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