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ClubUptime Refugee Thread - Page 2
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ClubUptime Refugee Thread

2

Comments

  • @clubuptime: After you stopped selling OpenVZ VPS's it was more then obvious that something was going wrong.

    The fact is that clubuptime looked like a pretty solid company and it ended up closing its doors after 4 years wasan't it? ( I might be wrong here )

    Working with 'premium' providers like softlayer and providing 'budget' servers would never work.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @clubuptime Are you still under NDA with who the ditcher was? I'm fairly sure I was having a wonderful chat with who it was on the old lowendtalk. :)

    Francisco

  • @Francisco are you Portuguese or something? Sorry for this "random" question but this name is pretty common in Portugal thats why i'm asking, i also have seen your second name a few times "Dias" its another common name in Portugal.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    My father immigrated from Chaves in the 80's and my mother parents immigrated from the Azores back in the 50's or so ;)

    So yes, very much a Portuguese name!

    Francisco

  • ah, yeah. I know some friends with names similar to yours , yeah i'm from Portugal :)

  • @Francisco: Unfortunately, yes. For about another 10 months. At that point, I'll gladly spew his name to anyone who asks. We're definitely not happy with how things ended up going. Club Uptime and it's clients ended up being casualties to Brohosters business instabilities as Brohoster was tied at the hip to Club Uptime.

    To the rest of you, contrary to popular comments, Club Uptime and it's VPS offerings were doing very well as of late: Especially since we stopped offering budget services and changed our business model to match that of a higher end provider such as Linode (Who we actively used and loved, actually). Since we don't offer all the bells and whistles that Linode does, we offered lower pricing.

    Brohoster on the other hand was started by a 17 year old kid who came to me with an idea that I agreed to let him run with. He had a few servers and some clients. I figured the worst that happens is I end up with more shared hosting clients. I honestly never expected Brohoster to go from under 150 clients to over 1200 in a single month. The pricing was too low, it grew too fast, and it buckled under it's own weight in the end. It was only made worse by the previous owner walking away with a ton of money, but that really wasn't what killed it all in the end. We needed more staff, and the requirements to continue running the platform grew by nearly 30% with every software update to the Minecraft platform.

    I tried selling the company several times due to how unstable it was, but the users of Facepunch decided to turn it into a big PR nightmare claiming that I stole the company, that I was just trying to make a quick buck, etc...

    They essentially rendered the company unable to be sold, leaving it attached at the hip to Club Uptime.

    Our deal with the person to take over the companies at the very end was nothing more than to cover our debt. We wouldn't even walk with $5 from the deal. It was to do nothing but cover the $64,904.23 plus about $7800 in debt from personal loans that I took out to help keep the company afloat for the past month. Unfortunately, that person tried to default on the Softlayer payments last minute, and well, you see how that turned out. As for the "missing $93,000", I'd still love to see where those figures have come from. WHMCS reports that we brought in about that much over the past three months: Not that we should have it. Softlayer runs us $32-34k/month, with staff and other expenses bringing it to nearly $44k/month.

    I'm being heavily criticized right now for not coming forward sooner, and this I do understand fully and I'm not putting blame on anyone but myself for that. The last thing we wanted to do was start a mass panic when we had someone on NDA with a letter of intent to purchase, which would have kept everything alive and running.

    It was an ugly situation that was made worse by the fact that I was caught traveling at the time on an anniversary retreat with my fiance. Suffice to say, she wasn't happy with me working from my cell and iPad when I had decent enough cell signal that allowed me to do what I needed to. Brian Gonzalez, the companies co-owner ended up doing most of the negotiating with Softlayer to get the servers turned back on due to my traveling, however I was involved every step of the way sitting in on countless conference calls with Jeff Reinis and Mary Hall over at Softlayer (Btw, Mary is an AMAZING account rep!).

    Lastly, Web Hosting Talk has done a pretty good job at trying to shut up anyone who attempts to defend Club Uptime in any manner. We've seen hundreds of posts disappear, my account (corporate paid annually, too) has been "disabled" (albeit with the as of yet empty promises that it will be re-activated), and no one can seem to explain anything over there. I actually didn't notice how much content had been removed that was pro-Club Uptime until a third-party had mentioned it. To say the least, I'm going to take what's said there with a grain of salt from now on after experiencing their content filtering first hand.

  • clubuptime said: my account (corporate paid annually, too) has been "disabled" (albeit with the as of yet empty promises that it will be re-activated)

    errr woowww O_o i didn't notice that until you tell that one here. yeah i see that now. :(

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I think the reason for that is because it looked like multiple people were sharing that account.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @clubuptime - Very interesting. If it's the case, I had a run in with them last year over the lowendbox.net/.org domains. I called foul play but they claimed otherwise.

    WHT is an odd place alas. The mods sometimes nitpick on the really stupid stuff then ignore the big, obvious, scams. I've seen them play nice to hosts that didn't deserve it and pulled some serious sleazy stuff right infront of them without any sort of punishment till many moons later.

    Francisco

  • So yes, very much a Portuguese name!

    Fran needs an about page. Not the first time this has come up. :)

    The mods sometimes nitpick on the really stupid stuff then ignore the big, obvious, scams.

    Yup.

  • I can't believe brohoster/cu are both down, those kids could have been young multi-millionaires and set for life if they had both stopped being greedy.

  • jhjh Member

    I don't think it had much to do with greed - they were running in the red.

  • CVPS_ChrisCVPS_Chris Member, Patron Provider

    Jtodd hit it on the head

  • WHT isn't... uh... "democratic" ? :p

  • those kids could have been young multi-millionaires

    Do you really think Mindcraft is going to last that long? Seems like yet another fad that will be gone in a year or two.

  • CVPS_ChrisCVPS_Chris Member, Patron Provider

    With the new update I think it will double or even tripe in size to be honest

  • I really don't know why Minecraft is that popular.. I've actually tried it and it was kinda boring to me.

  • HMMMM...

    I'm not sure why are they declaring the cost thing as they reason for them to get out of business, this might not be an issue for such a company, then can leave servers on whom clients are not paying them.

    Well that is their issue, but I think the facepunch issue guy has sued them a large amount of bucks due to which they are unable to do business.

    I am just guessing, it might not be true.

    Regards

  • We've gone from 41 users to 138 within a day or so? Sock puppets maybe?

  • Guys you can contact us too if you're an EX-clubuptime client. We will give you 1 month of free services (xen , open vz)

    Just signup and email to [email protected] with details of your cu plan.

    thanks

  • drmike said: Sock puppets maybe

    Not as far as I can see. Account growth seems to be normal after I make v3 more public last week.

  • I don't think they respond to emails sent to [email protected].

    And by the way two full weeks passed, let's see if they really do refunds as claimed.

  • CVPS_ChrisCVPS_Chris Member, Patron Provider

    WebsHosting said: Guys you can contact us too if you're an EX-clubuptime client. We will give you 1 month of free services (xen , open vz)Just signup and email to [email protected] with details of your cu plan. thanks

    I will double that.

  • CVPS_Chris said: I will double that

    And you wonder what sleezy things you do?

  • Hey, I'll triple it.

    Oh wait, I don't do VPSes.....

    :)

  • I do hope they give out the refunds. Asking for anywhere between 45 days to 60 Days for refunds might be a company practice but is that not enough time for Paypal not to allow a dispute to be opened. I've seen a couple of WHT winning their disputes so would advise others not to wait so much if you do not get any reply from emails sent.

  • @CVPS_Chris Did you contacted the sales ?

  • @VmIIT: We request people be patient as myself and the co-owner are pulling out of our personal bank accounts to refund people at this point. We've had almost $12,000 sucked away in chargeback fees alone, which ate more money than the company had left over. The unfortunate part? The total in refund requests was just over $4,000 so far.

    We asked people to be patient so that everyone could get refunds, but everyone jumping on the "LETS CHARGE IT BACK!" bandwagon has guaranteed that most aren't getting a refund in a timely manner. We predicted this, we asked people to be patient, and too many people still said "Don't trust Matt, you won't get a refund!". Whomever the user "Target" at Web Hosting Talk is a prime example of this.

  • VmlITVmlIT Member
    edited August 2011

    @CU looks like you put yourself in this situation. A simple "Refund will be processed in 30 Days" would have been enough.

    If I was a client and a host says. We will process refund in 45 to 60 days. For me thats enough time for them to run away and enough time for Paypal or any other to not allow me to open a dispute.

    Though I must say I am happy that you guys are giving out the refund. That is Honesty.

    Regards

  • I agree with @VmlIT on the point that they actually created the disaster themselves.

    First, there's no response to the email. Second, there hasn't been any customers who step forward to say that they received the refund. Of course everyone would understand that there's limited fund, and no one is asking them to do it at one go.

    Now let's wait and see who actually get the refund without doing a charge back.

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