nLighten confiscated hardware of MIRhosting and its colocation customers

treesmokah

For context, MIRhosting got in hot water recently after it's founder got arrested for his affiliation with PQ.hosting. He was released shortly afterwards. (link)

On June 2, MIRhosting had all of its hardware, including colo racks of their customers taken offline by nLighten in Netherlands and Germany. As far as I know, it's was not an action of law enforcement.

To this day hardware remains offline, and customers are unable to access it in nLighten datacenters.

It has escalated to a battle between nLighten and lawyers of affected customers.
Statements from some of the affected hosts can be read here: https://hosting.kitchen/tag/nLighten/ (archive)

It affects multiple providers, some of which are present here.

Neoon

EnLighten mahNuts

havoc

Kinda guessed it would be russians before clicking on the link

Gumbus

Damn, nLighten aren't messing around... I wonder if anything has gone down at Serverius..

treesmokah

Affected hosts are:
AlexHost.com (AS200019)
VDSina.com (AS216071)
HIP.hosting (AS41745)
Datacheap.ru (AS215305)
IHC.ru (AS216139)
Weasel.cloud (AS41745)
RuWEB.net (AS216139)
EuroByte.ru (AS216139)
Hosting-VDS.com (AS216129)
McHost.ru (AS216139)
KVMka.ru (AS216024)
LandVPS.ru (AS216300)
SebekVPS.com (AS216129)
Retzor.com (AS215305)

Its possible there is even more of them, some smaller resellers I did not find yet.

Coverage on Russian forums and media:
https://hostsuki.pro/all/ocherednoy-evropeyskiy-pozor---data-centr-nlighten-otklyuchil-klientov.html (archive)
https://www.ruscable.ru/forum/theme-612337/ (archive)
https://gamemodels3d.com/forum/?topic=2755 (archive)
https://internet-lab.ru/hosting_800 (archive)
https://searchengines.guru/ru/forum/1142851 (archive)
https://habr.com/ru/news/1043210/ (archive)
https://runet.news/news/70926 (archive)

There have been no updates yet on when nLighten releases the hardware, everyone is still locked out and hardware powered off.
Some providers started migrating to other locations using offsite backups.

No public statements regarding this from MIRhosting (or its founder) either, he for sure was a "free" man a few days ago. I do not know whether he got arrested again.

Needless to say, I think that was an extreme overreach by nLighten and most of these affected hosting providers are innocent.
Unless it somehow turns out to be law enforcement action, I expect nLighten to be sued and pay a lot in compensations.

treesmokah

nLighten released the hardware of AlexHost, VDSina and HIP.hosting (at least)

AlexHost

@Alexhostcom said:

Updates regarding Netherlands (NL) situation:

Dear Community. We are continuing to migrate servers. As of today, we are no longer affiliated with MIRHosting. Our new data centre will be entirely our own; we are working towards that.

The servers are being moved gradually; we hope to have everything ready today (once again, we hope…), though we cannot confirm that everything will be ready today, but that is our expectation.

Things are moving along smoothly; in fact, we were one of the first to manage to move out of the data centre. Everything is being transferred to another data centre.

We’d like to thank everyone once again for your support and patience, and for understanding that this issue is complex and has been complex. It hasn’t been easy at all, and we fully understand why some of you haven’t been happy with this situation, but believe it or not, we haven’t been happy with it either.

Now everything will be directly hosted in a new data centre. At the very least, we’ll try to get everything connected and aim to have everything at least operational or ready by today.

Our aim is to ensure our customers are satisfied and that everyone has their servers back up and running as soon as possible. We are working to make this happen, perhaps even today. We can’t guarantee it, but we’ll do our best.

Note: For those who didn’t understand the issue, it wasn’t easy to resolve; there’s plenty of detail in this thread to explain what happened.

Thank you to everyone who commented and supported us – there are so many of you that We can’t mention everyone by name. A huge thank you.
Alexhost

VDSina

HIP