# SecureDragon to discontinue VPN service.



## MannDude (Nov 20, 2013)

Just got this email from SecureDragon earlier:



> All of our VPN servers are off-line except Florida.  It looks like the problem is with the VPN application software. At this time we have decided to discontinue our VPN service offer. I will issue you a full refund and you may continue to use the Florida VPN till the end of the month. This will give you time to sign up with another VPN provide. VPN service has been a very small part of our business that has never really caught on with our clientele. If you have any question, please open a support ticket.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I had forgotten I had a SecureDragon VPN to be honest, but I see that 2 minutes after this email was sent to me I got refunded $9 from a past payment.

What was the issue with the VPN software? I also use VPN.SH, and am wondering if they use the software or not too.


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## peterw (Nov 21, 2013)

I am reading



> You don't want to run this service for a small amount of users.


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## drmike (Nov 21, 2013)

SecureDragon wasn't a deeply discounted VPN was it?

Looks like a pricey service:



> ◊ 100GB Bandwidth Included
> ◊ $0.10/GB Additional Bandwidth
> ◊ 4 Concurrent Connections
> ◊ PPTP/OpenVPN Support
> ...


Seems like a semi big deal since their CakeVPN site boasts ---> We're in 9 data centers around the world!

Security issues / PITA usage or financial?


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## peterw (Nov 21, 2013)

But they have deeply discounted vps and they cut the bandwidths some weeks ago.


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## drmike (Nov 21, 2013)

I missed the SD discounting of VPS accounts.  Do you have a link to such offer?

I noticed Chicago + Los Angeles in server locations.  Did Joe jump on board with CC at those locations?

Looks like [email protected] at those locations.


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## KuJoe (Nov 21, 2013)

We discontinued our VPN services mainly because of technical issues (there were also some bugs in the billing module but these weren't crippling most of the time). Basically, multiple times a month we would have some clients that couldn't connect to some of the VPN servers for whatever reason. I would spend a few hours rebuilding the RADIUS databases, then rebuild the RADIUS servers (3x), then rebuild some of the VPN servers (sometimes all 15), and then all users could connect to all VPN servers again. This week, we had an issue where all but one account could only connect to our FL VPN server (OpenVPN and PPTP) and none of the other ones. The one account that was the odd man out could connect to 2 other VPN servers but not the rest. I built brand new VPN servers and added them to the pool and still no dice for any of the accounts (including the 1 odd account). I rebuilt everything from scratch and I couldn't even get the authentication servers to see attempts from the other accounts.

Not including the VPN servers themselves (luckily we only owned the hardware for 4 of the servers), we've spend hundreds of dollars on our CakeVPN infrastructure and in the end it was a lack of knowledge on my part and a few painful bugs in the management software that were the deciding factors on how to proceed. Yes, our VPN clients made up less than 0.1% of our total clients, but for those clients who still want a VPN in FL, CO, CA, or IL a 32MB VPS is much cheaper and a worry-free solution.

Since we'll be keeping all of the software and the licenses we hope to reopen CakeVPN in the future when we get a VPN expert on staff who can maintain the servers and backend properly.

I apologize for those impacted by this decision and I am more disappointed than most because of the time I invested into this hoping to have something great to share with others. Even after the e-mail was sent out I spent 3 hours this morning trying to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it in hopes of learning how to fix it in the future but it was 3 hours wasted.

I would also like to add that we created these VPN services to meet a demand that we had potential clients hounding us for, we had A LOT of pre-sales tickets from people who did not want to manage or maintain their own VPN servers so we decided to build CakeVPN. Surprisingly, after we launched it the interest died off immediately. For the first couple of months it was smooth sailing, the technical issues only popped up in the past few months and this last issue was the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a shame too because aside from the initial investment, the operating costs were very minimal but the time invested was just to much for me at this point in time.


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## drmike (Nov 21, 2013)

Thanks @KuJoe!

Looks like it's back to engineering the solution. 



KuJoe said:


> we hope to reopen CakeVPN in the future when we get a VPN expert on staff who can maintain the servers and backend properly


Glad to hear that.


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## InertiaNetworks-John (Nov 21, 2013)

I'm not surprised at this at all. VPN's can be hard to maintain at times, and I'm sure that they got their share of abuse as well.


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## raindog308 (Nov 22, 2013)

InertiaNetworks-John said:


> I'm not surprised at this at all. VPN's can be hard to maintain at times, and I'm sure that they got their share of abuse as well.


What is the avenue for abuse?  Your VPN client just allows you to send network traffic - you can't login to the VPN server and soak up CPU, RAM, disk, etc. like a normal VPS.

I think what KuJoe's discovered that there's a significant desktop/end user support side to offering VPN.  I know a lot of the big VPN companies have custom desktop clients, some of which are pretty fancy.


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## KuJoe (Nov 22, 2013)

The abuse is mainly people using the VPNs to download illegal content but it wasn't much and not a factor in our decision.

As for the support, the number of tickets was also very low excluding the "cannot connect" issue I spoke of previously. Our Windows application worked perfectly and nobody had any issues with it except when we made some DNS changes a few months ago but I just created some new DNS records to fix it.


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## mcmyhost (Nov 22, 2013)

For those people looking for replacements I've heard good things about vpn.sh

They recently posted on LET.

http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/17044/vpn-sh-7-year-100gb-vpn-package-17-vpn-locations#latest


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