What I learned from giving away free VPSes

2

Comments

  • @Not_Oles said:

    @seriesn said:

    @Not_Oles said:

    @vimalware said:
    That said, sponsored resources like this are nice for LES community-commons services, like a Zulip Chat / Rocket chat instance.
    Latency doesn't matter so much for text chat, but having access to 4GB RAM is key. ?

    (Whichever has native mobile client with low battery DRAIN. ?)

    For whatever you are doing on which latency matters so much, according to the Ubuntu blog from 2015 LXC has 57% lower latency than KVM. To which I can add my impression that Ubuntu 20.04 LXC instances seem quite a bit lower latency than 18.04 instances, but I haven't made any measurements. You really might wanna try LXC plus Ubuntu 20.04.

    Haha! I didn't know about Zulip or Rocket. Thanks for mentioning them. I will look at them a bit more. Of course, IRC still lives, too.

    I actually had thought about setting up something for chat for my server users. But simply posting here in the LES forum plus having the ability to use LES PMs seemed good enough. Or am I mistaken? Would the LES community, or a subset of it, enjoy a chat interface?

    Discord? :)

    It seems you think most everybody here would like Discord and the channel would be active?

    Discord is the new irc haha. As for active, that depends.

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @seriesn said:

    @Not_Oles said:

    @seriesn said:

    @Not_Oles said:

    @vimalware said:
    That said, sponsored resources like this are nice for LES community-commons services, like a Zulip Chat / Rocket chat instance.
    Latency doesn't matter so much for text chat, but having access to 4GB RAM is key. ?

    (Whichever has native mobile client with low battery DRAIN. ?)

    For whatever you are doing on which latency matters so much, according to the Ubuntu blog from 2015 LXC has 57% lower latency than KVM. To which I can add my impression that Ubuntu 20.04 LXC instances seem quite a bit lower latency than 18.04 instances, but I haven't made any measurements. You really might wanna try LXC plus Ubuntu 20.04.

    Haha! I didn't know about Zulip or Rocket. Thanks for mentioning them. I will look at them a bit more. Of course, IRC still lives, too.

    I actually had thought about setting up something for chat for my server users. But simply posting here in the LES forum plus having the ability to use LES PMs seemed good enough. Or am I mistaken? Would the LES community, or a subset of it, enjoy a chat interface?

    Discord? :)

    It seems you think most everybody here would like Discord and the channel would be active?

    Discord is the new irc haha. As for active, that depends.

    Yeah, that "dependency" thing, again. :-)

    Thanked by (2)seriesn vimalware
  • flipsflips OG
    edited May 2020

    Would prefer IRC or Matrix, or some other protocol easily available in the weechat client (yes, "wee", not "we") ;)
    Still not sure if I'd be very active. I tend to idle mostly in my IRC and Matrix channels ... :)

    Thanked by (2)vimalware Not_Oles
  • Thank for the post! Once again, thank you for providing free VPS to me and other users.
    Your support was even better than some paid service. As you started selling server, I hope there'll be more and more clients!

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • @flips said:
    Would prefer IRC or Matrix, or some other protocol easily available in the weechat client (yes, "wee", not "we") ;)

    I would rather suffer my way through an open protocol like matrix, than use discord for anything more than weekend game voice carrier .

    Cloudron now has a packaged riot.im and matrix apps. Riot is the most popular web front-end to matrix. It should fit in their free tier. (2apps)

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • @Not_Oles said:

    If you don't mind saying, where are you?

    Sunny tropical paradise : Kerala, India.

    Come by after this is over.

    Thanked by (3)Not_Oles deepak_leb MaxKVM
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @vimalware said:

    @flips said:
    Would prefer IRC or Matrix, or some other protocol easily available in the weechat client (yes, "wee", not "we") ;)

    I would rather suffer my way through an open protocol like matrix, than use discord for anything more than weekend game voice carrier .

    Cloudron now has a packaged riot.im and matrix apps. Riot is the most popular web front-end to matrix. It should fit in their free tier. (2apps)

    I'm with you guys on the preference to suffer with open protocol/source/copyleft. :-)

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @vimalware said:
    @Not_Oles said:

    If you don't mind saying, where are you?

    Sunny tropical paradise : Kerala, India.

    Come by after this is over.

    Kerala sounds good! Love to visit! Thanks for the invitation!

    Mostly the graphics don't turn me on so much. But your .gif was different. Mesmerizing! I stared at it on my phone for several minutes. It has a real three-dimensional quality to it. Is she Kali?

    Thanked by (1)vimalware
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @quangthang said:
    Thank for the post! Once again, thank you for providing free VPS to me and other users.
    Your support was even better than some paid service. As you started selling server, I hope there'll be more and more clients!

    Thanks for your kind words! I am glad to have you on my server!

    Thanked by (1)quangthang
  • This is a really good post. Thanks for detailing your experiences!

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @Daniel said:
    This is a really good post. Thanks for detailing your experiences!

    Hey Daniel! Thanks for your kind words! Much appreciated!

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @Not_Oles said: There is a 30% LES Discount on the Gold VPS, so, if you want one, please use the discount link on this page instead of the full price link on the site.

    This promotion has expired, so the link in this thread no longer will work. Another LES-exclusive promotion is coming soon! Thanks everyone!

  • @Not_Oles said: I'm with you guys on the preference to suffer with open protocol/source/copyleft. :-)

    =) I wouldn't call it suffering, as I actually prefer the user experience of a real chat client like weechat (which also has different frontends, web/apps), and matrix and IRC work really well with it. There's also a slack plugin available, and I think there's a discord plugin. (Haven't checked.)

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @flips said:

    @Not_Oles said: I'm with you guys on the preference to suffer with open protocol/source/copyleft. :-)

    =) I wouldn't call it suffering, as I actually prefer the user experience of a real chat client like weechat (which also has different frontends, web/apps), and matrix and IRC work really well with it. There's also a slack plugin available, and I think there's a discord plugin. (Haven't checked.)

    Now I really am going to have to look at weechat. Thanks @flips!

    The "suffering" might mostly be from the point of view of users of closed source products which sometimes install more easily than free products. So maybe closed source users see "a lot of suffering" in getting open source stuff up and working. So I was trying to be facetious, but it didn't work. :-)

    I think the idea of a community chat might be enough interesting that it deserves its own thread. I'm off to look at weechat. Thanks again @flips!

    Thanked by (2)flips vimalware
  • @Not_Oles said:
    So I was trying to be facetious, but it didn't work. :-)

    I think I got your point, and I did laugh! =)

    I'm off to look at weechat. Thanks again @flips!

    :+1: :)

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • mobilemobile Retired

    That was a great run :lol:

    Thanked by (1)Not_Oles
  • That's lovely boss ☺️

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    Wow! I had no idea! Amazing!

  • Fascinating insights, thank you for taking the time to write all of that up.

    Thanked by (1)Ympker
  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @tarasis said:
    Fascinating insights, thank you for taking the time to write all of that up.

    You're welcome!

    I see you're a graybeard too! :) I'm 72. Are you older? I've been wondering whether anybody here is older than me. :)

  • cybertechcybertech OGBenchmark King

    Hi I'm 21. Since 1999.

    Thanked by (2)Not_Oles Abdullah

    I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.

  • Lovely to read this, did users abuse your free VPS? If yes how you handle them?

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @ukhan said:
    Lovely to read this, did users abuse your free VPS? If yes how you handle them?

    Glad you enjoyed reading! ?

    It was quite a bit of fun. No abuse at all.

    I have a new little project going on now. If you're interested, please look in the free stuff category for my fedora rawhide whitehat playpen thread.

    Maybe I will do another free VPS offer before too long.

  • I understood right? OP gives VPSes and spies on customers?

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    @Anon said:
    I understood right? OP gives VPSes and spies on customers?

    Excellent to ask these important questions! Interestingly, these questions are reciprocal, too. I can imagine a user setting up her VPS as a honeypot to catch me spying on her! What about the user who asked me for my ssh public key after he accidentally erased it from his VPS? I was almost sure he was setting up his VPS to crack my ssh encryption so he could spy, not only on me, but on all the other users too. After all, spying is everywhere these days. Witness Google and Facebook and Apple.

    Awhile back a guy named Ken Thompson wrote a compiler to compile login so that login always accepted his password in addition to whatever password was specified to be used for any user. Moreover, the compiler was programmed to compile this trick into future versions of the compiler -- even versions from which the code for the trick had been removed. So, for many years, Ken could log in to every system on which login was compiled with a descendant of Ken's original compiler -- which was, indeed, many systems.

    Details of this story were presented when Thompson received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Here is a pdf version of the story and here is an html version.

    According to this guy, "Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name 'kt'."

    Thanks again @Anon! I appreciate your raising this important topic. Best wishes!

  • @Not_Oles said: Maybe I will do another free VPS offer before too long.

    Will it be LXC or KVM this time ?

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Hosting ProviderContent Writer

    LXC

    Thanked by (2)david MaxKVM
  • Thanks yet again to @AnthonySmith and to everyone here at LES for making this place as lovely as it is!

    And thank you to @Not_Oles for an excellent, entertaining, and informative post!

    Thanked by (2)MaxKVM Not_Oles
  • Please count me in on that, game server's are fine ?

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