Hi there,


I'm thinking of getting a simple machine online, that might one day evolve into a Tilde (who knows).

I figured I'd like to experiment with an unmanaged hosting solution, and as you can guess, typing "unmanaged hosting" in $your_search_engine ends up in
many results.

When this happens, I often resort to the experienced words of those who came before me...

Do you have any special recommendation, when it comes to unmanaged hosting?


- dacav
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On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I'm thinking of getting a simple machine online, that might one day
evolve into a Tilde (who knows).

Hooray! That's such a fun way to get rolling. I hope you have fun, learn
stuff, and it turns into something people use.

Do you have any special recommendation, when it comes to unmanaged hosting?

I dunno about 'unmanaged' specifically, but I've really had good
experience with vultr. I know there's a few people who do hetzner and
ovh. I suppose you could do it on a droplet too on digitalocean. There's
a dirt-cheap place in India that someone was talking about recently too.
I think it was like $2/mo.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Hey Tomasino,

On 2020-10-13, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I'm thinking of getting a simple machine online, that might one day
evolve into a Tilde (who knows).

Hooray! That's such a fun way to get rolling. I hope you have fun, learn stuff, and it turns into something people use.

Yeah! That would be great!

I'm intrigued by the idea of having a pubnix, but also wondering what could make
my own tilde "special". I think you had great ideas with both cosmic.voyage and tilde.black.

But given my extreme limited free time, I should really be conservative with my goals. But hey! Having something online is definitely a good start.

Do you have any special recommendation, when it comes to unmanaged hosting?

I dunno about 'unmanaged' specifically, but I've really had good
experience with vultr. I know there's a few people who do hetzner and
ovh. I suppose you could do it on a droplet too on digitalocean. There's
a dirt-cheap place in India that someone was talking about recently too.
I think it was like $2/mo.

By 'unmanaged' here I mean that I get the sysadmin hat, do my updates, and choose things from the beginning to the end. Maybe with VNC access, so how
do I mess with the bootloader? Then I don't need a physical server: a
virtual machine is perfectly fine.

Thinking out loud (or rather, writing) some wishlist:

- I'd like to start by choosing my operating system, for starters. So for
instance, having custom ISO is a very strong "plus". I was actually thinking
to run Slackware (going back to origins, as that's the first distribution I
ever ran).

- I would not dislike the idea of getting my hands dirty on the IPv6 world.

- I would prefer to have it in Europe, for privacy related reasons.

- And speaking of privacy, whois privacy would totally be a plus!

...

I notice that vultr has custom ISOs[1] so that's good! And that it already provides many flavours of Unix, including *bsd (another thing I'd like to explore more, even though I already own a freebsd-loaded raspberry!).

I'm a bit puzzled by their home page though: they offer really *A LOT*.
I suspect I would just need a "Compute Instance"[2], right?

I will definitely check hetzner too, thanks!

I also found Hostwinds[3] before reading your answer, and it looks appealing.


[1] https://www.vultr.com/features/upload-iso/
[2] https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/
[3] https://www.hostwinds.com/vps/unmanaged-linux
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On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

Hey Tomasino,

On 2020-10-13, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I'm a bit puzzled by their home page though: they offer really *A LOT*.
I suspect I would just need a "Compute Instance"[2], right?

Yep, a compute will do it. I went with the $5/mo one for cosmic for the
first year of operation. I've only recently upped it to $15/mo. You can
do a lot with very little. All the VPS offerings are fairly similar with respect to your list of wants. Shop around a bit before you settle.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-10-14, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

Hey Tomasino,

On 2020-10-13, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I'm a bit puzzled by their home page though: they offer really *A LOT*.
I suspect I would just need a "Compute Instance"[2], right?

Yep, a compute will do it. I went with the $5/mo one for cosmic for the
first year of operation. I've only recently upped it to $15/mo. You can
do a lot with very little. All the VPS offerings are fairly similar with respect to your list of wants. Shop around a bit before you settle.

Thanks, I did as you, and went for Vultr.

Now I've got my VPS.

It is in fact very cheap after all, yet plenty enough to experiment
and have some fun.

Thanks for your suggestions!
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-10-16 8:10 a.m., Dacav Doe wrote:

On 2020-10-14, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

Hey Tomasino,

On 2020-10-13, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I'm a bit puzzled by their home page though: they offer really *A LOT*.
I suspect I would just need a "Compute Instance"[2], right?

Yep, a compute will do it. I went with the $5/mo one for cosmic for the
first year of operation. I've only recently upped it to $15/mo. You can
do a lot with very little. All the VPS offerings are fairly similar with
respect to your list of wants. Shop around a bit before you settle.

Thanks, I did as you, and went for Vultr.

Now I've got my VPS.

It is in fact very cheap after all, yet plenty enough to experiment
and have some fun.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Only reason I avoid hosting such as Vultr and the like would be because
of the bandwidth limit.. Only would take 1 round of some idiot hitting
your server with some sort of distributed attack and you'd be paying for bandwidth out the ass. So I avoid those. I stick to places like OVH,
Kimsufi and soyoustart. (all same company) because they don't charge
for extra bandwidth and they also have ddos protection included. well
at least soyoustart and ovh do. Not 100% sure on kimsufi.

I get hit by DDoS attacks a couple times a month running a tilde/related services. Only reason I know it happens is ovh sends me a notification
when I get put in the mitigation and when i get removed.

Best luck to you in your learning / possible tilde running :)

--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-11-08, deepend <deepend@tilde.club> wrote:

Only reason I avoid hosting such as Vultr and the like would be because
of the bandwidth limit.. Only would take 1 round of some idiot hitting
your server with some sort of distributed attack and you'd be paying for bandwidth out the ass. So I avoid those.

Wow, wtf?

I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much one can do against DDOS: even if you firewall it out, the connections attempt will get to your host, right? If so, how can you avoid such a thing?

I think there's 1 TB of allowance on Vultr... which is quite a lot. But obviously not much for a DDOS, I guess.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020, Dacav Doe wrote:

I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much one can do against DDOS: even if
you firewall it out, the connections attempt will get to your host, right? If
so, how can you avoid such a thing?

In olden days, you call your VPS/Colo provider and ask them to null-route
the unwanted traffic from their side. But these days, I believe,
some providers have large enough infrastructure to cope with live
DDoS detection; and they would apply temporary rate-limit, selective dropping, or null-route according to the traffic surge characteristic detected,
without the need for manual intervention.

Regards,
~xwindows
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-11-10 6:41 a.m., xwindows wrote:

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020, Dacav Doe wrote:

I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much one can do against DDOS: even if
you firewall it out, the connections attempt will get to your host, right? If
so, how can you avoid such a thing?

In olden days, you call your VPS/Colo provider and ask them to null-route
the unwanted traffic from their side. But these days, I believe,
some providers have large enough infrastructure to cope with live
DDoS detection; and they would apply temporary rate-limit, selective dropping,
or null-route according to the traffic surge characteristic detected,
without the need for manual intervention.

Regards,
~xwindows

Yeah not exactly sure how my data center deals with it.. But I know my services have never been directly affected by any DDoS attack I have
been subject to.
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-10-13, Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> wrote:

I figured I'd like to experiment with an unmanaged hosting solution, and as you
can guess, typing "unmanaged hosting" in $your_search_engine ends up in
many results.

Well I realize I'm replying... let me see, 11 months late...

But hey.

So there is often a consideration: VPS (a virtual machine) or dedicated. A very
rough guideline would be VPS is cheaper for low-end workloads and dedicated is cheaper for higher-end workloads.

There are places (eg, hetzner) that do both, some that do VPS only, etc.

Pros of a VPS:

- Installation/recovery may be easier, since you can see the virtual console

- Cheaper for lower-end workloads

- Don't have to worry about the hardware at all, since you can't access it.

Pros of dedicated:

- Much better performance, in general

- You get to deal with the bare metal. Want to use md-raid on the thing? ZFS?
Fine, you decide. (You can theoretically run those on a VPS also, but you're
generally atop some other intermediate layer)

http://soyoustart.com/ has dedicated boxes for around $40-$50/mo - a great price. You can, for instance, get a Xeon with 32GB RAM, 2 480GB enterprise SSDs, and a Xeon E3-1245v2 (4 core / 8 thread) for less than $50/mo. Something comparable in a VPS will run you probably three times that much. Or, if you need storage capacity more than storage speed, for the same price you can have 3x 2TB SATA drives in your box. Combine them in RAID5 and that's still 4TB usable, plus redundancy. You just will not find something like that for only $50/mo in a VPS.

OTOH, if all you need is 512MB RAM and a gig of spinning rust storage, then obviously it can be found for a lot less than $50/mo.

One possible strategy - and this is what I do - is to buy a dedicated box and then run your own lightweight containers (Docker or LXC) in it. 32GB RAM will go a long ways. (Not quite as far if you use KVM, as then each VM has a kernel,
cache, filesystem, etc in it.)

I have used just about every major service over the years. I have been with SoYouStart Montreal for a number of years now and generally appreciate the service. My only gripe is that their speed of resolving hardware issues leaves something to be desired, but a phone call or two usually clears that up.

Some of their servers come with access to the remote console via IPMI, others don't (and you've have to pay for an IP KVM by the hour or something if you need
it, but I never have; they also have a rescue environment you can boot to).

- John
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