# It's impressive how bad Crissic got when Quadranet took over



## Gary (Mar 23, 2016)

Multiple downtimes (this time 22 hours and counting), slow performance, packet loss...


I wouldn't mind if support bothered answering tickets in a timely manner, but it's been hours since I ticketed them and they've not replied.


Also interesting is that this status page says there are no problems: https://my.crissic.net/serverstatus.php


While this one shows serious problems: http://status.crissic.net/


Crissic always oversold their servers - performance was never great - but it was cheap and stable at least.


----------



## drmike (Mar 23, 2016)

In fairness hours wait for tickets are common, regardless of the marketing speak many of these companies push.


Crissic had wait time on tickets before it was sold.  If you ticketed when it was US overnight you would have waited deep into the morning typically at least.


Problem is hours now equals daytime work hours where Quadranet is.  So, things are an afterthought at this point and on autopilot.  No finer way to clear the IP assets than by causing the customers to leave.  Sad to say it, but that's why Crissic was bought and subsequently mothballed.


Pinging the usual suspects, ideally one of them can jump into support worker mode and do the necessary.


@QuadraNet_Adam @QuadraNet.Dustin @SkylarM


----------



## DomainBop (Mar 23, 2016)

> It's impressive how bad Crissic got when Quadranet took over



It's impressive but the bad support (not to mention the SPAM spewing out of that datacenter) shouldn't be too surprising when you consider Quadranet picked up a pair of key employees from CC/CVPS/123sys, a provider who was known for abysmal support and being SPAM friendly. Take a look at when Quadranet's SPAM problems started to increase...


This acquisition was mainly an IP grab and the low end customers that were inherited have largely been treated as unwanted baggage by Quadranet since this deal happened so the slow response times and downtime aren't too surprising.



> While this one shows serious problems: http://status.crissic.net/



The Miami uptime reminds me of 123systems


Only 24 nodes.  They must have done a lot of consolidation (or maybe Crissic was smaller than I thought),


----------



## QuadraNet_Adam (Mar 23, 2016)

We are aware of an issue isolated to 1x node at Crissic which is currently running a FSCK check and will finalize/complete shortly. Rest assured, Crissic customers are being taken care of, and we are doing everything in our power to get the affected customers back online as soon as humanly possible. If anyone has any questions pertaining to their Crissic VPS, please feel free to submit a support ticket at the Crissic Client Area, or PM me on vpsBoard.


----------



## drmike (Mar 23, 2016)

That @QuadraNet_Adam he's quick I say!  


Hopefully @Gary they get you handled. Let us know what happens.


----------



## willie (Mar 23, 2016)

Mine is working mostly fine, and currently reports 67 days uptime.  Network has generally been ok to very good.  Main annoyance for me is that the disk i/o is sometimes very slow (too much seek contention probably).  It could also be that memory is oversold, but I'm not noticing this since I rarely run anything on that box that requires much memory.  No idea about ticket response since I haven't opened any tickets since long before the acquisition.  But Sklyar used to be very fast at answering them, back in the day.


----------



## Gary (Mar 24, 2016)

DomainBop said:


> They must have done a lot of consolidation (or maybe Crissic was smaller than I thought),



Or a LOT of people jumped ship when Quadranet took over...


It's back up and working now, @drmike. Almost exactly 24 hours downtime judging by the new uptime and when it went offline.


9 hours before the downtime was acknowledged by way of a reply to the ticket, very much during US business hours. FSCKing is hardly an "all hands on deck" situation, so why it took so long to acknowledge is anyone's guess.


BTW, has http://status.crissic.net/ been disappeared? I'm getting connection refused. Out of the two available, the honest status checker vanishes...



willie said:


> Sklyar used to be very fast at answering them, back in the day.



This was my experience too.


----------



## drmike (Mar 24, 2016)

Gary said:


> Or a LOT of people jumped ship when Quadranet took over...



No doubt they dropped people on the floor when they bought.   Any cheap brand has high turn over monthly.  If you aren't selling products actively (which they have no public sales site or ongoing sales) you will drop 20-50% within 3 months.  Crissic was a personality brand like most in the cheap sector.  The place revolved around the owner being there and active.  When the sale happened and similar happens elsewhere, customers wisely run for the hills.


I mean think about the big picture, all the hosting companies sold and traded, do we have many poster children for post-sale happiness for services and customers?  No, we mainly have massive failures. Probably 80% to 20% ratio or better. Sales and mergers aren't simple and most shops aren't smart enough to pull such off gracefully.



Gary said:


> 9 hours before the downtime was acknowledged by way of a reply to the ticket, very much during US business hours. FSCKing is hardly an "all hands on deck" situation, so why it took so long to acknowledge is anyone's guess.



Must be some YUGE drives and slow at that.  Similar gets said often.  Usually the RAID busted and dreaded work to recover and then FSCK.  It's only a single admin task and lots of waiting.  But hey I wasn't there to say exactly what happened, I know that such is horrendous and stress and no doubt prone to staff milking the clock and being careful.



Gary said:


> Almost exactly 24 hours downtime judging by the new uptime and when it went offline.



Rough.  Did they notify customers proactively of the failure and ETA? Guess I expect too much,  back to my Raspberry Pi self hosting with better performance and uptime.


----------



## Gary (Mar 24, 2016)

drmike said:


> Rough.  Did they notify customers proactively of the failure and ETA? Guess I expect too much,  back to my Raspberry Pi self hosting with better performance and uptime.



Nope, it'd been down 12 hours or so by the time I opened a ticket, then it was a further 9 hours before I heard from them. 3 hours after that, everything was up and running.


Hardware problems happen, but I can't say I'm impressed with the lack of communication around the whole thing.


----------



## SkylarM (Mar 28, 2016)

drmike said:


> @SkylarM



Hey there! Please note that while I do work for QuadraNet, I do NOT have any involvement in the Crissic brand, support or otherwise, at this time. Dustin and Adam would be the best contacts in situations such as this.


----------



## davidgestiondbi (Mar 28, 2016)

Seem like they start to sell VPS again. Or should I say VDS.


Maybe their plan was not only for the IP..... http://my.crissic.net/cart.php?gid=19 ... or not


----------



## drmike (Mar 28, 2016)

What is a VDS?  


https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=vds


Nothing there... hmmm


Seriously Virtual Dedicated Server?  GTFO.   What is dedicated about it?   Does it come with reserved core(s).  I mean at those crazy prices it ought to.   


I thought we all stopped using the bullshit VDS term years ago.   Then recently CC and others tossed out these E3 sliced up boxes and semi-rightly called them VDS.  This however is just a vanilla KVM be it on an E5 or not.... with SolusVM.


$29.99 for a 1GB KVM plan?  It should include cPanel for that price.


Who in their right mind would buy 1GB KVM @ $29.99 or $22.xx with discount?  You can buy more for less elsewhere. Heck these plans get right up into dedicated server pricing.
ANSWER: NO ONE WILL.


Uplink Port: 100Mbps Seriously?  1Gbps is a paid $5/mo addon.


I am laughing.  What is this new website?  A parody for believability for IP justification?    Meh, they'll just say I am a bitter asshole.  Include all these folks in on it for the same sentiments: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/79601/crissic-is-back.


----------



## DomainBop (Mar 28, 2016)

drmike said:


> What is a VDS?
> 
> 
> https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=vds
> ...



DrMike officially sucks.  I was just about to hit the post button and start a new thread about the Crissic relaunch when I saw his post.  I wasted all that time writing for nothing 


Quadranet is probably happy I decide not to start that thread because this would have been the title:


_"Quadranet, A Host With 37 Spamhaus SBL's Who IS Ranked As one of the Biggest Sources of SPAM by SenderBase, Relaunches Crissic Selling High End VPS."_


and these would have been the TAGS:


_"quadranet, crissic, dirty networks, SBL, Spamhaus, Senderbase, Spam Friendly Hosts, April Fools Day Came Early, Kevin Hillstrand Doesn't Do Support on Holiday Weekends"_


...and this would have been the first paragraph of that thread:


_"Quadranet, a hosting company which has one of the dirtiest networks around: 37 current Spamhaus SBL's, and it is ranked by SenderBase as one of the worst sources of SPAM on the Internet (11th highest daily SPAM volume, 2nd highest number of SPAM domains...quite an accomplishment when you consider there are 10's of thousands of ISPs), has relaunched Crissic as a high end VPS provider selling 1GB RAM/$30 VPS's.  Considering the recent complaints about Crissic downtime and support sucking at Crissic, this must be an early April Fool's Day joke..."_


TL;DR Quadranet should really be thanking DrMike for posting first. 



> Who in their right mind would buy 1GB KVM @ $29.99 or $22.xx with discount?



VPSB exclusive video of a typical hosting customer who is willing to pay $30 for a 1GB non-HA VPS using the feature-lacking SolusVM  on a network full of spammers, phishing sites, botnets, credit card carding sites, and cybercriminals


----------



## drmike (Mar 29, 2016)

DomainBop said:


> _"Quadranet, a hosting company which has one of the dirtiest networks around: 37 current Spamhaus SBL's, and it is ranked by SenderBase as one of the worst sources of SPAM on the Internet (11th highest daily SPAM volume, 2nd highest number of SPAM domains...quite an accomplishment when you consider there are 10's of thousands of ISPs), has relaunched Crissic as a high end VPS provider selling 1GB RAM/$30 VPS's.  Considering the recent complaints about Crissic downtime and support sucking at Crissic, this must be an early April Fool's Day joke..."_



But but but....  I fail to see what is 'high end'.. Other than price and that's originated from being high while pricing things...


1GB @ $30?  Can't remember when we last saw this price point seriously.  2007? 


I mean look, big brand, Godaddy:


1 GB RAM


 



Managed plans as low as
$24.99/month
ON SALE - SAVE 16%
$29.99/month when you renew4





 


CONFIGURE







Managed





Included







CentOS 6 Only




 






Includes: cPanel® | Patching | Security | Monitoring | Backups


----------



## DomainBop (Mar 29, 2016)

drmike said:


> 1GB @ $30?  Can't remember when we last saw this price point seriously.  2007?



1 GB RAM but only 10GB disk space (no mention of SSD), 500 GB transfer, and 100 Mbps port, no backups, and in an age of snapshots, auto scaling, object space, etc they're using SolusVM and offering far fewer features than the competition.


GoDaddy is $30 for 1GB but is managed and includes CPanel (plus 40GB storage and unlimited bandwidth, and backups).  Hostgator is $40 but is semi-managed (plus 60GB disk, 1TB transfer, 2 IPs, and backups).  I can't think of an unmanaged solution with comparable resources in that $30 price range.


Question is, who is their target customer? The two groups that would pay that much, small mom and pop businesses and enterprise customers, are unlikely to choose Crissic because they gravitate towards the familiar so the mom and pops will go to GoDaddy and Hostgator and enterprise customers will go to a cloud solution like AWS, a managed solution like Rackspace, or a VMWare solution like Peer1's Mission Critical Cloud.


My biggest question though has to do with the use of a Missouri LLC instead of the parent company (_TOS_: "_Crissic Solutions, LLC agrees to furnish services"_,).  Domain is registered to Quadranet but all of the customer agreements are with the Missouri LLC.  My guess would be someone was too lazy to update the legal docs with the new owner's name but who knows.  The bare bones TOS issues alone (Missouri LLC, no mention of venue/jurisdiction etc) would scare off most enterprise customers.


There is also the dishonesty factor which would come to light and scare away any potential enterprise customer when they did their due diligence and came across statements like this on the about us page:



> Crissic has over 10 years of industry experience



Dustin needs to expand on that with details of the 10 years if he's going to use the full "10 years of industry experience" as a marketing tool: _"a fifteen year old who liked to brag about hacking his classmates and school teachers started a hosting company from his classroom called Crissic  and then ran out of money, shut down, left customers stranded, and disappeared for four years only to come back and after a couple more years sell everything off and customers suffered once again..._



> _A few kids pissed me off, so I deleted their work for their classes(they finally got smart and had a memory stick on them constantly HA). So they started questioning me. How did I find access to the student files, how did I know what I was doing, how did I know how to use Command Promt, how did I know this, how did I get around the firewall. It was rather stupid.
> They basically locked my account down. I still got away with all the same crap, but they never realized it.
> 
> A teacher pissed me off, I figured out her password — it was the same as her login (lastname first initial). So her login name was bawdenj, so her pass was bawdenj. 2 days before the end of the term, I “accidently” deleted her files, grades, everything. _
> ...


----------



## Nikki (Mar 30, 2016)

drmike said:


> What is a VDS?
> 
> 
> https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=vds
> ...



The only people I've seen actually using the term VDS right is NFO. I noticed they never specified if it came with dedicated cores, guaranteed network, etc, meaning for all you know it's shared with 90 other people on an L5520 


I'm also pretty sure that SolusVM doesn't offer the ability to assign cores to a machine, at least when I used it last, which was 3-4 years ago, so what the hell are they thinking? The pricing is stupid, as even NFO's 1 core, 1GB VDS, with InterNAP or better network, is only $7.99/m, with a 100% Hardware/Network SLA...


----------



## DomainBop (Mar 31, 2016)

> Then recently CC and others tossed out these E3 sliced up boxes and semi-rightly called them VDS.



OnApp added those Hybrid SmartServers to its panel in November 2013.  Maybe HVH is doiing a white label version of its not-sister brand ServerMania's OnApp based Hybrid Smart Servers since its plans are about the same right down to the same 1240v3's...



> The only people I've seen actually using the term VDS right is NFO.... NFO's 1 core, 1GB VDS, with InterNAP or better network, is only $7.99/m, with a 100% Hardware/Network SLA...



NFO is a company I've recommended to people many times (mainly the NYC location).  They lowered the price on those 1GB to $7.99 (as low as $6.79 with longer terms) from $9.99 fairly recently I think.  Besides the dedicated core they also come with 100GB disk space and 4 TB bandwidth.



> I noticed they never specified if it came with dedicated cores, guaranteed network, etc



I don't think Crissic is offering dedicated cores because their AUP prohibits _"resource intensive scripts" _and _"CPU intensive scripts"_ and their TOS imposes CPU usage caps: _"Customer's programs and services may not use more than 90% of one CPU core per process thread for more than 15 minutes. Customer's programs and services will be limited to 90% of 1 CPU core if found to be using more than 90% of one CPU core per process thread. Subscriber's programs and services may not use more than 200% of two CPU cores for more than 2 minutes."_


----------



## graeme (Mar 31, 2016)

DomainBop said:


> Dustin needs to expand on that with details of the 10 years if he's going to use the full "10 years of industry experience" as a marketing tool: _"a fifteen year old who liked to brag about hacking his classmates and school teachers started a hosting company from his classroom called Crissic  and then ran out of money, shut down, left customers stranded, and disappeared for four years only to come back and after a couple more years_



In spite of which people thought very well of Crissic not long ago: https://vpsboard.com/topic/6093-updated-vpsboard39s-provider-of-the-year-the-results/#comment-83933


----------



## drmike (Mar 31, 2016)

graeme said:


> In spite of which people thought very well of Crissic not long ago: https://vpsboard.com/topic/6093-updated-vpsboard39s-provider-of-the-year-the-results/#comment-83933



January 2015 is like forever in hosting kid land.


Since then Crissic for instance went from:


 a humble newish upstart, be it version like 3.0 or 4.0 iteration (definitely wasn't first merry-go-round ride)

to operation where people complained the owner wasn't around (first indicator of something going wrong in a company - when public face goes missing)

to being sold to Quadranet

to being mothballed for 7 months

to reappearing as a 'premium' brand


All that said, Crissic was good and did well because the administrators working there cared immensely and worked super hard and long.  Silent mostly guys living in the mess and trying to keep things patched and smooth, the silent magicians that keep most shops running, but that you hardly hear a peep about.


----------



## HN-Matt (Mar 31, 2016)

drmike said:


> But but but....  I fail to see what is 'high end'.. Other than price and that's originated from being high while pricing things...
> 
> 
> 1GB @ $30?  Can't remember when we last saw this price point seriously.  2007?
> ...






















Try http://www.yuppiehost.com/vps-hosting.php


----------



## Geek (Apr 8, 2016)

> _A few kids pissed me off, so I deleted their work for their classes(they finally got smart and had a memory stick on them constantly HA). So they started questioning me. How did I find access to the student files, how did I know what I was doing, how did I know how to use Command Promt, how did I know this, how did I get around the firewall. It was rather stupid.
> They basically locked my account down. I still got away with all the same crap, but they never realized it.
> 
> A teacher pissed me off, I figured out her password — it was the same as her login (lastname first initial). So her login name was bawdenj, so her pass was bawdenj. 2 days before the end of the term, I “accidently” deleted her files, grades, everything._
> ...








_"Yo, check it out guys, it's insanely great -- it's got a 28.8 bps MOODEMM!"_​

---​

Fun fact -- dude on the far right now goes by "Sally Can't-Dance". 
You might remember her from "Con Air". Also on the far right.  ​





​


----------

