WebHorizon's NAT VPS Services: Changes upcoming, Migration to HostBill!

Abdullah

Hello, esteemed LowEndSpirit community members!

I have some exciting news to share with you regarding NAT VPS services at WebHorizon!

We recently upgraded our billing system to HostBill, an advanced platform designed to provide an enhanced hosting management experience. With the implementation of HostBill, we have addressed various control panel bugs and streamlined the management of NAT VPS services, ensuring a smoother and more efficient process.

This upgrade is now available for NAT VPS services aswell, on our dedicated brand NatVPS.net brand.

New NAT VPS brand portal: https://clients.natvps.net/

We are actively working on developing a migration plan for all clients to seamlessly transition to this new brand portal. The migration will be carried out one location at a time, and we estimate that it may take approximately a month to complete. Rest assured, we will communicate the migration plan to you and provide detailed instructions when your location is scheduled for the transition.

Meanwhile, the old portal is still available and existing services will continue to be accessible there.

We genuinely appreciate your patience and cooperation during this transition period. My team is dedicated to making this migration as smooth as possible for all clients. I am confident that the HostBill upgrade will greatly enhance your control panel experience and streamline the account management.

Please note this change affects NAT VPS services only.

Thank you for being a part of this community and for choosing WebHorizon as your trusted NAT VPS provider. I look forward to serving with excellence and restoring the great support experience in coming days!

Abdullah

I wanted to provide some additional information about our decision to migrate to the HostBill control panel.

Our existing setup with Blesta + Virtualizor, though reliable for a time, has presented some challenges, such as VMs not terminating properly and other control panel bugs. I understand how these issues can impact user experience, and it has been causing a lot of additional support burden.

Using HostBill, with SolusVM in the backend, these issues are resolved and offers greater stability and reliability. Additionally, HostBill allows us to streamline billing management, making it easier for to provide efficient support and billing services.

Please note that, due to the nature of the migration, there is no direct path to transfer services from the old setup to HostBill. As a result, service re-creation on the new portal will be required. Rest assured, our team is fully prepared to guide you through the process to make it as smooth as possible.

As previously mentioned, the migration will be carried out one location at a time. We are actively developing a well-thought-out migration plan, which we will communicate to you in advance. Detailed instructions will be provided when your location is scheduled for the move.

In the meantime, your existing services will remain active on the old portal, and you can continue to manage them as usual. We genuinely appreciate your patience and understanding during this transition period.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please feel free to share them.

bliss

@Abdullah said: Meanwhile, the old portal is still available and existing services will continue to be accessible there.

So if I'm satisfied with the current control panel, will my service be re-created forcefully?

@Abdullah said: there is no direct path to transfer services from the old setup to HostBill. As a result, service re-creation on the new portal will be required.

You mean the current data will be trashed seamlessly, and the customers should back up data now, right?

Abdullah

@bliss said:

@Abdullah said: Meanwhile, the old portal is still available and existing services will continue to be accessible there.

So if I'm satisfied with the current control panel, will my service be re-created forcefully?

When time comes, yes we will need to do it as we can't maintain two clusters for the same service offering.

@Abdullah said: there is no direct path to transfer services from the old setup to HostBill. As a result, service re-creation on the new portal will be required.

You mean the current data will be trashed seamlessly, and the customers should back up data now, right?

Not right now. As previously mentioned, the migration will be carried out one location at a time.
We are actively developing a well-thought-out migration plan, which we will communicate to you in advance.
Detailed instructions will be provided when your location is scheduled for the move.

bliss

@Abdullah said: Not right now. As previously mentioned, the migration will be carried out one location at a time.
We are actively developing a well-thought-out migration plan, which we will communicate to you in advance.

Sorry but seems you misunderstood my point.
It's not when.
I'm asking if my data will be lost after the seamless migration?

If yes, then I'll back up the data; if no, then I won't bother to back up the data.

Sorry for my question, but your statement confused me a little:
On one hand,

@Abdullah said: As a result, service re-creation on the new portal will be required.

On the other, you touted the migration as "seamless".

Sorry again if I'm wrong, but I don't consider a data loss during migration as "seamless".

skorous

@bliss said:

If yes, then I'll back up the data; if no, then I won't bother to back up the data.

Always. Backup. Your. Data.

Abdullah

@bliss said:

@Abdullah said: Not right now. As previously mentioned, the migration will be carried out one location at a time.
We are actively developing a well-thought-out migration plan, which we will communicate to you in advance.

Sorry but seems you misunderstood my point.
It's not when.
I'm asking if my data will be lost after the seamless migration?

If yes, then I'll back up the data; if no, then I won't bother to back up the data.

Sorry for my question, but your statement confused me a little:
On one hand,

@Abdullah said: As a result, service re-creation on the new portal will be required.

On the other, you touted the migration as "seamless".

Sorry again if I'm wrong, but I don't consider a data loss during migration as "seamless".

I understand. Please backup the data.
This is the best way I can think of as there isn't any automated migration path to hostbill from blesta.
manually migrating and restoring them in accounts seems unfeasible for NAT services. So we will give a 15 days prior notice for migration and data backup.
Sorry about the trouble and thank you for the cooperation

kvidden

So prior deals will be changed here as well, as with the move of France location earlier this month?
The German and Poland double disk and unlimited bw that is.

Fritz

I want to keep my old IP, can you make sure that be possible @Abdullah ?

alento

@Abdullah said: I understand. Please backup the data.
This is the best way I can think of as there isn't any automated migration path to hostbill from blesta.

I am confused @Abdullah are you migrating the actual service or just the billing?

If just the billing from Blesta to HostBill, then services will be completely unaffected. Unless, of course, you do not disable auto-termination in Blesta.

Anyways, congrats on the upgrade to Hostbill. I am sure that you will find it much more friendly in most areas, and it will be more complex in others, sadly. But having used both, I can understand Hostbill, but still need to reach out to Blesta every time I want to do something.

yoursunny

@alento said:
I am confused @Abdullah are you migrating the actual service or just the billing?

If just the billing from Blesta to HostBill, then services will be completely unaffected. Unless, of course, you do not disable auto-termination in Blesta.

Provider wants to delete all services, destroy all data, change all IP address, and reprovision service from HostBill.
Provider does not have balls to connect HostBill to the existing Virtualizor instance.
Provider is too lazy to develop scripts to live migrate existing containers to new host machine.
Provider is too cheap to buy 240 hours from the wonderful @skorupion for developing such scripts.
Provider does not have spare host machine, so that they cannot provision new server before deleting old service.
Provider is on the way to become a meme provider.

Not_Oles

@yoursunny said: Provider wants to delete all services, destroy all data, change all IP address, and reprovision service from HostBill.
Provider does not have balls to connect HostBill to the existing Virtualizor instance.
Provider is too lazy to develop scripts to live migrate existing containers to new host machine.
Provider is too cheap to buy 240 hours from the wonderful @skorupion for developing such scripts.
Provider does not have spare host machine, so that they cannot provision new server before deleting old service.
Provider is on the way to become a meme provider.

Hi @yoursunny!

I have much respect for you, for your knowledge, your experience, and for your many positive contributions. Maybe you are just joking. And maybe I am, like so often, yet again completely missing out. If so, I am sorry!

Because of my respect for you, may I please ask, how do we at LES improve anything starting from suggestions such as @Abdullah wants "to delete all services," "does not have balls," is "too lazy," and is "too cheap?"

Is it too crazy to imagine that @Abdullah might want to give his clients a better experience by changing billing panels? And that @Abdullah might be trying to institute this improvement within Low End constraints such as not paying for spare servers? And that @Abdullah is doing well by providing advance notice of the upcoming improvements?

Thanks for considering my comment here! Thanks again for your many positive contributions!

Always best wishes and kindest regards,

Tom

fluttershy

@Not_Oles said:

@yoursunny said: Provider wants to delete all services, destroy all data, change all IP address, and reprovision service from HostBill.
Provider does not have balls to connect HostBill to the existing Virtualizor instance.
Provider is too lazy to develop scripts to live migrate existing containers to new host machine.
Provider is too cheap to buy 240 hours from the wonderful @skorupion for developing such scripts.
Provider does not have spare host machine, so that they cannot provision new server before deleting old service.
Provider is on the way to become a meme provider.

Hi @yoursunny!

I have much respect for you, for your knowledge, your experience, and for your many positive contributions. Maybe you are just joking. And maybe I am, like so often, yet again completely missing out. If so, I am sorry!

Because of my respect for you, may I please ask, how do we at LES improve anything starting from suggestions such as @Abdullah wants "to delete all services," "does not have balls," is "too lazy," and is "too cheap?"

Is it too crazy to imagine that @Abdullah might want to give his clients a better experience by changing billing panels? And that @Abdullah might be trying to institute this improvement within Low End constraints such as not paying for spare servers? And that @Abdullah is doing well by providing advance notice of the upcoming improvements?

Thanks for considering my comment here! Thanks again for your many positive contributions!

Always best wishes and kindest regards,

Tom

He's wiping people's services. There is no "better experience" there.

FrankZ

The following is just my personal opinion:

I expect that @Abdullah is just doing what he thinks is best to be able to maintain the NAT services into the future. These services are not big money makers and come with some inherent issues for providers. Is it better for providers to drop these lowend services, like Calin is doing, to avoid the future problems and expenses ? I have services with webhorizon that have already gone through this process, and still have more to go. I just don't see reinstalling, and restoring from backup, as that big of a deal. I do it in the normal course of events regularly. I'm not sure where this outrage is coming from, or if it is deserved.

skorous

@FrankZ said:
The following is just my personal opinion:

I expect that @Abdullah is just doing what he thinks is best to be able to maintain the NAT services into the future. These services are not big money makers and come with some inherent issues for providers. Is it better for providers to drop these lowend services, like Calin is doing, to avoid the future problems and expenses ? I have services with webhorizon that have already gone through this process, and still have more to go. I just don't see reinstalling, and restoring from backup, as that big of a deal. I do it in the normal course of events regularly. I'm not sure where this outrage is coming from, or if it is deserved.

Similar expectations here. I've got a small website, a small monitoring node, and a couple lighthouses, proxies, etc... on these. Before coming here and reading this thread I happened to put in a ticket asking about just re-provisioning them ahead of the official plan to lessen the amount. I can rebuild them all fairly quickly/easily except for the first two and consider this a good opportunity to test my build scripts and backup processes for those.

@fluttershy said:

He's wiping people's services. There is no "better experience" there.

If it resolves any/some/all of the issues that pop up time to time for me I'll happily declare it a better experience. That said I do agree, perhaps this is just my perception since most of it hasn't affected me but, his environment has felt like very .... "dynamic" ... of late. A lot of change at a pretty consistent rate.

EDIT: typo ( stupid fingers )

yoursunny

@skorous said:
If it resolves any/some/all of the issues that pop up time to time for me I'll happily declare it a better experience. That said I do agree, perhaps this is just my perception since most of it hasn't affected me but, his environment has felt like very .... "dynamic" ... of late. A lot of change at a pretty consistent rate.

WebHorizon == constant migrations

That's why I sold my bundle and never ordered another.

mikewazar

Can I get a response to my ticket? The panel is broken, people on Discord and complaining and no official announcement of the issue was raised, yet here you are on LES?

Mumbly

@yoursunny said: That's why I sold my bundle and never ordered another.

I am also dropping both of my NAT VPSes (from gullo and WebHorizon) because at some point it's not worth the hassle no matter how cheap it is. Constant long-term outages, migrations, outages, migrations, nonworking IPv6 because of this and that reason, node suspensions by DCs because of some client's abuse, outages, nonresponse from hosts and more outages.

And I am not talking about too big expectations, I know that it's cheap and so on ... and I was really trying to keep them, but at some point simply isn't worth the hassle no matter how cheap it is. It's like extremely unreliable, often non-functional dead weight which require special care on my VPS list and that needs to go.

Ympker

@FrankZ said:
The following is just my personal opinion:

I expect that @Abdullah is just doing what he thinks is best to be able to maintain the NAT services into the future. These services are not big money makers and come with some inherent issues for providers. Is it better for providers to drop these lowend services, like Calin is doing, to avoid the future problems and expenses ? I have services with webhorizon that have already gone through this process, and still have more to go. I just don't see reinstalling, and restoring from backup, as that big of a deal. I do it in the normal course of events regularly. I'm not sure where this outrage is coming from, or if it is deserved.

Usually, on a NAT VPS, I just host a personal vpn, so if it gets wiped all I have to do is setup ssh keys and config again and fire up Nyr's script and all is ready to go. Naturally, the complexity of this re-deployment of services varies, but I'd assume there are ways to automate a lot of these tasks. Especially docker containers can easily just be re-deployed.

@Mumbly said:

@yoursunny said: That's why I sold my bundle and never ordered another.

I am also dropping both of my NAT VPSes (from gullo and WebHorizon) because at some point it's not worth the hassle no matter how cheap it is. Constant long-term outages, migrations, outages, migrations, nonworking IPv6 because of this and that reason, node suspensions by DCs because of some client's abuse, outages, nonresponse from hosts and more outages.

And I am not talking about too big expectations, I know that it's cheap and so on ... and I was really trying to keep them, but at some point simply isn't worth the hassle no matter how cheap it is. It's like extremely unreliable, often non-functional dead weight which require special care on my VPS list and that needs to go.

I've signed up with a Budget Greencloudvps instance (15€/yr) and I'll likely drop my NATVPS.uk instance pool for it at some point. While NatVPS.uk has been quite solid and I love the resource pool idea where I can split my 256MB RAM into 4x64MB instances or 2x128MB, in the end, one solid Greencloudvps vps will be sufficient for my needs.
Nat renewes at 6$ish and Greencloudvps at 15€, so there's quite the price difference, but from where I am standing right now it seems well worth it. I still got a couple of months before renewal comes up, so time will tell.

sh97

For 170 INR (~$2) yearly, WebHorizon has been pretty decent for me.
Never had any major outages or issues so far.

Abdullah

I am working with hostbill to see if it would be possible to have this done without the need for destroying data/changing IPs at all.

I made this post only for notice purpose as most our clients are from LE* .
How to migrate over is still in progress. It is likely that VM will need to be destroyed and recreated on the new platform (so mentioned it in announcement) , I was recommended this way bcz it involves two migrations Virtualizor -> SolusVM and Blesta -> Hostbill making things complex.

@Fritz said:
I want to keep my old IP, can you make sure that be possible @Abdullah ?

It is technically possible to move all data with IPs, please allow us some time and will confirm you on this .

Abdullah

@yoursunny said:

@alento said:
I am confused @Abdullah are you migrating the actual service or just the billing?

If just the billing from Blesta to HostBill, then services will be completely unaffected. Unless, of course, you do not disable auto-termination in Blesta.

Provider wants to delete all services, destroy all data, change all IP address, and reprovision service from HostBill.
Provider does not have balls to connect HostBill to the existing Virtualizor instance.
Provider is too lazy to develop scripts to live migrate existing containers to new host machine.
Provider is too cheap to buy 240 hours from the wonderful @skorupion for developing such scripts.
Provider does not have spare host machine, so that they cannot provision new server before deleting old service.
Provider is on the way to become a meme provider.

That's excessive, . I am not cheaping out hostbill cost us more than blesta
spending on development is not an issue but it's not simple as getting a script done.
I am working with hostbill to see if it would be possible to have this done without the need for destroying data/changing IPs.

Also we have enough capacity to scale the natvps services by more than four times in SG, JP, DE & FR , other locations can be arranged if needed.

bliss

First of all, I'd like to thank @Abdullah for what he has offered:
NAT of Web Horizon is affordable, stable (except those in Hong Kong), and performant (unlimited bandwidth, fast apt-get update, etc...). And Abdullah is decent and respects people.

So I'm sorry to see WH is changing, because I don't believe there is any space to improve. I'm not making compliments.
When WH is at its best, any change is damage. My user experience will inevitably deteriorate. Although I know for sure the change is necessary too.

Anyway I wish WH flourish in the future. WH deserves flourish.

Oh, don't call the migration "seamless", which is absolutely not from clients' eyes.
Just announce the migration in advance, and I know @Abdullah did this for kind reminder.

As for @yoursunny 's statements, I think it's a fun way of expressing thanks to the kind announcement, which is as well out of kind heart.
I know this because we are to some extent in the same situation where clients suffered poor Hong Kong NAT VPS.

bliss

Thank you.

flo82

@Abdullah what happens to unlimited bandwidth with lower speeds? will this change?

kvidden

@flo82 said:
@Abdullah what happens to unlimited bandwidth with lower speeds? will this change?

That question was sadly answered in the FR instance thread:
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/6128/natvps-net-migration-of-france-nat-vps-services-to-new-node#latest

Where its said to be a hard cap.
So the sweet sweet deal with unlimited without reduced speed is gone as well.
So using it as a personal VPN now will be not so useful sadly.

Abdullah

@kvidden said:

@flo82 said:
@Abdullah what happens to unlimited bandwidth with lower speeds? will this change?

That question was sadly answered in the FR instance thread:
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/6128/natvps-net-migration-of-france-nat-vps-services-to-new-node#latest

Where its said to be a hard cap.
So the sweet sweet deal with unlimited without reduced speed is gone as well.
So using it as a personal VPN now will be not so useful sadly.

Not gone. I can adjust it to unlimited manually. Just don't pull 30T ok

Abdullah

@flo82 said:
@Abdullah what happens to unlimited bandwidth with lower speeds? will this change?

once the migration completes just raise a ticket mentioning it, and I will get it adjusted

kvidden

@Abdullah said:

@kvidden said:

@flo82 said:
@Abdullah what happens to unlimited bandwidth with lower speeds? will this change?

That question was sadly answered in the FR instance thread:
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/6128/natvps-net-migration-of-france-nat-vps-services-to-new-node#latest

Where its said to be a hard cap.
So the sweet sweet deal with unlimited without reduced speed is gone as well.
So using it as a personal VPN now will be not so useful sadly.

Not gone. I can adjust it to unlimited manually. Just don't pull 30T ok

Then I misunderstood the FR thread in that case and I stand corrected 😀

yoursunny

Provider walks back VPS deletion plan after reading harsh comments.

Abdullah

@yoursunny said:
Provider walks back VPS deletion plan after reading harsh comments.

😂