First, I would like to offer my condolences to the family of K T Ligesh, the owner of HyperVM and LxLabs. It is a tragedy to see such a brilliant coder take his own life. You may read the entire story here
LxLabs develops the best control panel for OpenVZ/Xen which is a virtualization platform for hosting many servers on one physical server. HyperVM allows clients to control their server by enabling power control, operating system reinstallations, and charts for server status.
A major users of HyperVM is cheapvps.co.uk (a2b2, vaserv, fsckvps) which I would estimate hosts at least 5000 vps clients at the very least and I’m underestimating. They provide very cheap hosting and I did host with them for quite some time as a backup solution. I then found space on a friends server and didn’t need them any longer (I’d say about 2 months ago). To get back to vaserv, Their company took a big hit when a vulnerability was released (and as I understand it) was not fixed until 2 weeks after LxLabs was notified. Anyways, their entire service was hacked and most of their data was lost. I feel sorry for those who didn’t backup their vps regularly.
Back in the day when I was using LxLabs software: hypervm and lxadmin (which is like cpanel), the owner was very nice to help me with every problem I had. Eventually I made the move to cpanel because there was always some kind of problem popping up and I needed something much more stable and proven at the time. Cpanel did fix all of my woes.
Anyways, I bet there was a lot of pressure on the owner from everyone. VAserv still isn’t back up fully and it has been 4 days now. I really feel sorry for their staff. They must be losing a lot of money because of this 1 tiny hack. I can sort of see why the owner would kill himself over this, but because of his death, the programming community has lost a brilliant programmer. In addition, the VPS industry has lost a source of cheap, powerful software, so vps prices will likely rise in the near future if the legacy of hypervm isn’t carried on.
One final note on this, as a result of this, I hope the programming community realizes that updates are extremely important both for the developer and the client. I also cannot stress enough that proper backups should be made often and verified for redundancy! I will be verifying my backups later today 
So you may be wondering, how did I find out? I have been looking at a vps server to host exchange 2003 or a similar email solution for mobile sync (to get away from the heavy ajax interface of mailxchange at 1and1 plus have control over my backups). I went to cheapvps and they were down, then I checked vaserv and found out that way. Because they have been down and I needed a server yesterday, I went with another provider who I might be reviewing in a couple of weeks or months
Tags: a2b2, cheapvps, CPanel, exchange 2003, fsckvps, hypervm, Ligesh, lxadmin, lxlabs, mailxchange, openvz, owner, suicide, vaserv, vps, Xen
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming
Hey, great post, very well written. You should post more about this.
Thanks very much for the info, I can finally say I’ve read something worthwhile.
http://www.workingforgoogle.com – Free Step by Step Tutorial