Inception Hosting LES/NAT OpenVZ products - End Of Life. END OF AN ERA

Rahul

Hello, 47 Minutes ago I received this heart breaking email.

Hello,

I hope you are well.

From the subject line alone the content of the email is probably already clear.

With a heavy heart, it has been decided to bring this service to an end, it started as a project run by Inception Hosting around 10 years ago however with the lack of development upstream for OpenVZ specific to the hosting industry and declining interest in favor of KVM this is now to management heavy to justify continuing with.

It is also understood that OpenVZ 8 as a project has been essentially dropped in favor of focusing on OpenVZ 9 with no solid release date and OpenVZ 7 is likely going to end of life within 6 months in line with CentOS 7 we think it is right to call time on this project and refocus efforts on our KVM product line.

We will be setting all NAT/LES OpenVZ products to expire and prevent them from renewing, we will honor any existing terms and if you have less than 30 days on your service we will extend that by another 30 days at no extra cost to allow you time to migrate any data.

Those of you who have a service in Phoenix will already be set to expire as discussed in a separate email following the raid failure earlier in the year.

We have also recently revised the prices on our KVM plans so perhaps one of those would be fitting for you if you are looking for an alternative, the main website prices have not been updated yet (Work in progress) but we did post a link on the LowEndSpirit forum: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/6960/inception-hosting-new-plans-new-prices-uk-nl-de-usa if you are interested.

If you have any questions or concerns please do let us know via a support ticket, direct email responses will not be seen.

Thank you for your years of support.

Anthony.
Inception Hosting Limited.

Thanks to @InceptionHosting ( Anthony ) for keeping the party going this long.

I still have fond memories of hosting game servers on these small vm's. What about you folks,what was your use case ?

If I had to guess, then VPN ?

corbpie

End of an error

jureve

VPN, statics sites and small projects

Good provider. Thks Antony @InceptionHosting

ThomasP

guess thats the end of the lifetime free NAT that i had won
thank you was running awesome

amj

It also could host a WordPress (with SQLite)

Rahul

@jqr Would like to hear your input too.

InceptionHosting

Thanks for the post.

It was not a fun decision to make but it had to be made, the state of VZ in the hosting industry is bad and behind the scenes, I have some insider knowledge about the development, and it is shocking so I am shutting it down before it is a problem.

It will have been 10 years before it goes, I think that's a pretty good effort for a side project and absolutely the most fun I have had in this sort of work, no competition.

Lots of hosts replicated the project which was encouraged, we even had a small federation of LES hosts at one stage, sort of 'The official LES hosts', lots failed when they found it was not so simple and you REALLY don't make much money at it, in truth it has probably covered its costs but that's about all.

The original LES site ran on a 32MB NAT VPS and the old forum ran on 1 x 64MB NAT VPS for mysql (SUPER TUNED) and 1 x 32MB NAT VPS as the front end.

Some screenshots for nostalgia.

For a while, there was a NAT KVM service in Netherlands too and one of the more interesting uses for that was to install freedos and then use the VNC session to play old DOS games, combined with the html5 VNC session it was an online retro computer games machine haha.

The abuse levels were not fun to start with but that settled down and it has now been YEARS since the last abuse report for these servers.

And then, once the federation of original LES hosts broke down with the exit of a few there was just myself and @mikho left, the 'LES' name was reused and here we are today talking about it in the bigger community that spawned from this project and then also forked from LET and combined to what it is now.

Fun!

jqr

@Rahul said:
@jqr Would like to hear your input too.

Hey Rahul. Thanks for tagging me. I spent a lot of time at the original LowEndSpirit Forum, but I've always been a lurker. I started with VPSs (back then called LVSs) back in 2004 and I was lucky to come across LES along that journey.

I don't have a ton to add, other than to thank Anthony for giving this nerd (and countless others) access to a platform where I learned so much about networking, system administration, web and mail (!) hosting, etc.

jtk

@Rahul said:

From the subject line alone the content of the email is probably already clear.

Good for them for gracefully removing a service. I hope a few other providers eventually follow suit and move away from OpenVZ and migrate customers to KVM (cough RamNode cough EthernetServers cough).

Neoon

@InceptionHosting said:
It was not a fun decision to make but it had to be made, the state of VZ in the hosting industry is bad and behind the scenes, I have some insider knowledge about the development, and it is shocking so I am shutting it down before it is a problem.

Same on LXD now, since Ubuntu took it over, People are not happy.
At least there is a good fork, ran by the ex. lead dev from LXD.

I would ditch Ubuntu anytime over Debian, if I find a way to live patch the Kernel like I do currently on Ubuntu.
Probably gonna switch over night.

mwt

Yeah, the LES $3/yr devices were my very first servers. I'm here now because those were child-affordable.

deepak_leb

I wonder what would @serverian do.