ishaq and budgetnode

[bsdguy]

Some of you may know me from LET where I have been more or less active since some years.

Today there was/is a thread about budgetnode not delivering what they offer and playing games. Details can be found at LET.
I had some strange experience with budgetnode myself but I'm not the type of person who immediately runs and opens a complaint thread. But as others seemed to experience strange behaviour from budgetnode, too I thought I'd add my line, too.

Then hell broke lose.

ishaq, the owner or manager of budgetnode immediately contacted me by PM and seemed concerned. I was bewildered because I had tried to contact budgetnode in multiple ways and when I got a reaction by email they basically told me to f*ck off. Maybe I interpret too much into it but I even felt that they were cynically ridiculing me by asking me to open a ticket - which, of course I couldn't do, as I had no access to my account which was my problem in the first place.

After that experience I had lost my confidence in budgetnode and didn't care anymore. But ishaq suddenly and surprisingly seemed concerned. He wrote nice phrases like him wanting me to have my service. Well, more precisely, he got concerned when I told him that I have proof of payment ...

But as I said, after my excessively bad experience with budgetnode I didn't care. You see, sometimes you get a VPS for your money and sometimes you get a lesson for your money; that's how I see it and with budgetnode it was a lesson - STAY AWAY!.

But ishaq pushed me to please provide some info to help him to find the account. Funny, just recently I was hoping for just that but all I got from budgetnode was utter ignorance and some sarcasm. But, of course, then I was just one of probably many individual victims (some of which wrote about it in the LET thread I mentioned; I myself added a post, too, btw. a quite calm and restrained one).

I told him that I didn't care but he pushed and pushed and finally I gave in and helped him to find the account with the VPS I had payed in advance for a full year. Hardly had he identified it, things became clear. All he was after was to push me to now change or delete the negative post about budgetnode ...

I told him that I would not change it and that I was still pissed, having lost some weeks I had payed for after all.

That's when he switched from provider to admin, utterly abusing his admin position at LET. He deleted my post.

Meanwhile he

- killed my account (saying that he'll refund me)
- publicly broke client privacy
- serial abused his admin position
- had pals write against me (smart move, particularly considering that one of them even had a budgetnode reseller signature ...)
- debated with me, then deleted my posts and posts of his not exactly smart pals, debated or had debate again, deleted again
- changed the thread title to paint me as bad and himself as smart winner, although it was not even me who had opened that thread in the first place (see above. The fact that someone *else* had opened a critical thread was the reason for me to talk at all about my bad experience).

Short: Stay away from budgetnode! That guy won't stop at anything and having a VPS there seems to be more of a lottery anyway.

Note: I'm not a troublemaker and I had providers multiple times mention publicly how easy going and clean a client I am.

 

[jarland]

That's when he switched from provider to admin, utterly abusing his admin position at LET. He deleted my post.

My sincere apologies for this. I have re-posted the words that were deleted, but was not able to restore fully. I will make sure that does not happen again.

 

[WasNotWSS]

My own experience with BudgetNode:

When I received my VPS with them (an $8/mo service), the network was unstable and throughput was awful. (I don't have the data I originally posted to them as it was sent through WHMCS, and for some reason was not set to public-viewable in the existing ticket.) I opted to cancel.

The disk was clearly overloaded- it took seconds for a basic 'ls ~' to return. Rather than cancel me, they offered to migrate me to their new VPS server in LA. Rather than being migrated, I was reprovisioned-setup with CentOS 6. I reinstalled Debian (thankfully I didn't have anything important I expected to make the cutover), and gave it a go.

Now, the bandwidth was near ADSL speeds, so I responded in kind. In about a minute, I was advised to set my MTU to 1400, and see how it worked. This was my single contact with Ishaq via BudgetNode- the rest of my support had been through Jordan.

After I set my MTU to this value, it worked better, but still wasn't trustworthy enough for me to use with the odd network congestion and seemingly-random loss of packets (ICMP failures alone were somewhere between 2-4% as memory serves), so I ended up canceling my service as I needed a stable UDP for this project). From start to finish, this was January 1st - January 20th, 2017.

 

[bsdguy]

My sincere apologies for this. I have re-posted the words that were deleted, but was not able to restore fully. I will make sure that does not happen again.

This means a lot to me, so thank you. Not so much the restored post but the fact that a single admin can not go berserk at LET without someone pushing the brakes.

The two of us had our troubles, too, but you did not abuse your admin power and you tried to stay fair (which can be hard when being angry).

ishaq had the means to completely turn things around and against me - and he did so. Not once, not just in posts. No, he even changed the title of the thread.

Well noted: I bought - and payed 1 year in advance - some 3 weeks or so ago. And I never made any noise or trouble. I simply took that to be one of the bases where one pays for a lesson. Nor did I ask for a refund and write angry emails or the like. I only said something when today I saw that there seemed to be others, too, wondering about the validity of budgetnodes offers and other issues.

Yet ishaq did everything - which is a lot for an admin - to paint me as the evil guy who just looks for trouble. Gladly I have lots of well deserved thank yous because I write fair reviews and help users when I can, so it's not that easy to paint me as the evil guy, particularly because multiple providers have made positive public statements about me.

But ishaq certainly tried. He completely bent the thread and turned it into a private war in which he had all the weapons and I had none.

Frankly, before today I wouldn't exactly recommend budgetnode but I wouldn't make noise either. I pretty much took budgetnode to be one of the (not so few) average providers who care about finding and making people sign up and then not care much.
Now, however, particularly after a lengthy PM exchange, I have learned that ishaq is an extremely egomaniac guy who utterly ignores the other side and *only* sees and takes care of *his* side, no matter what and no matter the means.

So, it's not my first negative experience but what happened today that convinced me to warn potential customer to stay away from budgetnode. And, frankly, I'm also convinced that keeping ishaq as admin will bring trouble to LET and harm it.

 

[bsdguy]

@WasNotWSS

First: Nice to see you again, not-a-manatee *g

As for the quality of budgetnode I can't say anything as I never came to the point of using it but I'm not at all surprised by what you report. Perfectly matches my impression of ishaq: "Get them client animals to sign up and pay and then, oh well ...".

As you mention Jordan: That was one of the go-fors ishaq sent to piss at me. Unfortunately for them Jordan didn't act exactly smart and got first bitchslapped and then his post was deleted, too, by ishaq.

Dirty and egomaniac are the two words that come to mind when trying to summarize my impression.

 

[Lee]

I have no view on the events that led up to it, perhaps you were at fault. What Ishaq done though was totally unacceptable, It goes some way to confirm my publicly available views on his MO in getting on staff positions at sites like LET and others. As for Jordan he is just an annoying lap dog, barks away, nobody listens.

The saving grace in all this as I said on LET is that @jarland can be relied on not to shy away when something goes wrong.

 

[Jonathan]

Why would LET allow something like this from an admin? That simply puzzles me.

Some people do not understand business. Sometimes you get good feedback, sometimes bad. As a business owner or staff member you have to turn whatever type of feedback into something positive, be it through enjoying the praises on the fruits of your labor or as a learning experience. Clearly this ishaq fella doesn't understand that.

@bsdguy for the sake of transparency, can you use the report link to submit proof of service from BudgetNode?

 

[raindog308]

jarland's already commented from the LET team so I'll leave that there.

As for BN...

I have a small KVM I bought from BN semi-impulsively. I wanted a separate node for handling my email from home (Comcast blocks outgoing port 25, so I have to relay things like alerts from my home systems, etc.).

I'm not driving it hard - it's just a tiny KVM relaying mail and for that it's been fine. However, I'll probably move when it's up for renewal because the price is increasing and they're discontinuing 256MB plans (see email below). For what I'm doing with this node, a $15/yr BuyVM would be fine. I can't really fault the price increase and they're giving me 5 months' notice but it's just an extra $9/year for no reason for me.

Personally, being a mod has convinced me that the low end market is not one I'd ever want to enter


Thank you for choosing and being a loyal customer of BudgetNode since 12th October 2016. We sincerely appreciate your business.

We're writing to inform you that the plan you are on (256MB KVM Special) is being discontinued effective immediately. It is no longer available for sale and cannot be renewed.

Your service(s) have been automatically upgraded to the next plan that was included in the promotion you purchased from. The new plan specifications are listed below:

RAM: 256MB > 512MB
Storage: 10GB > 20GB
Port Speed: 100Mbps > 1Gbps

This upgrade is free for the remainder of your billing term. Your service was previously billed at $15.00/year and will renew at $24.00/year. For your information, this is a $9 or 37.5% price increase.

Please restart your service from the control panel to apply this upgrade. You will need to extend partitions manually to take advantage of the disk upgrade. Our support team is on hand to assist if you have any issues with this.

We understand that price changes are not well received, we have made this decision to maintain a consistent and reliable service. The plan was not profitable for us to continue.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and hope that you will continue your services with us.

If you have any questions please contact the billing department by opening a ticket from your customer account or by emailing [email protected]

Thank you,

James W.
Billing & Accounts
Access Internet Ltd

 

[bsdguy]

@bsdguy for the sake of transparency, can you use the report link to submit proof of service from BudgetNode?

Sure - if you explain me what that means. He has killed my account, so I can't produce anything there. But I have my payment record, emails, etc ...

 

[bsdguy]

There is more to that and I'm glad to see that finally at LET some smarter users began to use their brain rather than just taking the side of the admin (I'm one myself and I know how many, many "friends" admins have ...).

I'm there since about 3 years. Opened 10 threads, most of which are either requests or reviews (service to community). With my reviews I always took great care to be fair and unbiased. Somewhat brutal example: cociu, whom I like a lot (no secret; it's well known and not hidden) was, to put it diplomatically, not exactly at the top in my review of 10 or so cheap, cheap servers. (Btw: cociu never complained to me, so I seem to be right about calling him a fine guy). And I put quite some work into that review, making coloured spreadsheets, etc.

In those years I've written about 1250 comments and got about 800 Thanks. Not at all bad; not too many with that ratio of comments/thanks. Over the years I bought from about 10 providers and until yesterday not even 1 had a single bad word about me. Never an abuse problem, not a single one in years.

Short, anyone desiring to paint me as a trouble maker is bound to fail. And please note that not even now I talk bad about budgetnode. I'm talking bad about ishaq, not about his company. I made a stupid typo, I confessed that right away (publicly!), once I knew about it. I contacted them through their contact form and got a canned non-response bla bla. I contacted them by email - to politely ask, not to accuse or to make trouble - and got a canned non-response again; to make it worse that time they pretty much told me "f*ck you!" by asking me to open a ticket - whoch, of course, I couldn't possibly do as I couldn't log in.

That was weeks ago. I made no trouble, wrote no further email, made no fuzz, opened no "budgetnode are scammers!" thread. All I did for weeks was to *quietly* and for myself book this under "stay away from budgetnode" and "well, this time you payed not for a vps but for a lesson".

Then yesterday someone opened a thread about budgetnode and with budgetnode in the title. The OP was obviously not happy about some low end product end of life or something like that. Others chimed in, partly critical, too. All I did was to join and to make a somewhat cynical remark along the line "at least you got something. I didn't get anything". That's it.

And suddenly I had a very active ishaq in my PM blabbering about him wanting me to have my service. What I know only now is that his concern was *only* about how he looks publicly. He didn't care a rats ass about me. That became very clear when he finally had found my account and that I couldn't log in because I had accidently dropped a letter from my email address - Bingo! Now he had everything he needed to say he's completely innocent and I'm just a troublemaker. From that moment on the conversation changed very much. He even asked for an apology.

His other problem was that he expected me to be grateful and on my knees from the beginning and eager to get my vps. But due to his companies utter ignorance and extremely poor support 3 weeks had passed and I actually had got another vps with another provider.
So, rather than being grateful for him being willing to finally do what I had tried to make him do for weeks, I was quite desinterested and told him so. Important note: I did not even ask for a refund (so much for bsdguy the evil troublemaker). I simply didn't care for that budgetnode thingy anymore.
In fact, as soon as he mangnanimously told me that my vps was now available I simply logged in, corrected my email address and shut the vps down - and I told him so.

To make it short - that a**hole had plenty time and plenty chances. He could have simply said "I'll refund you and we're done" and there wouldn't have been a war. But he didn't, he did that only when *he* wanted and to punish me. Which translates to him obviously being an idiot, too.

During that whole PM series (which I btw saved as things sometimes happen to vanish at LET ...) one thing was omnipresent and brutally clear: ishaq is an egomaniac and I mean that in the clinical sense. Even in a situation where he had understood - and proof - that BN has performed lousily and that I was in fact a paying in advance customer it was all only and exclusively about "I, ishaq want this, I, ishaq want that". It was utterly, even brutally clear that he didn't care *at all* about his customer. It was all only about him, him, him.

The reason why I was very reluctant from the beginning was that I had to learn that BN doesn't care about their customers, once they had the money. Why should anyone in his right mind want to do business with an utterly ignorant provider who even ridicules you? THAT is why I wasn't interested. And again: I did not even ask for a refund (nor for my vps). It was ishaq who pushed it.

Now, after what I experienced yesterday I take ishaq to simply be a psychopath who, to make it worse, can't control himself in the least and is easily ready to abuse whatever means at his disposal (like being admin at LET) to get his way. Simple as that - and I don't say that in hatred but I merely describe what I see.

 

[Lee]

Why would LET allow something like this from an admin? That simply puzzles me.

Like any forum you take on people you believe will do a good job out in front and in the back. Jarland needs to make those choices, not saying the guy is instantly bad due to this one incident and should be stripped of Admin although it does raise more questions than it answers.

I have all but abandoned the LET market, there is much going on in the background that most don't know about in provider terms, what's below scum of the earth? Whatever it is is where many of the LET providers lay.

All I have now is a couple of BuyVM Slices, or one I can't remember.

@bsdguy, I would check FraudRecord, can guarantee they reported you on there.

 

[WasNotWSS]

@bsdguy for what it's worth, the term you are looking for is megalomaniac.

 

[Lee]

During that whole PM series (which I btw saved as things sometimes happen to vanish at LET ...)

Can you post this. I always find the tone on both sides is why it ends up where it does.

 

[Jonathan]

Sure - if you explain me what that means. He has killed my account, so I can't produce anything there. But I have my payment record, emails, etc ...

That would be great and work just fine. Gotta do our due diligence is all

 

[bsdguy]

@bsdguy, I would check FraudRecord, can guarantee they reported you on there.

Thanks for the hint but a) I don't think he is *that* insane and stupid (one of my clients is a large international lawyer group and will be more than happy to sue the living shit out of him) and b) *shrug* There are enough providers who can give me anything I need and will gladly do so.

 

[bsdguy]

That would be great and work just fine. Gotta do our due diligence is all

Call me stupid but clicking on the "report" I find only a small field to complain about some post ...

So, *how* can I give you the information/data in a confidential and secure way? I'm ready but I don't yet see/understand how.

 

[Jonathan]

Call me stupid but clicking on the "report" I find only a small field to complain about some post ...

So, *how* can I give you the information/data in a confidential and secure way? I'm ready but I don't yet see/understand how.

Yeah that's the right place. We use the report system (complaining on your own post) to track proof that you had an account with a host. Just black out any private information and toss a link in the report. Only mods/admins can see it.

 

[bsdguy]

Done. Sent the report.

 

[bsdguy]

Can you post this. I always find the tone on both sides is why it ends up where it does.

Being a Mod you can see it in the report. For all others: I was pissed and desinterested and pushed but reasonably polite. But there is again expressly written that I wasn't looking for a refund nor the vps. ishaq played it constructively and friendly in the beginning (experience with unhappy customers?) and showed his real face as soon as he saw that he wouldn't get what he wanted (that I take back what I had posted). So he abused his admin role and took it by force.

 

[Jordan]

What the OP continuously fails to mention in this whole story is that the reason he never received his service in the first place was simply due to the fact he entered the wrong email address. To suggest we did not deliver what we promised is misleading.

Therefore when he opened the ticket he mentioned, the response he received was that the ticket needs to be opened under his billing account. Anyone who understands how WHMCS will work, will know that since the email was wrong the ticket will show as being a guest ticket.

The client seems to think that it’s our responsibility to follow this up somehow. But follow it up how? Support are not actively on the lookout for emails which may be invalid. If the client was confused by this response, you would expect them to try and contact us again or through alternative methods, but they did not, they simply assumed we’re ‘scammers’ and then disparaged the business in public.

My whole stance on this is that Ishaq did make a mistake removing the post, he should have first asked for a second opinion from another staff member to ensure the business interests are not clouding his judgement, however his viewpoint that it was libellous is entirely correct.

I do not think this reaction is justifiable. In my view, deep down bsdguy feels responsible for this, and is therefore attacking Ishaq wherever possible and providing as little context as possible in order to twist it in his favour. And naturally, as with every company, there are people out there that don’t like us who will join in. And, I believe this is helping you get over the idea you made a mistake.

I suggest that in the interest of providing a fair unbiased account, you post screenshots from the private conversation on LET before this discussion continues, then let people make a judgement.

As for certain untrue claims about us not caring after we receive money, I would like to point out since our incorporation last year, we have repeatedly upgraded our hardware in all locations, where it was not strictly necessary, and will continue investing in our existing products AS well as new products. Your feedback is always welcome and is acted upon.