# Vultr the great animal f*****



## drmike (Dec 20, 2014)

Here's the problem with paying third world clowns to mass spam offers on Twitter and other social... You end end up with your message slapped upside some fairly seedy content.
 
Case in point, Vultr the DigitalOcean wannabe.
 
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=vultr&src=typd
 
Go to ALL view.
 
1. Mass spams for days now, same darn post over and over to all sorts of folks:
 
*Tsakhiyya* ‏@tsakhiyya  10m10 mnutes ago
@GeyshaPerez_ Cheap Windows VPS http://bit.ly/1xouDlu 

2. The goldmine in the valley of ill repute.




*nckhai* ‏@nckhai  6h6 hours ago
http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6817728 

At least nckhai mixes the fun up, disguises it and rewrites it.
 
However, cursory look at nckhai's account goes like this:
 
https://twitter.com/nckhai
 
2nd post from top = Vultr spamming
 
3rd post from top... 

*nckhai* @nckhai · 8h8 hours ago


Tôi đã thêm video vào danh sách phát http://youtu.be/ZPuBHrPUcFo?a  Animals Sex l Animals Mating l Hot animals mating crazy videos

4th post from top = Vultr spamming

5th post =

nckhai @nckhai · Dec 19
Animals Sex l Animals Mating l Hot animals mating crazy videos Part 15 l Funny Animals: http://youtu.be/JE3M4uWCVW4?a via @YouTube 


6th post =

nckhai @nckhai · Dec 19
Animals Sex l Animals Mating l Hot animals mating crazy videos Part 13 l Funny Animals: http://youtu.be/ZPuBHrPUcFo?a via @YouTube 

7th post =

nckhai @nckhai · Dec 19
Animals Sex l Animals Mating l Hot animals mating crazy videos Part 14 l Funny Animals: http://youtu.be/2mBF4zO8BQg?a via @YouTube 


8th post =

nckhai @nckhai · Dec 19
Tôi đã thêm video vào danh sách phát http://youtu.be/Lpa9hlrjN8I?a Animals Sex l Animals Mating l Hot animals mating crazy videos 

You get the point...

Later on the account owner transitions to... drumroll....

Car Crashes Compilation Part 37 - Car Accident - Russian Car Crash - December 2014: http://youtu.be/00gfkeBhr_A?a via @YouTube 

nckhai @nckhai · Dec 17
Car Crashes Compilation Part 36 - Car Accident - Russian Car Crash - December 2014: http://youtu.be/pxnR866mUj8?a via @YouTube 

Then right back to animals engaged in reproductive matters....


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## GaleDribble (Dec 20, 2014)

LOL. Those are just random vultr affiliates though right? I doubt vultr has anything to do with that.


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## RTGHM (Dec 20, 2014)

* hits report button 

* spams report button

I am just going to open his referral url about 20,000 times - maybe throw it on hitleap just so they suspend his account.


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## DomainBop (Dec 20, 2014)

> Here's the problem with paying third world clowns to mass spam offers on Twitter and other social... You end end up with your message slapped upside some fairly seedy content.


The even bigger problem with affiliate programs is affiliate fraud.  My company used CommissionJunction to run our affiliate program from '99-'01 and back in those days most affiliate programs were pay to click not pay per sale/signup...we had 15,000+ affiliates...$10K-$15K monthly paid out to affliates with little return and even though CJ claimed to screen out fraudulent clicks I know that the majority of what we paid out probably was due to click fraud. Not all of the fraud was due to small time "clowns" either, we caught our largest affiliate generating fake clicks, and guess what: they were a venture funded real business (or maybe not a real business, they burned through their VC millions and filed for bankruptcy when the dot com bubble burst...I laughed when they filed their Chapter 7).



> Those are just random vultr affiliates though right? I doubt vultr has anything to do with that.


If you're going to run an affiliate program yourself like Vultr is doing you really need a full-time employee managing it and screening applicants and you need to keep a constant watch on what the affiliates are doing (where the ads are being placed, how the affiliates are generating sales, quality of the leads generated by individual affiliates, etc., etc.).  Even if you use a managed network like CJ or Linkshare you still need someone on staff to oversee the program because bad affiliates can damage both your brand image and your pocketbook.


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## drmike (Dec 20, 2014)

You know these gifts keep giving and tis the season.
 
Check this out:
 
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q="goo.gl%2FZLou61"
 
That is literal match for: goo.gl/ZLou61   which is a Google URL shortcut that aims at: https://www.vultr.com/
 
 
There are 1530 exact matches for this little short URL in Google.
 
I threw that https://www.vultr.com/  into Google's URL shortener and no dice on it spitting out dupe short URL....
 
Meaning we have 1530 bullshit matches with some spam retards using the same short URL for tracking purposes....
 
Among those 1530 matches:
 



> SpiderVPS - Client Portal
> https://www.spidervps.com/clientportal.php
> Aug 3, 2014 - Aug. 2014 - @TheVultr - they are the reason we stopped selling SSD VPS... #vps goo.gl/ZLou61; 11:46 - 18. Juni 2014 - Super boulot des ...





> Portal Home - Dexabit Inc.
> 
> https://www.dexabit.com/customer/?do=home
> 
> ...


^--- cause you know other providers always promote random companies on their own customer facing systems  Yeah right, I have oceanfront property to sell you.... in North Dakota.



> Malware for domain: goo.gl - Clean MX - realtime
> 
> support.clean-mx.com/clean-mx/viruses.php?domain=goo.gl&sort...
> 
> ...



Here we have what appears to be email spam sent out with the same Google short URL containing a virus.

... and in the past hour we have the same short URL used 3 times on Twitter - while two say the very damn same thing...



> *Teodor Pripoae* ‏@teodorpripoae  10m10 minutes ago
> 
> Cele mai ieftine servere VPS - http://vultr.com  http://goo.gl/ZLou61
> 
> ...



*** vpsB appears to change underlying goo.gl link to be a t.co link underneath... unsure why... but yeah.. not like that on Twitter.


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## MannDude (Dec 20, 2014)

Have you tried to contact them to let them know they have affiliates that are likely going against their affiliate policy? I can't imagine they _want_ them to spam blast twitter with affiliate links with non-related messages. Probably best to clean house and suspend those affiliates I'd imagine.


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## Amitz (Dec 21, 2014)

Vultr is rubbish.


http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/39215/vultr-feature-matrix


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## wlanboy (Dec 21, 2014)

Not the first company that has to learn that you cannot get affiliates without trouble makers.


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## drmike (Dec 21, 2014)

MannDude said:


> Have you tried to contact them to let them know they have affiliates that are likely going against their affiliate policy? I can't imagine they _want_ them to spam blast twitter with affiliate links with non-related messages. Probably best to clean house and suspend those affiliates I'd imagine.


Well, that link: goo.gl/ZLou61

I am not seeing any affiliate relationship unless it's masked somehow inline.  Appears to shoot you straight to Vultr.com on https... every time.

This is someone paid to spam Vultr I'd think.  Glad to have others give it a looksie as I am on 36 hours of uptime and less than paying attention...

Poor Vultur, I posted in February about Vultr "drown"ing in the DigitalOcean.  My point was DO has a big gulp of liquidity aka VC money... Vultr chasing that beast wouldn't be great idea and may drown themselves.  It was a tip towards say Noah and an Ark and a bird sent to find land in the vast ocean.   But they send the Vultr....

Anyways the word drowning isn't something I'd ever think a company would go run with as advertising.  Whole concept of death via drowning is rather harsh.  I originated that as a pun and word play.

Well Vultr ran with it conceptually.  I mean search their Twitter stream top to bottom, look for ahh: storage look for: RAID, you won't find either in any posts.  You will however find DROWN in two different tweets.



> *Vultr* @Vultr · Jul 15
> 
> 
> 
> Faster Cores, Faster UnixBench Results, Faster I/O, Faster Feature Releases, and Faster Support! Stop drowning and start soaring with Vultr!






> *Vultr* @Vultr
> 
> 
> · May 10
> ...


Just saying 2-3 months after I mouthed it.


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## drmike (Dec 21, 2014)

Well THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for the team assist.

Someone pointed me in private to this:

http://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/ZLou61/all_time

Guess you can do this to many URL shorteners and get underlying click data...

Look at what we found...

There is not affiliate code  on that goo.gl short URL from my post above.   It straight up is short URL ---> vultr.com.

4001 total clicks on that BS link.

Looks like this started June-July 2014.

Guess that's another bad Vultr behavior item unearthed... All those fake or compromised Twitter accounts, looks like good amount via Facebook also....


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## drmike (Dec 21, 2014)

One potential explanation about this is perhaps Vultr has retweet this feature in their panel and that is the origin.

I am curious where this short URL is coming from cause Kossen actually tweeted out that above code in December


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## Dylan (Dec 21, 2014)

It's from a tweet-for-credit promo in their CP:


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## DomainBop (Dec 21, 2014)

Amitz said:


> Vultr is rubbish.
> 
> http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/39215/vultr-feature-matrix


DaveA won't answer questions about Vultr's RAID setup, CPU type, or multihoming but I bet if you asked the providers on that thread who are whining about his lack of transparency how many VPS's they put on their _"latest Xeon E3-1270v3 with fast RAID10 8x1GB SATAIII and 1 Gbps ports"_  nodes very few of them would be willing to disclose the info on how much (or little) they're overselling/overloading their nodes.  Advertising/hyping the processor type and RAID/disk hardware specs in offers but not telling the customer that they'll be sharing that node with 100/200/300 other VPS's and the performance they'll actually get will be worse than an Atom N2800 is just as bad as DaveA's lack of transparency about RAID/multihoming/CPU type.


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## Amitz (Dec 21, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> DaveA won't answer questions about Vultr's RAID setup, CPU type, or multihoming but I bet if you asked the providers on that thread who are whining about his lack of transparency how many VPS's they put on their _"latest Xeon E3-1270v3 with fast RAID10 8x1GB SATAIII and 1 Gbps ports"_  nodes very few of them would be willing to disclose the info on how much (or little) they're overselling/overloading their nodes.  Advertising/hyping the processor type and RAID/disk hardware specs in offers but not telling the customer that they'll be sharing that node with 100/200/300 other VPS's and the performance they'll actually get will be worse than an Atom N2800 is just as bad as DaveA's lack of transparency about RAID/multihoming/CPU type.


That's why I do not deal with providers as described and I will simply do the same with Vultr in future...


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## tonyg (Dec 21, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> DaveA won't answer questions about Vultr's RAID setup, CPU type, or multihoming but I bet if you asked the providers on that thread who are whining about his lack of transparency how many VPS's they put on their _"latest Xeon E3-1270v3 with fast RAID10 8x1GB SATAIII and 1 Gbps ports"_  nodes very few of them would be willing to disclose the info on how much (or little) they're overselling/overloading their nodes.  Advertising/hyping the processor type and RAID/disk hardware specs in offers but not telling the customer that they'll be sharing that node with 100/200/300 other VPS's and the performance they'll actually get will be worse than an Atom N2800 is just as bad as DaveA's lack of transparency about RAID/multihoming/CPU type.


How many hosts actually disclose the VMs in each node? None.

I can tell you that their CPU performance is off the charts.

I have a monitoring script that checks for abuse/overselling and there are no abuse issues.

By the way, I have had a poor experience with DaveA and definately not a fan but got to give credit where it is due.


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## drmike (Dec 21, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> DaveA won't answer questions about Vultr's RAID setup, CPU type, or multihoming but I bet if you asked the providers on that thread who are whining about his lack of transparency how many VPS's they put on their _"latest Xeon E3-1270v3 with fast RAID10 8x1GB SATAIII and 1 Gbps ports"_  nodes very few of them would be willing to disclose the info on how much (or little) they're overselling/overloading their nodes.  Advertising/hyping the processor type and RAID/disk hardware specs in offers but not telling the customer that they'll be sharing that node with 100/200/300 other VPS's and the performance they'll actually get will be worse than an Atom N2800 is just as bad as DaveA's lack of transparency about RAID/multihoming/CPU type.


The provider piling on Vultr indeed was interesting.  It is a general problem I have with the industry - where people attack and undermine their competition usually without any real knowledge or basis.

IF Vultr isn't running RAID at all, then yeah, weird and bad.  If they are running RAID-0 or RAID-1, well again, weird and bad and the route moron new hosts take to stretch two pennies.  Not an approach you'd expect with a company that owns other known brands....

Containers on a node are ummm high routinely for any of their low cost economic models to actually function.  However, the high container count is often offset by masses of those containers being simply bought and left to sit idle.  So while there may be on a real node 150 containers, typically another customer isn't competing with 149 other folks for resources 24/7.  Some providers have more real usage of containers which presents hell situation for owners/admins (if they have any) to balance use, juggle containers to other nodes, etc.  Loading of servers is something easy to pick on as being abusive on customers.  Until performance is unacceptable, the container headcount means something, but little.  Easy enough to end up on a lightly populated server with 20 containers, inadequate resource limiting and actual folks using things and end up with experience as bad as being on busy loaded 150 container server.

Vultr's omitted details were strategic, intentional.  Most of these gripes and inquiries about the multihomed, RAID, CPU were raised on their own forums months ago and went unanswered with room of people feeling odd and wondering WTF was up there.   Should have and is a buyer beware.

All that said, Vultr chomped on the wrong Moby Dick when jumping in fray against DigitalOcean.  Cause last time I check DO spec delivers what DO marketing proclaims and they don't play word games about RAID, network, CPU, etc.  They may not be forthcoming down to your specific node, but they actually say and use RAID.  But DO isn't cloud either, at least they have some cloud-like features....

It's atypical low end approach to things on a grander scale - Vultr is.   This all started when Vultr launched website that was such a blatant ripoff of DO's that the two were embarrassingly visually similar.  Even the copy then was too similar.  Then it was straight off to gear porn specs, absent mention of RAID, replaced prominently with Enterprise SSD language.  Throw in 10Gbps and "benchmark" porn and slap CLOUD on the homepage 5 times.

Vultr isn't a cloud provider.  They are a KVM VPS provider, at best.

Does Vultr bring competition in the KVM VPS market?  Probably.   They are doing $5 a month on the smallest plan @ 768MB of RAM.... But, until you hit $70 a month and 8GB of RAM, the plans just are more lowend-like stupid puny disk allocation amounts.

Economically, KVM per GB pricing:

1GB = $7  ($7 per gigabyte of RAM)

2GB = $15 ($7.50 per ")

4GB = $35 ($8.75 per ")

8GB = $70 ($8.75 per ")

$7-8.75 per gigabyte of RAM isn't bad, but in lowend land, it can be beat in a big way.

At $70 a month for 8GB of RAM with a SSD drive, one could buy a dedicated server from many providers.  Will it be a current generation server?  No.  But we have no clue what is in Vultr's boxes.   It won't be shared resource either so you get full CPU/core usage and you get full disk throughput (and yes for $70 a month can find a SSD drive on a dedicated box).

Which after all that, Vultr and similar models are good for:

1. One account many containers reduced billing and email hell.

2. Flexing marketing give you credit freebies to multiply your chip in.

3. Being able to click and deploy new instance in new geographic location at a whim (well if Vultr actually has stock available - was issue in past)

Beyond that, single platform, single company that can go tits up or cranky admin can rm -rf the place, one billing issue erroneously and put offline, questionable gear specs, shared resources with unknown container headcounts and unknown gear capabilities (maybe they are running Atoms  ).....

I'll continue to use companies like DigitalOcean and Vultr (although not actively using DO until they revise some things) as development sandboxes.  Problem though remains, why should I burn through cash on KVM when I can do same sandboxing on much less costly OpenVZ instances.  A limited amount of reasons to go KVM and 95% of the time I don't need KVM.  $60 a year on 512MB VPS with less storage than average phone.   Well, maybe for some that's appealing, those that self rob paying providers much more for BS VPS.


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## wlanboy (Dec 22, 2014)

drmike said:


> Problem though remains, why should I burn through cash on KVM when I can do same sandboxing on much less costly OpenVZ instances.
> 
> A limited amount of reasons to go KVM and 95% of the time I don't need KVM.  $60 a year on 512MB VPS with less storage than average phone.


Second that.

But people spend more money on the same service if they think they get a premium addon for it.

My personal 5% is FreeBSD - but most of the time all discussions about KVM vs OpenVZ are fanboy-like marketing.

Vultr and DO both did that premium brand marketing quite well.


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## drmike (Dec 22, 2014)

wlanboy said:


> Second that.
> 
> But people spend more money on the same service if they think they get a premium addon for it.
> 
> ...


No doubt, there aren't a whole lot of providers caring about FreeBSD.  So in that way Vultr does indeed stand out.

KVM versus OpenVZ is based on perhaps flawed honesty basis, where OpenVZ is straight up mass oversubscribed compared to resources all over.  KVM on the other hand has ummm reputation for running more 1-1 sales versus underlying resources.   Now KVM surely can be oversold or nested via slabbing to increase sales versus resource ratio, however MOST companies at this point avoid the OVZ like shenanigans.   That's what the marketing death fight there is big picture.

DO and Vultr are VPS hype companies.  Nothing cloud about them.  Whole thing with both is price on their smallest packages, lure of multiple locations and ???????.  DO I get they are developer friendly and their tutorials, howtos, etc. are fairly numerous


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