Topic: Umisoo hosting of Bitmaintech Antminers (Read 5756 times)

I got royally screwed by UMISOO: they have cancelled hosting without warning and will compensate using antpool PPLNS, and "replace" my miners with hashnest Hashpower (1:1 conversion). At least I will not have to bother with their abysmal support anymore. Cnuts!

very unstable conditions at Umisoo lately, miners going down intermittently without notification, and now an announced downtime of already over 3 days. Big letdown. Would not recommend them anymore.

What did happen December when Paycoin mining was on, I suspect umisoo hired our miners and refund our fees
Happened to mee too 

Anyone who wants to buy 1 s4 hosted at umisoo, not sure does my balance 176$ include if trading the miner??

Miner has been bought December 2014, reason im selling is that s4 cgminer is configured so that its not too good with p2pool (--queue 8192 - it should be something like 80) producing alot dead shares. They told me from bitmain not to worry when i bought it and told that someone at umisoo can change the setting, it was a big joke.

But it works with ghash and Ckpool - so if interested tell me what you are offering for that s4.

I don't know but i will give S5 a try, anyway UMISOO said they should able to lower the fee (Made a fortune in AMHash1 trading during the crash in Havelock yesterday just exactly recovered all my lost with the fucking Hashie, i'm losing confident with cloud mining...
I'll go for the bulk purchasing myself.

I was debating to buy some S5s with Umisoo but people seem to have a lot of problems with them. Is it only the S4s anyone have any other miners with them without problems?

UMISOO hosting fee for a S5 is now only USD1.99 a day, planned to buy more S5 to put in UMISOO, who wanna joint me to get the bulk discount of qty 52 from Bimaintech?

Just wait 1-2 days before panicking, its Christmas and no body is working. So its time for hacker to attack...

S4 restored somehow the pool info were defaulted to 10.x.x.x with UMISOO username, i manually changed the pools to my preferred settings  and now see the hashing rate is only 1.8 not 2.0 i used to have. C1 is still down.
What a mess in their coding wtf.

My miners just went off-line as well. All of a sudden I owe Umisoo almost $2,400 USD!! WTF is going on??

Same here! Paid 7 days ago for a month hosting and they just took my miners offline saying that the hosting has expired. WTF!

Great! All of a sudden, my miners go offline because apparently I owe over 2000$ hosting fee for a little over 2 weeks! Also, hosting fees per day on their site are equal to the value of the device! Major cockup! I am losing money because my miners went offline during a betarigs rental and now I look bad in front of my renter!

I HOPE YOU FIX THIS ASAP AND REFUND!

Just another example of poor customer service from Umisoo. You can only blame so much on poor communication. The fact that I'm even having to try to communicate with them, is an indicator of a poor hosting company. Isn't the saying something like "You know your IT dept is doing there job, when you don't even know they exist"? Something like that.. Yes I work in IT. I'm a SQL database engineer for a large corporation, so I know about SLAs, which is why this frustrates me. Are they like this with all of their customers? I'm seriously worried that they won't even ship my miners to me, because this will be my first and last month of hosting that I pay them.

I really hate ranting, but I just want others to avoid Umisoo if at all possible. Could these issues be why Bitmain took them off their order site as a shipping option??

Here's the full email thread.

----------------My Last Response------------------------

Why can't you compensate me for my miner being offline for 6 hours, when you did not give any notice?? I had a contract to rent out my miners. If I had known about the maintenance, I would not have rented my miners out during that time. Plain and simple. When you perform "maintenance" you always give your customers notice to let them know that their service will be interrupted during a specific time. This seemed more like you lost power to an entire rack of miners, and you are blaming it on "maintenance. "

If you can't host my miners 24/7, with proper customer service to let me know when you will perform maintenance, then can you please just ship my miners to me so I can host them myself. I'll be more than happy to take them off your hands because you all seem to be to busy.

Also I will quote you about compensation for an earlier email. "Of course, we will compensate the losting time via prolonging the time.Thank you."

I will also note that your email that you sent about "maintenance" came 5 hours after my miners first went offline.


From: [email protected]
Subject: Re:RE: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 16:48:37 +0800

hello,dear
I am sorry to tell you that we can't compensate you 0.06BTC
Becuase it is a common step to maintain the mines,it is normal,so we can't give you this fund although we understand your mood and emotion.Sorry.Thank you for your understanding.

Date:  Thu, Dec 18, 2014 03:19 PM
To:  "webmaster"<[email protected]>;
Subject:  RE: Kindly Reminder
 
The miners are back up and running now. Both miners are also running at full speed now. Thank you very much!

Just to be clear, the miners were not running slow, they were offline completely for 6 hours. See the chart attached. Your ghash charts on Umisoo at first glance look like there was no downtime because you just skip any data points when the miners are offline.

As you can see at my rental rate I lost 0.06 BTC for the 6 hours I was down because I had to give the renters an extra 6 hours of rental time for the downtime. If you could compensate me 0.06 BTC at 17jgFqktNuDarMij7pV2E7KeempMcpefAC it would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re:RE: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:44:55 +0800

Hi,
You misunderstand us.We mean that we are maintaining the mines,so the power is off somewhere,which causes the  miner works slowly,this is the most accurate  explaination，so please rest assured.
Thank you.
Have a good day.

webmaster

Date:  Thu, Dec 18, 2014 01:55 PM
To:  "webmaster"<[email protected]>;
Subject:  RE: Kindly Reminder
 
How does a mining pool maintenance effect my hosted miners? Also its not by chance that both miners went down at the same exact time.

I work for a Fortune 100 company in their IT department. I know how data center's operate, so please don't play games with me.

If you don't have the resources to host my miners, then please just let me know so I can host them somewhere else.

When my miners are back up I'll send you the bill for my lost time. I'm currently making more than 0.24BTC/day with these 2 miners by renting them out, so please understand my frustrations.

Regards,
Chris

From: [email protected]
Subject: Kindly Reminder
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:05:00 +0800

Attention please!!!
Today we are  having a mining pool  maintenance.Perhaps there is something wrong with your miner.But we can't monitor the situation of every customer's miner.But everything will recover in the afternoon today.
please forgive us for the inconvenience brought to you.Of course, we will compensate the losting time via prolonging the time.Thank you.
Have a good day.

Among other issues with Umisoo. Apparently their entire website is down. I even emailed them a couple of hours ago asking why their site is down. My miners appear to be still be working properly, but I have no way to check on them or change my pool settings. https://www.umisoo.com/

This brings up their biggest issue. Monitoring. It's not existant. It's basic infrastructure 101, when you have thousands of servers, you implement some sort of monitoring solution. Either custom software or 3rd party. It would not be hard to build a simple script to scan all the miners on a network, pull their activity, load it into a report, and setup metrics to alert against. I've done this with Powershell before, not complicated.

Hosting is more involved than just providing power and making sure you're connected to the internet. You must have the infrastructure in place to support thousands of servers. I have no idea how they keep up with emails as their only way of communication.

Suggestions for Umisoo if you're monitoring this thread.... right....
1. Write your own monitoring. Query your database of miners (sort by miner type, loop through the list and query the the stats via cgminer, etc)
2. Create a ticketing system. Both for customers and automated alerts.
3. When you're monitoring shows an alert, create a ticket.
4. Take care of the tickets in the order they are created.

Agree with all the comments here.  I have 5 S4's hosted at Umisoo.  I would have dozens more, but it really does seem like a startup operation and I want to see more stability before I put a bunch more on there (on the retail side; Umisoo has been doing its own hosting for a very long time).  There are some major advantages though.

Here is hoping that Umisoo is reading this thread!  I would spend a lot more coin there if these issues were fixed.

PROS:

(1) Cost is cheaper than any alternative I have found (for co-location, not cloud which is totally different), especially when factoring in the price drops that are being phased in.

(2) While not perfect, Umisoo is the only service I know of that will allow you to change your pools without a support ticket.  GAW used to provide a similar interface, but they have since moved on to pretend mining.

(3) Shipping from within China to China cheaper and faster versus sending to U.S.

(4) Email support is responsive in my experience. 

CONS:

(1) Lack of clarity on costs and invoicing.  You basically deposit BTC and they draw against the BTC for hosting fees.  However, there is no invoice, no record of the deductions, no transaction history.  You have to trust that Umisoo has it right, or else spend a lot of time checking (for the record, I have not seen anything strange yet).

(2) Monitoring system doesn't work (as others have noted).  Credit for downtime appears to be based on the faulty monitor.  So essentially no credit for downtime without email complaints.

(3) Lots of problems that appear to relate to the S4 (firmware upgrades needed, manual set to 2048 diff, and power supply failures).  These do not seem to be unique to Umisoo BUT Umisoo takes a bit of time to handle. I suspect they have many thousands of S4's, probably with hundreds having the same problems.... so they get to you when they get to you.

(4) No trouble ticket system.  Everything is email based.  Very confusing when trying to solve multiple problems with different miners.

Sounds like my experience with Umisoo. Just a little over 2 weeks with them now and 1 of my 2 S4 miners seems to be dropping 1 hashboard and is only hashing at 1.4TH/s. The first time this happened they said it was a PSU issue, then they said they replaced the PSU with one that they had and I was back hashing at 2TH/s. Then about 7 days later the same issue has came up again and I'm only hashing at 1.4TH/s, which of course had to occur at the worst possible time with ridiculous rental prices. I've emailed them and this has been their responses.

##First incident and suggestion from Umisoo on 12/8 (this is laughable because I'm not sure how this advice was supposed to help considering the only access that I have to the miner is to configure my pool settings and see their reported hash rate.)
"Hi,  The reason why your machine doesn't work well is because the power isn't  enough.Try again please and contact with me immediately if my advice doesn't work.Wish my advice could help you."

##Most recent incident
Me - 12/16 00:15 UTC
"Hello. My miner id xxx is having issues again. This always seems to happen after I change my pool settings. Can you please reboot the miner?"

[email protected] - 12/16 14:00 UTC
"Your question is received and we will deal with it as soon as possible,please rest assured.Thank you.Have a good day."

Me - 12/17 05:14 UTC
"Thank you for checking on it. Have you found anything out?"

[email protected] - 12/17 05:22 UTC
"Not yet,because we have many customers every day,so perhaps there is some time to your turn.Please wait patiently.Thank you."

Glad to know that I'm not important... Now 16 hours since their last email and no response and I'm still renting out a miner that is only hashing 1.4TH/s.

For the record my other miner has been hashing at 2TH/s most of the time but has recently dropped to 1.9TH/s. I wish I had a way that I could just submit a request for a hard reboot every once in a while.

At $130/month for hosting, I'm really wishing I would have just paid the extra shipping and had Bitmain mail them to a US hosting company.

Have been struggling for 8 days finally they are manged to resolve the issue, firmware upgrade to stock version 20141016 wtf.
Both miners are now working great at ghash with correct hashrate

UMISOO is running their business as usual and i'm still running a bad S4 as usual, I shouldn't have paid 3.3 bitcoins for the miner boxes and place them in UMISOO this is the biggest mistake i have ever made in my bitcoin life, i wish i should have invested more in AMHash cloud rather than buying my own hardware.

I am still trying to get my issues sorted out. I brought Bitmain into the email conversation, which got a quick and apologetic response out of Umisoo, as well as an assurance from Bitmain that they would ask Umisoo to take a look.

Umisoo didn't do anything that fixed the issue. Eventually after reading this thread I found out about changing the difficulty, so I pointed them at Slush's pool with 2048 difficulty, and one of the units is hashing at 2 TH/s finally. I think they had to reboot it to fix one of the non-hashing boards. No one at Bitmain or Umisoo suggested this, it was only through suggestions here that I decided to try changing the difficulty.

My other miner is still not hashing at any pools I set it to, even though the graph on Umisoo's website shows that it is. I keep explaining this to them and then they keep saying they will look into it, then nothing changes and when I follow up they say that it looks like it's working and they will look into it. Then repeat. I've asked them now to provide a screenshot of the unit hashing at a pool not a graph from their website, to prove that it is hashing. I had set the units to Eligius to demonstrate this, since stats are public, but I don't think it got through.

I feel like this would be much easier to troubleshoot if I had web or SSH access to my machines but they I don't know if this is a service they provide.. I've asked them a couple times but they haven't responded to my question...

Bitmain has been responsive and easier to work with, as I've come to expect from all my dealings with them. It's not that Umisoo is unresponsive, but just that communication is very difficult, and well, they don't really appear to know what they are doing, or to pay attention to what is actually happening with the units...

hmm that looks like a hashboard might be down, indeed. At least, at umisoo, my two S4 always show high hashrates, what the pool displays can largely vary.

Of course, after I posted these pix, mine decided to go into overboost mode and are now displaying 2,2 TH/s average I guess +/-0,25 TH/s variance displayed by pool are quite normal.

Also, it is quite important to be able to set the minmal difficulty to 2048. on eligius, my miners only managed 500 GH/s instead of 2000, and ghash.io was reporting wild hashrate drops and jumps all the time. After a bit of forum reading, I found most happy S4 users were mining at slushpool, does anyone else have other recommendations? I chose them also because at the momen, you get the BTC Trezor for a special price there, when you mine with them for more than 3 days.

i moved all my S3 and Avalon to AntPool

show time, my S4

so, the miners were received at Umisoo and are hashing now since a few days. My appreciation of the service is a bit mixed, here's why:

-Communication is a bit lacking. I was wondering when Umisoo would start operating the miners until I saw that I had an invoice for 0.366 BTC per unit which I had to pay before the miners were put under my control. It would be better if they sent an email for this, to avoid the situation I had when I finally could change the pooldata on the miners: until that moment, Umisoo were mining with the units at antpool and another pool (I forgot) with their own workers!

-Hashrate displayed at umisoo is heavily normalized: it usually shows this:



so a nice flat line.

However, hashrate at slushpool is displayed differently (these are 2 devices):



you can see average hashrate is below 4 TH/s. I had best results so far on slushpool, tried antpool (p2p), eligius and ghash.io, they had varying results but less good than sluhspool (I manually set minimal difficulty to 2048).

-Bitmain partnership: I wanted to buy more miners and host them at Umisoo, but Bitmaintech have removed the option to ship to Umisoo directly and told me no reason for this, simply if I wanted to host them there, I would have to send them to their address. Umisoo did not seem to know about this and told me a couple of days ago, they'd get back to me when they have more info. Still waiting for that. Hope they will respond before my coupons become invalid.

-Fees: as I said, about 4,50$ in BTC per day, in January there is supposed to be a reduction in electricity costs, but I am waiting for an official confirmation. The fees need to be paid beforehand and as far as I can see, I can send them BTC whenever I want in advance, so that might be handy to be able to time those payments so that you get the most out of your BTC (pay the fees when BTC is high). Still, there is a serious lack of information on that matter, I wish they sent at least an email to tell you how the system exactly works and also to inform you when the miner is going online (for me it was in the middle of the night, so I "lost" some mining time before I could set my pooldata.

-Pooldata: in their interface it is only possible to set pooldata and workers/passwords. No possibility to over/underclock, change parameters, reset or update firmware. I guess you need to send mail to support for these matters, but haven't tried yet.
On the whole, it's quite basic, but sufficient. You MUST remember though to select the pool parameters you want to submit (put a tick in the box next to it) before you send the data, or else the parameters will not be sent to the miner.

My conclusion: not too bad as a service so far, you receive a fairly good service with mails responsiveness (well, so far I haven't really stressed them), the service continuity has been OK for the short time I have been with them but hashrate is a little underperforming. I don't know if that's the pool or the units themselves, but the hashrate indication on Umisoo website is definitely not very accurate.

I would use them to host more miners, so far they have done well, but I wish I had direct access to the miner's built-in UI. Still, the basic functionality is there and you can change pools and workers to your heart's content.

I just wish I knew why Bitmaintech seem to have stopped collaborating with them, but I doubt Umisoo are going to tell me.

an email rec'd from UMISOO at 0730 UTC saying my S4 has a bad hashboard (didn't say how many x's) and now are talking with bitmaintech for an RMA (didn't say how long it will take).

They are watching the thread i believe

@1952tau, pls keep us informed the results after talking with bitmaintech, i've asking them to verify my S4 firmware version for couple of times but they never answered me, i'm now started to think if the running S4 @ 1.5T was the one S4-B2 i bought direct from bitmaintech?

I am in a very similar situation. I have two Antminer S4's hosted with them. Initially they had their own pool information set. In my case, I was able to change the pool using the Miner Manager interface. However, when I set them to GHash.IO, one miner gets about 350 GH/s instead of 2 TH/s, and the other miner doesn't show up at all. I switched to Antpool, and there, one miner gets 1.5 TH/s and again, the other one doesn't show up at all. The graphs on their website are incorrect. They show one miner hashing at 1.5 TH/s - so this one is more or less working, although it is hashing far below spec. The other miner is hashing at 2 TH/s according to their graphs, yet does not show up at all on any pools I set.

I have sent them several emails, and at first, they responded with very short emails promising to look into it. Now they are not responding at all. This has been going on for several days.

If I don't hear back from them by tomorrow I am going to attempt to reach out to Bitmain in the hope that they have some leverage with them and can help get my miners running. Failing that I am going to try to get a refund and have the miners shipped elsewhere, although given how things are going so far I fear even that will be a struggle...

SO basically... no I don't recommend them. And I am very disappointed with Bitmain for promoting them as a preferred hosting provider.

Like they are working on your issue to bring down part of the system, my S4 was down since 0100 UTC this morning but C1 was working hard at 1T mining at another pool.
Interestingly their "Miner Monitor" page still showing hashrate ongoing both miners.

Miner Configure Page -> did you hit "Select-All" before submitting the form?

I should add. I am being changed by Umisoo but have never been able to change the pre-defined pools or workers set by Umisoo. Looks like when Umisoo connected my S4s Umisoo set a pool of their liking and workers or their liking.

Today I am still waiting to access my miners. When Umisoo setup my two S4s they added the f2pool.com pool and their own workers. I cannot change the pool or workers which were specified by Umisoo. Umisoo has my money and they tell me they are working on the problem which will allow me to change the pool and workers. I have no idea why I cannot change the pool and workers set by Umisoo on the two S4s I paid for. The two S4s I paid for are sitting at Umisoo hashing for a pool (stratum.f2pool.com:3333) configured by Umisoo with workers configured by Umisoo. All I can do is watch my miners generate bitcoin for Umisoo. I am awaiting an update from Umisoo.

Running a S4 and a C1 in UMISOO, C1 is working great always 1T but the S4 is having terrible hashrate of 1.5T no matter where I minded at, btcguild @ diff 2048 or antpool get exactly the same result, anyone has similar problem with UMISOO?

I am working with them on an issue right now. They have my two S4s. Give me a day or so and I will have some feedback on them.

I have just ordered an S4 to be delivered to them, and inquired about the possibility to host C1 liquid cooled miners there. Will report back as soon as there is anything to report.

EDIT: Bitmaintech hadn't received my bank transfer yet (wish I had enough BTC to pay with that. I hope they will receive it Monday and proceed with the shipping to Umisoo.

Any updates from anyone else using this service?

I had a S4 shipped there and it looks by the tracking number it showed up.

Is it based on pre-paying for the first month? I see there is an unpaid order in my account for 0.3385412415BTC so do I have to pay that before the miner goes online?

UPDATE: That is exactly what I had to do. Paid the invoice and then once they had the miner they set it up and sent me an email telling me to configure it.

I just started hosting with Umisoo. I manually set the worker to 2048 on btcguild and that definitely helped.

I have noticed that through umisoo, the miner loses its connection to btcguild every 12 hours, and it is unable to connect to eligius. I had to connect to btcguild using the ip address. Anyone have any input on how to best configure in order to prevent downtime?

Hosting fees for umisoo are here: https://www.umisoo.com/agency/listProduct.action
S4 is ~$133 /mo

You should check out the official S4 thread - The hash speed is a known issue.  might wanna point your miner to BTCGuild and set the difficulty manually until a new firmware is provided in order to realize the full potential of your S4 miner.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/antminer-s4-discussion-and-support-thread-796839

How much is your service fee for using Umisoo?

Hi all,

Has anyone else had experience of Umisoo hosting your Antminers?  I see there are posts here for the Hashnet offering but Umisoo can actually host your Antminers and provide you with an interface.

My story so far is that Umisoo have had my new Antminer S4 for a little over a week.  I've finally managed to get it online yesterday, and a miner which should mine at 2TH/s has so far peaked at 200GH/s.

I can get into the interface and update the mining settings, but weather I try ghash or eligius I'm getting the same maximum results.  Whilst I appreciate they are based in China their support has been terrible.  They have restarted the miner, told me to try IP addresses on my miner settings rather than ghash.io or eligius.st.  They've even told me there's a problem with the S4 getting confused as an S2!  Hang on a minute, I should be connecting to a physical, self funded and owned S4!

A very poor show so far.  Wondered if anyone has any experiences with them?  I now find myself with a miner in China, I'm in the UK and powerless to get it working correctly.

Hopefully others are having better experiences otherwise we need to be warning fellow miners to stear well clear!
David