Security

Twenty VPS Service Providers to Shut Down Today Without Explanation

By Bill Toulas / December 9, 2019

According to a report by ZDNet, at least twenty Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers are closing their doors today, and they only gave their customers the weekend to save their data. The companies have notified their clients that their servers will be taken down and wiped clean. No further explanations were provided as to why this is happening, while the fact that this concerns so many different services at once can only be explained if the same owner is behind all of these "brands". Considering the similar website format as well as the same notification message template, this is almost certainly the case.

The list of the VPS providers that are about to shut down today is the following:

The notification email that the customers of the above services received talk about business challenges that were magnified during the past few months, some of which were impossible to overcome. Besides this vague statement, no further details were provided, so the community is already talking about “exit scamming”. This is something that crooks love to do after they trick thousands to subscribe to their services. We have seen it happen in darknet marketplaces, and we have also seen cases of payroll management firms trying to do the same.

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Source: ZDNet

This time, all of the VPS services that are suddenly pulling the plug offered extremely cheap subscription plans during the most recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Adding more basis to the suggestion of scamming intentions, none of the VPS providers are listing physical addresses or offer proper business registration information on their websites, so they are likely “ghost” companies.

Such incidents are not unheard of in the low-cost segment of the market, and many steps on this same trap every year. It is possible that the aforementioned 20 VPS service providers are not the only ones who will exit scam shortly after Cyber Monday, but merely those who have bothered to send a notification to their clients. To stay safe from such nasty situations, make sure that you run a “background check” on the service providers that you’re about to subscribe to, and look for things like the presence of physical addresses, identity information, business details, etc. These firms try to limit the possibility of having to deal with client recourse after exit scamming, so the risk is pretty obvious if you look closely beforehand.

Can you report about any other VPS service provider that has shut down today? Share it with us in the comments down below, and help us spread the word of warning to more by sharing this post through our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.



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