All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Review of SpeedyKVM (Spoiler Alert: BEWARE)
Just wanted to share my experience with SpeedyKVM which, before today, was great.
Pros:
Prices - Can't beat them.
Datacenter locations - more than enough for US providers
Live sales chat was very knowledgeable and fast
Tech support staff was prompt and helpful for the two or three minor issues I had with getting started
Cons:
Their anti-DDOS systems block external load testing tools like Blitz.io, so you can't really see how they will perform with live traffic.
Upon signing up you will receive no less than 6 separate welcome emails, some of them with conflicting information.
The above issue wouldn't be a huge problem other than: They can and will terminate your account without any notice, for any reason. So if, say, you miss one of the welcome emails which requests credit and photo ID confirmation, they would rather terminate your account - and kill your live sites - than make any attempt to collect that information retain your business.
One simple additional email or phone call (which could be automated of course) from them could have resolved this entire issue and - who knows - maybe I would've been a happy customer for years to come. An account suspension would have done the same thing, I would have sent them what they needed and we'd be back in business with them.
If this happens to you and you email them asking for an explanation as to why you got terminated (because, again, you missed an email) they will say roughly (or exactly) the following:
"Notice was given 13 days ago that we needed to verify your payment method, [LINK TO IMAGE OF THREAD YOU CAN'T ACCESS] The account has been closed do to no reply. We can not help you further, thank you. -- Jeff"
Because, ya know, they have one of those well-known, industry standard, unadvertised 13 day termination policies.
They apparently have so many customers that they would rather argue with terminated past customers on Twitter than try to keep customers. I only know this because I found a bunch while posting my own complaint on Twitter. Our conversation there went something like this:
My tweet: @SpeedyKVM Thank you for closing my account with ZERO notice because of a missed email - 3 live sites toast & support says Not Our Problem
Their response: Didn't verify cc/id information in 13 days, plenty of notice given. CC fraud is massive in this industry, bye.
My responses: I missed ONE email (in a dozen) and never got a follow-up. No phone, email, nothing. Apparently you don't need the business. It just speaks to a complete lack of giving a damn about your customers. I'm glad I found out before I moved all my sites there.
At which point they blocked my account.
I'm curious if they know that other people can read these things... like the general public and other potential future customers.
Their response here will likely be much the same: "It's not our problem, you had 13 days to respond to that one email we sent you." Which is both sort of true and also completely dumb from a business perspective. I did get plenty of notice, if you define "plenty" as one email.
Furthermore, to assume that the new customer - who chatted and emailed with three different people in your company - and who's credit card number and balance is anything but fraudulent, is some kind of spammer, scammer, or thief... is just pretty foolish. Especially given that their justification (credit card fraud) is handled by Stripe, their merchant provider, not them.
I currently have VPS and decicated accounts with Linode, Vultr, and Hivelocity - all of which were going to be migrated to SpeedyKVM over the next month. I'm thrilled beyond belief to discover exactly 13 days in that SpeedyKVM would rather draw arbitrary lines in the sand than have my business. I can't imagine what I would have done if all of my sites servers all went down at the exact same time, because of a miscommunication.
So, if you're reading this Jeff - or whoever - at SpeedyKVM: You're welcome. There's one single sentence above (starting with "One simple additional email or phone call...") that could be worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in additional business to you over the coming years, assuming you implement on it. Of course, you could choose to continue terminating perfectly good business, smugly deploying your "13 day cancellation with no notice" policy.
In summary: SpeedyKVM is dedicated to utterly absurd communications and client relationship policies and they're disinterested in building long (or short) term relationships with their customers. They'd rather say "bye" on Twitter and handle a slew of complaints than just pick up the phone or drop an email and say "Hey, it's Jeff from SpeedyKVM... how are you liking everything? By the way, we need to get a copy of your ID and..." That's just insanely stupid given how costly and difficult it is to acquire new customers in an industry this competitive.
Presumably, their infrastructure and service is solid - my experiences up to this point were positive. But I can't possibly recommend them for anyone who is serious about their own business.
I can safely recommend all of the providers I listed above and can say that Linode is the next closest in value and doesn't have any of the load testing issues. I can also say that I had a similar snag with Vultr and guess what they did... that's right, they sent a single follow up email and the issue was immediately resolved. They still have my business 18 months later at $100+/month.
Best of luck to all of you with your hunt for the right infrastructure provider. Good luck to SpeedyKVM as well... I think you're going to need it.
Comments
edited...
Fixed that for you :P
SpeedyKVM is Wable, go find the reviews about Wable's customer ...love - nothing new
@wzrd $100 a month may be a lot to you (and to me). But after expenses how muchis left as pure profit for Incero? Not a whole lot. The fact you didn't reply to an email is your fault, not theirs. And it probably is a cruel calculation, but if you can't handle your initial account setup correctly - chances are, they will have on average more difficulties from those kind of users, than those who follow directions. Finally, how much money could you possibly save by cutting out linode and vultr? I can see saving money by downgrading from a HiVelocity dedi to a VPS. But it begs the question - if you have had good relationships with linode and vultr - why not aggregate everything there? I'm thinking you chased a discount SpeedyKVM was offering and created a ton of work for yourself- when you could have just upsized Linode and host everything there
I saw a similar thing about serverhub and agree, it's scary and unacceptable behaviour to activate a service and then shut it off weeks later because of this type of concern.
I've had some hosts ask me to send in ID before taking payment and activating the service and that's fine. I sent it in one case, and went elsewhere in another. But once you've gotten the money and activated the service, leave it turned on unless an actual problem happens.
Thanks for the feedback! I will pass it on to the team.
No. THEY are the ones who didn't handle the initial account setup correctly. There is nothing in their TOS that says anything about photo ID confirmation (I just checked). They took the money, activated the service, then added new conditions after the fact. I'd consider that a breach of contract on their part. Their TOS in fact seems to have been written by lunatics, but photo ID is one area it didn't mention.
SpeedyKVM has some nice offers but unless there's a part of this that I haven't seen, it's enough to keep me away from them.
I do agree money should be refunded (without customer asking for it) as a function of account closure. They do seem to abhor tickets from Wable and KVM users and I do think they make the effort to be terse to reduce ticket volume. As far as photo ID goes, I would never give it to any internet provider. If I can get credit cards without submitting my ID, then why on earth would I submit it for a $7 service? And yes, I'm certain there is part of the story we havent seen.
Stolen credit cards?
@doghouch was referring to the fact that for legitimately issued credit cards, I never had to email a photo ID to a group of faceless people whose ultimate intentions are unknown.
I'd also like to know whether the customer's data was preserved for customer retrieval after the suspension/closure. If it was deleted that's another mark of insanity. It might not be so bad for a small vps, but the mere possibility of such a deletion is intolerable for a company hosting dedis and storage plans (that apparently happened with serverhub).
They do get to credit check you though, which is one way of verifying an identity. But even then, we know that fraud takes place.
Unless providers are going to start credit checking customers and only allowing them to use matched addresses.. but no client is going to agree to that.
@vortexmagnus and a client would have to be insane to send a legitimate id via unencrypted email to a stranger who could be anywhere in the world with widely varying laws regarding identity theft for approval of a $7 vps. Although people send them all the time to vendors - its just crazy. And how does the recipient even know its valid? I could probably make one that looks like an ID but isnt really. And many states have multiple versions of ID/drivers license. Is me sending it to someone overseas going to prove anything? or me sending an "ID" to someone in Texas when I live on the east coast? In any event @wzrd took his shot at the vendor that termianted him and I doubt he will become a regular poster.
Oh I'm not disagreeing with you here, but the credit card principle I am.
Asking for photo ID is a wasted exercise in most cases. Too much fake ID and stolen ID to match cards anyway. There's far better ways to combat fraud that also don't consume the clients time either.
It's called watermarking. You watermark the scanned image with the name of the recipient. Kinda hard to be abused.
They don't. Some do it for regulatory requirements (for example, betting sites), others as a deterrent and others because they heard they should.
About wable.com.
This guys have banned my account after signed up and insert my credit card details on their website due I'm living in Brazil.
Now you know how Chinese feel.
When will over trend associated with feminism, I hope the time will come when humanity will begin to respect international relationships as well as their national internal one. Now a huge number of provider owners - nazis, fascists and racists. This is manifested in various violations of business etiquette in doing business and in relationships with the customer, in statements, of rudeness, which is very easily verify with proxy servers or a few services for the grammar correction. A lot of such providers here at LET. And that is very bad....
It's not racism, it's valuing your time and minimizing costs. Exactly why do you think you are entitled to buying whatever you like?
WTF did you smoke today
I would advise you to remember an LET rule:
I'm not sure what that has to do with the thread or anything but a providers choice of how to handle potential fraud is their choice. Everyone is different. For example, probably 25-40% of my client base is from Brazil or South America. Different companies choose to target different individuals.
You saying nazis and fascists sounds like you're talking to a government, not a provider on LET!
I'll just piggy back on this thread with my one-month review.
Previously I've had a few years of identical (KVM storage VPS) with Backupsy, so I'll be comparing to that.
Here is my selection thread https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/99837/looking-for-cheap-storage-kvm-vps
I've registered with LET coupon for $4/mo for 512GB VPS, and after some back and forth with support were able to switch to yearly billing. Major upgrade from Backupsy $5/mo for 250GB, very happy about it.
Switch to the yearly billing is a must with SpeedyKVM because their TOS declares very strict termination policy, and your chances of "monthly payment gone wrong and your data destroyed while you were hiking some trails" are pretty high. Like "worse than storing external HDD at your grandma's place" high.
Unfortunately SpeedyKVM does not allow fund deposits like Backupsy, and switching to longer billing cycle is your only option.
SpeedyKVM website customer area isn't as polished as the one you get at Backupsy.
You get two sets of credentials (and a bunch of welcome/setup emails as others noted) for customer area and control panel itself.
Login form for the latter does not allow storing credentials, which is a major PITA. You also don't get to choose credentials there.
Control Panel itself if more feature reach than the one found in Backupsy: I was able to mount netinstall image I wanted without talking to support, and do a custom install.
You might want to change default virtual network adapter, because it somehow manages to render avahi DNS running on my private VPN completely useless.
There is also a three implementations for VNC console in web browser, which is nice to have for wide user browser coverage.
Connectivity with Ukraine is noticeably better than the one I've had previously.
Evidently from rsync backups, storage is quicker on random I/O.
Don't have anything to say about tech support, because I didn't need one.
Don't have anything to say about service termination, apparently I'm white enough.
I think I'll stay for a few years here.
If @SpeedyKVM_Ryan takes suggestions:
1) watermark can be taken out with photo editing
2) issue isn't the possibility someone making a duplicate document-- it's disclosure of info in the document.
This says "stay away" all by itself.
Retaining credentials doesn't help, probably makes it worse. CC issuers screw up all the time. At least when it's a manual payment you see it happen and can react immediately.
Yeah.
Unless you are constantly available to react, it's not the question "if", just "when" things will go wrong.