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minivps.co.uk and MiniWebHost sold to Astutium Ltd
a few hours ago I received this email:
Today we have an exciting announcement and good news to bring you.
Effective immediately the MiniVPS and MiniWebHost brands have become part of the growing family of services operated by Astutium Ltd, a leading UK hosting provider based in London, UK.
After many requests for additional virtualisation services and features, as well as alternative domain extensions and new hosting packages, the MiniVPS and MiniWebHost brands have now joined Astutium in order to expand the range of services offered and to provide our customers with enhancements to their hosting experience.
As part of Astutium the MiniVPS and MiniWebHost customers can now access an extended range of services including :
- Broadband network access
- Over 1200 ccTLD and gTLD domain registration types
- High-availability email and web hosting
- Dedicated Minecraft hosting
- OVZ virtual private servers
- KVM and Xen virtual dedicated servers
- private cloud services
- Managed (and Unmanaged) fully dedicated servers
- London colocation
- IP Transit
- Control Panel licences
and much moreBelow is an answer to some frequently asked questions.
If you cant find the answer you are looking for, please don't hesitate to reach out and contact us for any reason by raising a ticket, dropping us an email or giving us a call.
We want to thank you for your business and we look forward to providing you with reliable service for many years to come.
Sincerely,
Martin Diver
MiniVPS and MiniWebHost
Astutium Ltd
Number One Poultry
London
EC2R 8JRPhone (UK): +44 20 3465 2555
Phone (US): +1 607 264 2555
Fax: (UK): +44 20 3475 2666=======
= FAQ =
Q: Will I get the same level of support ?
A: Support will get even better for you! Our online support system (very similar to the one you use now) is accessible through the Client Portal.
We aim to improve the provision of support to the Mini-Brand clients with more support staff and faster responses, as well as making available a complete range of pro-active virtual/dedicated server management optionsQ: Will I manage my account the same way ?
A: Astutium uses an online user friendly system that allows the customers to take control of their own services, a later and more customised version of the current system you already access.
By Friday 11th September all data will be imported in to this new system and we will have emailed you with new access details.Q: Will my service improve ?
A: Over time, Absolutely!
For MiniWebHost clients your websites will shortly be migrated to new, lower-population, faster Dual Intel QuadCore Xeon SSD based servers hosted at our DataCentres in the UK, NL or US (depending on your location/choice)
For MiniVPS OVZ clients we will shortly begin the transfer of your containers to newly deployed state-of-the-art hardware in our datacentres, on our network and to our IP ranges from the current 3rd-party systems
For MiniVPS KVM clients we will soon begin the transfer of your virtual machine to newly deployed hardware on our network on our IP ranges
Uptime, Performance and Reliability should all be increasing as we refresh the hardware and add new services.Q: Can I still order Domain Names ?
A: Yes. As an Accredited Domain Registrar we are able to offer all ccTLDs (country domains) and gtlds (generic domains) at very competitive prices with instant online registration (in over 99% of tlds) for available domain names, as well as all the New GTLDs. We average 30% on registrations and renewals than resellers, and consistently top the 'best-value-for-money' tables of accreditted registrars.Q: Do I need to do anything ?
A: By and large there is no need for you to take any action. If we need you to do anything we will let you know specifically.
There are a few web sites which do not use the the Mini-Brand nameservers which we will need you to update at your DNS provider, but the number of those is very few, and we will contact you with specific details.
For legacy virtualised services, there may be an IP change for your server if it needs to be moved between datacentres- details will be advised to you in advance if that happensQ: Will I Access SolusVM for managing my Virtual Server the same way ?
A: The SolusVM URL for accessing the control panel may be changing over coming weeks , as we merge all the servers onto our systems - details will be sent to you by email if/when the solusvm access domain changesQ: Will there be any downtime ?
A: The entire migration to new servers should occur in the background and you should experience zero downtime if you are already on our IP ranges
We have not yet set the schedule for hardware replacement for the server migrations from 3rd-party datacentres - details will be sent to you separately and posted on our status blog when we have confirmed dates - and any IP changes will be communicated well in advance. In many cases a migration wont even be necessary at the start, as we are looking at taking on the existing hardwareQ: Who do I contact now ?
A: From Friday you will be able to contact Astutium directly to get the assistance you need.
The existing support ticket system and account management portal will be setup to redirect you to the main Astutium services - until then, keep using the same methods you do now.Q: Will my price change ?
A: Yes, sometimes down, sometimes up - all depending on the services, products and add-ons you have with MiniVPS or MiniWebHost (or the older Mr-Host and Mr-Host-ShoutcastAlthough we will mitigate as much of that as possible, and the majority of customers price (excluding any taxes) are not expected to be changing significantly - a breakdown of the expected price changes is below:
Domain Name Prices
Domain Registration, Renewal and Transfer pricing where possible will be the same or reducing.
As astutium are one of the few ICANN Accredited Domain Registrars and have access to direct pricing on domain names (rather than going through a reseller) - where savings are possible they will be automatically passed on to you reducing the price you are paying now as domains are transferred to our own registrar
Website Hosting Prices
The cost of the hosting services will be largely the same/unchanged, with some more heavily utilised packages increasing slowly over time to cover the actual cost of providing the services without 'overselling'
In many cases this can be completely offset by the reduction in costs on the domain names, and so if your domain is registered elsewhere other than one of the the Mini-Brands (or Astutium already) you can save money by transferring that domain in now - contact [email protected] for details on how to transfer your domain names to Astutium.
Streaming Radio Hosting Prices
The cost of the streaming services will be largely the same/unchanged (with the exception of VAT which is beyond our control)
SSL Certificate Prices
Astutium offer a much larger range of SSL certificate types (each type is designed for a specific purpose/industry/use)
in most cases the price for replacing/renewing your certificate will be exactly the same or less than you pay now
IP Addresses
The IP Address pricing is not expected to change as part of the acquisition, although they are likely to increase in price regularly - IPv4 is in very short supply as there is a finite number and all LIR's (Astutium is a RIPE LIR) are limited to those they have now, with new IP allocations no longer possible. The current pricing of additional IP Addresses is directly related to the actual costs incurred to manage, route, obtain and supply them, we do not profit from the nominal charge for additional IP addressesOVZ Virtual Servers
We are expecting to keep the existing pricing for the current OVZ virtual private servers the same for existing clients, and make new plans and new options (and upgrades) available over timeKVM Virtual Servers
The prices for KVM Virtual Dedicated Servers will be 'normalised' with the Astutium packages, meaning in most cases no change to price or featureset, with some reducing in cost at next renewalIMPORTANT * * IMPORTANT * * IMPORTANT *
VAT
As a VAT registered business we have to charge VAT (at the prevailing rate) on all new and current (unpaid) invoices for users within the EU.For users outside of the EU there are currently no mandatory taxes although several states within the US may require us to start charging Sales Tax shortly to their residents.
Although we apologise for this but it is unfortunately taxation is out of our direct control...
- If you are a UK VAT registered business yourself, you can of course claim this back in full through your VAT-100 as normal.
- If you are an EU VAT registered business, please contact us with your address, vat number, country and once validated by VIES all future invoices will be produced excluding VAT
- If you are an EU individual you will be charged the VAT rate of your local country which we have to collect on their behalf.
- If you are outside of the EU, currently we will set you as VAT Exempt.
Q: What Payment methods can I use?
A: You will be able to pay all of your future invoices by the payment method that is most convenient for you, with the exception that we are unable at this time to continue to accept Moneybookers/Skrill as they have recently been acquired - we are already in discussions with them as to when they will reopen the service for new applications.Astutium accept
- Debit/credit cards
- Paypal
- Bitcoins
- Standing Orders
and many other methods full details can be seen at
https://www.astutium.com/knowledgebase/142/What-payment-options-do-you-accept--How-can-I-pay-.html
Have fun @MartinD with your new found freedom 
Some info posted by joepie:
Bit of background on Astutium:
Previously called Othello Technology Systems, and there exists a thread on LET about them.
ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement breaches in 2013 and 2015.
Their acquisitions are listed publicly, as mentioned in this thread before, but not updated for 2015.
They acquired a host with issues; it's unclear whether the issues started to exist before or after Othello Technology Systems acquired them.
Note that I'm not making any judgments here, just collecting information.
< end quote >
Sorry if the formatting is bad, got a CloudFlare error in the middle of writing this
Comments
Shame, Martin provided a solid service.
Shame for customers that @MartinD's moving on but sounds like he was looking to get out of the business, so good for him.
FWIW, ICANN breaches are fairly common and not necessarily a cause for customer concern.
Rob Golding, the owner of Othello/Astutium is fine, he is a decent enough person. He has his finger in many pies and often a little lean on the ground. But he does provide a good service and will be a stable home for these companies.
I hope the new owner can figure out how to run ntpdate. When I had a server with minivps.co.uk, clock drift was horrible and support couldn't figure out how to fix it.
That's one of the best "we sold you" notices I've ever seen. I don't even get notices that GVH has sold my client account to someone else again until I start getting "newsletter" spam from the new company.
sigh Very sad to hear that. I've been a customer since Oct 2012 nearly uninterpretable services. Was very stable and fast box for my websites. Martin was extremely helpful and capable person. But seems like he got tired of this.
Not sure if I'll keep this box with the new owner or check someone more reliable. I hate those sudden moves because it involves a lot of things to do for me when IP changes.
I remember this clown. IIRC he came to LET and tried justifying why he raised the prices to 30$/month for a 256mb OVZ or something like that.
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/44381/#Comment_44381
Interesting, the site is now being redirected straight to Astutium, minivps as a brand has just been killed straight off it would seem. Thankfully I went in and removed my details, that's a mailing list I don't want to be on.
I've been a MiniVPS customer since 2011, and the service has been flawless. I remember just a single short outage in 4 years. Such a good service clearly did not come by chance, Martin is a capable person.
The sale to Astutium may be a good choice after all. I already have been a Astutum customer, they opened my customer account when they bought UK Cloud in 2012. I had a yearly VPS at UK Cloud for a insanely low price and they kept it running without any issue and without IP changes; there was a sharp price increase at reneval time, but I didn't needed the VPS anymore by then and I cancelled it. They never sent unsolicited offers. I also exchanged a few emails with the sales department to solve a minor issue when they imported my data, and the error was rectified in a short time. They seems to be a respectable company with a good service, but they target a higher market (I believe). I will keep an eye to the renewal date of my yearly VPS and will ask about the price one month in advance.
Price changes (in general) are only as a result of one -ro-more of
There are a few of the minivps packages we'll be phasing out though - primarily the very small or the strangely configured
More importantly, welcome back as a client
IP Address changes are unfortunately inevitable this time as the bulk of the systems are at 3rd-party locations and networks.
We completely understand the impact that has, particularly where nameservers or hosting servers are involved - much of the HW was due for replacement over the next year anyway, which will be accelerated now and starts over the next few weeks, and ip renumbering was already underway to internal rather than datacentre ranges - you'll be given plenty of notice before anything happens that will affect you (the exception being if rented hardware dies and vps need to be reprovisioned wholesale, they'll likely be setup on new hardware and new ips)
No, we did not acquire DMBHosting
Most registrars that stand up for or try to protect registrant rights get 'breach notices' at some point - the important issue is whether they get withdrawn by ICANN and/or resolved by the Registrar.
The MiniVPS 'brand name' is likely to be retained and repurposed for just the VPS (OVZ offerings) - at the moment there is a bit of everything in there which will get tidied over time
The site redirect is largely a function of the way the template was designed & integrated into WHMCS - a simple redirect rather than hundreds of .htaccess rules for 301s/302s was the most expedient way to ensure clients get to the right site to open any tickets or manage their service if they need to
Rob
Regardless of the rationale, price hikes are going to seriously piss people off. I think you'll also find the above-mentioned categories to be overrepresented at LET.
Well business is business, these things happen, it will be great for some, for others they are lucky there is a world of choice available.
I doubt anyone on annual plans will be shafted though which is great and happens all to often, Othello are not some small fry you do a back door deal on skype with, I was surprised to see them buy a host with none UK locations though always thought they were strictly UK.
Hope it goes well for everyone.
All Minivps locations were UK were they not?
I thought it was France and NC USA too?
Astutium are in the US (NY & AZ) and NL (Amsterdam) as well as the UK, but it's primarily London based services as that's where the main offices and the primary datacentres are
Germany and Singapore are on the potential list of locations to add PoPs based on client geography and traffic patterns - DE is much easier to backhaul but more traffic would go through SG
MiniVPS provides services from multiple places in the UK ( most of which will eventually be transferred to our network in London ) as well as FR (ovh - will be reviewed with the clients using it as to why and whether its kept) and US (which will get migrated to our kit eventually)
Shame you will not be keeping Manchester on.
My question to these companies that end up buying out others is, "Why do you always insist on ruining a good thing by immediately moving customer to a different location or service, etc?" Why it is that if your buying a successful host such as MiniVPS which I am sure was at least some what profitable, would you then immediately go mucking about with things instead of just leaving them be? This is the thing that bothers me the most about these acquisitions, If something is already productive why do these companies always insist on changing it? Sure, might cost you less, but when you start doing such things it has to create a churn rate on your customers... for example... I have been a customer for years.. but you go moving my server to a new location (which I did not purchase the service in) then I will surely cancel my server. I know I am not alone in feeling this way, so why would you not just buy the company and keep the assets where they are, offering your customers the ability if they would like to to move to your 'newer, better, faster, etc platform" but not forcing them out of the product they already have?
Now it doesn't seem like Othelo is going to do this immediately, but still, is it really worth the churn rate and the pissed off customers to do so? @othelloRob since you guys seem to be a decent hosting company, can you explain the logic behind these types of decisions? Is it really worth it?
I ask because most of the time when these buy outs happen and I get the inevitable e-mail stating that they are going to move or change my service, to me, that is an immediate "Must go cancel service since it seems the new host can't even sustain what they purchased, so why should I even bother with them" in my mind.
Now maybe you guys will do it right, I don't know? I would still appreciate the outlook on something like this from a company who is actively buying hosts to see if it is all really "just about the money" or if the customer is even considered at all when these deals are made?
Thanks in advance for your time and response.
Cheers!
@TheLinuxBug, business - off LET - is about the money. Rob has invested his and has ideas for making a return - which include a more realistic business model. If you don't like it, plenty of super cheap providers out there who don't know how business works.
@jh if I wanted a dumb obvious response I would have asked for one to begin with (or not at all).
I know the obvious answer, hell I work for a company that acquires other brands as well, however, we have a different mind set when doing it than most of the hosts here. So, I want a real response from a company actively pursuing other hosts to better understand the thought and logic behind it... in some cases it isn't all just about the money, in others it is. As MiniVPS has been successful (as far as I can tell) I am curious why changes would be needed to stay profitable, etc.
Cheers!
In general UK traffic ends up flowing through Docklands, so by shifting the virtuals to London you get lower latency, less (potential) points of failure - resulting in an overall better service, plus by being in our racks on our kit and our network, should anything go wrong, we're onsite and able to fix it not reliant on 3rd parties
This depth of discussion is best done over beers - there are pros-and-cons - feel free to come to the next webhostchat forum social or similar and we can thrash out the logic:) But I'll try to answer ...
It's rarely 'ruining a good thing' when you plan to migrate, it's to improve things, get better control of them, automate the service delivery, make support better, remove 3rd parties from the equation and so on
In the case of some MiniVPS services, a HW refresh of one range is essential maintenance anyway, the IP change and move-to-own-racks was already in progress, so things would have changed no matter what
Disruption is never undertaken lightly and always with the overall clientbase needs at the forefront - wading through a number of minivps tickets, reliability of access for one type of service is what the bulk of the non-account-queries are about, and that cannot be g'teed or managed effectively when it's on rented kit at a provider who have had 2 'blips' in the last 3 weeks !
Success is a subjective term - it depends on how you measure it - is that purely a 'gross profit' measure, or would uptime be more appropriate ? Is having less tickets per client per year a better measure because 'it-just-works(tm)' ?
Control is the simple answer - control of the quality of the product/service, control over costs, control over some proprietory tech/commercial advantage etc
Churn happens for a variety of reasons, and has to be measured/managed/predicted as much as possible
Take one shared host we acquired a while ago, they had massive churn, and the bulk of that was directly related to regular periods of outage at the company they rented the server from combined with their cramming everything onto it ... So yes everyone got new dns/nameservers and access urls etc, but in the 8 months since they were migrated, not 1 minute of unplanned downtime, no longer on a single massively oversold server, and the cancellations that have been since then are largely due to the project ending or because they chose to move to another one of our sevices, rather than host-hopping
And we'll be sorry to see you leave, but wont make it difficult for you to do so if you choose - did you actually pick a 'location' for a reason, or simply a service type/level and a country ? If there is a very specific need for a very specific location, feel free to talk to me, and we can see if something can be worked out that covers your requirements and provides a valuable option for others
In our case it's more about ensuring the customer needs are met, which is generally acheived by having service on-net and at our locations - if you take the Newcastle MiniVPS setup as an example, near 100% of the data is travelling back-and-forth to E14, so even if you were in say Doncaster, and hosted in Newcastle, the traffic flow is
you > yourisp > varous-routes-to-docklands > datacenter-upstream > various-routes-to-datacentre > datacentre-provider > minivps
(and back again)
Would you not consider that 'better' if it simply went
you > yourisp > varous-routes-to-docklands > as29527/astutium
(and back again)
I've not seen the facility yet (thats next week) and I'm sure it's highly redundant from the specs of power etc, but it's also a bit of a trek to have our technicians work on the kit, when they're based in and around London - so say for example a catastrophic failure of all the switches occurs and they need replacing and the config restores - the potential downtime to you is probably 6 hours, whereas if that was at one of our London locations, its probably 30 minutes
In all decisions
are weighted and considered
Many of the acquisitions I'm involved in (not the MiniVPS one, but plenty of others) are about rescueing clients who would otherwise beb abandoned, or because we're asked to take on the clientbase (like the ICANN transfers of de-accredited registrars) or because they're clients looking to exit the industry
HTH
Rob
Maybe that's the case for Melbourne's network (AS39451) who have been dropping their Tier 1 upstreams in favour of pushing traffic over their fibre link with iomart. (AS20860)
Cogent, GTT and Level3 all have direct links to North America from Manchester, with GTT and Level3 also having direct links to Eastern Europe.
I'm not trying to pass judgement on your decision to move kit, just giving my 2 cents on the connectivity situation in the North of England.
That explains that then
@othelloRob Thanks for taking my request seriously and taking the time to reply! I don't think we get enough transparency from hosts in this niche so I appreciate that you would come here, take the time and be so forthcoming about the way you see and do things.
Cheers!