The problem with exit scams is that fortunately, they don’t exist anymore. What fueled the exit scams was the fact PayPal never allowed refunds for virtual goods or services, today however they are both covered. You may want to go read PayPal’s terms of service. Not sure how I’m running away with people’s money when they’ll get a refund and then PayPal and I will settle later on, it’s not like the money was spent, it’s sitting in a CIBC account since both accounts (PP/Stripe) get dumped almost daily. When dealing with annual accounts, it not wise to put services not rendered on the books i.e. the prepayment, as it’s actually classified as a liability. Who knew?!
I’m not going to be proactive in refunding, simply because of all the drama with the refunds themselves. If people think paying $12/yr for a service, using the service for 6 months, then charging back the full $12 when they’re only lawfully entitled to a $6 refund, I’m not going to sit there and fuck around with arguing with people. Let them get their $12 refund, I’ll tack on a $200 administrative fee, a $50 charge back fee, the balance due and the interest, then fire the account off to collections. Problem solved.
Regardless of what people want to believe, the company was profitable. Profitability however isn’t the only metric used when forecasting a company’s future. People need to stop using the word owner and start using the word investor. For me this was an investment and while profitable, the company never hit any of its quarterly targets. Not hitting the targets makes it difficult to forecast the future in terms of its value i.e.putting more resources into a.k.a. what this investment is worth to me.
It’s also important to understand why those targets failed. It’s not one single issue, it’s multiple issues overall. Yes, the economy isn’t the greatest, yes, we have inflation. Are people’s wages going up? The reason why I say this is because the company never had a strong commercial/corporate customer base, it was mostly hobby companies and VPN users i.e. residential. While I’m not going to complain as revenue is revenue, as people struggle trying to make ends meet, and let’s be honest, if you had to decide between two VPS’s i.e. Limewave or Vultr/DO, you’ll always pick the most established provider and drop the other. That’s fine, business is business. There have been a few, larger providers, very vocal about lack of growth and the economy. Kinda odd for me to bring up struggling customers, isn’t it? 62% of the customer base never paid their bill on time (and yes I did remove the $0.50 late fee), not knocking them, however if you can’t pay a $1.85/mo service on time, it’s either because a) money is tight – OK, not everyone lives in a country where they make a lot of money, I get it or b) the service wasn’t a priority. Now if the service wasn’t a priority, that’s a slight problem, no?
HE losing their SEA<>Tokyo run didn’t help things either. It’s hard to compete in markets where the company actually found a niche (not that I planned to be a provider in those markets), however the MJJ’s love HE. HE, HE, HE, fuck NTT fuck Cogent. The amount of “can I get single homed HE” tickets was actually surprising, had I known I was going to be a VPN (I mean VPS) host in that market and their love for HE, I never would’ve signed Cogent. I’m sure I could’ve picked up v6 Cogent routes off Wowrack cheap. Meh. But now with the 40-60 ms of additional latency, whatever monthly customers the company had in that market, well… let’s just say 24 hours after HE shit the bed, there was a decent number of cancellations.
Having a DC tech fat finger some shit in the rack didn’t make things go any smoother. However the work was being done to upgrade the network and add additional power. People ticket in “network is shit” – “I know…”. I can’t pull a fucking rabbit out of my ass and “problem solved”. Doing the upgrade was a huge and I mean HUGE pain in the ass, however once complete, I hate to say it, the last 2 months or so have been probably the best in terms of performance and reliability.
Now there were some plans made in November to try a small pilot, nothing big, however I did find a deal on some E3-1245v3’s and was planning on doing a dedicated servers out of Seattle. When the network was built, there was never any plans for colocation or dedicated servers meaning the physical infrastructure for the backend was never there. So yes, it’s gonna be a hit or miss in regards to whatever automation solution I picked (pay attention now – the project never got that far) and working out the bugs, the additional power going in was for these servers.
What it comes down to is that regardless of the capital that went into this location, $43K to launch and another $10K in November, the numbers weren’t there. If people want to believe it was an exit scam, that’s fine. The decision to cease operations wasn’t on the table until the end of the fourth quarter, which is the end of December.
But let’s be honest, if I’m struggling for cash and need to pump accounts to pay carriers and colocation bills, why in the fuck would I spent two grand on old shit servers? Why pick up (and carry) the additional power? As of right now, they’re still sitting unpackaged and that kinda sucks, because I was looking forward to seeing how things would’ve turned out.
If I was struggling for cash, why not sell the ports? How many providers here would be interested in, pot luck special, FLAT 10g ports - $200/mo for one and $300/mo for the other – pick your rate and I’ll tell you if it’s Cogent or HE. Anyone in wowrack want my 10g FLAT SIX port, it’s only $75/mo, $550/mo retail btw. I got a killer deal on 40 amps if anyone’s looking for a deal. Anyone looking for a /21 of IPv4 non 4.10, make me an offer. The ports aren’t being sold nor are the IP’s or power.
It’s not that I didn’t value the customers I had, I did. I’m very grateful for the customers that decided to do business with me, thank you! At the end of the day however, decisions need to be made and it’s just business.
As for the ARIN updates, yes there are plans. As of right now, I have the rack space just don’t have the free power. The plan as of right now, nothing official, is that I’ll be bringing a few nodes online for a 24 hour period then cycle with the same pattern until all the nodes have had their last day. What I’m waiting for is OVH to approve the BYOIP orders as I figure, it’d be wise to have some form of basic DDoS protection. Once the nodes come online, people can rsync the data off if needed, however the same restrictions as before apply i,e. no outbound SSH, so my advice would be to change the SSH port of the remote host now to avoid any delays when the node comes online. OVH states up for 3 weeks, so tick tock. We all wait.
For the node that was a total loss, it will be repaired and brought back online so you can recover your data if needed.