Last week ends with a huge conflict between Rambler and nginx developers in Russian internet segment. This is a very important event not only for Russian IT, but for the whole world. And, of course, it is more important than the events this article about. There are many blog posts, news, even Russian TV talk about nginx. Someone made hackaton to support nginx developers, another replaced their Server header in the web server to protest against Rambler decision (I did that).
Meanwhile, this blog went down at the same time. This is because of a situation in one not so big Russian company, which I call “santa barbara”, which affected my and ~13,000 others sites according to ihor.ru.
Act 1. Storm in the glass
Friday. Evening. Site went down for a couple of minutes. After a while we had learned from the official ihor sources that some guys broke into the datacenter and broke router settings that was the reason of that outage.
Notice from author: All URLs goes directly to the Telegram client. To open them you need Telegram client installed and have an active Telegram account. But if you don’t want that, I cited all of them.
Another notice from author to English-speaking readers: All Telegram posts was written in Russian language, so I translated them for you.
Dear clients, we inform you that we have recorded an intrusion of an unauthorized persons into the DC. This is the reason of the service outage. That culprits had messed the router settings that followed in network problems. We got full control of the situation now. Our staff is working to revert everything back and our administration is filing a police report. Today we’ll sue the violators, because that people are responsible for today’s outage. Their faces and actions was recorded. Besides their actions in the DC they have attempted to discredit Ivan Lungov, founder of the “Ihor Hosing”.
Official telegram channel @ihor_hosting
Then we learned that there is a conflict between the investors and CEO.
During the weekends there was a shit throwing into each other. Investors have created a telegram channel @marosnet and publised some info regarding ihor CEO, huge ihor debts. In the meantime, the official telegram channel @ihor_hosting was throwing their counterarguments.
Do you know what the difference in the owner’s approach, who funded this company and Ivan Lungov’s approach, which want to stole it?
Ivan gathers people near DC and planning an assault while owners collect documents to resolve this situation in the legal field.
Ivan will post a cry-story today about how hard he worked today. In the meantime owners publish the documents which is the evidence that he took huge loans, don’t pay them back and was getting assets out from the company.
We have a facts, truth and a law with us. He have a blackmail, emotions and a fraud with him.
Thanks to everyone for this day of silence, but this situation is far from resolve.
Backup your servers.
Investor’s telegram channel @marosnet
Black @marosnet PR have written too many suspicious information already, so we will comment a statement about transferring a website to the third-party and a statement that Ivan Lungov did that.
Let’s see this two letters. These are about domain name transfer.
https://yadi.sk/i/Bb3K6D6BtaB_qw
https://yadi.sk/i/fDYHjUd1yCXutg
We have this information. Now we do some brainstorming. Who appointed a CEO Leonid Maximov? He was appointed by Pavel Karpenko.
How many shares do Pavel Karpenko have? His shares are 74%.
By the way, like this time, the CEO change was illegal, without any notification and other important procedures.
Also we will comment about “lack of payment” for electricity from Ivan Lungov.
Instead of words we publish these scans of payment orders for november and december.
https://yadi.sk/i/8CwpGJl12sfsEA
https://yadi.sk/i/HPt7wMWHutz5Hg
https://yadi.sk/i/UzJgPwPfloeNeQ
Official telegram channel @ihor_hosting
False information from Ivan Lungov:
The information of a 200-million debt is not true.
Facts:
Loans from Mykhailov D.A. (DM TECH LLC owner)
http://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/833d59cc-4459-43c7-ae9f-4f45273715cb
http://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/fa16e6ef-b818-4a4b-ad0a-339faaa09ab3
Loans from Lungov I.A. to Marosnet company (more that 20 million rubles without interest) >17
Loans from Kharitonov N.A. to Marosnet company >29
Loans from Zuev N.A. to Marosnet company
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OwX8cVvb9J7UGyYucK7KhOVGeWs0tqu6
In total: more that 200 million rubles for which Ivan Lungov is responsible by himself as a CEO. That’s why he is getting profit out on the other company and registering his personal property to other persons. In the meantime he shows everyone that he rides a regular car that he bought in credit.
Summary:
Mykhailov:
22 988 000
22 811 720
5 080 969
Kharitonov:
29 537 000 руб
Zuev:
129 188457 руб
Lungov:
Leftovers about 17 000 000
+ some other small loans.
Investor’s telegram channel @marosnet
Act 2. Destroy and fuck everything up!
Not everyone was ready for the thing that happened in a silent morning. New management team just shut down everything and have suspended all their client’s websites…
Dear clients, we inform you that all services are still unavailable because the DC was shut down. This raised a massive problem because many of you can’t even backup their projects to revert them back to work. The decision to shut DC down was made by well known persons to you. They are Mykhailov D.A, Bogdanov Y.A. and Vlasov A.A. They was helped by Alexander Belov, the CEO of Datacheap.
Official telegram channel @ihor_hosting
You know what’s the scariest part? The thing that too many people (surprise!) haven’t made a single backup. You know what’s even scarier? The thing that some folks relied on ihor backup service. Which are located in the same DC where their server is. Which was shut down.
After more than 24 hours outage new administration finally decided to bring all servers up. They was unable to bring up everything so old employees have helped to restore some of them they still have access to. But I’ve read many things for the time that servers were down. Someone got fired from the website outage, someone got the virtual HDD mount problem or filesystem crash. Someone lost their positions in search engines.
Good news.
We’ve decided to turn on the DC and identify clients on the owners meeting right now.
We’ll post all the details, mechanisms and terms after the meeting.
Investor’s telegram channel @marosnet
Act 3. I gonna buy boots for my wife! Because I’m not a slacker, I’m a partner!
Whom should I transfer? In the beginning, I haven’t resigned from the ihor CEO because I wasn’t notified about resign. There is a normal legal procedure. But these guys decided to cause the mayhem.
Ivan Lungov @vanloonm in telegram chat Ihor Unofficial
There should be a special procedure that was violated.
Ivan Lungov @vanloonm in telegram chat Ihor Unofficial
The most idiotic thing I heard from new administration is that their statements that we’re not their clients, so we must go fuck themselves and we should ask Ivan (Lungov – fired, but still “legitimate CEO of Marosnet TC LLC and Ihor brand” – note.) for refunds.
From the September, 2019 Ivan Lungov have started to illegally transfer MAROSNET TC LLC client’s payments to another company named Hosting solutions LLC without owners wish. He stated in many open sources that this is restructurization. But how does he able to do a restructurization with 16% shares, but other owners with 74% against this decision? We’ll leave this question opened to the law enforcement.
…
We ask you to reply to the fired CEO Ivan Lungov with the same thing. Hosting Solutions LLC is not affiliated with Marosnet TC LLC.
You can ask for refund for all payments to Hosting Solutions LLC for Marosnet TC LLC services.
This is our official statement: Hosting Solutions LLC is a fraud and you’re paying to the scammers if you’re paying on the stolen ihor website. Don’t do that.
Investor’s telegram channel @marosnet
We ask all DC clients that was affected from Ivan Lungov and his team’s actions to refer to the Hosting Solutions LLC. We remind you that Hosting Solutions LLC is receiving ALL payments therefore this company bears responsiblity for the service. You can find all the contact information on the website.
Investor’s telegram channel @marosnet
I don’t know who paid whom, but all my payments including the last in December was to Marosnet TC LLC. Many Ihor clients paid them too, but there really was some folks that paid to Hosting Solutions LLC. So I guess that they have literally no reason to shut the DC down, because the majority of clients have paid to the correct company (in their logic), so they have fullfilled their contract obligations.
However, if only my payments would went to the Hosting solutions LLC as they said earlier, then the investor’s thoughts are probably correct, but the serious reputation loss goes exactly to them and the Marosnet TC LLC. As a valid customer I should not watch for changes of the legal entities. Moreover, I just don’t have as much information as them. If I buy an app in the Google Play Store I just don’t care who exactly will receive my payment. It can be Google USA, Google Ireland or even Google Honduras. For me it will be just Google. So there is the same situation. I’ve paid on the billing.ihor.ru website that have processed that payment onto another legal entity – well, ok, I don’t know what you’re doing with them.
This could be appealed, and folks who paid to another company can ask for refund. They can use their customer laws or even sue them (Hosting Solutions LLC, I guess) as the paid service was not provided. But there’s not only legal side of the story. The Marosnet TC LLC and ihor loses their reputation. Not Ivan Lungov messed up with clients, they just shouldn’t know about him (I’m sure only some of them did). The Marosnet TC LLC did. The company, that fraudulently transferred all client payments to another company through their website (If this was a fraud after all, I’m not defending any side of this conflict).
You should not be surprised, Marosnet TC LLC, that people don’t trust you after all that happened and after all your statements.
What lessons should we learn from this situation?
- BACKUP! BACK FUCKING UP! YES! BACKUP NOW! You might have a simple website as me, but even this would be a loss. Write a simple script that backs everything up somewhere. For example, I wrote a script that archives some important parts directly to my home NAS, but you can use any cloud file storage, Google Drive, Yandex Disk, MEGA, etc.
- Don’t throw all eggs in the same basket! I feel sorry for that guys that’ve used the service from the screenshot. No, I’m not saying that it is bad or you should avoid it. I’m saying that you should store your backups in a different place physically, not the same DC as your server. Ideally you should store them in multiple places. This is your gurantee not only from the situation like we’ve reviewed in this article. Many things can happen. DC may caught fire, your account can be suspended for ToS violation. Also there is some guys called “law enforcement”. They can take the whole server off your hosting company on order just because of some photos with CP stored in another directory…
- Check your backups! Yeah, don’t forget to check them periodically. Make sure that they’re really was creating and you can really restore from them. I haven’t checked them, but I don’t have any problems with restoration now.
- Keep at least some links to alternative hosting providers! Ideally the whole alternative server with the working copy of your project. So you don’t waste time to select your new home. Time is money!
- Use Russian hosting providers or not – the choice is yours. Maybe you target Russian users and you need a lower latency for them. Or maybe you’re scared of Russian siloviki. I should say that there are some good choices. On the other hand, Russia is not the only country with law enforcement. Other countries have their polizei, one-time, Five-O, FBI, кіберполіція and other cops.
- Don’t try to save money on your project if you earn money from it! Ihor is the perfect choice for someone like me. I don’t earn money from this blog, I don’t plan to put any advertisement here. But I consider to look for better and more reliable alternatives for some project that I’m going to earn money from. This does not cancel all of that I’ve written above!
- And last, but not least, for those who run their business – don’t involve your clients into your mess! Resolve your conflicts by yourselves. We’re just purchasing your services. And don’t shut down our projects to push on each others – we have fullfilled our obligations. Make sure you fullfill yours!
Wishes
You know, I really liked their services. For a very cheap price I got a relatively good VPS. Their technical support was very fast and I got all my problems solved quickly.
On the other hand while I looked through for another hosting provider I got a negative example. I tried to contact OVH. Well, they created a ticket last week, but no response by today. They even sent me a ticket number only after the second letter.
So, while small ihor tried to please every client, the big OVH just doesn’t give a shit. They can’t even answer to couple of questions to new clients.
I don’t know how many time I would spend if my server from them will go down. I even guess that I’ll spend more time than my ihor VDS down in this force-major situation. I’m sure that ihor technical support would resolve the problem in a half of a hour max.
So I just say thank you to ihor for that 2 years that I’ve used their services. I wish you to recover and resolve all your conflicts ASAP. And I know that it’s very hard situation, but I wish you a growth…
…but now without me.
