Time to rebuild my host spread

[TaoPhoenix]

Just coming with my Status: Were currently doing backups, so if anything appears out of ordinary then you know why!

Thanks
ColorHost

Hi Colorhost.

(Giddy) Backups are a good thing. I think you should do lots and lots of backups! Like once an hour! (/Giddy)

Is there a downside you know of in site performance when you do backups? It's great that you're being responsive.

[colorhost]

Hi Colorhost.

(Giddy) Backups are a good thing. I think you should do lots and lots of backups! Like once an hour! (/Giddy)

Is there a downside you know of in site performance when you do backups? It's great that you're being responsive.
Somtimes when i backup Performance does go alittle down, but not by much.

It may act up if the client that i backup has alot of things in his account, it just depends on whos account is backing up at the moment.

PS:I wont do the Hourly Backups! Hourly will kill the server constantly! I do Weekly though.

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

My general principle for the study is that minor slowdowns aren't damaging. Only major slowdowns are a cause for concern, because that's the warning sign of either oversellers or tech difficulties.

[Seraphim]

Well I am sure having a good time over here.

One of the drives in the RAID1 is showing warning signs, I may have to tear down again for yet another drive replacement. Though this time it won't be as long of an outage, since a physical replacement and array rebuild is faster than a clean setup.

We'll see how it goes, as long as it stays to bad sectors that will eventually be flagged and not used anymore I should be done testing and go ahead. Hopefully no other problems will surface.

I can understand all new drives having some bad sectors, but it would be just my luck that I hit 47 bad sectors on a drive brand new out of the box in the first three days of operation.

Either way, all of my services are back up I am just tuning the configuration and testing everything.

[TaoPhoenix]

Happy Easter.

Here is the current status of Round 3.

http://taophoenix.paradoxservers.net/ReVision.html

We have a situation where some hosts are direct resellers of Paradox, so there's a bit of a domino chain effect lurking, but they seem to have solved their local problems with unrelated service glitches.

I have two more slots available, and then it we can all go back to "just using" the hosts for ... the pages we host with them. In other words, the Round 3 excitement seems to be over, so according to my rough observations, we'll have to wait for about 4 months for the newcomers to pass the first duration metric.

[colorhost]

Happy Easter to you Tao!

It seems i have moved up in the ladder, Thats great :)

Ill keep up the GREAT service that your receiving!

Thanks
ColorHost

[Seraphim]

Happy Easter from SeraphimLabs

I've just finished testing and debugging everything, and am good to go again.

PM sent to Tao with my signup link.

[TaoPhoenix]

It looks like Seraphim and Lost Signal will be closing out Round 3. It will take me a few days to process out the signups, but that's the formality side.

I've been overhauling my design again too. That link I posted is getting near a usable form, with the iPhone being a key testing metric. (Though I don't know how to spin it sideways, and it's not a priority at all. I have wasted years procrastinating, so I have to finally buckle down and start researching the articles.)

The site shell structure will be done soon enough, perhaps a couple of weeks, and in the medium-soon future, it will be rolled out to synch the copies among the hosts. But even though the concept is to write the articles in layers, expect it to be months before anything substantive actually appears. Unlike Microsoft, I despise Vaporware announcements.

Happy Easter,

--Tao

[TaoPhoenix]

Hey Darksoul,

Any news on this? I can't connect to your server.

----
Address Not Found

www.paradoxservers.net could not be found. Please check the name and try again.

[Seanieb]

Looks like DNS is down. or everything is on one system... I'd hope not, either way it's gone over TTL so I cant see what IPs they used to be on. This is why I maintain two servers for DNS. :)

[TaoPhoenix]

A pity too, because he was doing really well for a decent time. As far as I am concerned this is rough news, but not yet enough to dislodge him from the creds he's earned so far.

It IS however the reason I made a spread of hosts. I can stay calm about it and just failover to the next in line. I will see what Colorhost is up to for a while.

[TaoPhoenix]

It so happens that Numbhost and Fasterhost are directly linked to Paradox as well. Do you guys have emergency resources lined up as failovers?

This is where the going gets rough, because my study is Bad News Triggered. To recap for anyone who missed the beginning or doesn't care to wade into the sea of posts, here is a recap of my purpose.

I noticed that all kinds of hosts of every variety gleefully post ads with great frequency. But like eating too much cotton candy at a carnival, it finally leaves the reader a little nauseated. This little industry is especially known for small dollar rapid turnover startups. Unfortunately, they often just fall off the grid ... and no one ever knows, except mystified customers. So I made a study, with the crucial feature being *opt-in* that in return for some modest exposure like Colorhost above, (or here! heh), if trouble strikes, that will get noticed by someone. Sometimes me, sometimes other entrants, sometimes by random members.

I call trouble "bad luck" because Stuff Happens, and the exact reasons don't really interest me long term. The metric is pretty simple ... "Don't Croak". Paradox has been pretty solid for a while, so this doesn't yet do anything dramatic to the standings... there's no cut-throat jockeying with a stopwatch. However, "Falls from grace" are possible, where a previously stellar host finally crumbles under the weight of marching circumstance. There was an unrelated thread about one case of this recently. I don't gripe much about "7 minute reboots". Somewhere about an hour starts to matter because if it goes that long, chances are it ends up half a day or more.

For hosts that hold on to a solid performance, they get a low key rough priority ranking visible to everyone, as an answer especially to the recent rash of newcomers looking for a host.

What are the limits of the spots on my ranks? This really is like a game show. The top tier gets a little "immunity" for having made it that far but not unlimited. Call it something like 4.5 Trouble-Events for newcomers and 6ish Trouble-Events for the top tier. NumbHost and Fasterhost each had an unrelated adventure, so this is strike 2 for both of them.

Put in fancy business terms, what my study promotes is robust emergency plans. Those two hosts above managed to remain on the list to avoid Double-Skunk knockout penalties because one had good data protection during the time of no access and the other had an instant failover option although data was lost.

However a real candidate for the top tier will have a big juicy ace in the hole to uncork when the Impossible starts to happen.

[Seanieb]

It so happens that Numbhost and Fasterhost are directly linked to Paradox as well. Do you guys have emergency resources lined up as failovers?

Were they reselling Paradox? Ouch.

[dmmcintyre3]

<doubble post, quick reply said it did not post.>

[dmmcintyre3]

The IPs are 208.94.241.218 - 208.94.241.222
I can't ping them or any up or down from them. There was a router close to it and I cant ping it ether. I'm thinking it might be a datacenter issue. It seems like nothing after 208.94.241.150 is up on the IP block.

[TaoPhoenix]

The IPs are 208.94.241.218 - 208.94.241.222
I can't ping them or any up or down from them. There was a router close to it and I cant ping it ether. I'm thinking it might be a datacenter issue. It seems like nothing after 208.94.241.150 is up on the IP block.

I'm no techie, but that sounds like the snowball started pretty high up on the mountain.

Azoundria (IsMyWebsite), I think I recall you had some real resources on tap. Do you have multi-data centers hooked up?

[Seanieb]

I'm no techie, but that sounds like the snowball started pretty high up on the mountain.

Azoundria (IsMyWebsite), I think I recall you had some real resources on tap. Do you have multi-data centers hooked up?



network:IP-Network-Block:208.94.241.128 - 208.94.241.159
network:Org-Name:Joe's Datacenter, LLC


"Joe's" Datacenter?? Doesn't sound too professional to me, it looks like they put servers on wal-mart wire racks :P

[TaoPhoenix]

The IPs are 208.94.241.218 - 208.94.241.222
I can't ping them or any up or down from them. There was a router close to it and I cant ping it ether. I'm thinking it might be a datacenter issue. It seems like nothing after 208.94.241.150 is up on the IP block.

This is why my ratings are a little wavy. McIntyre of Fasterhost gets creds for being involved even if he got crunched, and that makes a difference. It translates into a last-gasp chance left even if he gets whacked a couple more times.

[Seanieb]

traceroute to 208.94.241.150 (208.94.241.150), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 67.212.74.233 (67.212.74.233) 0.646 ms 0.923 ms 1.233 ms
2 64.15.66.201 (64.15.66.201) 6.683 ms 6.867 ms 7.051 ms
3 209.44.125.129 (209.44.125.129) 0.485 ms 0.582 ms 0.657 ms
4 ge-2-2-4.mtl10.ip4.tinet.net (77.67.78.205) 0.226 ms 0.257 ms 0.255 ms
5 xe-2-2-0.nyc30.ip4.tinet.net (89.149.183.38) 8.562 ms 8.579 ms xe-8-3-0.nyc30.ip4.tinet.net (89.149.183.42) 8.716 ms
6 te3-4.ccr01.jfk07.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.10.89) 8.834 ms 8.925 ms 8.917 ms
7 te0-3-0-1.mpd21.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.1.133) 9.044 ms te0-2-0-4.mpd22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.61) 9.175 ms te0-3-0-1.mpd22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.1.221) 9.074 ms
8 te1-8.mpd01.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.157) 28.671 ms 28.673 ms 28.596 ms
9 te0-3-0-1.mpd22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.7.165) 52.981 ms te0-0-0-3.mpd22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.25.77) 53.032 ms te0-2-0-3.mpd21.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.30.105) 53.057 ms
10 te4-2.mpd01.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.30.174) 53.057 ms 53.175 ms 53.274 ms
11 vl3808.na31.b006290-3.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.20.45.238) 54.939 ms 55.386 ms 55.135 ms
12 38.104.86.74 (38.104.86.74) 53.206 ms 53.121 ms 53.254 ms
13 SW1.KCMODATACENTER.com (208.94.243.14) 55.872 ms 57.601 ms 59.314 ms
14 jdc-vm8.joesdatacenter.com (208.94.241.130) 54.003 ms 53.643 ms 53.402 ms
15 208.94.241.150 (208.94.241.150) 53.622 ms 53.879 ms 54.525 ms


Goes through for me, but PS's DNS is still down.... Eh, cogent. That's probably why. :P

[dmmcintyre3]

^^ 150 is up but try 151


I'm no techie, but that sounds like the snowball started pretty high up on the mountain.

Azoundria (IsMyWebsite), I think I recall you had some real resources on tap. Do you have multi-data centers hooked up?

I tried pinging from 3 different locations and nothing. Traceroute from my house:

dmmcintyre3s-MacBook-Pro:~ dmmcintyre3$ traceroute 208.94.241.218
traceroute to 208.94.241.218 (208.94.241.218), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 * 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.137 ms 1.629 ms
2 128.3.1.1 (128.3.1.1) 1.063 ms 1.179 ms 0.959 ms
3 68.208.254.5 (68.208.254.5) 50.545 ms 51.897 ms 50.274 ms
4 68.208.254.41 (68.208.254.41) 50.174 ms 47.810 ms 54.455 ms
5 205.152.174.28 (205.152.174.28) 57.050 ms 56.149 ms 58.672 ms
6 ixc01gsp-pos-6-0-0.bellsouth.net (65.83.239.65) 56.509 ms 60.663 ms 60.276 ms
7 205.152.123.66 (205.152.123.66) 59.635 ms 59.368 ms 56.749 ms
8 12.83.0.168 (12.83.0.168) 60.061 ms 59.867 ms 59.325 ms
9 12.83.0.183 (12.83.0.183) 58.943 ms 58.357 ms 57.498 ms
10 65.83.238.202 (65.83.238.202) 62.201 ms 62.722 ms 61.104 ms
11 cr84.attga.ip.att.net (12.122.140.202) 64.724 ms 64.828 ms 64.175 ms
12 cr2.attga.ip.att.net (12.123.22.249) 63.829 ms 64.840 ms 62.971 ms
13 ggr4.attga.ip.att.net (12.122.140.81) 62.437 ms 62.027 ms 62.438 ms
14 192.205.35.134 (192.205.35.134) 67.830 ms 68.940 ms 69.348 ms
15 te9-4.mpd02.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.121) 68.543 ms
te9-4.mpd01.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.169) 69.673 ms
te7-4.mpd02.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.113) 69.871 ms
16 te9-7.mpd02.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.90) 87.335 ms
te3-1.mpd01.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.65) 86.507 ms
te3-3.mpd02.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.29.86) 84.439 ms
17 te0-1-0-2.mpd21.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.4.185) 102.805 ms 98.556 ms 99.078 ms
18 te4-2.mpd01.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.30.174) 98.747 ms
te4-4.mpd01.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.30.166) 99.915 ms 99.036 ms
19 vl3808.na31.b006290-3.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.20.45.238) 98.600 ms 101.690 ms 99.219 ms
20 38.104.86.74 (38.104.86.74) 98.190 ms 99.213 ms 99.895 ms
21 * * *
22 * * *
23 * * *
24 * *^C

[TaoPhoenix]

"Joe's" Datacenter?? Doesn't sound too professional to me, it looks like they put servers on wal-mart wire racks :P

Don't get too fiesty this early Seanie! Azoundria is tied for Top-3 status because he's been solid for some 3ish years now. I am pretty sure he has something like 7 interchangeable local servers already. I didn't know if his reach extended as far as multi datacenters. I'm getting out of my depth here, but suppose he has one datacenter "FrontLine" but some kind of failover mirror system in place.

No one really likes misery, so I tend to treat laughing on a karmic whiplash system. Just be glad I didn't count your mis-spelling my screen name on the setup as your "Half Issue"!

[Seanieb]

Looks to me like it might actually be those IP's aren't configured or up on the server.. maybe it crashed or rebooted and 150 is the only IP to auto start, this is why you make interfaces auto-start and other web services autostart, sudden reboots only leave you down for a minute (hopefully)


Don't get too fiesty this early Seanie! Azoundria is tied for Top-3 status because he's been solid for some 3ish years now. I am pretty sure he has something like 7 interchangeable local servers already. I didn't know if his reach extended as far as multi datacenters. I'm getting out of my depth here, but suppose he has one datacenter "FrontLine" but some kind of failover mirror system in place.

No one really likes misery, so I tend to treat laughing on a karmic whiplash system. Just be glad I didn't count your mis-spelling my screen name on the setup as your "Half Issue"!

Heh. The best to him then.
Edit: Wait a minute, I'm talking about ParadoxServer's situation, are we still on the same page?

Paradoxservers is hosted at "Joe's", I don't know about Azoundria.

[TaoPhoenix]

What's IsMyWebsite's datacenter called? This is all way past my tech skills.

However the general gist of my comment holds. Suppose that comes back with an equally "unprofessional looking" name. Ben&Jerry's is such an unprofessional name for an ice cream chain... uh... excuse me a minute while I clean my spoon...

In fact you segued fantastically into a side fragment of my study purpose: names don't matter, only results. In fact the plethora of "professional" names over on the ad side coupled with spectacularly miserable results is the entire reason I started this little thingie. My top spot is named after the Hawaiian word for village.

[dmmcintyre3]

Looks to me like it might actually be those IP's aren't configured or up on the server.. maybe it crashed or rebooted and 150 is the only IP to auto start, this is why you make interfaces auto-start and other web services autostart, sudden reboots only leave you down for a minute (hopefully)

Everything under it is up too. It's not the server it seems more like a router issue. Unless you are referring to the router not having the interfaces auto start?

A single server failure would not cause this big of an outage. There is only 5 IP's on Paradox's server. (and it's not a VPS.)

[Seanieb]

What's IsMyWebsite's datacenter called? This is all way past my tech skills.

However the general gist of my comment holds. Suppose that comes back with an equally "unprofessional looking" name. Ben&Jerry's is such an unprofessional name for an ice cream chain... uh... excuse me a minute while I clean my spoon...

In fact you segued fantastically into a side fragment of my study purpose: names don't matter, only results. In fact the plethora of "professional" names over on the ad side coupled with spectacularly miserable results is the entire reason I started this little thingie. My top spot is named after the Hawaiian word for village.

Obviously names do not matter as much as what a company really does, but the fact those guys used minitower servers on cheap wire racks show a lean twords "cheap"



Atom:~ seanieb64$ host ismywebsite.com
ismywebsite.com has address 174.37.58.194
ismywebsite.com mail is handled by 10 mail.ismywebsite.com.
Atom:~ seanieb64$ whois 174.37.58.194
SoftLayer Technologies Inc. SOFTLAYER-4-7 (NET-174-36-0-0-1)
174.36.0.0 - 174.37.255.255
VectorLevel LLC NET-174-37-58-192 (NET-174-37-58-192-1)
174.37.58.192 - 174.37.58.199


"IsMyWebsite" is on VectorLevel/SoftLayer, Softlayer is an okay company but we used to use them and we had customer service issues with them.


Everything under it is up too. It's not the server it seems more like a router issue. Unless you are referring to the router not having the interfaces auto start?

A single server failure would not cause this big of an outage. There is only 5 IP's on Paradox's server. (and it's not a VPS.)
Ah, I only checked 150. If there's nothing up above 150 at all, it could be a routing issue, but a quite weird one at that. It could just be that nothing above PS is used.

[TaoPhoenix]

Ya'know those clip shows everyone hates on TV? They're mostly a tactical device to either rescue a hopelessly confused audience or buy a week of scheduling when their lead actor gets into a car accident 12 minutes before filming. Those "conversation in a room" episodes where a Major Character Relevation Occurs (I think I once heard them called "ship in a bottle" episodes") are in fact new material, but buy the week when the previous show opener was the most expensive ever produced in the network history etc.

Y'all saw my rant of how volatile hosts are. This is just about the 6 month mark. Let's go see! In no particular order:
turesweb
finitemedia
JustAPost & Freezehost
mwzaf

Speaking of that Whiplash Karma thing, finitemedia was doing a lot of snarking until they themselves got pulverized.

[dmmcintyre3]

It could just be that nothing above PS is used.

208.94.241.217 was a router at one time, I'm not sure if it is anymore. I cant ping it just like the rest of the ips above 150

[TaoPhoenix]

By now it might be useful to repeat my take on the post-to-host model. I consider this a passably valuable thread with a fair amount of work expended. And it's "only" 150 of my posts. That I even got this far at all is because FWS is a major entrant in free hosting on the web, and interested hosts replied about one-for-one with my updates.

Imagine now those plans you see asking for some 20 posts a month, and then later "bad luck" strikes and they fold. It becomes lost effort, and THAT is the true cost of the post-to-host model... it's the risk calculation grid of lost effort.

[Seanieb]

Ya'know those clip shows everyone hates on TV? They're mostly a tactical device to either rescue a hopelessly confused audience or buy a week of scheduling when their lead actor gets into a car accident 12 minutes before filming. Those "conversation in a room" episodes where a Major Character Relevation Occurs (I think I once heard them called "ship in a bottle" episodes") are in fact new material, but buy the week when the previous show opener was the most expensive ever produced in the network history etc.

Y'all saw my rant of how volatile hosts are. This is just about the 6 month mark. Let's go see! In no particular order:
turesweb
finitemedia
JustAPost & Freezehost
mwzaf

Speaking of that Whiplash Karma thing, finitemedia was doing a lot of snarking until they themselves got pulverized.

I hope you don't think I'm hating on something unwarranted

Allow me to elaborate:

I could lease a 100U rack (for the sake of discussion) and put 100 1U servers, which is the average that I sell, or I can get 250 mini towers on wire racks with the cheapest components and sell them for half the price. In my opinion, using miniservers encourages you to use the cheapest components you can get, the cheapest boxes and pack them in like sardines, causing more hardware failures and higher network utilization and reduces server quality, it can get me more of a markup, though.

Instead of that, I choose to use rackmount servers with better parts, the space costs more, the parts cost more, but they're the best quality, the best cooling (my server never runs higher than 25C idle, 44C with a quad core under 100% load in a 1U case) and the highest network quality.

I'm not hating on anyone unwarranted, I just don't like seeing people cut corners to serve quantity over quality. I don't think anyone can really blame me. The networking provider I use (Netelligent) does miniservers, and I decided not to do the same, since they just tend to be all about cheap.

I'm not hating on anyone for the sake of slamming other companies. SoftLayer has pretty bad customer service as I experienced it. Personal experience, I'm expressing it civilly and only trying to make sure people don't end up walking off with a bad taste like I did.

I'd much rather sell less servers at a higher price than deal with congested networks and hardware packed in and frequent hardware failures. I pay the extra cost, and so do the customers for simply happier customers. I'm sure there's a lot of people who use discount box machines and are perfectly happy with them, but I like going the extra mile. That's all it is.

Also, I really dislike "post to host", It's scuzzy and it doesn't earn anything really for a host, advertisements would be more reasonable if you really want something in return, if someone wants more space from me I'd ask them to put up Google text ads, but that's about it.

[TaoPhoenix]

I think we're converging. I consider everyone up front to be new-to-me voices on an equal but 2nd-tier footing. As raw time passes, the cred-meter grinds up.

You mention an important part of predicting how a host might do. However, even with quality hardware all kinds of other adventures can happen. I'm not sure all of what "customer service" entails but through the vertical chain "mean service" disappears by the 3rd link in the chain or so.

My page design is pretty tight so ads are a problem. I tried to word my note above that risk is "just a cost" in post-2-host. I remarked elsewhere if a host had a good post-export system that would help a lot so a user could get his posts back to use on some other project.

[Seanieb]

I think we're converging. I consider everyone up front to be new-to-me voices on an equal but 2nd-tier footing. As raw time passes, the cred-meter grinds up.

You mention an important part of predicting how a host might do. However, even with quality hardware all kinds of other adventures can happen. I'm not sure all of what "customer service" entails but through the vertical chain "mean service" disappears by the 3rd link in the chain or so.

My page design is pretty tight so ads are a problem. I tried to word my note above that risk is "just a cost" in post-2-host. I remarked elsewhere if a host had a good post-export system that would help a lot so a user could get his posts back to use on some other project.

Thats' why the ads are 100% optional, you can keep the 5GB of space (which is plenty imo) or if you want more, you can have ads

your choice.

Also yes, I recently had a WDC Blue fail in another server, which was my first hardware failiure in a while, IMO another advantage to doing what I do is there are less hardware failiures. Packing computers in small spaces can get really hot, and end up costing you MORE $ when you have to pay for tech hands or parts and deal with P-O'd customers or SLA credits. So doing it the "right way" can some times cost a lot less for you, and your customer base in the long run.

In regards to customer service, it's mostly personal for me, I do all business on a personal case basis, and I don't really inquire too much into business of my customers as long as I don't get any bad complaints from downstream (I've had a customer I had to "let go" due to spam that was reported to me by Level3, it's just part of how it works, several reports from credible sources and I have to consider the cost to me of getting in hot water with upstream providers.

[Seraphim]

TaoPhoenix I am still waiting for that signup from you so we can get my entry on the board.

That's certainly interesting though to see that suddenly three hosts have dropped off the board. Probably just a faulty router or incompetent technician.

[Seanieb]

By the way - the Paradox/numbhost/etc situation is why I do not resell or make reseller shared hosting packages available. I think it's cheap, it's silly and it can seriously complicate things when a host goes down and takes six other small hosts with it. I don;t think there's anything seriously wrong with it, but I just think it's not the best practice. No offense to anyone, this is just why I don't trust it. Some people buy reseller packages for multiple sites or friends, I certainly make that available if anyone contacts me for extra accounts.

[TaoPhoenix]

TaoPhoenix I am still waiting for that signup from you so we can get my entry on the board.

That's certainly interesting though to see that suddenly three hosts have dropped off the board. Probably just a faulty router or incompetent technician.

Heh tonight's excitement threw me behind a couple of days, but you were official from my note a few days ago.

[TaoPhoenix]

By the way - the Paradox/numbhost/etc situation is why I do not resell or make reseller shared hosting packages available. I think it's cheap, it's silly and it can seriously complicate things when a host goes down and takes six other small hosts with it. I don;t think there's anything seriously wrong with it, but I just think it's not the best practice. No offense to anyone, this is just why I don't trust it. Some people buy reseller packages for multiple sites or friends, I certainly make that available if anyone contacts me for extra accounts.

I consider the key use of reseller to be educational. Call it like an OJT exercise. At the far end of the day I am aware my page is cute at best, and so I don't need real horsepower.

Many of the owners here have started with a first attempt that melted, then got it right the second time around with a new brand. I've chipped in some notes in private messages.

[Seraphim]

Yeah. Reseller is kind of like VPS, it's not the full package but it's still enough to try the water without the overhead of a dedi. You said yourself some time ago that I might have gotten in over my head when I started right out with a dedi to work with instead of going for a VPS or reseller.

Either way, I'm just sitting here watching the new posts on this site and working with paypal IPN. Not about to shell out money for a billing system when I can write my own.

[Seanieb]

I consider the key use of reseller to be educational. Call it like an OJT exercise. At the far end of the day I am aware my page is cute at best, and so I don't need real horsepower.

Many of the owners here have started with a first attempt that melted, then got it right the second time around with a new brand. I've chipped in some notes in private messages.

Hm. Interesting idea, I guess it's an okay starting point if they don't have the capital for their own hardware.

[TaoPhoenix]

Gee, for what was due to be the boring round, it's fleshed out all right! Lost signal is up, and I parked Paradox & related because at the 24 hour mark, they may be out cold.

The board looks like this:

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

[Seraphim]

I'm wondering just what happened.

Best I can tell DarkSoul hasn't been seen the whole time either. Though most likely this is due to him working on his servers trying to get back online, it certainly does seem odd that Paradox would just evaporate like that.

Tao's account with me is created and awaiting content, seems like I'll be the last to join this round.

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm wondering just what happened.

Best I can tell DarkSoul hasn't been seen the whole time either. Though most likely this is due to him working on his servers trying to get back online, it certainly does seem odd that Paradox would just evaporate like that.

Tao's account with me is created and awaiting content, seems like I'll be the last to join this round.

It's a little stranger than "just busy"... he was edging out a couple of big gorillas because he had the fastest response time for support for a while. I'd gather he's pretty upset and the type to hunker down, which is unfortunate because I am trying to promote communication among hosts when stuff goes sour. I still like the owner, but he's just tipping the line into the exact stereotype profile I hoped to educate against, that of the Disappearance. Even if you're cooked, sign on and bow out.

[Seanieb]

It's a little stranger than "just busy"... he was edging out a couple of big gorillas because he had the fastest response time for support for a while. I'd gather he's pretty upset and the type to hunker down, which is unfortunate because I am trying to promote communication among hosts when stuff goes sour. I still like the owner, but he's just tipping the line into the exact stereotype profile I hoped to educate against, that of the Disappearance. Even if you're cooked, sign on and bow out.

Or at least pay your customers the common courtesy of telling them what the hell is going on.

[Seraphim]

It's a little stranger than "just busy"... he was edging out a couple of big gorillas because he had the fastest response time for support for a while. I'd gather he's pretty upset and the type to hunker down, which is unfortunate because I am trying to promote communication among hosts when stuff goes sour. I still like the owner, but he's just tipping the line into the exact stereotype profile I hoped to educate against, that of the Disappearance. Even if you're cooked, sign on and bow out.

Or work your magic like the administrators that customers like to have and do what you need to get yourself and your customers back online that way even if you aren't at 100% capacity for a week you can let people know why things got slower than usual.

I find it amusing, he was ragging on me for using a server with a single hard drive.

The reason why is because I actually have two servers, that way if one quits I can transfer all the load to the other and maintain my presence with minimal downtime. Otherwise I'd be out for several days like this waiting for repairs.

[TaoPhoenix]

Or at least pay your customers the common courtesy of telling them what the hell is going on.

One and the same...

I'm learning some real surprises about how to deal with liason factors to the participants... I can afford to be quiescent because I am not hosting critical data.

[TaoPhoenix]

In my feeble understanding, one's local hardware can be fine, but you're hosed if your backend data center goes down. That's the reason I try to keep the ragging down to a dull roar - the more robust the setup, the more epic the freakchance that takes it down. All that's different is the quality of the tall tale resulting.
"Oh yeah? I have two datacenters per continent except Antartica."
"Oh look, it's a record solar flare cycle this month."

[dmmcintyre3]

I have on my site a contact form for any clients who want more info. I still don't have email right now on my domain. I guess I will go set up google apps and move all my sites onto my vps

[Seanieb]

In my feeble understanding, one's local hardware can be fine, but you're hosed if your backend data center goes down. That's the reason I try to keep the ragging down to a dull roar - the more robust the setup, the more epic the freakchance that takes it down. All that's different is the quality of the tall tale resulting.
"Oh yeah? I have two datacenters per continent except Antartica."
"Oh look, it's a record solar flare cycle this month."

No one can really predict solar flares causing carrier outages. That could knock out something like Level3 backbone and screw over a lot more people than datacenter providers.

Also considering the huge amount of planning, testing and execution a system that takes (to be 100% perfect), it's not surprising it's not commonplace.

[Seraphim]

In my feeble understanding, one's local hardware can be fine, but you're hosed if your backend data center goes down. That's the reason I try to keep the ragging down to a dull roar - the more robust the setup, the more epic the freakchance that takes it down. All that's different is the quality of the tall tale resulting.
"Oh yeah? I have two datacenters per continent except Antartica."
"Oh look, it's a record solar flare cycle this month."

Exactly.

And it is possible to take out a datacenter, in fact it's happened at least once before that a server in the datacenter was DDoS'd so hard that it actually crashed the router and knocked a large portion of the datacenter itself offline for a few minutes.

But events like that and worse tend to be rare, so good planning can avoid a lot of hassle from it. Never going to be 100% failure proof no matter how you set things up, but you can make it so that a system has to have a lot go wrong in order to bring it down for any length of time.

Edit: Oh Fasterhost just checked in. Seems that he's not completely dead yet. Good to know.

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, Seraphim Labs is on the board.

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

Pretty wild for round 3!

With the departure of Paradox who was getting extra credit for availability, the board is stabilizing. IsMyWebsite is now first, based on slightly greater availability here, but it's a flat draw with cWahi who reportedly has some scary bandwidth on tap.

2nd tier is a series of fresh hosts, and by this point everyone may have forgotten all about this from boredom by the 4 months it would take for the new hosts to hit the first milestone.

Remember, the point of the presentation is for me to be able to recommend a host and stand by it. So far, that's only the two hosts in the top tier. Remember this is an opt in system open to virtually any host, so it's really starting to bother me that of the 200 hosts here only two have made it in a study whose chief criterion is not to go offline! The active part of round 3 is almost over; I have easy design space for one more host.

P.s. I think SeanieB has a youtube Lost channel, hence his server name, because I stumbled into something yesterday. Either that, or the Smoke Monster is inhabiting his screen name.

[Seanieb]

Hahaha, no, that's not my channel on YouTube, that's not me. He's one of the rare people who took my screenname :P

Complete coincidence.

Edit: Can I ask why all your buttons link to the control panels instead of people's sites?
There's a link to my site in my signature.


Okay, Seraphim Labs is on the board.

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

Pretty wild for round 3!

With the departure of Paradox who was getting extra credit for availability, the board is stabilizing. IsMyWebsite is now first, based on slightly greater availability here, but it's a flat draw with cWahi who reportedly has some scary bandwidth on tap.

2nd tier is a series of fresh hosts, and by this point everyone may have forgotten all about this from boredom by the 4 months it would take for the new hosts to hit the first milestone.

Remember, the point of the presentation is for me to be able to recommend a host and stand by it. So far, that's only the two hosts in the top tier. Remember this is an opt in system open to virtually any host, so it's really starting to bother me that of the 200 hosts here only two have made it in a study whose chief criterion is not to go offline! The active part of round 3 is almost over; I have easy design space for one more host.

P.s. I think SeanieB has a youtube Lost channel, hence his server name, because I stumbled into something yesterday. Either that, or the Smoke Monster is inhabiting his screen name.

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm nearing the end of the study.

The first surprise is the relative lack of feedback on the utility of the results. I can count on one hand including deluded false positives the number of times anyone has said this was useful to them.

It really makes me sad to get all hopeful only to watch a host crumble. The old joke in business goes, "after you get good enough, you get to delegate". I will remain interested in durability data on hosts, but soon it will no longer be vital to be firsthand in the tests. If someone likes the concept and wants to take over vetting the bottom tier, I'm game to observe and chime in. But it's looking like I have two solid hosts for a decent while at a minimum. It would be nice to make that a full house with all five current entrants. If I can ride my 12 minutes of delusion of grandeur to the end, I'd likely add any host that survived a similar round of vetting in live observance. Briefly, the 70-30 mark is 7 months.

[colorhost]

Sorry for the posting updates! it seems my email has been acting up and not keeping up on my subscription i put in this thread and never emailed me back.

hm, why did i drop down? i read through and it doesnt say why i dropped.

Anyways, ill contiune to check in...If my email will update my subscription!!

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi Colorhost.

You got a bit of a false bump while the status was being thrashed out. You are essentially tied with Lost Signal and Seraphim Labs as a Round 3 entrant. Since this is a time-lapse durability test, all three of you are starting about 7 months behind my two stars on top. Brand new hosts seem to have milestone markers at 4 and then that 7 months.

I grew tired all at once recently as the results seem to be solidifying. It was important to make this an opt-in project, and I remain unhappy that so few did, compared to the thundering quantity of generic ads posted on the next thread over.

I will make a prediction. Shortly after someone with more energy than I aggresively makes a chart grouped by Years-In-Service, Some 25 hosts will rise to the top and experience a surge of new clients. The 200 other newcomers will then face the tough question "why should I pick you if you're only going to be here 6 months?" The other toll that takes is on client-host friendships.

You're a good guy. Really, my study was supposed to be ridiculously easy. Don't croak. I hope you make it past the 7 month mark to join the ranks of stable hosts.

[colorhost]

I have been opened for a year and that year i was mostly all free hosting.

And i am always here like some people no affence to some.

I appolgise for not being here often though seems like ymail was behind on subscription emails.

Thanks
ColorHost

[Seanieb]

Hi Colorhost.

You got a bit of a false bump while the status was being thrashed out. You are essentially tied with Lost Signal and Seraphim Labs as a Round 3 entrant. Since this is a time-lapse durability test, all three of you are starting about 7 months behind my two stars on top. Brand new hosts seem to have milestone markers at 4 and then that 7 months.

I grew tired all at once recently as the results seem to be solidifying. It was important to make this an opt-in project, and I remain unhappy that so few did, compared to the thundering quantity of generic ads posted on the next thread over.

I will make a prediction. Shortly after someone with more energy than I aggresively makes a chart grouped by Years-In-Service, Some 25 hosts will rise to the top and experience a surge of new clients. The 200 other newcomers will then face the tough question "why should I pick you if you're only going to be here 6 months?" The other toll that takes is on client-host friendships.

You're a good guy. Really, my study was supposed to be ridiculously easy. Don't croak. I hope you make it past the 7 month mark to join the ranks of stable hosts.

I may not have advertised on this forum, but I've been hosting since late 2008.

I currently have 21 customers spread between VPSes, shared hosting, dedicated servers and game servers, and everything is still lightning fast and stable.

I got my own server (I was sharing one before in exchange for managing it) on April 26 2009, and I've been doing this all on my own since then.

[TaoPhoenix]

Well then! You two may have a chance then! Seraphim did me the courtesy of announcing his green beginnings, so that's quite fine, and that means my board is roughly in the right order.

[Seraphim]

Well then! You two may have a chance then! Seraphim did me the courtesy of announcing his green beginnings, so that's quite fine, and that means my board is roughly in the right order.

I was also wondering why the buttons lead to the control panels instead of the sites.

Mine is http://www.seraphimlabs.net

Either way good to see the board populated, even if Paradox and co is still down.

Also I noticed not all of the versions are in sync. Colorhost still does not have Lost Signal or Seraphim buttons on it.

[dmmcintyre3]

I'm getting a apache test page on http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/

Is that your default page if there is no index.html?

[Seanieb]

I'm getting a apache test page on http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/

Is that your default page if there is no index.html?

Yeah, that's the default page if there's no index page, and for whatever reason there is no index page at the moment. Maybe Tao is working on his site or something, his files are there though. There's just no index.whatever file

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

The page itself appears to be ^there

[Seraphim]

Yeah, that's the default page if there's no index page, and for whatever reason there is no index page at the moment. Maybe Tao is working on his site or something, his files are there though. There's just no index.whatever file

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

The page itself appears to be ^there

Yeah. The page is very much there, just TaoPhoenix doesn't have an index.html or index.php in any of the accounts.

If you try mine, the test index.php from /etc/skel on my server is still visible, since it is copied to all new accounts to verify that everything is working and kind of 'park' the site until it gets content.

It would make sense to use a placeholder index file to redirect to the actual content, but this could also be on purpose to see what hosts redirect the site to error pages or other tests that can only be made on a site with no index.

And yeah. I'll be hitting one year in the business in August. So it'd be interesting to see if I can come close to the capability of the veterans.

[Seanieb]

Also, a quick note here:

I'm gonna have a spot of downtime late tonight (at least past midnight PDT) to perform some minor maintenance, I'm mainly going to perform and rsync our backups of the most important stuff tonight. This is mainly getting ready for moving to the new hardware we're going to be getting soon (upgrade to memory, motherboard and moving to hardware virtualization to increase security and efficiency on the shared server)

[colorhost]

Update: colorhost had datacenter outage but we fixed it now sorry for inconvenice.

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

I was also wondering why the buttons lead to the control panels instead of the sites.

Mine is http://www.seraphimlabs.net

Either way good to see the board populated, even if Paradox and co is still down.

Also I noticed not all of the versions are in sync. Colorhost still does not have Lost Signal or Seraphim buttons on it.

Good questions Seraphim. The answers relate to my particular handling, and I am sure there are other styles.

1. The Buttons to Panels was a shortcut I took because while everything is in flux I need quick access to the panels to upload things. I was also doing a big design change in the middle so that saved a ton of time. Soon enough the bars will go to the main pages and one of my computer pages will have the login links out of the way.

2. The sync thing was a strategic move. Consider for a moment the recent board turnovers. The FWS thread here is the governor of the project, so whatever link I posted here is active at that time. For example while we were chatting in messages that meant Lost Signal had the best known copy.

Sync is a behind-scenes activity that doesn't appear to anyone else except rabid detail experts and the hosts themselves. This method gives me some time to keep the project updates posted quickly, then "texturize" behind the scenes.

3. Future design changes.

A more important case is that the page as I'm sure y'all have noticed, doesn't in fact have any content in it! It's more a learning hands-on medium for me about basic web concepts as anything for public consumption. So, there will always be about two hosts with wildly differing copies. I'm not sure yet which of you will end up on lead, but it's as much damage control as anything... if I completely squash it, the other hosts have stable points to recover from!

There is a joke from Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux: "Wimps make backups. Men make mirrors and let other people keep the backups!" Read things like the Firefox dev notes sometime. If I don't veer off track, there would be three versions, like "last best-version snapshot as backup, current best improvements, and wild experiments".

[TaoPhoenix]

Update: colorhost had datacenter outage but we fixed it now sorry for inconvenice.

Thanks
ColorHost

Good to know, and the update earns you that credit towards the "half-strength problem" some day.

[TaoPhoenix]

Yeah, that's the default page if there's no index page, and for whatever reason there is no index page at the moment. Maybe Tao is working on his site or something, his files are there though. There's just no index.whatever file

http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html

The page itself appears to be ^there

I'm open to feedback on this. I understood an index may be useful for search engines, or "people who want to see all the files". But I'm not exactly enthused with people jumping around from a file list, so I start with a jump page. Only this year I changed the "branding" of the jump page to ReVision.

Wouldn't an index page list everything on the server? The reason I ask for modest amounts of space is that unused files are on tap as desired, but only what you can access starting from the ReVision page is the "authorized version".

Meanwhile, if Seraphim has about a year up too, then that was one of my emerging criteria for round 3, so I can now enforce it more - I still have a slot but I'd prefer the entrant have a year in business.

[Seanieb]

I'm open to feedback on this. I understood an index may be useful for search engines, or "people who want to see all the files". But I'm not exactly enthused with people jumping around from a file list, so I start with a jump page. Only this year I changed the "branding" of the jump page to ReVision.

Wouldn't an index page list everything on the server? The reason I ask for modest amounts of space is that unused files are on tap as desired, but only what you can access starting from the ReVision page is the "authorized version".

Meanwhile, if Seraphim has about a year up too, then that was one of my emerging criteria for round 3, so I can now enforce it more - I still have a slot but I'd prefer the entrant have a year in business.

No, an index page is simply the "default" page of a site, if you place the word hi into index.html in your public_html directory, http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ would say hi, it doesnt list the directories, it's simply the home page.

[TaoPhoenix]

Seanie, I'm getting some not found messages this morning. I thought last night I posted everything right. Any ideas?

[Seanieb]

Seanie, I'm getting some not found messages this morning. I thought last night I posted everything right. Any ideas?

Backups are taking longer than I thought. Should be done in a few minutes. I'll update you.

[Seanieb]

Backups are taking longer than I thought. Should be done in a few minutes. I'll update you.

Done, everything is back to normal.

:beer:

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, I've posted some of the basic supplies pages to the newer hosts, and barring goofs, the front page of the new hosts has sales pages now, while the logins are a couple levels down in the computer section.

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html
http://taophoenix.lostsignalweb.com/ReVision.html
http://taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net/ReVision.html

(I am using the other pair of hosts to hold the legacy copies so I can glance at whatever progress the troubled hosts may be making.)

Remember, hosts are encouraged to post notes of trouble spots, because it's better to be proactive than have someone here call you on it.

Otherwise, we enter the waiting period, where we just hang loose and Do Stuff.

[colorhost]

I am Gonna be more active, so when any trouble appears you will hear from Me!

Thanks
ColorHost

[Seraphim]

I wonder what happened to Paradox. Not a word from them since the outage, they must have had something fairly major happen. At least one of the resellers reported in that they are attempting to transplant services to a VPS just to maintain presence.

[dmmcintyre3]

At least one of the resellers reported in that they are attempting to transplant services to a VPS just to maintain presence.

Are you referring to me? I don't have a VPS powerful enough to run all the sites that I was hosting. I just have my sites on the VPS.

[seoliving]

What's your offer? My point was if you're nervous that you don't have that much on hand, offer it anyway. I load my site spread asynchronously depending on each site's capacities.

[TaoPhoenix]

What's your offer? My point was if you're nervous that you don't have that much on hand, offer it anyway. I load my site spread asynchronously depending on each site's capacities.

I think he meant he just had his business pages posted up, so he could give status info, which is the first step to damage control.

I gathered he couldn't host any of his clients without severe slowdowns, and I'm thinking it's better to just say service is down than make clients put with with snail pace loading.

[colorhost]

This doesnt effect your server Tao, but i am posting ALL Updates on servers :)

Server Axiom is having high apache issues, we are fixing it.

Thanks
ColorHost

[Schmarvin]

Weren't there a lot more hosts in your list at the start? I would've accepted your offer to be put up there, but then I'd feel like a ---- by outlasting the competition :\

[TaoPhoenix]

Join the fun and take your best shot Schmarvin!
You are one of the clarion examples of someone who learned fro
a bad bump.

What's becoming apparent is that we have both commercial
and personal providers here. As a client I see roles for both
but my usage strategy would be different. Put technically, I grew frustrated
with entities who obscured their volatility.

The top of my board shows two companies who have so far delivered on their claims.
The bottom half shows new-to-me entrants. Except for a few admonishments against snarking, I let the hosts Do Their Thing.

So far in my rough vision I forsee entities offering service under a category.
Commercial, Personal/NonCommercial, and especially startup k
learners. I'd load a fun small page on the learner sites, and look to the commercial guys for my master page .

Everyone has bad luck but there seems to be an accelerating roster of newcomers and I for one got thoroughly lost simply selecting a host based on features.

One of these years I will actually fill put the page with articles and by then I need to know the host won't melt under 1000 page hits. Or vanish to become a dead link.

So you are safe from "feeling bad for lasting" because in the commercial category, ... you are supposed to last! Entities operating in the learner category can just hope their best is enough without much risk of backlash .

[TaoPhoenix]

This doesnt effect your server Tao, but i am posting ALL Updates on servers :)

Server Axiom is having high apache issues, we are fixing it.

Thanks
ColorHost

Post away Colorhost! It's another step in the process of getting full circle communications with the hosts. Notice also we are emerging as a wholly new type of thread, from the single issue ones that finish out in a week or so.

Ideally the hosts can learn a bit from each other. I liked the upstream issues discussion.

When you get a minute think of a phrase to label announcements as directly affecting the client page or backend.

(I am posting from my phone so I apologize for funny typos).

[Seanieb]

My top two most hit websites on the same shared server your site is on get a little more than 2 million and a couple hundred thousand hits respectfully per month. The #1 site that makes the millions of hits pays me back in their bandwidth costs through heavy advertising (they go through hundreds of gigabytes of traffic, (~300 GB on average, 450 on their worst month.) a month.) Adsense has recorded about 690,000 impressions since I was last paid. This system has been measured by my bandwidth provider transferring nearly 4 TB of data since December, (4,036 GB to be exact) and we've survived a few distributed denial of service attacks on a couple of websites. Some of those "bad bumps" have costed me quite a penny in overage fees.

Here's my bandwidth graph since I had the cacti service enabled on my port in September.

http://i41.tinypic.com/125qpvp.png (I guess I don't have the ability to use img tags)

This graph is swapped, Outbound is traffic outbound the router, to my server, and vice versa, inbound is inbound to the router from my server.

Those big blue spikes are DDoS attacks, it sits low at only 5 mbit, due to the average of the traffic usually being below it, but the biggest spike was at least 200 mbit/sec. Costed me 24 GB of bandwidth every two minutes. That's an install of Windows 7 every minute.

I have a great relationship with my networking provider, so it fortunately all works out.

Lesson learned is to always prepare with a lot more bandwidth or the money on hand for it.

Edit:

http://i41.tinypic.com/dxzkec.png

This is what I got the last time I ran Webalizer on that #1 domain, I actually had to disable it because their access logs were getting up into tens of gigabytes, making generating webalizer take way too long. Actually, I'm not sure about whether or not this webalizer is 100% accurate, not sure about 700,000 hits a day. If this webalizer is right this site gets more like 20,000,000 hits. a month. But I don't know how accurate it is compared to Google Analytics or some other alternative.

The uniqs number a month sounds a bit more accurate though. I know this place gets a fair bit of google traffic, at least 5,000 impressions a day.

[TaoPhoenix]

I know, no fun industry can be left in peace without someone coming along to analyze things. But I'm just looking for a Few Good Hosts. I'm hoping this far side of round 3 goes well so I can get past the hello stage to my hosts.

[TaoPhoenix]

This doesnt effect your server Tao, but i am posting ALL Updates on servers :)

Server Axiom is having high apache issues, we are fixing it.

Thanks
ColorHost

Something else may have happened. I can't load the colorhost pages.

[Seanieb]

Something else may have happened. I can't load the colorhost pages.

Noticed this thread updated and thought I'd let you know, there might have been some glitchiness tonight, We found a really obscure power management issue that had messed up the CPU frequency, Everything should be a bit quicker, if you can believe that, :P

[TaoPhoenix]

Colorhost seems back. Do lots of hosts do 7AM maintenance?

[Seanieb]

Colorhost seems back. Do lots of hosts do 7AM maintenance?

Some. Depends on whenever they schedule it.

Also, just wanted to post that we recently completely overhauled and relaunched our forum for LSW customers and the IRC network.

http://forum.lostsignalweb.com/index.php

if you're interested Tao, you should probably register. :D

[Seraphim]

Colorhost seems back. Do lots of hosts do 7AM maintenance?

For hosts serving primarially America and Europe, 3AM-8AM EST is generally the day's lowest loads. So it's a good idea to do maintenance then that way fewer customers are disrupted than doing it at say 9PM when the bulk of the day's traffic is being processed.

I tend to do mine closer to 3AM, since by 7AM I am either sound asleep or trying to be.


Weren't there a lot more hosts in your list at the start? I would've accepted your offer to be put up there, but then I'd feel like a ---- by outlasting the competition :\

I'm all for running along side the big boys. Set the standards for the newer companies to work towards.

[colorhost]

No, it was DataCenter issue...somthing WAY beyond my control.

I might move off of my provider, Infinite.

Usally there really good at uptime on there side..., but now it seems everything has been going faulty on Green server.

Thanks and sorry again
ColorHost

[colorhost]

It seems it is now happening again, i am Constantly working with my datacenter on this issue!

http://twitter.com/infinitienet Here is the datacenters twitter.

I am sorry for this and i will makeup for the downtime we have had today.

Thanks
ColorHost

[Seraphim]

I wonder if that will affect Netelligent too. They also use a lot of Level 3 upstream.

Will look into.

[TaoPhoenix]

It seems it is now happening again, i am Constantly working with my datacenter on this issue!

http://twitter.com/infinitienet Here is the datacenters twitter.

I am sorry for this and i will makeup for the downtime we have had today.

Thanks
ColorHost

Gee, looks like it's rough there.

Just do your best.

[colorhost]

It seems to be up and normal now,Not FULLY up...But Normal.

They Seemed to experince some issues on some stuff, which they hopefully have fixed soon.

PS: How would this go against me in the Competition? I did stay in contact etc...so i dont know how this would effect me, feel free to clear me up.

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

The study is long term, and carefully avoids little fluctuations. So for this third tier, all the three entrants remain tied, and yes Colorhost, you did do a good job of posting notes. All three of the new entrants have.

The trigger is what happens with major outages, such as Paradox's. Both that event and Darksoul's abrupt disappearance startled me. (There's a remote chance he is dealing with something really serious in offline life.) Notice for example his sublevel resellers have made some efforts to report that they are looking for options, but they too have lost their place, though with closer to a "honorable discharge".

A piece of advice is that if all other things are equal, I recommend that the new hosts do their backups very late rather than very early, because I get up for work at 6AM so a "missing bar" will be more noticeable. Even better is to do a kind of "static image" that stays up, because retrieval is far more important than logging in to my account.

[colorhost]

Understood.

I will try to do backups Around that time, but i gotta take accord for other customers too you know?

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

Understood.

I will try to do backups Around that time, but i gotta take accord for other customers too you know?

Thanks
ColorHost

Sure. I meant to suggest that a staggered backup at the cost of a slow response is better than a total outage during backups, because it's the outages that catch my eye.

Otherwise it sounds like we're settling in. Schmarvin, did you want in before I start putting the gloss on my page versions across the hosts?

[Schmarvin]

Its up to you, I don't mind. It won't affect my traffic, so whatever floats your boat. :)

[TaoPhoenix]

I'd like to, for completeness. I wanna watch the successor to GlacierHost rock! :)

When you have time float me a PM with the signup info.

[Schmarvin]

I think I have free signups available. Register for a free account on the site.
Then, if you need anything else done, open up a support ticket. :)

[TaoPhoenix]

I created Ticket #208997 to get a modified plan going.

[Schmarvin]

I've replied to the ticket. Please check my response.

[TaoPhoenix]

I rescued it from Spam, and send my note back too.

[Schmarvin]

I didn't get a reply to the ticket.

[TaoPhoenix]

I tried to send "That will do for space, but I would still like a subdomain, and I don't see how to get that on your standard order page. "

Saturday about 11AM

[Schmarvin]

You would put in, you.x-ind.com

[TaoPhoenix]

Sent, correctly I hope.
Your Order Number is: 6122004450

[TaoPhoenix]

Schmarvin, I need some setup help. I tried to put in a ticket, but I don't know if you saw it.

[TaoPhoenix]

Like one other case before, Cross Industries is in, and I'll make an official board shortly after a couple of setup details get resolved.

[Seraphim]

There is a slight chance of intermittent connectivity issues from me. These should be very brief, just individual services restarting to load updated configuration files.

I just had a spammer get into my server and send ~150MB of phishing emails in the span of 3 days, so I am like woah how the heck did he do that and going over my configuration to prevent it from happening again.

[Seanieb]

Hey,

My main shared system is offline due to a bad software failure, I'm hoping it should be back up by noon EST.

[TaoPhoenix]

Good reporting Seanie.
I'd had trouble accessing my page, but it's nice not to have to play silence-poker.

[Efil]

(Rant)
....Also, don't trumpet your "community", because free hosts are primarily mercenary resources, not communities.
(/Rant)

It's good to know that we don't have "trumpets" to sell nor "mercenary resources" to offer. But anyhow, if such stereotype of yours 3 years ago remains wholesome till now, I am pleased to invite you to come to our community. There, we have free resources and volunteer services to tap on your hosting spread. I just hope you may realize, that although we do suffer and fall due to hardships and force majeure (http://waterseven.com/community/index.php?topic=157.0), we continue to struggle because of a tie that bonds between our community members (http://waterseven.com/community/index.php?topic=178.0). I think joining our community may influence your opinion a bit, if not significantly. But if after joining our community and you realize your suspicions are true, then we can just agree to disagree. Cheers!

[TaoPhoenix]

It's good to know that we don't have "trumpets" to sell nor "mercenary resources" to offer. But anyhow, if such stereotype of yours 3 years ago remains wholesome till now, I am pleased to invite you to come to our community. There, we have free resources and volunteer services to tap on your hosting spread. I just hope you may realize, that although we do suffer and fall due to hardships and force majeure (http://waterseven.com/community/index.php?topic=157.0), we continue to struggle because of a tie that bonds between our community members (http://waterseven.com/community/index.php?topic=178.0). I think joining our community may influence your opinion a bit, if not significantly. But if after joining our community and you realize your suspicions are true, then we can just agree to disagree. Cheers!

Dear Efil,
At the very least watching your results was one of the case studies that directly informed my evolving vocabulary and later led to this survey study project.

The basic theme of my sometimes frustrated discourses does remain - a community consists of a collection of people. *Where the community resides* is an independent factor that needs to be solved in some other fashion. Sometimes communities dissolve when the primary meeting facility can no longer continue. In that case I consider them "Communities Emeritus" or dormant, and the people "Alumni", in recognition of the good times.

Sometimes if a new facility becomes available, the community reforms. It is no accident that a charismatic leader can make a difference whether the community does successfully reform, or whether too much momentum was lost.

The operation of the facility is another matter entirely. That *is* a business transaction. Yes, you have had bad luck, for that is the non-accusing term I like to use in my discussions here.

The key point of my emerging discussions here is when the entity *offering service facilities* such as site accounts, refuses to discuss site operations as the economic supply and demand event that it is, and tries to use one of several words such as "community" as a way to deliberately blur the terms and conditions of the offering. There are jokes in business management that "buzzwords" float around in sweeps when it becomes the 'in' word to include in marketing materials. It is that abuse of marketing terminology that frustrates me.

I would like to post one of your updates from your linked thread that I believe serves as a big step towards handling these frustrations.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The Last Wave
« Reply #10 on: November 15, 2008, 11:33:43 AM »
Here's another update:

Water Seven in the future:
1. Organization change from "Community" to "Private Company Limited." The target date is July 07, 2009. Water Seven will become a registered company (with limited liabilities) here in Japan.
2. Server facilities change from "rental servers" to "home server." We will build our own "data center" (home server) in one of the rooms inside my new house. We will stop renting servers from other companies. There will be no more billing problems to come in the future after this change. The target completion is December 07, 2009.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2008, 11:38:20 AM by Efil »
------------------------------------------------------
Here you go a long way and make an important step towards properly labeling the economic entity of Water Seven that offers accounts, which you now call a "Private Company". The Company, private or otherwise, is the entity that offers space, and it either successfully connects all the economic factors, or it fails.

The "Community" is the collection of people gathered under the leadership of one topical theme such as a Water Seven theme. Leaders may change, and facilities may change. Membership as a whole changes. The collection of people however they congregate is the community.

It is vital to realize that the activities of a group of people acting at the Community level would have some kind of voting process to affect how many of their activities are handled. Imagine for example deciding upon an "official Water Seven" logo or such. A President or a Board may be able to break ties. Prospective new memembers can survey the proposed rules and decide if the spirit of the gathering is right for them.

Imagine for a moment a community that operates as "satellite sites" without necessarily a central forum board. Through emails or even traveling micro-blogs the community may float across several actual service providers. There is a name for this - WebRing. A banner like "Water Seven Web Ring" would be at the top/bottom of each member site, and link to other member sites. The individual site developers would have decisions on what facility to use.

When an individual/group decides to *provide a facility*, then they enter the business world of income and expense. It always develops that someone engaged in providing a facility then tries to adjust the terms of the community to help increase the chances of that facility's economic success. Under US tax law, the minute a dollar shows up on a table, it sorta "starts the clock of What Am I". You can decide to have no revenue and call it a hobby, and hope the whole thing goes away from the legal side. Or you can try to place a few ads to Break Even. But the minute the owner does that, it's off and running as a full business.

There is a worldwide "discussion" of how fierce the moderation should be. Some like strict moderation where everything worse than the term Hell gets disallowed. It makes them feel comfy in a Rated PG setting. But if you review the news, we have a worldwide problem with censorship growing in about 10 countries, so some advocates are pushing to allow slightly fiercer comments to stand so long as they are not truly trolling such as goatse etc.

I would have to review the rules of Water Seven to decide if I chose to apply. I vaguely recall some activity quotas I am not ready to commit to. But it *is* important to me not to risk my site hosting based upon fierce rules. I am always relatively polite even when opinionated. However my philosophy on web hosting is that the fewer the rules the better, retaining only the ones necessary. For example, if the call sign of being a Water Seven member was to display the logo, and one day it developed that we parted ways, all I would do is remove the logo affiliation, and my site continues on its way elsewhere. *It is the fear of losing the entire hosted site contingent upon following strict rules* that I object to the deliberate blurring of "Community" and "Host".

In summary, at some time I may review the terms and conditions of applying to Water Seven. If I were to apply, it would be in the knowledge that generalized hosting is available elsewhere, and that having a customized Water Seven themed site were to provide some value from being a part of that community. A case study for you to ponder is how to process members who choose to separate the duties as a community member vs. contributing towards the facility hosting.

It is a buyer's bazaar out there, despite the marketing attempts to make it look like a seller's managed marketplace. My entire study concept of this thread, which I daresay is growing to noticeable levels, is that when someone runs their own ring of mirror sites, the adventures of the individual nodes become less emotional and that I believe benefits everyone. I have made decisions whether to add hosts to the survey, and so far, about 80% of the well meaning folks have encountered "bad luck". So be it. I can let them do their thing and we all move on.

Best Regards,

--TaoPhoenix

[Seanieb]

Alright, my system is back up and has been stable for a few hours now.

[TaoPhoenix]

Alright, my system is back up and has been stable for a few hours now.

Yep. I daresay you were down a few hours longer than your first rough guess, but the responsibility of reporting an outage turned it into a simple case of "change to another mirror site" instead of a frenetic "Where's Lost Signal" thread with 12 posts.

Efil, what you did right that I respect is that you DID report your woes well. So no one likes trouble to strike, but if it does, just say so and let time march on.

[Efil]

Dear Tao-san,

Regarding the “Private Company” plan, in case you haven't read this, which is found around the second page of the same thread, I'll add it here for your reference.



Internet service providers here in Japan normally doesn't give fixed IP address to households, I think it has something to do with rules and regulations of the country. It is the very reason why we are going to register Water Seven as a "private company limited." As a registered company we will eligible to purchase fixed IP address that we can use for the home server.

I know an ISP provider that doesn't require such an eligibility but their system doesn't seem to work on Linux based servers.
Also, our connection will be a "business connection".

However, since the most practical solution for us until now remains to be “rental server” instead of “home server” the privatization plan is not yet exercised.


Efil, what you did right that I respect is that you DID report your woes well. So no one likes trouble to strike, but if it does, just say so and let time march on.
I believe there's no reason for me not to report anything. It's the community I love, and the community I've been protecting afterall. Besides, reporting is commonsense for us, as we've even been long prepared for Efil being hit by the bus (http://waterseven.com/forums2008/index.php?topic=48.0). (Please use “TaoPhoenix” as the username and password to access the thread.)

Cheers!
Efil

[TaoPhoenix]

Dear Tao-san,

...

I believe there's no reason for me not to report anything. It's the community I love, and the community I've been protecting afterall. Besides, reporting is commonsense for us, as we've even been long prepared for Efil being hit by the bus

Cheers!
Efil

I wouldn't call it "Common Sense" because it's so very rare! Perhaps it is Water Seven sense! And ... that would be one component towards explaining to prospects what an organization offers.

Sadly, this thread just had a major example of the varying values of scarcity of UnCommon Sense.

[TaoPhoenix]

There we go. After a bit of Monty-Python-esque impossibilities in the setup, I'm all set up with Cross Industries.

http://taophoenix.x-ind.com/ReVision.html

I'll make a green bar for them in a couple of days and load the site a couple more days after that.

But last I knew that puts Round 3 in quiescence again.

[TaoPhoenix]

Cross's green bar is up, as well as part of the page, enough to avoid crashing into NotFound right away.

The study has come a long way, and the current crew of new entrants is going to be more resilient as a whole. We may lose one, but the whole level won't get skunked for a while.

Now comes the fairly dull part of just living life. If someone clamors to get in, I'll consider it, but otherwise the logical part of the design is full. Not bad for 7 months work.

Hosts are encouraged to figure out their own news rhythm. I'm not out to spot a 5 minute outage and pounce. Lost Signal's episode the other day is a good example. A very rough ballpark is if the host thinks they'll be down more than an hour. If it's trouble and you're down an hour, it's probably gonna get worse and ought to be noted.

I encourage backups to be done if possible in slower layers rather than total outage. I almost never jump on service delays, at the very least because my own connection is so rotten it would wreck any attempt at a measurement. I consider total outages more serious, because the web is an Always-On event. Also, one of these years I am actually going to launch the site with something in it, and we need to have a good read that the host is never down with "false alarms".

[BrandonTheG]

Posting this on the once host known as FreezeHost/JustAPost.

We had problems, a lot of problems. We were covering this up, and we weren't solving them the way we should have been. This is the problem when you give one man control of important resources. I am going to strive this for the fellow new hosts on FWS and for behalf of a previous hostee, always let more than one person have access to important things.

Things happen. Having been helping to run/own free web hosting companies since early 2006, I've seen it all. I have learned a lot over the years, what to do, what not to do, valuable trade secrets, and learned how to be successful fast. This is great, everybody knows how to do this, am I correct? No, but you learn this over time, by making changes, trying new ideas (Like FreezeHost/JustAPost)...the problem is when you start an idea, make sure you follow it up. I had been hosting nobody but Mr. TaoPhoenix. Things were fine, but when my primary person for the paying the server, he had a 'tendency' to disappear. This happened once, but because I didn't want to look like a ---- to our one hostee (remember, try to make the best of a bad situation. One bad review can ruin your dreams), so I covered it up. The thing is, it was becoming repetitive, and he was catching on. After a while, he disappeared; and I never heard back from him.

So I know I am tired and it's 12:30 AM, but I hope that some person takes my advice. Make sure there are safeguards in place to protect your clients accounts, there data, and the reliability of your servers. One bad review can cause problems for years. It's better to have No reviews, than a bad review. Especially in the close-market such as Free Hosting, or Hosting in general, there is always somebody who can 'outdue' you. Make the best to avoid these situations.

This must be one of the most valuable things I have learned in the past 4 years I have been active in the web hosting industry. And hey, it's important, and I like to see people succeed. So just take this tidbit of advice if your reading.

And I would like to say sorry to TaoPhoenix for disappearing and not posting it sooner. This was very unprofessional of me, and I hope you don't use it to look upon me as a distrustful person.

I'd also like to thank TaoPhoenix at the same time, he has taught me a valuable life lesson I am trying to move onto others.

[TaoPhoenix]

Gutsy Brandon, Gutsy.

My little project grew ivy tendrils into some interesting side roles. If nothing else, I am a fairly levelheaded client to host. I don't ask for much, and I don't submit very many support tickets once the basics are running. In the old coal mines they used to have canaries (which went unconscious early ) to tell them when they had a ventilation problem and gave them some X hours to get to safety and regroup. I think that's where you are now. I ended up with a role of taking things out of "talky theory" into "an actual client", which helps safeguard against the wheel&dealer types who ... then don't pay a server. Better that the experimental host fail on me than in a bigger arena.

Your post touches on a recommendation I've had for a while, in that there are too many 1-man shows here. Fellow X burns out, Fellow Y runs into a malicious attack fellow Z loses his server. I think it would be interesting if any three of y'all joined forces.

I really appreciate the post Brandon, because that clearing the air is in the absolute best spirit of what I've tried to do in my careening thread of adventure.

[TaoPhoenix]

P.S.

Another little side effect I hoped to demonstrate is that we're hitting the age when hosts can't hide anymore. Even if nothing gets posted at the FWS level, individuals, once they prove they are not trolls, will start to make their own decisions, and "review things". So since a review WILL eventually happen, coverups are so 1990's X files.

In 2012 (to be facetious with the date) there will be no coverups because everyone can tap an expert remotely through the net, then just amplify the results. Sure, I don't know about Colocation failures or DNS bad packets or whatever. But the new age means that someone will. All I report on my board is a binary "Here/NotHere" survival metric. (See my note about slow backups better than outages). Then the other guys with Da Skillz can dig to their heart's content.

[colorhost]

Hey Guys! Checking in with my updates

"Server upgrade might happen today and we might have some downtime, but they may only be 30 minutes, we will keep you posted."

Thanks
Colorhost

PS:I have noticed Paradox Servers is back up, but to be honest i don't think there gonna last now.
Also, Are you gonna update all the hosts copies of your page? i see mine is a tad out of date, i just like mine (and others of course) to be up to date.

[dmmcintyre3]

123456


http://paradoxservers.net/showthread.php?tid=112[/url]']
we will start hosting again on the 5th or 7th of may unless something comes up. The reason we stopped in the first place was to transfer over to our new connection, unfortunately during transit the data was corrupted in the server - including the backup hdd within the server.

If you were a previous client with us and you wish to continue your hosting, you will have to sign up again.

The new connection will grant us 25mbps+25mbps (down/up) unmetered. This means that our total transfer rate will be 16tb per month, which compared to our previous 1.5tb grants us a lot of breathing room and the ability to increase the amount of data transfer per month we can offer to every client.

We hope to see you again soon!.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hey Guys! Checking in with my updates

"Server upgrade might happen today and we might have some downtime, but they may only be 30 minutes, we will keep you posted."

Thanks
Colorhost
...
Also, Are you gonna update all the hosts copies of your page? i see mine is a tad out of date, i just like mine (and others of course) to be up to date.

The front board will be spread through soon, perhaps this weekend, perhaps a couple days later.

What I haven't figured out is when I go after working on actual page design behind the front page, which host will end up on "lead". The nice part of a spread is automatic version control - if I get a nice new tweak, spread it like butter. If I get too enthused and end up with OhMyGawdNo, I roll it back to the last known good copy.

In fact, that may solve my design structure problem. The spot Paradox had for a while was "Service Lead". Unfortunately as a new host, he fell right into the profile timeline for trouble at the 5 month mark. But while he was around, he was the fastest source of answers to weird little questions that proved useful to learn from.

Looking at my design, I have room for two volunteers for Service Lead. These are hosts who have enough time away from the bare necessities of running their host to be ultra responsive to questions here. It's OptIn. Maybe I'll get no one. But it's a nice selling point in favor of new hosts. The remaining hosts down on the lower tier would remain at my fairly quiet standard interaction style.

Getting two Service Leads opens up the board for up to two more entrants for the continuing Round 3. By now I command slightly more status than a Pet Rock, and slightly less than a good piece of Chocolate Fudge. But as the project matures, the survivors are earning chops for automatic recommendation to new clients. (Note to self - make the Service Lead bar a different color.)

[BrandonTheG]

Gutsy Brandon, Gutsy.

My little project grew ivy tendrils into some interesting side roles. If nothing else, I am a fairly levelheaded client to host. I don't ask for much, and I don't submit very many support tickets once the basics are running. In the old coal mines they used to have canaries (which went unconscious early ) to tell them when they had a ventilation problem and gave them some X hours to get to safety and regroup. I think that's where you are now. I ended up with a role of taking things out of "talky theory" into "an actual client", which helps safeguard against the wheel&dealer types who ... then don't pay a server. Better that the experimental host fail on me than in a bigger arena.

Your post touches on a recommendation I've had for a while, in that there are too many 1-man shows here. Fellow X burns out, Fellow Y runs into a malicious attack fellow Z loses his server. I think it would be interesting if any three of y'all joined forces.

I really appreciate the post Brandon, because that clearing the air is in the absolute best spirit of what I've tried to do in my careening thread of adventure.

No problem, Tao. I've been busy, I know I was hell of a dam late but you need to put your best foot forward and admit mistake when it happens, it's all comes down to character.

[Seraphim]

Misshaps happen.

But it is true more and more that you can't just run away from the disaster you made, people are finding ways to hunt down troublemakers and see they get their fair share.
In a way it's a good thing though. It means the internet is maturing. Back in the 90s the internet was like the Wild West, you could do just about anything you possibly could and get away with it.

Good to see that Paradox is coming back to life. Hopefully things go smoothly and Darksoul starts posting here again.

[BrandonTheG]

Misshaps happen.

But it is true more and more that you can't just run away from the disaster you made, people are finding ways to hunt down troublemakers and see they get their fair share.
In a way it's a good thing though. It means the internet is maturing. Back in the 90s the internet was like the Wild West, you could do just about anything you possibly could and get away with it.

Good to see that Paradox is coming back to life. Hopefully things go smoothly and Darksoul starts posting here again.

I think we are all coming back :).

[colorhost]

Yup, i am coming back little by little...since i really dont do free hosting anymore, i dont really come into this section...or this site for that rather, but i do try to remember to come here for my updates.

[TaoPhoenix]

Yup, i am coming back little by little...since i really dont do free hosting anymore, i dont really come into this section...or this site for that rather, but i do try to remember to come here for my updates.

Hey Colorhost.

Please clarify that when you get a moment. I get several manager coupons for reducing ad placement or specs, but if you don't offer any other free plans at all, that might do weird things to my study which is about free hosts. I'd keep your observation metric going, but I'd probably do something like make it a different looking bar/placement almost like a "Study Spinoff".

I'm interested in why you wouldn't offer free hosting, because I still believe one of the strongest cases for free hosting is that as a entry level by a paid host. I know all about the quality splits of free/paid, but I just happened to procrastinate on my page so long I never needed a paid host. But "one of these years" I will. Thing is, the host needs to Not Croak.

[colorhost]

I was a free host when i signed up for this, but if this will effect your study....you have my permission to remove myself from the study.

Thanks
ColorHost

[TaoPhoenix]

Interesting.

You've done too good a job of reporting just to trash my account with you. But instead I would like to treat it like a "control group" which in studies alters a major factor (here, such as free/paid) for overall comparison. So I will do something to my layout, and it will take me a few days to plan it out.

For the other hosts, I do request if someone switches to Paid-Only, that they holler my way. Overall I don't expect free hosts to fully match the Power of Paid" across the line.

[TaoPhoenix]

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html

Here is a rough-house layout change based on the recent news. Colorhost will continue to be observed, but the purplish color means they are now a Paid host, and that my plan is an isolani from a manager coupon. Still, they get the attestation of the watched-over effect. In a science sense, it starts a "Control" group to compare performance vs. some of the lower tier free hosts.

Cross Industries has been moved up, not only for a love of efficiency in layout, but because they were in fact contacted early on, yet held off officially joining until recently. However Cross has unofficially been observed for a good while now, before I created the board. Schmarvin has already been through his crunch, so I think he's a tough contender to beat now.

That leaves my bottom two tier slots open again.

(Heh. Colorhost wished for the newest copy of the page, so it was granted!)

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, it looks like the activity has faded down, so that's about the end of the signup phase of Round 3. Now we come to the dull monitoring part.

[BrandonTheG]

This must be, the longest thread, in Free hosting requests.

[Schmarvin]

This must be, the longest thread, in Free hosting requests.

Yes. It actually should be moved to Discussion as this isn't a request, its a review of hosts.

[dmmcintyre3]

This must be, the longest thread, in Free hosting requests.

No, it is the second longest thread in Free hosting requests

http://freewebspace.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=2&page=1&pp=40&sort=replycount&order=desc&daysprune=-1

[eSupun]

No, it is the second longest thread in Free hosting requests

http://freewebspace.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=2&page=1&pp=40&sort=replycount&order=desc&daysprune=-1

I thought this is the longest thread in request forums. But now i see there are many more out there which has big amount of replies. Thank you for showing it.

[TaoPhoenix]

I thought this is the longest thread in request forums. But now i see there are many more out there which has big amount of replies. Thank you for showing it.

Heh Hi eSupun!

I don't have far to go to make it the longest!

[TaoPhoenix]

Yes. It actually should be moved to Discussion as this isn't a request, its a review of hosts.

It's a Frankenstein creation that does indeed combine a request with a discussion. The request part is Opt-In, but ongoing.

[TaoPhoenix]

Copied from elsewhere.


Tao I might be able to help you and all I need is a hosted by link.Socheaphost.com(To live again!)
24khost.com(coming soon!)
SoSolabs -> SoSoBill Coming Soon
SoSolab Dedicated Servers

Hi SoSoLab.

Judging by your sig, you're not up and ready yet. I'll start to design an efficient showboard where I'd take a *smaller than usual* account and only load a few files. Then if some monster rises up and bites out your server, it's less fanfare than having one of the full contenders go down.

[eSupun]

Heh Hi eSupun!

I don't have far to go to make it the longest!

But you will do it man. Willingly or unwillingly :P

Just some few posts to go.......

[Brandon]

I'll bite. I've run a free host before (sold in 2007), and am planning on running a new one, BabbleHost.com, with no intent of selling.
What are your requirements?
Would:
1 GB Disk
10 GB Bandwidth
cPanel/Fantastico
10 of all features (mySQL, domain, e-mail, etc.)
Be acceptable?
If so, shoot me an email (in signature) or a PM for setup :)

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh - a second Brandon! I almost scrambled you for a minute. Yes, that spec list is just about right on target. I typically ask for subdomains.

Your note says "Planning" - what's your timeline so we don't "start the clock" too early only to have you hit a glitch?

[Brandon]

By "planning" I meant I already have the server paid, configured, the host bill software up, and support services ready. I'm sorry, I used a poor choice in words :o The only thing that is necessary still is for my (procrastinating) partner to finish the web design. Everything else is fully operational, and I already have a few accounts hosted. Backup services are a go as well. :) Oh, and I did forget to mention that I do give you a sub-domain name, of ---------.babblehost.com :)

EDIT: Also, your plan is specifically NOT ad-based or post-for-host. I have other income sources on different services that I plan on offering, so I'm not going to just disappear overnight like many free hosts tend to do.

[johnyboy2157]

I am new in this field right now i am avoiding paid hosting, getting benefits from free :D

[TaoPhoenix]

Sure Brandon@babblehost.
I tend to take a couple of days to keep my files straight on this stuff, but we'll be corresponding.

[JordanRHughes]

Wow soo many to choose from. Looks like I got my work cut out for me this weekend. Thank you all for sharing.

Jordan.


We can offer you 1GB disk space, 10GB bandwidth.
cPanel control panel.
No file size limit.
There is 60 day inactivity limit if there are absolutely 0 hits.

http://www.hostaider.com

[johnyboy2157]

I agree , i think you need more , its not much :D

[Seanieb]

Hey Tao, I've been offline for a couple weeks for personal reasons coupled with AT&T having technical difficulties with my home DSL line, but nothing bad happened while I was gone, I checked in occasionally with the system and everything went well, How have you been?

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm okay. I have another new entrant to process : )

[TaoPhoenix]

Hey Tao, I've been offline for a couple weeks for personal reasons coupled with AT&T having technical difficulties with my home DSL line, but nothing bad happened while I was gone, I checked in occasionally with the system and everything went well, How have you been?

Hey Sean.

Did perchance you Lose the Signal? I'm getting

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.lostsignalweb.com.

[Tyler]

Same problem here.

[Seanieb]

No clue why, but Apache crashed. I changed some config today and reloaded it, it might not have reloaded properly.

Edit: Found out why: It had to do with a change I made in IP configuration and an SSL website hosted on this box on another IP address. The part that caught me off guard is it seemed to stay running...until someone accessed one of those SSL sites. Then the entire httpd crashed.

[Seraphim]

Edit: Nvm he fixed it.

[BrandonTheG]

Another Brandon ?!

[TaoPhoenix]

By "planning" I meant I already have the server paid, configured, the host bill software up, and support services ready. I'm sorry, I used a poor choice in words The only thing that is necessary still is for my (procrastinating) partner to finish the web design. Everything else is fully operational, and I already have a few accounts hosted. Backup services are a go as well. Oh, and I did forget to mention that I do give you a sub-domain name, of ---------.babblehost.com

EDIT: Also, your plan is specifically NOT ad-based or post-for-host. I have other income sources on different services that I plan on offering, so I'm not going to just disappear overnight like many free hosts tend to do.

Here we go. Babblehost is up.

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/ReVision.html

See usual about filling out the links later, page versions, etc.

[Seanieb]

Excuse me for derailing this thread - but I'd like to remind Darksoul that it's quite unprofessional to go on IRC anonymously (with your home internet access) and troll prospective hosts about their pricing.

Your amount of conceitedness suprises me, when you bash other people about maintaining shoddy services, disappear for a month and restart the same crap again.

Also, nice job being a sysadmin and not knowing what a chroot is. If it wasn't you, you should prove it to me.

Good luck.

(Note, I base my accusations on a: using the web client on Seraphim's website, connecting to our IRC network from fiOS in Seattle, WA. (lsn-C878B24.sttlwa.fios.verizon.net)(hashed hostname for protection of personally identifiable information) (his profile says Washington) Most people wouldn't bother to connect with that web client if they used IRC, or unless they thought it'd make them anonymous. Grow up)

I certainly will not ever do any business with 'Darksoul' after this point.

(To whoever it was who gave me bad reputation: I have no shame in calling someone out on their 'BS', I expect at least the basic level of professionality I attempt to provide to the industry from the rest of the industry.)

[TaoPhoenix]

Tough stuff.

On a broader level my thread is to link disparate parts of this small-dollar industry to nudge it out of the wild-west feel it has to it. I have tried to keep a lid on the worst of things, but issues need to be thrashed out for the public education-by-instance, anything to help shed real light on how these businesses are actually run.

I'd suggest backing down from "you don't know X" type comments becase all of you know a lot of stuff, and it sounds great, until it's *your* issue that pokes a hole in your knowledge. No brownie points are awarded for "My service was down but at least my reason was more exotic than yours".

Friendly warning - while my score isn't exact, by this point you've lost "a half point" out of the "2.5 points allowed". I don't hover over my sites - they're just rotating lead jumpgate pages to whatever else I'm doing on the web. Your outage yesterday was a surprise, for what sounded like local-knowledge reasons. You had a nasty software failure on April 27. And a bad-luck draw on the delayed backups April 9. I'll roll all that junk together into only a half point, but I can't rate you at a bulletproof 100% anymore.

For the rest of y'all, what saved him from getting seriously docked was that he has been good at reporting. "I don't care how busy you are, if you're hosed, say something."

So someone has been hanging christmas ornaments (in May!) from your halo, but you're so far still rated as a fine host.

[TaoPhoenix]

No, it is the second longest thread in Free hosting requests

http://freewebspace.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=2&page=1&pp=40&sort=replycount&order=desc&daysprune=-1

Only a couple more comments!

[Seanieb]

I personally dislike the "trollbaiting" of other small hosts like Seraphim that I've been partnering with for a while on some things (like their IRC channel being on my network) - me and what I am pretty sure to believe is Darksoul were talking on Seraphim's channel earlier today, and me and Seraphim are pretty sure he's doing this just to bash other hosts, and I think it's petty and silly, I think you should spend more time improving your service stability, rather than buying a $3.50 VPS system to host your DNS; and bashing other service providers, when you can't afford to spend more than a cup of coffee on an extremely important service.

Also, none of the things I discussed on my last post have anything to do with my Apache being down the other day, but the fact remains he dropped every one of his customers with zero warning for more than a month and expects he can come back out of nowhere and start treating everyone else like crap again.

[TaoPhoenix]

I had composed the following reply last night before my shared line melted entirely.

In Reverse order:




Also, none of the things I discussed on my last post have anything to do with my Apache being down the other day, but the fact remains he dropped every one of his customers with zero warning for more than a month and expects he can come back out of nowhere and start treating everyone else like crap again.



Sure. I put a bit of thought into my note. Darksoul went from dark horse lead all the way into nuclear meltdown and foreited his entire ranking of all "2.7 points" all at once. I won't aggressively chase away any new clients he may get ; this thread speaks for itself. It's like a Double Stakes ride. For the hosts that are cruising along my easy metrics, they get recommendation merits from me via steady limelight. Let's hear it for cWahi and IsMyWebsite!

But when it goes sour, the trouble point is about at the 5 hour mark. Good reporting makes it drop to whatever minor % I mentioned above. But trying to play Cut&Run is where it gets ugly.




I personally dislike the "trollbaiting" of other small hosts like Seraphim that I've been partnering with for a while on some things (like their IRC channel being on my network) - me and what I am pretty sure to believe is Darksoul were talking on Seraphim's channel earlier today, and me and Seraphim are pretty sure he's doing this just to bash other hosts, and I think it's petty and silly, I think you should spend more time improving your service stability, rather than buying a $3.50 VPS system to host your DNS; and bashing other service providers, when you can't afford to spend more than a cup of coffee on an extremely important service.



Yep - trolling is bad news. Most of the rest of your comment is on target. I'd call it more generally the addictive drama of business.

[TaoPhoenix]

Wow so many to choose from. Looks like I got my work cut out for me this weekend. Thank you all for sharing.

Jordan.

What perspective are you writing from there, Jordan? Testing out my featured hosts?

[TaoPhoenix]

They appear to be down for new signups for a while.

http://www.ismywebsite.com/

The community has grown a lot over the years, and we are once again at a point of difficulty due to the sheer number of responsibilities and limited schedule of our volunteers. You can expect a relaunch in June which should allow for much more effective growth, both for you, your website, and our community. Read more on our blog.

ReLaunching In:
11 Days 02:51:50
We are relaunching June 1st, 2010.

Blog address full of juicy details:
http://ismywebsite.wordpress.com/

This would be another tricky point in my scoring. I'd call it a half point demerit for cumulative length of time down to new signups combined with the lack of notice. However no more than that because existing clients appear to have full access.

[TaoPhoenix]

The versions are merged now, with Babblehost currently added to the lineup and some other stuff updated & fixed.

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/ReVision.html

Processing for Round 3 is again done unless I get another entrant for the last slot.

[Seraphim]

There goes my Iptables.

Looks like I might be down for a little bit. Messed up something in that most recent change and knocked out my networking. Hopefully will be around an hour at most, I've got the datacenter on the line hooking up a KVM for recovery.

[Schmarvin]

Bravo server is at 209 clients, Charlie server is at about 10 clients (I think), and Delta server will be online tomorrow.

What do the different servers mean? Bravo = Directadmin, Charlie = cPanel, Delta = Windows Hosting w/ Plesk

I feel special, I haven't had any problems with my servers. :D

[Seraphim]

Bravo server is at 209 clients, Charlie server is at about 10 clients (I think), and Delta server will be online tomorrow.

What do the different servers mean? Bravo = Directadmin, Charlie = cPanel, Delta = Windows Hosting w/ Plesk

I feel special, I haven't had any problems with my servers. :D

Knock on wood.

This was just cleaning up my firewall and adjusting the filtering settings, seemed trivial. But there was an error in the configuration that cut off all network access, I had to rent a KVM for the night to reset it.

Seems to be okay again now, I've corrected the configuration.

[TaoPhoenix]

Bravo server is at 209 clients, Charlie server is at about 10 clients (I think), and Delta server will be online tomorrow.

What do the different servers mean? Bravo = Directadmin, Charlie = cPanel, Delta = Windows Hosting w/ Plesk

I feel special, I haven't had any problems with my servers. :D

Shouldn't that be Charlie = Cpanel, Delta = DirectAdmin, and Whiskey = Windows? : )

And oh yes, feel special... very special!

[TaoPhoenix]

Knock on wood.

This was just cleaning up my firewall and adjusting the filtering settings, seemed trivial. But there was an error in the configuration that cut off all network access, I had to rent a KVM for the night to reset it.

Seems to be okay again now, I've corrected the configuration.

Weird Wild Stuff Seraphim. But good job on reporting. No foul so far.

[TaoPhoenix]

This must be, the longest thread, in Free hosting requests.

It is, it is!

http://freewebspace.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=2&page=1&pp=40&sort=replycount&order=desc&daysprune=-1

No there's no stopping the Hosts with the Mosts!

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Betelgeuse!

[Seanieb]

Hey, I mentioned some scheduled maintenance a while ago, but due to the instability of the current OS (CentOS) the machine you are on is having, I am taking the machine down for a total overhaul and upgrading the operating system to Debian. It'll be going offline 4-5AM PST on Tuesday morning to be backed up and hopefully up and running by mid day Tuesday. Hopefully this change will lead to all-around higher stability on this machine. It'll be going down for a few minutes also a few weeks from now for some additional hardware upgrades, but those should be in a manner of minutes, rather than hours. Just thought you'd like some forewarning.

DNS NS2 and the sites on server two should remain up and running.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hey, I mentioned some scheduled maintenance a while ago, but due to the instability of the current OS (CentOS) the machine you are on is having, I am taking the machine down for a total overhaul and upgrading the operating system to Debian. It'll be going offline 4-5AM PST on Tuesday morning to be backed up and hopefully up and running by mid day Tuesday. Hopefully this change will lead to all-around higher stability on this machine. It'll be going down for a few minutes also a few weeks from now for some additional hardware upgrades, but those should be in a manner of minutes, rather than hours. Just thought you'd like some forewarning.

DNS NS2 and the sites on server two should remain up and running.

You bet - because multi-hour outages are bad news for free hosts if unexplained. Also I have a weird custom file whose only copy is currently on your server, so I should get around to changing someone else's local version for a while.

[Seanieb]

You bet - because multi-hour outages are bad news for free hosts if unexplained. Also I have a weird custom file whose only copy is currently on your server, so I should get around to changing someone else's local version for a while.

Fortunately it's early in the morning, so fewer should be affected than later in the day.

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay - after a few days to see who's doing what, I think it's safe to say Round 3 is closed. Looks like a pretty solid round going into the usage period.

(Now the last slot is the FWS link)

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/ReVision.html

[TaoPhoenix]

Cross might be doing a backup. It's down for me.

[TaoPhoenix]

Sure. I meant to suggest that a staggered backup at the cost of a slow response is better than a total outage during backups, because it's the outages that catch my eye.

Otherwise it sounds like we're settling in. Schmarvin, did you want in before I start putting the gloss on my page versions across the hosts?

Heh - Like this post! At least I was polite enough to call it a backup rather than assume a problem!

[TaoPhoenix]

With the round logistics settled, I finally settled down to start writing the pages! Here's some early examples from the Buddhism section.

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Buddhism/BuddhismGroup1.html

(With a wink to Colorhost, the version spread will be highly uneven for a long time because I do lead development on some particular host. )

[TaoPhoenix]

It's been fun, but this *has* been a project with a clear goal - to find some hosts with a durability focus that I can both use and recommend.

Not least because I got tired of looking at "Placeholder 4" in my Science group, I decided that this is a big enough area of my computer investigations to get higher billing than "Misc Topic 4".

My Science Page is now complete.
http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Science/ScienceIntro.html

A very rough version of the Free Web Space page is:
http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Science/ScienceGroup4.html

(I now have a slight logical-structural problem but I'll think of something.)

Round 3 will be the last as I no longer see a Grand Slam implosion of my spread. There is one final slot. Then I will write articles in two sections - Winning Hosts and Hopeful Hosts.

[Seraphim]

Incidentally just an update on the IsMyWebsite issue, since I was reading through the old posts and wondered what they're up to since we haven't heard anything in a while.

They seem to have delayed their reopening to June 15th. Probably technical concerns and lack of available staffing based on their reasons for having disabled signups originally.

Everything's still good and solid here. Once again I can keep the servers alive without a lot of trouble, but still working on my marketing formula to populate said servers with customers.

[TaoPhoenix]

...

Everything's still good and solid here. Once again I can keep the servers alive without a lot of trouble, but still working on my marketing formula to populate said servers with customers.

Something I hadn't yet settled may now be relevant. I currently have "two winners and five hopeful hosts" in my study. Depending on who feels an urge like yours to add some marketing, will influence which of the new hosts I pick for my more volatile experiments. From your note, I am taking it you are volunteering, but please confirm. Last I knew Cross is all set with its marketing plans.

Colorhost, you moved to be a primarily paid service. To me that means you are almost volunteering "Double-Or-Bust" because of the general thematic division between free and paid service. Can you confirm that my bandwidth-heavy experiments should run through you? For example, I may submit a Slashdot article in the medium future, and that site is infamous for 2-day bandwidth spikes that take down typical small hosts. Are you ready for that?

Anyone else who wants a crack at that can volunteer, because I am all about Opt-In, but the general warning is if you get hosed you get "gently laughed at" by one of the 100-smartest blogs on the net. It's okay if y'all say "we prefer slow and steady hits". cWahi is the other candidate for power-spikes.

I am big on "Internet Branding" so I'll need one or two of the hosts to give me another couple of small-space accounts just so that the subdomain doesn't read "TaoPhoenix.yyyy.com". Again, apply as interested.

[Seraphim]

Depends on how big of a hit we are talking about and where it is being flung at. I could always lock down my proc limits as well so that at worst a site or two is slow responding and I get a fairly high load for that two day stretch, but if it is going to hit a heavy load like a PHP/MySQL backend such as a forum that'd more than likely hit me with more power than a DDoS as far as my server's capabilities are concerned.

What exactly did you have in mind? I am well aware of the tremendous potential for legitimate traffic in volumes greater than some botnets DDoS at when playing with the slashdot effect. Ultimately it would come down to where the hit landed- a static HTML I could probably survive it by throttling while a hit to a page that made heavy use of MySQL could deal a crippling blow.

If you notice some brief outages from me tonight they'll only be temporary- no more than a couple of minutes hopefully. Going to see how hard of a stress test I can put on it without killing it to see if I think I can take that next step with the arrangements I have now.

[TaoPhoenix]

It would be a static html page. (That's all I design currently). Fortunately, it would also be small, such as a under a meg.

"Survive by throttling"... sounds like a slow page load. If you want I can make you 2nd link behind cWahi. You may not have been around for their appearance, but they marched in with "Hi. You can't bust our bandwidth".

You'd get the overflow traffic, which may be a better compromise - juicy customers with a decent page load, but let the first wave of the tsunami go to Cwahi.

[Seraphim]

Better hope their claim is good then. In that arrangement, a failure of the first link would cause a tidal wave of connection requests that would probably knock out everyone else.

I think it would be better to use a DNS Round Robin and load-balance the incoming traffic across all of the hosts participating in this stage. That way they all receive relatively equal share of traffic in order to more accurately compare slowdown effects. It would also avoid a chain reaction if a host failed, because their share of the traffic would be redirected to the still-standing hosts.

The way I would go about setting that up is get a free domain name like taophoenix.co.cc, set all of the hosts to accept that as an alias of the existing sitenames, and then configure the short TTL multiple A-records needed for that to be used for load balancing. As long as all of the sites had the exact same content, it would operate transparently to the viewers, but we could check each host in turn using the current link structure to see who can take the heat and who can't.

Even with that though, knowing slashdot there's a good chance it'll knock out quite a few hosts. I'll probably have to let the datacenter know it's not an incoming DDoS, when they see the charts go nuts on my line they'll be wondering what is going on.

When I stressed my server earlier the relatively static index to my own site was able to recieve as much traffic as I could generate for benchmarking using my other server with nothing more than a load spike and a bit of slowdown. It worked out to just under 1000 simultaneous requests, processed as fast as it could go.

[TaoPhoenix]

(Part 1)
"Better hope their claim is good then."

To which I reply 'Ya'Know - No'. They got kicked off here for that audacious claim, in the whole "unlimited" wars. For anyone else I'd agree with you. But that's why they have that eerie #1 spot on my study - because after the furor died down here, no one has been able to bust their claim.

I asked a second time on someone else's request for hosting a linux distro which would involve people downloading 700meg distro files, and they said "Bring It On and Include the Girls From The Movie (My exaggeration)".

The thing about audacious claims is they stake out special mind-space. It's like when a new religious leader shows up. Only one in a 1000 pulls it off, but when they do they rewrite the game. (Ye Current Religious Leader is Steve Jobs.)

Generally you are right and over a long haul I'd set up something like that. But a couple two hosts giggled at me for "not having a real site" ... So for this one shot I'd probably just try to strategically list the hosts in descending order. Slashdot is fairly good at being sensible; generally they don't deliberately set out to hose people. (I'd be more worried about stuff like that on Digg etc.)

It is fair though to give warning, because it's just an article and not a time sensitive piece, so they can follow your tip and not call it a DDoS.

This is actually a weird puzzle. I don't yet know "Hu's On First and Watt's On Second". Remember Colorhost has that weird link color because they're positioning themselves as a paid host, which to me says they need to be able to take a little heat.

[Anthony2010]

I know about the offer board. I've picked from it before.

[TaoPhoenix]

I know about the offer board. I've picked from it before.

Hi Anthony.

Who did you select and at what point?

[TaoPhoenix]

Versions are HardLocked and Registration is closed. Thanks everyone for commenting and thanks for all the hosts of any phase to were/are involved.

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html

All hosts have been granted something like 0.6 bonus points for being part of the final phase because now it's becoming more like those reality shows where the cast only dimishes. Put humorously, it now takes "Pi" # of incidents" aka a hair over 3 to be finally disqualified. This means that there is some leeway for blips, but it would take a Series of Unfortunate Events to really get booted off the island.

Current hosts are still requested to post downtimes. This is now the key factor that determines the final decisions. There is less jockeying for positions from the cold logical standpoint now. Remember that if possible slowed service fares FAR better than an outage, which reflects my view of how the industry should work. To recap, outages "start a clock ticking" in which the user begins to doubt whether the host is falling prey to the usual Free Host volatility. If you're doing a backup but the page does eventually load, any number of things can be assumed but it means that the host is there somewhere under the rubble.

The final board can be considered my recommendations for hosts in very approximately the order listed. Recapping the conceptual assumptions of the study:

1. I negotiated some "manager coupons" to even out disk sizes. This is roughly 1GB, which is where I feel the industry will soon stabilize as a minimum with Linkback Only. Plans offered under 1GB in my view are a concession from the user forgoing competitive selection to help a (typically new) host get practice as an educational experience. Plans above 1GB may appear here and there, but eventually it starts entering the Red Zone of overselling.

2. More manager coupons are present to trade default ad placement / post count requirements for ease of output similarity. In this case the very basic level I have is LinkBack, with the additional trade of publicity and "certification" to FWS. Since ad placement / post requirements are instant subjective decisions by host managers, I left them out of the study to prevent aggressive jockeying. At the moment Colorhost remarked they want to move to paid only hosting, hence the special color, but they're still a valid entry for durability.

[TaoPhoenix]

Shortly I will have an important reordering of the placement. I noticed in passing the occasional requests for ----- hosting. Of the hosts on my board Seraphim is the lead SelfCertified ----- host. If any of the other hosts present want to announce to FWS that they are open to ----- material, I will update the board. (Colorhost, I'll think of something for your alternate PaidHost status, this was a fluke.)

[Seanieb]

Alright, we're all re-situated after our OS reload, and we've been stable for the last couple weeks, much more so since then, so I think our software nags are over - for the time being.

I'm also working on testing and trying out a new billing and client management system, Since you're here to experiment, I will be PMing you instructions later on on how to register with my system, would like your opinion on the sign up process!

[Brandon]

Shortly I will have an important reordering of the placement. I noticed in passing the occasional requests for ----- hosting. Of the hosts on my board Seraphim is the lead SelfCertified ----- host. If any of the other hosts present want to announce to FWS that they are open to ----- material, I will update the board. (Colorhost, I'll think of something for your alternate PaidHost status, this was a fluke.)

I am open to any ----- material that is Legal within the United States.

Also: Downtime for the month was <5 minutes for standard server reboots.

[TaoPhoenix]

Got it! Here is my first attempt at a widescreen version. (The links are smashed though because it was a total paste experiment.) Recommended screen res is 1600x 1200 with the browser maximized ... show of hands - is that good for the "medium-highend net"?

I have a bad habit of biting off grand plans, so I think I have 1 too many levels in the phone version, and I should lengthen and consolidate the articles.

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html

[Seraphim]

Decent. You should look up how to use CSS and Margins instead of tables and hard-coded graphics. It helps smooth things over and make it faster/lighter with current web browsers. Plus it avoids the ever common exploded table issue that happens when hand-editing a table based html.

And yes, while I do allow ----- content I do not endorse that content type in any way. It's just one of those where there is a market for that type of service, and since the ad networks for it have a higher payout it's worthwhile picking up a few customers in that area when possible.

[TaoPhoenix]

With the new tweaks the phone-board becomes:

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/ReVision.html

Colorhost is grey, Babblehost is self-cert for mature content. I get it you're "not endorsing", my impression is that hosts are supposed to be neutral-ish amd just making business style decsions. A visitor shouldn't be cross-comparing sites for the sake of looking for something to slam, though that occasionally happens! : /

[TaoPhoenix]

Soon I'll have to switch my board links so that in the now Sooner-Than-Forever timeframe when I actually start telling the world I'm here, I can have a FAQ that says the order of hosts is the preferred mirror order. Also, for that purpose I'm starting to think that no one is going to get "red = able to host M-18" content and they might think it's a dead host!

Certainly the field of Free Hosting has long earned an article in my layout, so the study sequencing will be listed there in a more coherent fashion.

(Edit - I can also just orphan the original board page so that the thread here stays intact. All I'd have to do is make an alternate "mirror-order" version of the page. Also, the new wide layout won't need a Study-Results version.)

Below is the World-PhoneVersion with the hosts in approximate mirror order.

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/ReVision-Phone.html

[TaoPhoenix]

Here is the Free Host version of the page beginning to take shape with the hosts in study order. I dropped a level of depth on the phone version, so now the colored/study-ordered links double as the login links for techies. The front page has the sales pages of the hosts.

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Science/ScienceGroup4.html

[TaoPhoenix]

...
Also: Downtime for the month was <5 minutes for standard server reboots.

Looks like you are doing some maintenance tonight.

[TaoPhoenix]

Decent. You should look up how to use CSS and Margins instead of tables and hard-coded graphics. It helps smooth things over and make it faster/lighter with current web browsers. Plus it avoids the ever common exploded table issue that happens when hand-editing a table based html.

And yes, while I do allow ----- content I do not endorse that content type in any way. It's just one of those where there is a market for that type of service, and since the ad networks for it have a higher payout it's worthwhile picking up a few customers in that area when possible.

Totally right, but that's much later. I got tired of having a blank page, so I settled for something I understand even if a little clunky, so I can start writing articles.

[TaoPhoenix]

Describing the adventure here:

http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/HostFAQ.html

[Brandon]

Looks like you are doing some maintenance tonight.

Sorry, yes I did have some unexpected cPanel update maintenance go through that John didn't tell me about. (John is my associate at BabbleHost, he generally handles most of the server-side maintenance, although I help out where I can.)

EDIT: although, looking at uptime for the site, there shouldn't have been any issues accessing your site: server uptime is at 6 days.

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh ... I only ask when I DO have issues! I was getting spot outages for about three hours.

Enough in fact that I began switching to a mirror from my spread, and synching. It looked like when someone with Windows -Type needs to reboot 3 times after an install of some big pack.

[Brandon]

Heh ... I only ask when I DO have issues! I was getting spot outages for about three hours.

Enough in fact that I began switching to a mirror from my spread, and synching. It looked like when someone with Windows -Type needs to reboot 3 times after an install of some big pack.

Just got off the phone with the datacenter: they had some intermittent issues with the network. All should have been stable throughout the day. One of the upstream providers was having some issues, creating some packet loss.

[TaoPhoenix]

Just got off the phone with the datacenter: they had some intermittent issues with the network. All should have been stable throughout the day. One of the upstream providers was having some issues, creating some packet loss.

Sure. And thus with that info, yeah it breaks "brittle uptime records" but vis. the paradox thread over yonder, keeps the actual business rapport going.

[Brandon]

Sure. And thus with that info, yeah it breaks "brittle uptime records" but vis. the paradox thread over yonder, keeps the actual business rapport going.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here? :confused4
If you're asking for verification that this was truly an issue on the part of the DC:
http://www.fdcservers.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=4679&page=3

AND tonight from 9pm-3am there will be intermittent downtime while FDC replaces the bad hardware on their network and does upgrades, although it is supposed to be very short amounts of downtime while they move uplinks
http://fdcservers.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=4682

Really sorry about this Phoenix, just got bad luck on some network troubles, although this should solve them and be good to go :) We're also in the process of securing a server setup for redundancy, in addition to our backup server.

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh I have apparently been using unclear wording all day including work!

My perspective is that a host cannot claim "uptime" if any part of the supply chain goes down including the back end parts. Rather, it's more of whether it is "Innocent Downtime" or "Botch Downtime". I am fairly lenient as long as the "client-facing rep" aka you in this case simply reports in with an update. (If it's a really evil backbone dns thing or something the other hosts will chime in with the usual fascinating tidbits. )

The main thing that my methology penalizes is Silence. I don't run automated utilities, so that even gives you guys the benefit of luck. I simply rotate every few days who is lead jumppage, so when I can't reach the page is when the "clock starts ticking".

[Brandon]

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to claim uptime that didn't happen. I was actually unaware that there was any downtime (my site uptime script seemed to ping the server during the intermittent uptime).

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to claim uptime that didn't happen. I was actually unaware that there was any downtime (my site uptime script seemed to ping the server during the intermittent uptime).

Speaking of downtime, I posted a note to slashdot with a mirror of some minor data in a minor thread at 3AM. So I'd be interested in a traffic report to see if *anyone* clicks on it heh.

Heh we might need to wait 5 hours for people to get up though : )

[TaoPhoenix]

Are you having a blip?

I first had trouble when I posted the note above this one, and it looks like you're still down.

I just got the verizon page!
Sorry, 'www.colorhost.net' does not exist or is not available.

Whois still looks valid.

Is this a back end thing?

See, it's 'Da Silence Thang folks. Because he made me report it, the clock has started. I even humored his earlier flavor posts being interested in page development etc, by using him as one of the dev leads. So last night I barely avoided an egg as a non-existent data mirror!

He wasn't nearly as charismatic as Paradox, but 'Ya See gang, this study is about responsibility. In return for weeks/months of subtly advertised exposure, if trouble strikes ya gotta chirp up. I'm safe - I spent six months making a spread, and I have quadratic backups. Who really gets hurt is the host - if they slink away, they'll essentially never survive placing first rate ads here again.

Further Edit2:
... And he may escape with a half point knock max since he seems to be back up. Now we just need a note. So the end is he lost basically "that third round bonus" and is back to "only" the 2.7ish points standard study margin. So yes, this note is here, but it's not fatal. Per Babblehost's remark, it seems smaller hosts may not have automated reporting tools to know when something goes down and/or it's not clear if their same internet service is keeping them from reporting. So tangentially to those other threads "paid vs free service", he'd need some oomph to meet his earlier remarked goal of providing paid-only hosting.

[TaoPhoenix]

Yeah, full half point deduction by this point because of the silence from Colorhost. This study is not unlike "public tickets", so this is tangential data on the customer service rate at the hosts.

[TaoPhoenix]

Are any of the hosts in the study open to installing Dropbox? It's a neat little utility that speed-synchs down from the net to nodes. Seraphim and Lost Signal, unless I'm missing something that might be really useful for your service because unlike the Cpanel loader, that Webmin manager seems to only run single files at a time except zipped, but zipped is a nuisance with many fast revisions.

[Brandon]

Are any of the hosts in the study open to installing Dropbox? It's a neat little utility that speed-synchs down from the net to nodes. Seraphim and Lost Signal, unless I'm missing something that might be really useful for your service because unlike the Cpanel loader, that Webmin manager seems to only run single files at a time except zipped, but zipped is a nuisance with many fast revisions.

I'm not sure if you were referring to the cPanel hosts or not, but I'd be willing to give Dropbox a shot :)

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh Brandon I'm getting increasingly unclear! I was especially thinking of those other two because it was so bad I took them off development lead, but yes, all the hosts still responsive here are urged/invited.

Now for logistics. I will PM you the username and password in a few minutes when I get to my dev machine. Otherwise it just sits there as a folder and I think all the typical panel controls should operate on it.

[TaoPhoenix]

Info sent

[Brandon]

Okay :) I'll set it up later tonight (around midnight CST) so that nobody should be disturbed if I need to do a reboot when compiling/installing (although i don't believe I need to do that). I'll let you know when I get it setup. :)

[TaoPhoenix]

I don't think you have to reboot because I didn't on any of 3 machines. But with great effort I'll refrain from whining like a child. : )

[Brandon]

I'm assuming you'll want the dropbox folder to be your public_html?

[TaoPhoenix]

Actually no. I am carefully segregating the "permissions" so to speak. Just like access to my files is not public, we won't use the public box. It's just a way to power-upload stuff which then becomes a typical part of the host pages. But good question, creds for asking.

P.S. Depending on Seraphim and Lost Signal's co-status, you're in the running for the replacement of Paradox's old spot of "Fast Service" award. For what modest amount it's worth, it's saying that since you'll never roll back the clock 10 years to catch CWahi Crosswinds, you need another niche. They too have also shown some interest.

Unfortunately, Colorhost is rapidly approaching 2nd tier from lack of response. He's still on the board, but won't be Dev lead for a while.

[TaoPhoenix]

Seraphim went blip.

[Seraphim]

When/where? The only issue I have had reported lately was one of my customers having a DNS problem, which appears to have been coming from his registrar.

Hmm. Well that's bizarre. Will correct it asap.

Edit: Apparently my httpd was down. It's back up now, Will check into what caused it asap.

[Seanieb]

Looks like the domain lostsignalweb.com expired on me out of nowhere.

The renewal's in progress, but it might be showing an ad page for a couple of hours until everything is reset for me.

[TaoPhoenix]

Sure. Such are the adventures.

[dmmcintyre3]

http://lostsignalweb.com/ loads your site for me right now.

[TaoPhoenix]

Any news on the Dropbox?

[TaoPhoenix]

Well, so be it. Babblehost got too busy to win the SpeedService award.

Also, IsMyWebsite seems to be glitching.

No one else wants to install dropbox?

[TaoPhoenix]

Lost Signal, please PM me the correct link to log into my account. I'm getting an error but I can't say for sure I didn't scramble the link.

[TaoPhoenix]

New page developments spread across most of the hosts.

[Seraphim]

Edit: found where you described it.

Yes, please do set that up if you feel you need it. I also find the Virtualmin file manager to be very frustrating, but usually it's not an issue for me because I SFTP everything anyway.

Let me know if you need anything configured on my end for it.

[Seanieb]

Lost Signal, please PM me the correct link to log into my account. I'm getting an error but I can't say for sure I didn't scramble the link.

PM sent, also - I already use Dropbox's limited Linux backup client for some very important data, that resides in a TrueCrypt volume for emergencies. I plan to use something akin to Amazon Simple Storage System (Amazon S3) or a NAS provided by my DC to back up in the future.

Are you asking if we would put a backup of your site on DropBox, or provide you backups to a dropbox of yours or something? I can arrange that.

I can also schedule Webmin to e-mail or save a backup for you on a schedule.
Webmin's backup system might not be as simple as I'd like, but it's very powerful, such as it's several different archive choices, remote backup and incremental backup configurations.

If Webmin gives you a hard time - you might want to read this helpful guide:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/users/server-owner

This might make some things a bit easier for you.

Here's some more info on backups in Virtualmin.

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/backup-and-restore

[TaoPhoenix]

Edit: found where you described it.

Yes, please do set that up if you feel you need it. I also find the Virtualmin file manager to be very frustrating, but usually it's not an issue for me because I SFTP everything anyway.

Let me know if you need anything configured on my end for it.

Last I understood I do need each volunteering host to install DropBox because it's an executable. Its purpose is less for backups, because I do a pretty good job of that, but more for speed-loading pages. So Seraphim, try installing it and then let's work through the blips. I'd like to try it this weekend.

[TaoPhoenix]

....

Are you asking if we would put a backup of your site on DropBox...


Yes, I am interested in more of the live-synch aspect of Dropbox, so you'd have to install it as a typical executing program. Though to my knowledge once it finishes a synch it sits there and does nothing exciting aka little server drain.

Per the other note, I do a really good job on backups - this is more for rollout.

I'd like to try it this weekend if possible and I expect it would take a couple tries to get right. Esp. see Seraphim chimed in too, that starts to give you the idea - rollout of "fresh pages".

[Seanieb]

Yes, I am interested in more of the live-synch aspect of Dropbox, so you'd have to install it as a typical executing program. Though to my knowledge once it finishes a synch it sits there and does nothing exciting aka little server drain.

Per the other note, I do a really good job on backups - this is more for rollout.

I'd like to try it this weekend if possible and I expect it would take a couple tries to get right. Esp. see Seraphim chimed in too, that starts to give you the idea - rollout of "fresh pages".

The issue with that is that if you upload something to Dropbox, there's no Linux client that you can use to access your files. So someone with server level access would have to put the files in your account, from the dropbox drive.

If you saw a completely different post, I misunderstood you and redacted my earlier post. I've been a little sick, and not been present lately.

Usually Dropbox is a sync for backing up TO dropbox, not FROM it, is the problem.

[TaoPhoenix]

This is where I have to bow to my technical superiors, but try to bear with me. The prime use I get from Dropbox IS in fact synching "from". From an end-user perspective, suppose I install it on two local machines, say the home desktop and my machine at work.

If I drag something into the "linked folder" at home, it goes "up, then down", and pseudo-magically appears on my work machine. So I was presuming that there was some "master address" like (In Windows) C:\Users\Clients\Tao\Public\ and then the same menu tree I see. So if the dropbox link was parked there, it would just act as a node down to the same area I get to if I used the regular client.

If anyone thinks it would actually work, chime in. If I'm just another confused client, uh... be polite? : )

[Seraphim]

I think it is possible to set up dropbox on a per-user basis to automatically sync like he is talking about. Just based on the windows client behavior, which I installed on one of my local systems to see what exactly it does.

Would have to read into how to perform the same function using the Linux CLI version, and then figure out a way to automate the process so it either maintains a daemon for it or does a polling check. Will experiment with this, since if it can be done dropbox would solve the dilemna I have of keeping both copies of my website in sync when developing new code for it.

[Brandon]

I hate having epilepsy. Back in the saddle again :) the server didn't go down while I was gone according to my monitoring.

[Seraphim]

Okay I have a test config up and running. Dropbox will operate successfully in a shell, and it is fairly simple to set up that way. At this very moment two independant instances of it are operating on my server, each under a different username.

The only quirk I see is that the daemon for it has to be started and stopped manually or using a cron job, though if I tinker with the code enough I might be able to create a plugin for virtualmin to automate it.

Anyway what folders in your account do you want linked to it, and where should they appear. I figured out in testing that I can symlink them into the dropbox folder and it will automatically keep them synchronized, which should be the behavior you were hoping for keeping all of the copies identical. In fact I may use it for a similar purpose to keep some of my own code sorted out a little more reliably.

[TaoPhoenix]

I think it is possible to set up dropbox on a per-user basis to automatically sync like he is talking about. Just based on the windows client behavior, which I installed on one of my local systems to see what exactly it does.

Would have to read into how to perform the same function using the Linux CLI version, and then figure out a way to automate the process so it either maintains a daemon for it or does a polling check. Will experiment with this, since if it can be done dropbox would solve the dilemna I have of keeping both copies of my website in sync when developing new code for it.

Dear Seraphim. Please do report in.

The hosts that can do this will earn a little leeway against glitches elsewhere.

[TaoPhoenix]

I hate having epilepsy. Back in the saddle again :) the server didn't go down while I was gone according to my monitoring.

Yuk! I think I agree that your hardware stayed put though. I'd just noticed that something was getting you down : (

[TaoPhoenix]

Well, so be it. Babblehost got too busy to win the SpeedService award.



I'll retract this since it looks like a health situation!

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay I have a test config up and running. Dropbox will operate successfully in a shell, and it is fairly simple to set up that way. At this very moment two independant instances of it are operating on my server, each under a different username.

The only quirk I see is that the daemon for it has to be started and stopped manually or using a cron job, though if I tinker with the code enough I might be able to create a plugin for virtualmin to automate it.

Anyway what folders in your account do you want linked to it, and where should they appear. I figured out in testing that I can symlink them into the dropbox folder and it will automatically keep them synchronized, which should be the behavior you were hoping for keeping all of the copies identical. In fact I may use it for a similar purpose to keep some of my own code sorted out a little more reliably.

Heh - the terminology gets a little weird here, and I'm sure we'll have to fiddle with settings... but the "Top of my Dropbox" should match the "top of my web area" for example where the top ReVision files are. Please do not use the "Dropbox-public" folder, because that's for web2.0 type sharing - I am using a webhost to share to the world!

Someone somewhere was talking about index files... I hate Indexes. If I want something to be visible to the world, I put it through a page. Otherwise it's my private file. Especially with Dropbox running, check the settings that someone can't arbitrarily type http://taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net/ and start browsing. (Seraphim, so far it's decently blocked, though it says "You are viewing a newly created account that is eagerly awaiting it's first content." - A better message might be more like "Incorrect page - check your spelling" etc. )

Anyway, the intended usage is when I float something into the top of my local install of DropBox, it becomes readable to the top level of pages on my site. Then through no accident, there will be the usual subfolders Science, etc, with the same structure match to the files I have now if possible.

[Seraphim]

That page is a default index.php that is copied from a skeleton folder into a new account as a placeholder for actual content, and also to make sure that the DNS propagated correctly. Should be able to just delete that file without any issues.

And yeah, I already noticed the public-shared folder in dropbox and have been avoiding that. The way my test environment is set up right now, the public_html folder of the test account appears as a folder inside of dropbox. But all of the content is intact.

It also does sync the files correctly now.

In my test environment at least each account has it's public_html folder under a different folder name so I can tell which server is which. Not sure if you have any host-specific things to keep track of, or if yours is the same on all servers and can put everything under public_html

So far the only real issue I see is the daemon stops after a certain amount of time idle. Will have to provide some type of script to monitor it's status and restart it.

[TaoPhoenix]

Good post Seraphim.

In case I missed it in Monday haze, are we ready to start live trials?

Meanwhile I'll have to think about Host Specific... at first my instinct says Dropbox is universal and host specific stuff would be loaded via the normal file managers - dropbox creates weird exercises in version control but done right it might be unbelieveably useful.

[Seraphim]

The issue with this is if there is any host specific changes, attempting to map all of them to a single public_html folder in dropbox will cause the host-specific changes to be spread to all of the hosts.

Of course a fix for this is just put each host in it's own folder. Then syncing is as easy as a copy-paste operation on your end- just copy the current source and paste it into each host's folder. But any host-specific content can be kept isolated to the correct host for it instead of appearing on all of them.

Might not be necessary though.

I will PM you the registration link to bind dropbox to your account, but am still working on a way to keep that daemon active or give you a way to start/stop it as needed since it shuts down after a certain amount of idle time.

[colorhost]

Sorry for not being here on this fourm, but i am still monitoring my servers and i am still active on my support and such.

I have noticed i have slid to last place due to lost of communication, Sorry about that. I try to stay active on this thread but it is tangled with infomation that i cannot go through all at once.

I will try to keep up, but i keep no promises.


Thanks
Kevin
ColorHost CEO

[TaoPhoenix]

Cross Industries Blip?

Seems like their central pages are up, but I am getting timeouts trying to access my account and pages.

[Seraphim]

I show that as well. The copy on my server is missing it's image button.

Still a no-go on Dropbox. The daemon dies after a few minutes idle, I am working on an automation script to maintain it.

[dmmcintyre3]

x-ind.com and my site on their DA server is up right now.

[TaoPhoenix]

Now to see if SMarvin is watching the forum here... I'm finding that after a good uptime of a week or so the hosts tend to go do their own thing.

[Seanieb]

Schmarvin was talking about some financial issues & a possible shut-down of his hosting service set in another thread. Hopefully that's not struck now or something.

[TaoPhoenix]

Elsewhere Schmarvin wrote on June 22nd, 2010, 03:01

"Seems I will have to close down the hosting portion of Cross Industries. Since no one can seem to help me with it, even for a profit.

**This thread can be closed. "

SeanieB replied in part:

...

You should arrange for saving up cash, automatic payment of running costs from the money you should be making, or deal with getting it paid for before you leave.

----------------------------------------------------
This is the key point. I can understand that a business might need the man hours, but if he was trying to combine a last minute angel investor, then posted that he desires to close the host, that's a lock.

Cross Industries has been disqualified and will be removed from the board in a couple of days. This is an duration solidity study, and owner intent to close ends participation.

... Plus it is a wee bit frustrating of the choice of threads. I would have appreciated a farewell post here.

[Seraphim]

I think what happened was he had a day front fixing computers, a few people I know do that instead of a steady income like mine.

But when he was going out of town he would be without that for a while, and didn't have enough money to continue.

What effect does that have on the rankings though?

Also still waiting on my end for that one more try with dropbox. I can definitely make a script that will check for the daemon and restart it if it has stopped, executed by a simple hit to a PHP file that I'll leave in your account. It won't matter if other people hit it, all it will do is maintain one instance of dropbox whenever the script is invoked. So at worst it might run a little more than it has to, but it won't hurt anything.

Edit: Okay he might not be dead yet. I reread the thread that information came from, and have sent him an email asking about it. Not sure what this would mean for your metrics, but I would at least like to see what he has put together before it is lost even if he still does intend to close down in the long run. Also there has been no indication that Cross Industries is dropping it's web hosting on their own forum, so if his servers really do start dropping suddenly due to non-payment his users are going to be taken by surprise.

[Seanieb]

Shame, should have planned a bit better.

Anyone hear anything from him at all yet? I'd think Tao would have heared before anyone, or at least one of his customers.

[Seraphim]

Just for reference, I am planning some scheduled maintainence to correct data errors on one of the hard drives in the RAID array. If all goes well it will only involve minimal downtime (reboots) in order to remove the offending drive from the array for diagnostics, followed by another reboot to reattach it if it checks out. Probably will not begin until Friday or Saturday, I need to make absolutely certain that all probable scenarios for this repair are covered in some way with minimal loss and consult the datacenter for recommended approach to this issue as far as actually restoring full capability on the offending drive is concerned.

Though if I can't repair the drive through software I will have to schedule an outage for a replacement drive to be installed. No data will be lost though, I will be making a full backup to another server before making any changes to the current setup. Just in case, even though with a raid array it's not terribly difficult since for the most part it is automated.

[TaoPhoenix]

I think what happened was he had a day front fixing computers, a few people I know do that instead of a steady income like mine.

But when he was going out of town he would be without that for a while, and didn't have enough money to continue.

What effect does that have on the rankings though?

...
Edit: Okay he might not be dead yet. I reread the thread that information came from, and have sent him an email asking about it. Not sure what this would mean for your metrics, but I would at least like to see what he has put together before it is lost even if he still does intend to close down in the long run. Also there has been no indication that Cross Industries is dropping it's web hosting on their own forum, so if his servers really do start dropping suddenly due to non-payment his users are going to be taken by surprise.

While possibly his other DirectAdmin is still up, my site is already down for something past a day now, then coupled with no response from him here. It's an opt-in promo spotlight, so even if he limps along later, I can no longer recommend him as a top choice.