server, costing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand and sell out “chunks” of that server, very minimal initial capex and usually they will break even within weeks.

How in the world then do people expect Cloud computing to be priced identical to standard VPS ?, it’s simple .. in general people dont !, those who cannot afford it do !.

It seems that we have now a new generation of people that believe if there is something in the internet that they cannot afford it, then the price is wrong, sorry, but thats not the case, sometimes your budget only really allows for mediocre.

I have instead focused on asking those people who “actually” signed up and their reaction could not be any more different, they love the product and they believe (like us) the pricing is actually it’ strongest point, the initial cost these days for anybody to get into a cloud setup is the hundreds of dollars per month, we reduced it to $30 !!!.

My team and I get demoralized when we read of people blasting us because we dont match the price of a traditional VPS setup, and for a while we did try to see if the math added up, could be be any cheaper ?, no, it does not add up, why would we sell at a loss ?, we are competitively priced and will stop dwelling on what a few leeches are screaming about and concentrate on providing a great product for those people who see the real value of our offering.

I too sometimes browse ebay for that elusive DB9 for a VW Bug price … but it’s just not going to happen.

10.04.2009 Computers / Internet, Short Rants 2 Comments

Cubans ?

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Once in a while I do enjoy the occasional Cigar, when I lived in the US I was allways disappnted I could not get hold (legitimally at least) of Cuban cigars.

I remember the US cigar affictionado magazine Propaganda for the south American variety as a better alternative (BS !!!)

So as I wait for a bus in London and I see the Cubans readily available in front of me, I wonder how much longer it will be until we see these kind of adverts in the US

16.03.2009 Short Rants No Comments

Do you want fries with that VPS ?

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

I was reading recently a post on WHT about a customer complaint that he paid $8 /month for a VPS with a certain host, and he was upset he only got 200Mhz per core on a quad core setup (800Mhz total), and not the “entire” cpu … !

That was the kind of post that makes me real happy that I dont work on Sales .. otherwise I’d tell that individual to shove it, take their money and go look for hosting elsewhere.

Lets do the math shall we ?

We know the host is using Quad Core 2.4Ghz CPU’s, and they offer “equal share CPU” .. this means they are putting (2.4ghz / 200Mhz = 12) 12 VPS’s per server, that on itself makes me doubt the sanity of the host, if they sell 12 of their $8 /month plan, it means the server brings in only $98 /month .. for Quad Core .. thats insane.

Why is it insane ?, because these are the kind of people that later on are wondering around trying to sell their businesses at any price, due to the fact their profit margins are so slim, they realize they can make more money per month by selling fries at the Mc Donald’s Drive-Thru than Web Hosting, and second, I am a firm believer you must be a very profitable company at all times, you OWE it to your customers, otherwise they are not safe with you as you are just a bankruptcy in the making ready to go off at any time (ok, I know I am generalizing here, but look at the amount of bargain basement hosts going bely up the past 5-6 years and tell me I am wrong..).

And the delirious customer ?, well, he is a by-product of the bargain basement offering, simply put, $8 for a VPS ?, such product should no exist, it creates a false statement that this technology can be sold at a certain price bracket, and that is just not true, problem is, customers expect it, and then when they get it, they want more, and again expect to be given more .. period ..

Rant Over …..

07.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants 2 Comments

Virgin First Class …..

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

When I bought my tickets today from Crewe to Euston I was made aware that due to track work there was no direct trains, so a 1:50 journey was to take 3:30.

I decided then to upgrade to first class, since it would be quite a long trip.

Big mistaque !!!! Not only I paid all that extra money, I paid it to travel standing up

The bloddy train was so full from Birmingham onwards I had to stand up and shut up, despite the fact the majority of people in 1st had standard tickets, the entire train had been downgraded, so no free seats anywhere.

I just wish I had know it before I paid extra.

16.11.2008 General, Short Rants, Trips / Places No Comments

WebHosting … Everybody Sucks

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

So last night I am made aware that the RC NUT website was down, ok, I checked the webserver .. no response, so I sent out a e-mail to support and didn’t tough much of it .. surely it would be up in 5-10 minutes

30 minutes later and no show, I started to get annoyed, told support to get a grip on things and since it was very late, I went to bed.

This morning I woke up early, about 6:00 AM to check it out, site was up, but no DB connectivity .. I have my DB on a separate server (thats the proper way a H-Sphere install is done) .. so I ping the DB server .. no luck, I then checked the IP of the webserver and .. i’ll be dammed, I was on a US server, not a UK server, I ping the MySQL server by name, and sure enough, it was there, but also in the US.

I changed my config files and removed the old US ip, the site was fully up .. except the site was 13 days old !!

Now, for 99% of people out there, this is not a biggie, but for a online shop with sometimes dozens of orders in one day .. this is a catastrophe .. over 100 order records are lost and all since we do inventory by the website stock level, a messed up inventory as well.

Upon further investigation, I found out that Relio’s (webhost) server provider in the UK seems to have decided not to pay their bandwidth bill, and the bandwidth provided cut them off, in essence rendering companies like Relio’s UK servers .. dead (notice, it was not Relio that did not pay their bill, but their server provider, UK Easily)

So I called the bandwidth provider (Uk Grid … all those UK names, they confused the hell out of me today), explain to them our situation and after some negotiations, they agreed to open up traffic to the server for 3 hours to allow me (and others) to access and backup their data out, that was commendable .. those guys where true stars in doing that, after I got the database back, I restored it and the website was up to date … gosh was I relieved.

Why was my site 13 days old to start with ? .. well .. simple, Relio backups my data every day to another server, and every week or two they backup that server to another server in the US .. ok, at first glance, not a bad setup .. but this experience taught me .. not good enough, I need more.

So, since Relio’s UK servers where dead in the water .. and no access to the backup server was possible, they had to do an emergency recovery from the US backups.

I will give Relio credit, to restore every UK account in the US servers, move DNS, remap ip’s, etc .. etc in less than 6 hours .. thats not bad, they did a good job, but it goes to show, no matter how good your first Tier is .. somebody up the ladder is bound to mess it up !!.

Thats the problem with the Web Hosting market these days, too many idiots working on it, we put out livelihoods in the hands of people who later turn around and mess it up for you .. and does not matter how big or small the company is, your are always at risk.

What is the solution ? well, nothing below 50K of hardware and a few K’s a month in fees, so sometimes .. you just have to pay up and shut up.

Thats what I am doing next, first I am going to hire a local hosting company (when I mean local, I mean 3 streets over), I feel the threat of a 300lbs+ guys walking into the office and breaking your nose is a good incentive to make sure they dont screw with you .. that can only happen if they are local, second, I am going VPS (Virtuozzo) .. my idea is to find a setup I can create a Virtuozzo Failover Cluster with a backup residing off-site.. third, I am setting up a mirror of all this on a VPS server in the US, with my DNS residing also offsite (easily re-routable) so if something happens to RIPE itself (The IP consortium of Europe) .. I can still be up, fourth … dont know fourth yet .. but it’s sure to pop up while we doing this.

Overboard, overblown, over-budget ? .. of course .. but piece of mind, i’ve been in this business for 10 years .. I have seen some huge companies working with a setup that would make anybody cringe, promises of redundancy are usually all hogwash, backups many times are simply not practical, yes, they will back your data, they just cant extract it back, customers are at huge risks all the time of loosing all their data, and for some, thats instant bankruptcy, I have try to give away control on how my data is stored and managed, but it’s proven once again, if I want it right, I have to do it myself.

24.05.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants, Work 5 Comments

Damm BT .. nothing ever works

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

I am so fed-up with BT .. everything I ever got from them fails.

Last year I decided to drop SKY .. they where charging me about £60 per month for SKY/+/HD .. so I decided, since now I had the AppleTV, to drop them and just get a PVR for Freeview instead.

Until I learned about BT Vision .. great concept, basically a Freeview PVR, with on-demand via Broadband .. the idea is great, so since I needed to have Broadband with BT in order to sign for Vision, I dumped Bulldog and signed for BT Vision (Broadband included)

Well .. thats when my problems started, I got from BT the following

- BT Vision Box

- BT Wireless Hub

- BT Vision Phone (VOIP)

I have now gone thru 4 BT Vision boxes .. these are PVR’s that can record from Freeview and on-demand .. they simply fail, Hard Drive and software failures plague the damm thing, on demand shows rarely work properly (fail half way) .. etc etc

I am on my second Phone .. the first one’s speakerphone was a dud, crackling and loss of sound made it impossible to use, and since I do allot of conference calls at home, I must have a speaker phone

And . I am on my 3rd Wireless Hub .. the hubs wireless is a nuisance .. they drop constantly .. so replacement number 3 is now being used .. it’s version v1.5 (new style) .. we shall see if it holds

But to make matters really worst .. I am now on day 6 of virtually no Broadband .. and BT does not seem to have a fix anytime soon ..

Since Sunday night, my broadband stopped working .. occasionally it would come back to live, at speed raging from 126K to 512K .. quite ways from the 8MB I am suppose to get, I called BT, they say our account was suspended by error (??) .. apologized and said it would be back to norm soon .. that was Monday ..

But thats just BS .. we are able to connect if we do the following .. take the phone off the hook, let it sit for a minute until a audible warning is heard and try to connect to broadband .. presto .. it connects .. at very slow speeds .. but it connects .. at least for a few minutes .. then it goes down again.

Another indication of trouble, the phone line is incredibly noisy when broadband is trying to connect, there is definitely something wrong between broadband and the phone line

Anyway .. 6 days now, 3 calls a day to them to piss them off, and still, no fix .. they have done the whole “lets go thru the troubleshooting steps” routine a few times now .. it just does not work .. I even try a different router .. simply does not bloody work .. but BT .. they still oblivious, not a clue and not a single engineer visit to troubleshot.

Dang it…. yes .. I am pissed off.

22.02.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants No Comments

Damm Blog Designs

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

I have been looking for a new design for the blog non stop for 3 days now.

What happen was, I upgraded (finally) from WordPress 1.5.x to 2.3.x .. in the process I lost my old (and tired) design .. so I went on the prowl for a new theme I can modify to my taste

Problem is, there are hundreds of themes out there, and most of them .. well, they plain suck.

I think I found something that will work for me, it’s a Theme called Purple Fever .. it only costed $49 .. I have paid, just waiting now for the download link.

Then the task of modifying it will begin …

10.02.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants No Comments

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