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Hi Everyone,

Has anyone ever heard of Nuvolat? http://nuvolat.com/

They provid Iaas, VM, FWaas. They sound good on paper but I am not sure if its a scam.

Anyone heard of them or got a call from them?

Thanks!

8 Spice ups
2

never hear of it, I just checked the web page, to be hones if you want to implemented a IaaS, SaaS or PaaS you should always go with the big ones, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Openstack

Maybe this nuvolat already works with one of them

who knows!

3

Hey, we use that from a little more than a year and a half, before it was called ‘Cloudfounders’.

We currently rent half a rack and have 8 production VMs running there with an excellent uptime.

They allow you to upload OVA files, they run a backbone of ESXi and the network management is done via pfSense (you have to request access for that, or use the web based one).

It provides backup (snapshots, daily) too.

I think we are paying like 150usd for half a rack.

I’d recommend them.

Let me know if you have any questions. BTW, i’m not affiliated by them, I was just looking up the password for one of their templates (that’s one point against them).

4

Hey! Thanks for your comment. The problem I have is that they want us to get a 5 year loan and purchase the whole server for 25k. The monthly payment comes up to $800 or so which they will refund me about $560 a month. This allows them to use the server until we utilize the whole thing in the future.

To me the whole process and plan sounds shady. My question is why do we need to buy out the server and get a 5 year loan. Why don’t we just rent the server from them like we do with Microsoft or Amazon. Also the fact that they changed their name twice within 2 years doesn’t seem right either.

If you don’t mind me asking, what made you go with them?

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From what I understand from talking to them, that is actually how they make their money.

The servers are SuperMicro servers that the preconfigured. The money (I was told 30K) includes the cost of the server and a license for their software and support of the machine. So what you are buying is basically an 5-6K server, licensing for their stack/tools, a support contract to maintain it plus power & ping AND all that marketing stuff they do for you.

Then they also make money on the add in services, e.g. cost per gig of storage, cost for bandwidth, software licensing etc.

If you look at the pitch, the only real cost to you to just “have” the server sitting empty is that $x/month of the loan. So for example, if you were to say, use it just for yourself, say as your own company, it would be a very cheap private cloud, with basically a 5 year commit.

Here is what I compare it to: It is pretty much like renting a Rackspace HyperVisor with equivalent specs, but rather than a 2 year RS commit, you are doing a 5 year commit. RS then charges you per VM for OS and management, and Nuvolot does the same, but at a lot less money than RS.

The biggest problem I see is that over 5 years…well that’s a long time to use the same hardware. However, presumably you might add more servers later.

I am pretty sure the financing through the third party is primarily because they can’t afford to finance a bunch of people. If they did their own financing, their costs would be much higher and thus they would have to charge you more money.

The refunding thing is optional if you don’t want to use all your horsepower, they will rent it back from you until you need it. It’s a mechanism to create a lower cost of entry.

Anyway, I am in the same boat, trying to decide if this is a good deal or not. It is certainly the cheapest way do a private cloud; and it’s got plenty of great resell tools (or so it appears)

1 Spice up
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Hey, i’m always using it as an admin.

But on the end side, my boss told me that they are trying to get the reimbursements from over a year now, which sucks terribly.

Be aware of this, regardless of how good it goes.

Regards

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I am being pitched as well for a $30k server. THey are willing to start me off with only 20% of the capacity which would be about $125 per month. My largest concern is the reimbursement and how long that might take and what happens after 5 years. I know the hardware support and warranty goes away. Then what? Have to buy another server and at what price. The only potential saving grace might be if they can drive some clients my way to offset the costs. If it sounds too good to be true … maybe it is. Tough call.

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Is cloudfounders still around. The web page www.cloudfounders.com is blank. All white.

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Hi DFIAMINGO,

Cloud Founder is not around anymore. They said Nuvolat purchased Cloud Founders which I think its a very big BS.

If you look at Nuvolat business history, it was opened up about 2 years ago, and it only has one employee which I think is just the CEO. I think cloud founders and Nuvolat are from the same owner. He bankrupted cloud founders so he just opened up another company with a different name.

In my opinion I think this is a big fraud and it sounds too good to be true. Specially when the company has only one employee (the CEO) and he hired bunch of people in India to do his sales. Who knows, the owner might bankrupt Nuvolat soon. Like he did Cloud Founders.

1 Spice up
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So I just today bit the hook with the 80% deal (they rent 80%)

In the contract they say that they will pay within 30 days of the end of the month of service.

E.g. they rent for May, they pay by end of June.

Now the difficulty comes in that:

  • lease payment is due at beginning of each month
  • Upfront usage of fixed cost service is at the beginning of the month based on what you have then (licenses, fw, etc)
  • Usage charges are billed at end of month
  • They want payment within 20 days.

Now, does this create cashflow issues for small businesses, most likely. However, in my experience it’s par for the course when you are a reseller of anything. This is why a business or personal line of credit is important.

the worst crunch comes upfront: Lease is due, reimbursable vmWare license is due. You get server. Two months go by and you get first Coop payment. After that, coop’s will basically come each month and things start to even out.

So to make this all work out, you will want to charge customers similarly. non-usage upfront, usage at end of month.

As far as at then end:

you pay $1 and you get the server. At this point, to keep using the same server, you pay $750/year for license maintenance and support. You are also paying hosting cost as par of the per-gig memory cost (about $1 of each $1.5/gb ram)

If you want to use your own licenses or linux, there is a $100/month flat hosting fee. This is also true if you are not in the coop and have 100% of your resources.

So, what I am seeing is that they don’t overwhelm people with all the details upfront, to not confuse the issue, but they do have answers to questions if you ask.

For example "What happens if you’ve sold too many CloudProtect servers that all go DR at same time? Turns out you can rent from the shared services (other coop members) and they have price sheets for that. It works out to be about halfway between what my cost is on my box and what I plan to charge. So it works in a pinch

So I shall have to see and will keep you posted.

Further note: was contacted by two leasing partners. Lease payment came out to the quoted amount. These guys work with lots of Nuvolat clients, particularly the smaller consulting guys who operate out of their home office. (Presumably larger companies use their own leasing vendors)

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I really hate to burst your bubble, but they will not be paying you at all. We have been using them for over a year and outright purchased the server for $25k. They have never paid the 80% as promised, and they sent an email in the beginning of April saying they were having cash flow problems and could not pay out any of the co-op payments.

We are building contingency plans for their eventual bankruptcy and closure. Sorry to say, I think you have been taken.

1 Spice up
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We have used them for awhile. If you have a monthly fee like us, get your co-op payment taken out of your monthly fees to them. This way you get it easily.

Still not a good sign to hear several of you are not getting payment. Jim Martin, I’d love to see the email you got in April.

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I bought into this also. They promised they’d provide leads that were so hot, all I would have to do is close them. Well, as it turned out, their “leads” required me to sell the entire thing, and they provided zero training how to sell their product, so, unless you already know how to sell virtual servers, I’d steer clear.

Now, I’m not faulting the lady they had making the cold calls and then setting up appointments for potential customer calls. She did exactly what I’d expect. But their CloudStart program generated precisely ZERO customers for me, which is absolutely NOT what they promised. In fact, they called me just the other day asking if I “provided cloud services for my customers” and gave me the same sales pitch as before, apparently unaware that I’m already their “customer”.

I say “customer” because before I bought in, they called every week, sometimes multiple times a week. Now that I am a “customer” no one will talk to me. They don’t return my calls; they only ever paid one of my invoices to them and that was only so that I could turn it over to the leasing company as my down payment, which I didn’t have. I bought in because my sales person told me that in 6 months we’d be laughing about it, and I’d be buying another server because this one would not have enough capacity for all my customers. That was 18 months ago. I have no customers for this, but I do have a $449/month non-cancellable lease bill to pay.

I don’t pay their invoices either. But my bill to them is higher than their bill to me, so I have offered to apply their bills as credits against my invoices to them. Crickets. Which would be alright if it happened that the FreshBooks page that has my invoices was showing any credits. It doesn’t.

My advice… If you want to sell virtual servers, go with anyone BUT Nuvolat formerly Cloudfounders. At least with Azure, you don’t have any expense until you make the sale.

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I wanted to make a repot that Nuvalot did reach back out to me and paid me all my back payments. They gave me the reasons behind the delay, which I can share with anyone privately, since this might not be the proper place to discuss.

Things appear to be back on track and I am happy to share my experience. As I mentioned before the service itself and the support techs have always been available and timely.

Brent

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Hi Everyone,

We are also looking into Nuvolat and very concerned with the mixed reviews with this company. Brent, I would like to somehow reach out to you so you can share us your experience with the company.

Thanks,

Mike J.

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Mikejack I would highly recommend for you to stay away. I know few othe IT firms in my area that had extremely bad experience with them. The people that had good experience with them are extremely lucky.

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They are POISON, IMHO. This is Zenith Infotech arisen from its ashes. I think Akash Saraf is lurking in the shadows. They have a boiler room sales operation trying to hook MSPs into long term contracts with offers that look too good to be true. And they probably are. All I know from my vantage point is that i have asked them REPEATEDLY to be taken off the call list, so now they hang up abruptly when I threaten to call the FCC on them

Jim

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Well, I have seen no sign of Zenith Infotech. But I thought they were still in business, I know they used to bug me a lot.

I am working with Nuvolat now, just over a month. It pretty much lives up to the Eval. There really aren’t a lot of secrets, but you do some times have to ask the right question. I suspect a lot of their clients are super techy, so they try not to get too technical. I, on the other hand push the system.

There are things I want to do that the web interface doesn’t do, but I just send in a ticket and it gets done. For example sNAT binding of a server to an additional IP. By default all servers send from the gateway, receive via NAT. However, sometimes you need to register something by sender IP, and need sender IP to match URL etc. Web interface can’t do that, but a ticket did it. Same with the load balancing.

I have emailed back and forth with Jonathan Kos, the president on multiple issues, they’ve been pretty responsive on most things. I’ve got his phone number, I think I’ve talked to him once or twice.

There were complaints about payment, but my first invoice to them for reimbursement of the VMWare Essentials license was timely and that was about $600. I am expecting my first bill from them pretty soon, and my first reimbursement for their COOP program where they rent from me is due around the 20th or 25th of June. We shall see if it comes in.

The tech support guys who are in India are extremely responsive, I mean typically within 15 minutes or less, and they are always happy to do a log me in sort of thing to help me. They are 24x7

The marketing team for me, also in India is very friendly, I have a dedicated rep who works US time

The US side is a bit less responsive on non-mission critical stuff, but when it comes to things like the leasing agency trying to bill me for insurance on a box I have no control over, they were super responsive and intervened with their partner leasing agency.

I think the US guys are just very busy with sales and trying to bring more people on. Again, the Indian side is super responsive, they are just at a bit lower business level, but they are all good.

So in summary, so far, one month in…they are far more helpful than AWS, Azure or Google, their interface/do it yourself-ness is about like Rackspace, but they are far far far cheaper than rackspace.

I am still finalizing pricing for my resale, but I can make a very good profit margin selling at Google’s Web prices which are about the cheapest out there, but with more features. 1/3-1/4 RS costs, 1/2 AWS, 1/2 Azure.

And btw, the disk speed is very good, The RAIN works nicely.

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Correction many of their clients are NOT super techy.

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FYI, got my first “Co-Op” payment within 7 days of the end of the first month.

However, I have not yet received a bill for first month of services. Have had to send them a request to let me pay them.

Gotta admit begging people to let me pay them is not a problem I’ve had before…but I actually need their usage charges in a timely manner (in the future) in order to rebill clients.