FreeMach™ - AlphaVPS - End of Year 2 Report
This is a continuation of the yearly service review/reports for the FreeMach™ service now that yet another year has passed with AlphaVPS. Big thank you goes out to AlphaVPS / @AlexBarakov for sponsoring this server for the second year!
FreeMach Overview
FreeMach™ is a free service providing free KVM VPSes to community members that was enabled by a sponsored E3 unmanaged VirMach server won during the LET 2017 Provider Poll. The service was offered because when I won the free server for a year, I did not have a purpose in mind. I didn’t want it to go to waste idling away, thus I decided to give back to the community. The project now has two locations, with the second sponsored node running in Sofia, BG, thanks to the wonderful folks over at AlphaVPS.
Here are some example projects that are/have been running on FreeMach –
- GeoDNS Load Balancing
- EasyEngine Testing
- Private File Sharing
- MariaDB Galera Cluster
- NodeJS App Development
- Non-Profit University Organization’s Website
- Rancher Testing
- IPv6 HE.net Tunnel Testing
- Hindi Community Website
- Control Panel Development
- Video Encoding Tool Testing and Development
- Web IDE / Dev Environment for School Projects
- Automated Build of Android Projects
- VOIP Module Development
- Mirror for Open Source Virtualization Platform Distributions
- Personal Media Server
- and a quite a bit more…
AlphaVPS Review
AlphaVPS has always been pretty great with the sponsored hardware and with the provided support! Looking back at my ticket history, there's only been two issues support issues that were promptly dealt with in the past year.
The first incident was an issue where a user's VM was exploited and was being used to send a large amount of traffic (DDoS) back in July 2020. Unfortunately, the control panel daemon had crashed and wasn't tracking the bandwidth used so the auto-suspension never happened like it should have (horrible timing, I know). Alex reached out to me via ticket letting me know of the high bandwidth usage, which I quickly tracked down the problem VM and worked with the user to reinstall and secure their setup. Within a couple hours, we were back up and running as usual.
The second incident was a little harder to debug and work through. I noticed some stability issues with the server rebooting on occasion (once every month or two). After working with Alex and his team to track down the cause of the issue, the server's redundant PSUs and the attached outlet were changed. Ever since that change occurred in January of this year, we've been smoothing sailing ever since. Support replies were always super fast (< 1 hour most times), which is pretty great for an unmanaged service!
The specs of the server are more than able to keep up with all the users on the system. The SSD disk is still chugging along and is in good health (28k hours). Network has also been really solid with some small minute-long blips here and there (probably from route issues between HetrixTools & AlphaVPS), but no long outages of any kind. Besides the occasional reboots from the PSU issue, the only other instances of downtime was when the system was upgraded to Proxmox v6 in Late Summer/Early Fall.
Server Usage
As is tradition, here’s some stats and graphs for the past year. Fairly light usage overall. Most of the projects running on the node don’t seem to be very resource intensive.
Uptime report: https://hetrixtools.com/report/uptime/6af17a5973b0c9d42563eda4358adae9/
Network:
CPU:
Load Avg:
Memory:
Conclusion
Once again, big props to AlphaVPS for being a solid service provider and for sponsoring the FreeMach server for the project for the second year in a row and for helping to support the many awesome projects of the FreeMach users. Thanks to Alex and his staff for being accommodating to our little community project and for always being there for us whenever support was needed!
Cheers!,
-Mason
Disclaimer: FreeMach is sponsored by VirMach (sponsored US location), AlphaVPS (sponsored EU location), and ProxCP (sponsored VM Control Panel). The FreeMach project is not associated with LowEndSpirit and I provide this endorsement of AlphaVPS on my own, personal accord (wasn't a stipulation by anyone for providing the service to us, but I think it's important to show how the server has been put to good use and continues to provide a great home to a great many of projects).
Comments
Mason: Awesome server administration as always.
VirMach, AlphaVPS and ProxCP: Big thank you to all for keeping this project alive.
nice review, Sir.
waiting for 1 free slot on EU - BG