How not to run a company and public relations - ChicagoVPS

[drmike]

Colocrossing has the house VPS front company running for, oh three days now as the last offer. No offer bias on LowEndBox  Yeppers, ChicagoVPS is lingering like a rotting corpse in the summer sun.  Total stop action public trainwreck.

The comments on the LEB offer are horrendous and Fabozzi does his best "I don't give a fuck" .... This zinger "The sales are through the roof, no matter what you have to say". #WINNING

http://lowendbox.com/blog/chicagovps-4-2gb-openvz-ssd-cached-in-chicago-buffalo-dallas-atl-nj-la/#comments

Hey Chris Fabozzi, how about your buddy Thomas Dale of UGVPS working for you and Colocrossing, while Facebook endorsing your shit heap of a company.   Classy pal, real classy. Colocrossing owns ChicagoVPS, at least the controlling percentage (more than 51%).   Might want to read and weep:

http://vpsboard.com/topic/1857-ugvps-thomas-dale-crystal-dale-chicagovps/

 

[WebSearchingPro]

Yikes, that sure escalated quickly. I actually want expecting Fabozzi to start posting in there, as it seems when customers complain and he starts posting things get out of hand.

 

[drmike]

It's my understanding per IRC that someone posted on that LEB thread this morning and had their comment(s) removed.

Claims about posts being missing, is almost certainly true.

 

[MannDude]

It's my understanding per IRC that someone posted on that LEB thread this morning and had their comment(s) removed.

Claims about posts being missing, is almost certainly true.

From #lowendbox


10:57 PM <•Konata> oh hey
10:57 PM <•Konata> my comment on chicagovps's latest offer actually got deleted
10:57 PM ⇐ CraigA_ quit ([email protected]) Remote host closed the connection
10:59 PM <•lbft> what was your comment
11:01 PM <•[Derek]> need some high calorie food to warm me up
11:01 PM <•[Derek]> so fucking cold
11:01 PM ↔ __Jade-G popped in
11:09 PM <•Konata> lbft: To the effect of "If you don't want ChicagoVPS, you can order from UGVPS instead... OH wait"
11:09 PM <•Konata> lol
11:09 PM <•lbft> haha
11:10 PM <•Konata> Actually aside from the fact that I don't remember exactly how I worded it, that's almost verbatim

That LEB offer is a disaster, but that's just Fabozzi being Fabozzi. I'd not take his word for anything. Before their most recent hack he and Adam claimed to have 'over 300 nodes' or something. Well, that turned out to be untrue. But I think most people are smart enough nowadays to just realize that he over-exagerates and blows hot air.

November 2012, had 40-50 nodes, which was accumulated over years of work and being in business and was BuffaloVPS and ChicagoVPS combined. Just 8 or 9 months or so later when they got hacked again had 150~ nodes. Though you can speculate how that happened. :blink:

 

[WebSearchingPro]

It's my understanding per IRC that someone posted on that LEB thread this morning and had their comment(s) removed.

Claims about posts being missing, is almost certainly true.

There needs to be accountability in this world. Its surprising that no one has started an open system to mirror these sites for accountability purposes. 

 

[Mun]

Actually, I'm guessing they do have 150+ nodes. Though he is a shitty person when it comes to his customers, he does make a chunk of change. He does this by spamming promotions across the internet and fills up a node with 100+ customers (overselling galore). After which, some customers complain and get bumped to there not so oversold servers, while the rest sit there processing on a box that is constantly loaded past the brim. Though many of them are idle boxes, process un-intensive, or simply basic level traffic.

It may bite him in the ass later, but sadly it is brilliant. He must be making ten of thousands of dollars if not more.

100 X 7 = $700 dollars for a node that may total cost per month be $250 if that. 

Mun

 

[Jade]

Ohmy :/ Sounds like a complete mess! I hope they fix their network problems soon!

 

[jcaleb]

Chris' replies speaks for itself whether the negative reviews indeed have suvstance

 

[drmike]

100 X 7 = $700 dollars for a node that may total cost per month be $250 if that. ​

 ​

See, problem is his average purchase per customer likely is around the $4 point considering the specials he runs and that never expire (well most don't). 

The formula is more like this:

172 accounts    x  $4 income avg  = $688 income.

In order to sweeten the post expense picture, he has to pack and stack the customers.   We saw that in the hacks and where there were 300GB+ of RAM sold on some servers.  How much RAM was on those servers?   Anyone can guess.  But rest assured they would be lucky to have been 64GB of RAM servers.

If you look at Colocrossing's VPS Provider servers line,  you see: (relative since current ad on LEB lists these CPUs)


2 x E5-2620
64 GB
8 x 1 TB
RAID10
LSI 9266 w/ BBU
20 TB
1 Gbps
$599.95 / month

2 x E5-2620
128 GB
8 x 1 TB
RAID10
LSI 9266 w/ BBU
20 TB
1 Gbps
$699.95

So each new node, we are talking north of $500 a month, plus any bandwidth surcharges.  We aren't even factoring SSD cost.

Going with 128GB of RAM, we can sell 64 2GB accounts at 1-to-1 resources to allocation.  128 accounts with 2-to-1 allocation. 172 accounts with 3-to-1 allocation.

172 accounts    x  $4 income avg  = $688 income.

$688 income - $500 server cost = $188 profit - any expense for SSDs.    The PURE SSD offers get interesting.   30GB x 172 = 5TB of disk sold.  Likelihood of the SSD offer being RAID and even adding up is rather unlikely.  You are in territory where 1TB SSDs are necessary.

At the end of the day, with 3-to-1 overloading of servers, looking at $125 tops profit per server and that's absent any bandwidth overages and ignoring at staff that should be getting paid.

$125 x 150 servers = $18,750/mo "profit" and oh yeah, still need to pay for staff and overages.

This is only possible where CVPS is using older lesser cost nodes and/or where CVPS is using 128GB of RAM servers from CC and getting a further discount of nearly $200 less a month.  

At the end of the day, sure they are making money.  But this won't go on for much longer as even the delusional cheapskate customers have had their share.

As you can see, the numbers just aren't much unless at mass scale.   They can't do what they do without cutting on hardware, 3-to-1 or greater over subscribing and having some sort of vendor giveaway -- or rather --- putting the corporate unsold servers to good use.

 

[Mun]

That's the thing though. Those are single unit prices. For single server raking (or a little more).

Where in actuality, CVPS probably has there own racks and own data connection. Trust me, it does make it cheaper. These companies like having full racks sold and in bulk. 

Mun

 

[drmike]

I was looking at the CVPS current LEB offer overnight.  Looked at all the comments and got these totals:

29 negatives
18 --- off topic or not a review
6 positives
6 CVPS self comments

 

[drmike]

And... finally LEB publishes another offer.  It has been days....

September 16, 2013 @ 11:35 am --- new ad

 September 12, 2013 @ 5:30 pm  --- CVPS ad

3 days 17 hours and 55 minutes of being the last offer on LEB for CVPS

That's on top of 2 back-to-back offers for CC companies (OrbitServers and CVPS).  Let's be honest, it's three in a row.  PremiumVM = HVH "employee" and his Atlanta node is via Colocrossing.

No bias or unfairness.   Nope...

 

[terafire]

People allow the bias to continue, because everyone knows the affiliation and bias, but doesn't do anything about 

It's brilliant, and evil at the same time. They know they pretty much have the last say in the VPS market.

That's like Microsoft owning an alternative OS magazine.

 

[JayZ]

100 X 7 = $700 dollars for a node that may total cost per month be $250 if that. ​

 ​

See, problem is his average purchase per customer likely is around the $4 point considering the specials he runs and that never expire (well most don't). 

The formula is more like this:

172 accounts    x  $4 income avg  = $688 income.

In order to sweeten the post expense picture, he has to pack and stack the customers.   We saw that in the hacks and where there were 300GB+ of RAM sold on some servers.  How much RAM was on those servers?   Anyone can guess.  But rest assured they would be lucky to have been 64GB of RAM servers.

If you look at Colocrossing's VPS Provider servers line,  you see: (relative since current ad on LEB lists these CPUs)


2 x E5-2620
64 GB
8 x 1 TB
RAID10
LSI 9266 w/ BBU
20 TB
1 Gbps
$599.95 / month

2 x E5-2620
128 GB
8 x 1 TB
RAID10
LSI 9266 w/ BBU
20 TB
1 Gbps
$699.95

So each new node, we are talking north of $500 a month, plus any bandwidth surcharges.  We aren't even factoring SSD cost.

Going with 128GB of RAM, we can sell 64 2GB accounts at 1-to-1 resources to allocation.  128 accounts with 2-to-1 allocation. 172 accounts with 3-to-1 allocation.

172 accounts    x  $4 income avg  = $688 income.

$688 income - $500 server cost = $188 profit - any expense for SSDs.    The PURE SSD offers get interesting.   30GB x 172 = 5TB of disk sold.  Likelihood of the SSD offer being RAID and even adding up is rather unlikely.  You are in territory where 1TB SSDs are necessary.

At the end of the day, with 3-to-1 overloading of servers, looking at $125 tops profit per server and that's absent any bandwidth overages and ignoring at staff that should be getting paid.

$125 x 150 servers = $18,750/mo "profit" and oh yeah, still need to pay for staff and overages.

This is only possible where CVPS is using older lesser cost nodes and/or where CVPS is using 128GB of RAM servers from CC and getting a further discount of nearly $200 less a month.  

At the end of the day, sure they are making money.  But this won't go on for much longer as even the delusional cheapskate customers have had their share.

As you can see, the numbers just aren't much unless at mass scale.   They can't do what they do without cutting on hardware, 3-to-1 or greater over subscribing and having some sort of vendor giveaway -- or rather --- putting the corporate unsold servers to good use.

I'm guessing cvps has some things ln place to reduce costs far more than you think. For starters you can lease servers similar to the specs you list from Dell, HP or countless supermicro builders for peanuts. I have personally leased $5k servers from dell on 3 year leases for 1% apr with a $1 buyout.

With the volume you are speculating he could also very easily be running a line of credit with IngramMicro, MA LABS, etc.

Who's to say he is leasing colocrossing servers?

As for bandwidth overages, buy a circuit. Cogent will drop you a 1gig circut for $750/mo unmetered. Cogent sucks you say? FiberTech, I-O-N, L3, they all will drop a 1gig circuit for $1,100-$1,500. unmetered. (all on-net ofcourse). if you dont care about quality HE will give you 1gig for $500 (bring your own IPs).

No idea what colocrossing racks go for but im sure its reasonable.

Not that he is doing that, but he could.

As for overselling and what not, damned if I know.

I bet that $18k is more than you think.

 

[raindog308]

" You might be better off going over to VPSBoard where all my haters are."