John’s Crawlspace

Finding a reliable proxy host can be extremely difficult. I’ve been running a handful of proxy sites for a little under 4 years now, and I have yet to find a host that I’ve been happy with. Some hosts have worked out well in the short term, but after a few months, for one reason or another, things always tend to fall apart.

Last year, I posted a review of Fused Hosting. If you didn’t read it, let’s just say that things didn’t go very well with them, and I’d recommend avoiding them at all costs.

After that debacle, I decided to give VPSNOC (VPS Network Operation Center) a try… They offered VPS Hosting solutions and they allowed proxy sites on their servers, so I figured it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of reviews of web-based proxy hosting services on the web, so I didn’t know better.

On October 11th, I created a proxy hosting account with VPS NOC.

I decided it’d be a good idea to use Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service to keep an eye on the sites, and get a feel for how much downtime (if any) I was experiencing.

On October 13th, the first Pingdom downtime notice hit my inbox. From that point on, it was basically a continual stream of downtime notifications. On most days, I got 15 to 20 of them. To give you an idea…

Notice that this is just a small sampling of the VPSNoc proxy hosting downtime notifications from 10/13 and 10/14.

I was hoping that this was just temporary, and that VPS NOC would get things back on track. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Any and all attempts on my part to get in touch with VPSNoc were unsuccesful. At times I wondered if they had anyone working there at all. Tweets, emails, etc all went unanswered.

I sometimes wondered if somehow I had blocked my own devices from connecting to the server. A quick visit to Down For Everyone, Or Just Me? straightened that right out.

The only beacon of hope were the billing notices. I still received these invoices for the proxy hosting “services” like clockwork each month – Even when my sites had been completely down for days.

Anyone with half a brain would have cancelled these “web hosting services” after the first month. I may have a little too much fun on the weekends, but I pride myself in having at least half a brain left. I’m a pretty busy guy though, and between work, freelance work, and extracurricular activities/social life, I wasn’t able to find the time to properly research a new proxy hosting company.

The holidays came and went, and at the end of December I found a new webhost.

I tried to cancel the VPSNOC proxy hosting service in January, when I had all of my files transfered over to the new host.

I sent my first cancellation request email to VPSNoc on January 12th. Nothing. I tried again on the 13th… And yet again on the 18th. None of these emails were replied to. I didn’t want to just *cancel* through the cpanel, because I felt that the company owed me a refund of some sort – not only because of all of the crazy downtime that I faced, but also because I was charged for over a month’s worth of hosting that I wouldn’t be using. I also tried calling the business number listed on their website. Both times I called, it went straight to an answering machine. I left detailed messages with my information and requested a callback, but naturally I never heard anything back from them. Surprise, surprise.

I finally decided to just chalk it up to a loss and cancel my account through the cpanel, since I didn’t want to be charged for a second month of service in a row that I wouldn’t be using at all. One month of proxy hosting service, down the drain. Crappy, but certainly not the end of the world.

However, my account cancellation requests still haven’t gone through. VPSNoc.com is still sending me invoices for hosting. Is it possible that all of the owners were kidnapped or something?

The new proxy host? So far, so good. Due to the fact that I’ve experienced next to no downtime with this new host, my network of web-based proxies are picking up steam again, and now I have a new issue to deal with – bandwidth overages! I think that any webmaster will agree that this is a much better problem to have than downtime, though.

Needless to say, I would not recommend utilizing VPSNOC for any type of hosting. Downtime of any sort is unacceptable, but when your sites are down for days at a time and you can’t get ahold of anyone to resolve it… Well, that’s just ridiculous. As you can see, the support is non-existent, so avoid using VPSNOC hosting services entirely.

I have several web-based proxy sites that I run to earn a little AdSense cash. I’ve had them for several years now.

My proxy sites require minimal maintenance, but the hosting is expensive (proxies are extremely resource intensive) and as such don’t end up earning me a whole lot. Most hosts don’t allow proxy sites on their servers for this reason.

I’ve been with 4 different proxy hosts over the past few years, and all of them have ended up disappointing me. I always end up experiencing an unacceptable amount of downtime – We’re talking multiple days per month, sometimes weeks.

Anyway, I switched to FusedHosting.net with the promise of unbeatable uptime and fast servers. For the first few months, this seemed to be the case.

And then the downtime started.

My sites would go down for days at a time. I’d send an email to customer support, only to receive a response days later (when the sites were finally back online) saying that they had zero downtime and that it must be on my end.

I realize that even a day of downtime is unacceptable and should be more than enough reason to make someone switch hosts, but switching ~10 sites to a new host can be somewhat of a pain, especially when you’re as busy as I am.

Communication always sucked with Fused Hosting, but sometimes the downtime was so bad that even the FusedHosting.net domain would be down for days at a time, and emails to their “support team” would bounce back entirely.

When I started to experience downtime that went on for almost a full month, I decided it was time to switch to a new host. It almost seemed like a practical joke, or as if they were testing the limits to see what they could get away with. With extensive downtime comes a serious decline in traffic and a loss in rankings comparable to flushing countless hours of SEO work down the toilet.

On March 17th, I got in touch with someone at Fused Hosting and let them know that I wanted to cancel, and would also like a refund for the obnoxious downtime. They told me, of course, that they would not provide a refund, but that my account had been cancelled. Thank god.

This past month, I was looking at my PayPal account and realized that I was still being billed by FusedHosting. Surprise surprise! They billed me for 4 additional months of hosting for a total of $120.

I attempted to contact them several times regarding this “oversight”, and I wasn’t making any progress. They took days to get back to each email and clearly this was going nowhere. I called several times. Finally I got ahold of someone on the phone.

He took a look at the situation, aka pretended he wasn’t familiar with me, my account, or the situation at hand, and that he had to look it up and familiarize himself. He told me that my paypal account would be refunded, and that it would take 2-3 days to go through. Near the end of the call he also sounded pretty sarcastic, and actually laughed at one point. I wasn’t sure how to react to that, so I just thanked him and decided I’d wait and see what happened.

Well here we are, almost a month later, and nothing. I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone over there either – They’ve ignored all subsequent calls and emails.

I’m not the only one who has had a bad experience with (or was straight up “scammed” by) FusedHosting. Here is someone else’s story.

I doubt that many of my regular readers are in the market for a proxy host, but I felt obligated to get this out there. Hopefully no one else will get screwed over or scammed by these guys.

I was reading an interesting article on NYPost. The article was about the CIA and their testing of LSD in the New York subway system in the 50′s. Interesting stuff, and as such, I wanted to share it with a friend.

Normally I’d just copy the URL and IM/email it to someone, but this time, I just highlighted a paragraph and copied it to my clipboard.

When I pasted it into the IM window, I noticed that more than one paragraph was there. In addition to what I had copied, some extra text had made it’s way onto my clipboard. It said “Read more” and provided a URL to the story. Slick, huh?

It’s definitely an interesting link building method. How many people that paste that from their clipboard wouldn’t notice the additional appended sentence? I would be willing to bet at least 30-40%, especially if they’re copy/pasting multiple paragraphs. So when these are being pasted onto social networking sites, forums, and blogs, backlinks to the site are being generated with no effort on the part of the webmaster.

I looked into how this works – actually, my buddy Andy beat me to it. They use a service called Tynt Insight to do this. Javascript is used to send whatever you copied to Tynt’s servers, where a backlink to the page that you’re on is added. There is some speculation that not only is what you copy sent, but also everything that is selected.

Invasion of privacy? Some would say yes. Slashdot says you can block this using Ghostery.

For those of you familiar with Twitter (that should be most of you by now), there tends to be a correlation between the amount of followers that a user has and the quality of that user’s tweets. If someone is new to Twitter, that’s one thing. But if you consistently spit out quality tweets, you will eventually have a sizable following on the site. For this reason (and a handful of other reasons), people want as many followers as possible.

Every few weeks, there is a new “get XX followers now!” scheme that pops up. I remember when I first started messing with Twitter (over a year ago) it was a service called Flashtweet. At the time, Flashtweet was free. You logged in, and the service would allow you to look at any Twitter user’s followers. You could follow all of them, and then wait for them to follow you back. Wait a few hours or a day or whatever, and then unfollow the ones that didn’t follow you back – Or unfollow all of them if you wanted. This seemed to work somewhat well, and I used to to build up Twitter accounts for some clients at the time. They still have rather large followings on the site, regardless of the frequency of their tweets.

The latest of these sites is Spread My Tweets! I messed around with it for a little while this morning, and it definitely works – You give it your login info, and it follows 15-20 people using your account, but in exchange, you get 40-50 new followers. I don’t know how new this site is, but it seems to be spreading like wildfire. I’d imagine that it is only a matter of time until Twitter tweaks their API or something so that the site no longer works.

The idea was appealing to me at first, but then it dawned on me – I have to be suspicious about the quality of the followers that you gain by using this site. I doubt many of them would end up being genuinely interested in the things you’ll be tweeting in the future, and most of them will most likely go through and unfollow when they’re done using the service. It really is just a number, and if these new followers won’t ever interact with you or retweet your content or anything, what’s the point?

Anyway, if you follow me on twitter, and happened to see some weird garbage this morning about gaining new followers, that was where it came from.

For more about these “get followers quick” methods, check out this post from KMK Blog.

I discovered Chatroulette last weekend, although apparently the site has been around since last November. For those of you familiar with Omegle, Chatroulette basically took that concept (being instantly connected with a random chat partner, with the ability to skip to someone new with the click of a button) and threw webcams into the mix.

If I hadn’t already tried the site out and someone explained the site to me, I would have had no interest. When was the last time I used a webcam… Probably when I was in high school?

When I first went on the site, some of my friends were hanging out, and we ended up spending a good 2 hours on there screwing around. The vast majority of the people on there are either guys with their shirts off, guys trying to get girls to take their shirts off, guys beating it like mad (this happens a lot, need to be quick with the ‘next’ button), dorm rooms full of guys waiting to yell homophobic slurs at you, fake celebrities (although the Jonas Brothers are apparently on the site all the time), or lemonparty/goatse surprises. Sounds awesome, right? I know I’m not doing a very good job at selling this site, but if you can stomach the things I just mentioned, it’s actually pretty fun to go on with some friends. You’ll be clicking ‘next’ a lot, but there are some pretty funny/bizarre things going on that make it all worth it. Oh yeah, and there are actually girls on there too… You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I ended up having a few long (10+ minute) conversations with people/groups of people. It’d be very easy to say that this site is for people with no friends or too much time on their hands, but I still think it’s a pretty cool concept, and if nothing else it provides some mindless entertainment on a Friday night while you’re drinking with some friends before going out or whatever.

This site is the sort of thing that reminds me that I’ve spent a lot more time on the internet over the years than my friends have. I click “next” and a guy hanging from a noose pops up. Friends say “holy shit, a dead guy!” I say “relax, it’s from Stile Project” (covered by yours truly here on March 5th, 2000) and then feel like some sort of weird wise old internet grandfather.

People displaying images like the hanging Stile, lemonparty, and other gross/amazingly awesome internet memes are most likely waiting to capture the look of shock/disgust on your face via screen shot and post it on /b/. So yeah, keep in mind that anything you do on here can very easily be saved and posted somewhere else.

If you don’t plan on checking out the site, but want to stay “in the loop”, here’s a good article about Chatroulette from NYMag.

Oh yeah, and if it isn’t implied already… “NSFW”.