Pyrogenic Media

I have to say, I very rarely do bad reviews on this site. Usually I just keep my mouth shut and move on, but the amount of time I have wasted on this particular company is astounding. And given that such simple tasks are somehow outside of their reach, I feel like I should atleast give a small warning to others out there. So here is the Thrust VPS Review.

So first, What is Thrust VPS? Thrust VPS is a (as you guessed it) VPS company that relies on huge servers with 48GB of ram, to provide affordable Linux and Windows VPS’. I guess you could say you get what you pay for, but these guys are atleast well known on various hosting forums, and atleast have enough money for a swanky website design. So I thought, “How bad can they be”?

It all starts with having a 1GB Windows VPS with them. I used the VPS to test automation tools off my own PC, and also to allow me to run applications from work, aswell as home.

Now two mistakes that I made.

1. 1GB of ram is not enough for what I needed.
2. I didn’t install anti-virus.

The latter ran me into trouble as  the automation tool I was using (A scraper of some sort), I was running into a tonne of dodgy sites. Usually these sites are fine because my AV on my home PC (Avast) will block the connection immediately, but alas, time slipped away and I completely forgot about it. Thus, I contracted a virus (The VPS I mean! Not me! :p)

But it is simple to fix right? I upgraded my VPS to a 2GB ram machine, and waited for the ram upgrade to happen. I waited several days and nothing happened. So by this point, I am a little disappointed that a) the upgrade wasn’t instant b) that support doesn’t even realize they have a new order.

I do what anyone else would do. I opened a support ticket asking for the upgrade. Strangely enough, this is the reply I got back :

Please update your plan details with the invoice number.

Ok… Now this worried me slightly. I am logged into my account, opening the ticket, can the support person not already see all invoices/current plans associated with my account?

I reply with my invoice number, and I immediately get flung to the sales department. After getting a canned response from support. I ask, and this is important for the rest of the story to flow :

“While your at it, can we have a complete re-install of the OS? Just to start fresh with the upgraded stats?

Also, is this a genuine windows version?”

The VPS was a slight mess because of the virus, and also because I had to cut down on resources that the VPS would use while being stranded on 1GB of ram. It would have been better for me to simply start a fresh install. They were using SolusVM as a VPS control panel, I know 100% that to re-install is a 1 click process. As for the genuine comment, it was made because if the Windows install was a genuine copy, I could install Microsoft Security Essentials (A decent Anti-Virus) for free.

Approx 5 hours after asking for my VPS to be upgraded, I got this reply :

Sorry for the delay, this has now been done for you. Please could you reboot your VPS via SolusVM so that the new settings can take affect.

Ok, they upgraded the ram. But they didn’t re-install the OS, nor did they answer my question on the genuine windows. I copy and paste my request back in again, asking to re-install the OS, and if Windows was legit.

12 hours later, and approx 36 hours after opening the ticket. I get this reply :

To get your Windows license activated please start a new ticket to support with your IP address and Windows admin password.

Ok that answers my question about Windows being genuine, but what about the re-install of the OS? That was my primary question and 3 replies in a row have skipped over the question.

I reply once again, copy and pasting it in TWICE, just so they can see what they need to do. They come back and reply :

I’m sorry I did miss that part. Re-installing the OS is something you can do yourself rather easily.
http://damnvps.com/wiki/index.php?title=Windows

Christ, so after all that they want me to do it myself. Now look, I am not blowing my own trumpet here. But I am not a computer illiterate donkey. I deal with these sorts of things on a daily basis, but their VNC console would not work for me. I had to reply once again in the hopes of someone helping me.

After asking for help, I get this reply from a braniac called Ryan :

I shall pass this ticket onto support so that they can help you with your issues would you like me to see if they can reinstall the OS to?

No shit Ryan. From the outset of the ticket I have wanted someone to re-install windows. Unfortunately I was asleep so I didn’t get to reply to this ticket, but someone named “karuppu” came to my rescue and replied with this :

Is it OK for you to recreate the server in another node?

Wait what? Why does it need to go onto another node? What is wrong with simply re-installing my existing VPS? I never understood this decision. As I had an existing VPS, all they had to do was reinstall the OS. I reply with this :

Yes, recreate the entire VPS if you want. All we require is a 2003 Windows VPS, and that is it. However you want to get there is up to you.

I mean really. All I want is the VPS setup, however the hell they want to do it is up to them. But unfortunately, even after being put back into support, now they fling me back to sales for some reason. Even after karuppu was about to help me. Finally, after 4 days of back and forth, someone named “Ryan” replies to me ticket :

This has now been rebuilt for you, sorry for the delay.

At this point I was thinking “THANK GOD!”. But alas it was not to be. Here is my reply :

Hi Ryan,

Are you sure? Since the OS is wrong on the existing VPS… And we also asked for Windows 2003 to be installed on the new one, and the new one (apparently) shows 2008.

I will tell you what, I will spell it out for you.

Reply to this ticket, with the exact details, of a Windows VPS with 2003 installed, that I can remote into immediately, that is activated as genuine, that after logging in, I am presented with a blank desktop.

That is all I am after. I am not sure if I am asking too much of you guys. If provisioning a VPS is too much for you guys, just let me know and I will go elsewhere.

Basically, the VPS he had provisioned said that it was 2008 windows (After I had asked for Windows 2003). But my old VPS also said it was 2003 Windows (And it was actually 2008). I could also connect to my old VPS even though from the control panel it said it was shut off, and I could not connect to me new VPS even though the control panel said it was on.

It just seemed like a huge mixup to me. Something that would have never happened had they just upgraded the existing VPS in the first place. After my reply, I sat and waited for someone half-intelligent to help me.

Then, the last straw. Today I receive this absolute peach of a comment from Arun.

Hello,

Shall we go ahead and install Windows 2003-32bit in this vps?

My reaction to this comment was something a bit like this….

It was just inconceivable to me that after telling them atleast half a dozen times to just re-install the VPS, we are still at square one.

And just FYI, I sent messages both to their Twitter, and to the owners Reddit account in the hope of someone just stepping up and doing what is required, but instead I have had the run around non-stop.

They have easily some of the worst support staff in the business, infact the worst support staff that I have ever dealt with in my life, not just in hosting.

If you need prompt replies, and intelligent people replying to your tickets. Stay away from Thrust VPS.

I haven’t posted much lately. Mostly that is down to a new role I have as a Web Developer now. As per usual I am not going to give away the name, but it is a fairly large media company here in NZ. Obviously it is working within their digital department, “digitizing” what they currently have in print.

I have only worked there just over a week, and already I see things that still astonish me about SEO in a real world sense. Generally I like to think that all developers that code for the web should have a good grasp of SEO technologies. And hopefully keep up to date with the changes that search engines implement. It isn’t always the case, but most people atleast have a good understanding of what will and won’t rank.

Interestingly enough I was talking to someone on my team about SEO. His actual job title is “SEO Developer”. As I got talking, I could tell that he seemed to be sticking by the book. And any sort of “contentious” issue that would get debated to no end at a SEO conference was a simply open and close case for him.

Things such as nofollow links and meta tags were an absolute 100% no impact on ranking issue for him. To me, especially nofollow links, I have a believe that they do work. Blog Comments while devalued, still seem to give me some sort of boost in the rankings. Whether that is because of the rank, or just because my website is “out there” is something that I could argue all day long. We talked about it for a while, and all I tried to get across was that nothing in SEO is a yes or no answer. Everything is shrouded in mystery and it is only with testing for yourself can you see what works and what doesn’t.

Even worse, he told me that <strong> and <em> tags around your keyword had absolutely no effect on SEO rankings. Once again maybe something that could be argued either way, but I think it is probably up there with things that you should do anyway. You can check out here for SEOMoz talking about different ranking factors : http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

Anyway, I am drifting off my original point here. The SEO Developer also mentioned that our department also hired an external SEO company to work on our sites. After asking them what they did, it seemed they made several onpage SEO enhancements. e.g. Keyword in title tag, keyword in H1 tag. The usual on-page SEO stuff. I questioned about inbound links and what they were doing offsite SEO wise. The other guys in my team didn’t 100% know the answer, but said that before we hired them, we weren’t ranking at all, and now we were.

ooookkaaayyy

Let me just point out something here. The website in question is one of the largest, (probably top 2) in it’s industry. There are 173k links pointing to this site, of which 158k are pointing to the homepage. The homepage is a PR5 page. However before the SEO company was hired, the keywords they “wanted” to rank for were not in the title or H1 tag at all. This alone would (in my eyes) make them  very slim chance of making it to the front page for this particular keyword.

So the SEO company changes the H1 and title tag to be the exact keyword. And we start ranking. But is that an example of how a SEO company can get us ranking? Even though the website itself had over 173 thousand links pointing to it before they even got going.

That is what you call money for nothing kids.

O and just FYI. The SEO company itself does not rank for it’s title keywords within Google.com or Google.co.nz. If that isn’t a good indication of who is ranking us, then I don’t know what is.

A few weeks ago Shoemoney had a SEO Webinar in conjunction with Affiliate Summit. I had initially signed on to attend, but later on when I actually checked the times, the time difference between NZ and where-ever it was being held was terrible, so instead I watched the resulting video, and looked over the notes people had taken.

Most notably I read through his questions and answers portion here : http://www.affiliatepathfinder.com/webinar-notes-from-affiliate-summit-webinar-seo-from-experience-with-jeremy-shoemoney-schoemaker/

An interesting question + answer stood out in my mind.

Q: Any thoughts on SEO nukeX?
A: Never heard of it. Probably someone trying to pitch their product.

Hmm. I found it kinda strange that Shoemoney had never heard of SENuke. In my mind, there is 2 products that really are “the” tools that everyone knows go hand and hand with SEO. SENuke and Xrumer.

But you know, possibly the sorts of things that Shoe does, doesn’t involve the type of things that SENuke is good at right? Wrong.

Q: What are thoughts on link wheels?
A: They work like crazy. Works really well, but also against Google standards.

Huh. Well, that is kinda funny when I think about it. If you didn’t know, Linkwheels was a term coined by Linus over at Lemonarian (back in 2009). Even back then, he made several blog posts about how amazing SENuke was in conjunction with Linkwheels. So the creator of linkwheels is putting (at one point) all his efforts behind SENuke, and Shoemoney seems to love Linkwheels, but doesn’t even know what SENuke is.

Don’t hate. Part of the reason is that Linkwheels are such a generic term now. They no longer work the exact way they were first described 2 years ago. And have since evolved into various linking strategies for Web 2.0 properties. I wouldn’t even be sure that Shoe knows who invented the linkwheel in the first place.

More so, to me it shows that the sphere of internet/affiliate marketing is so huge that guru’s don’t even know the biggest applications in their own niche (In this case SEO). I can’t talk, I probably wouldn’t have a clue what the bigger PPC/PPV tools are nowadays.

From the day I gave away free gateway code, I have been slammed with requests on how to allow CPA Postback. Half the time, people requesting it don’t even know what it actually is, just that it is what all the pros are doing nowadays. To begin with, I would like to say that I am not going to develop any sort of postback module into the gateway, it will become more clear as the post goes on as to why not.

Postback (In a CPA sense) revolves around CPA Networks alerting you to the fact an offer has been completed. Some networks call it a Callback URL, others just a Post URL, it is all the same thing. To think of it in simpler terms, think if the network emailed you with data (Such as IP of the user, the offer, and the payout) each time you got a lead/sale. Now morph that image in your head to think if they called a page on your website each time a lead was completed, this is postback.

The page that the network calls would also include data about the lead that was completed. For example :

http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/postback.php?ip=111.123.123.456&payout=1.50&offerid=56&subid=45

From that, We know the IP of the user that completed the offer, the payout that we made, and the offer it came from. We can also use a subid or other tracking tool (that the network may provide) to track datasources, userids (for ingame credits) etc.

The page that a postback calls needs to be created by you. Generally a network will tell you what data it will send to you, and what variables it will be under in the url, but the actual page to process the data needs to be created by you. What that page then does is up to you.

Common uses of a Postback are :

• Tracking conversions of a particular datasource.
• Running a gateway company (With the IP you can then unblock them from the gateway)
• Running an incent network (Pay people to complete offers etc)
• Crediting game users for completing offers (e.g. farmville)

Realistically the data is there for you to use. So if all you want is for it to send you an email once a lead comes in, you can do that too :p

The most obvious use is the second one in that list. You can track which users fill out the offer, and then unblock them from the gateway. You would need fancy code to simply “poll” a page repeatedly, checking whether the user had completed the offer or not. Not hard to do but….

Each network has it’s own implementation. Each network can send whatever data it wants, in whatever form it wants. While it is not impossible to try and account for all major networks out there, it is nigh impossible to get a catch all page setup. For example…

Here is Maxbountys call back structure

http://www.mysite.com/callme.asp?s1=#S1#&ipaddress=#IP#&offid=#OFFID#

and here is Peerflys

http://mysite.com/postback.php?offerid=XX&commission=XX&subid=XX&subid2=XX&subid3=XX

Now as you can see, the subids are called different things. In Maxbounty they are labelled s1 and s2. In Peerfly they are subid and subid2. This is just two networks that I know do postback, and they are already giving different data. Can you imagine what it would be like to do this across all networks?

That is a quick introduction to Postbacks (And why I won’t implement them in my gateway). They are simple to implement for one network, but a daunting prospect to try and incorporate all networks into a product. I will leave you with a short list of networks that I know provide Postback URL’s (Not all do).

Peerfly (non-incent)
Maxbounty
CPALead

Know of another network that allows postbacks? Comment below.