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Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Stacie posted:

Thank you for suggesting us kind sir :-D

If you guys have any questions I would be happy to answer them as shell hosting could be a little tricky!

How the hell do you set it up so the users can't gently caress everything up?

Are there any guides or pre-configured setups out there?

Or is it just trial/error from locking users down and giving them a little here, a little there and figuring that out from years of experience running a shell host. I had a rootshell.be account (Free) and it must have been on a 286 because it was slower than molasses and only 12 people were logged in.

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Aleksey
Nov 7, 2005

Bob Morales posted:

How the hell do you set it up so the users can't gently caress everything up?

Are there any guides or pre-configured setups out there?

Or is it just trial/error from locking users down and giving them a little here, a little there and figuring that out from years of experience running a shell host. I had a rootshell.be account (Free) and it must have been on a 286 because it was slower than molasses and only 12 people were logged in.

Due to security reasons I can't give you any specific details but the number one prevention is to have a very proactive monitoring and customer screening process in place.

Several years back abuse/fraud was out of control, but as of 2009 it went down dramatically. Either we did a pretty good job rejecting/kicking users off and word got around or it actually dropped world wide. I will never know.

And yes, trial and error was a big factor when we started several years ago.

In regards to a free shell hosting 'companies', those (from what I observed) never last and receive tons of abuse. Since you are not paying anything for the account it's a safe bet that there will be no expansion of any sort to handle more accounts once things start to slow down.

R1CH
Apr 7, 2002

The Ron Jeremy of the coding world
If you can't give out details about your security for "security reasons" then it's not very good security.

hmm yes
Dec 2, 2000
College Slice
it's worse security to write out all the details put it on the internet

DarkLotus
Sep 30, 2001

Lithium Hosting
Personal, Reseller & VPS Hosting
30-day no risk Free Trial &
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atastypie posted:

it's worse security to write out all the details put it on the internet

This isn't always true. Security measures aren't good because they are secret, they are good because of what they do. Having a firewall and antivirus protection isn't circumvented by making knowledge of their existence public. Telling the world what type of security you have in place isn't the same as telling them exactly how you implemented it.

Aleksey
Nov 7, 2005

R1CH posted:

If you can't give out details about your security for "security reasons" then it's not very good security.

Can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Elected by Dogs
Apr 20, 2006

Bob Morales posted:

How the hell do you set it up so the users can't gently caress everything up?

Are there any guides or pre-configured setups out there?

Or is it just trial/error from locking users down and giving them a little here, a little there and figuring that out from years of experience running a shell host. I had a rootshell.be account (Free) and it must have been on a 286 because it was slower than molasses and only 12 people were logged in.

Give users quotas, `killall` if they attempt a forkbomb when they exceed their ordered package of processes. see_other_uids 0, make .bash_history and etc flagged append-only and unmodifiable/editable by the user.

Make sure a user can't even ls /home. Heavily enforce permissions on many system binaries, don't allow w/who/finger/etc.

see other uids to 0 also makes netstat/sockstat show the user's processes only instead of systemwide, same with ps aux.

You could even push it to disabling users' ability to run their own binaries and just toss the common stuff like znc/eggdrop/etc in /usr/bin and use the user's config files.


Or just do it like nfshost and give every single user a jail.

Slappy Pappy
Oct 15, 2003

Mighty, mighty eagle soaring free
Defender of our homes and liberty
Bravery, humility, and honesty...
Mighty, mighty eagle, rescue me!
Dinosaur Gum
This could be a dumb question. I work for a financial company and we have a site that's developed and hosted by another company. On the main page of that site, they are streaming a single video file from another host using a Flash plug-in. We've been told that the company hosting our video is shutting down and they want us to find an alternative host. Seems to me that our host should find an alternative but whatever - I do what I'm told.

I'm afraid that if I just pop a file up on some host and tell our partner company to link to it that it might violate some ToS because most of the webhosts expect you to host your entire site with them. Am I overthinking this?

Either way, would someone mind telling me some things to consider when looking for a host to just stream a single file over and over again?

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

Spamtron7000 posted:

I'm afraid that if I just pop a file up on some host and tell our partner company to link to it that it might violate some ToS because most of the webhosts expect you to host your entire site with them. Am I overthinking this?

This is only a problem with free hosts. I've never seen this as a condition on proper hosting; it seems absurd.

Spamtron7000 posted:

Either way, would someone mind telling me some things to consider when looking for a host to just stream a single file over and over again?

Maximum data transer per month, and the connection speed.

R1CH
Apr 7, 2002

The Ron Jeremy of the coding world
Sounds like an ideal use for Amazon S3.

Mortanis
Dec 28, 2005

It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
College Slice
It doesn't look like there's a lot of good options for Windows based VPS setups. The company I work for has all its own hardware for hosting some 500+ website - we build the site, then host it. That's worked fine, but we're looking at losing the hardware due to cost, and maybe switching to VPS based services.

Our current servers are all virtualized (Minus our DNS server that is pretty ancient at this point) on VMWare ESX 4. Best case scenario, we find a host that would allow us to move our virtual servers to their host. I haven't found anything that seems likely.

The second option is a VPS (or multiple actually - we have a lot of varied servers for different programming languages, a MS SQL DB Server, and the like), and we migrate each site over to the new systems. A hassle, but doable. We'd still need to retain enough control to install custom software and the like for some of our specific clients. Most of the reliable VPS hosts I've seen are obviously linux based, though, and we are all Windows.

We have licenses purchased for all our software, such as ColdFusion (I know, I know. We're moving away from it but have to support the legacy sites) and MS-SQL 2008. We'd like to keep those purchases intact if possible - we paid for em, might as well use them. We also need at least a half, maybe even full, Class C - many of our sites use SSL and have a dedicated IP, rather than using Host Name Header. Most VPS's I've seen offer something like 10 IPs.

The final option would be finding a reseller package on a normal host, set up each site on their own hosting account, but retain a management console for all our customers. Not the best solution, and maybe not even better than keeping our hardware up, but I'm looking into all options.

Are there any serious options I should look into? My boss is pretty adamant we move away from having our own hardware, due to a number of factors, but nothing really seems to fit the bill for us cleanly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Aleksey
Nov 7, 2005

Mortanis posted:

Are there any serious options I should look into? My boss is pretty adamant we move away from having our own hardware, due to a number of factors, but nothing really seems to fit the bill for us cleanly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

If current setup works, why fix it? Since you already have your own hardware in place I'm certain that leasing new hardware and switching to a non co-located solution will cost you more headache.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Spamtron7000 posted:

Either way, would someone mind telling me some things to consider when looking for a host to just stream a single file over and over again?

How much throughput? You could get an unmetered server and do that, or look into a CDN (content distribution network) like CacheFly

Rufo posted:

This is only a problem with free hosts. I've never seen this as a condition on proper hosting; it seems absurd.

Well, there's got to be somewhere they pull the plug. If you made your own Linux distro, for example, and just used Dreamhost or Hostgator to host the ISO's, they'd pull the plug on you. You couldn't just store a bunch of 5 meg files and link to them elsewhere, I was talking to a guy who got shut down for that.

Mortanis posted:

It doesn't look like there's a lot of good options for Windows based VPS setups. The company I work for has all its own hardware for hosting some 500+ website - we build the site, then host it. That's worked fine, but we're looking at losing the hardware due to cost, and maybe switching to VPS based services.

Mortanis posted:

Our current servers are all virtualized (Minus our DNS server that is pretty ancient at this point) on VMWare ESX 4. Best case scenario, we find a host that would allow us to move our virtual servers to their host. I haven't found anything that seems likely.

So you own the hardware and it's co-located? I don't think it'd be cheaper to lease VPSes. Maybe you could some lease the servers or something, but you'd still have to migrate when the lease was up.

Does the VMware license even allow people to re-sell VM's, or is that just with the free version?

a llama
Mar 10, 2010

by T. Finn

Bob Morales posted:

Well, there's got to be somewhere they pull the plug. If you made your own Linux distro, for example, and just used Dreamhost or Hostgator to host the ISO's, they'd pull the plug on you. You couldn't just store a bunch of 5 meg files and link to them elsewhere, I was talking to a guy who got shut down for that.

As the guy who used to search boxes on a certain shared host that was listed specifically by the user above and rhymes with ghosthater, they'll go out of their way to shut down people using the hosting for 'file sharing', 'backups' or 'file hosting'. It comes down to the fact that it's much easier to pull large amounts of bandwidth and use tons of disk space when you're explicitly hosting files for the purposes of having them downloaded. This is pretty much industry-wide for any company beyond mom and pop hosting.

Xythar
Dec 22, 2004

echoes of a contemporary nation
Maybe on places that offer you "unlimited" hosting, but I should think that on a webhost where you pay for a set amount of bandwidth per month then it shouldn't be their business at all what you use that bandwidth for, provided it's not illegal.

Am I just talking crazy talk here or what?

optikalus
Apr 17, 2008

Xythar posted:

Maybe on places that offer you "unlimited" hosting, but I should think that on a webhost where you pay for a set amount of bandwidth per month then it shouldn't be their business at all what you use that bandwidth for, provided it's not illegal.

Am I just talking crazy talk here or what?

And its why you should run from any host that offers unlimited anything.

Mortanis
Dec 28, 2005

It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
College Slice

Bob Morales posted:

How much throughput? You could get an unmetered server and do that, or look into a CDN (content distribution network) like CacheFly
So you own the hardware and it's co-located? I don't think it'd be cheaper to lease VPSes. Maybe you could some lease the servers or something, but you'd still have to migrate when the lease was up.

Does the VMware license even allow people to re-sell VM's, or is that just with the free version?

We lease (lease to own, anyway) the hardware, which is hosted in a server host facility in our area, and the servers (Dell Poweredges) are running virtualized instances of WIN2K8.

The idea is that while we lease the hardware, the cost of the hosting facility, bandwidth, leases, maintenance, backups, redundancy, network maintenance (security, firewalls, etc) and the whole package deal is quite a bit higher than what companies like Slicehost are charging for even their beefiest packages, within reason. Why continue to do our own thing when dedicated companies likely do it better - and cheaper. So I'm looking into alternatives, and then we'd repurpose the hardware for internal projects that could use some serious horsepower.

It may not be viable, but I won't know until I look.

a llama
Mar 10, 2010

by T. Finn

Xythar posted:

Maybe on places that offer you "unlimited" hosting, but I should think that on a web-host where you pay for a set amount of bandwidth per month then it shouldn't be their business at all what you use that bandwidth for, provided it's not illegal.

Am I just talking crazy talk here or what?

There are few to no large shared hosting companies that don't offer unlimited or effectively unlimited hosting. This is because it is ineffective and will lose you lots of potential customers if you attempt to advertise against 'unlimited' hosts.

Also; remember that a host can literally cancel you for any reason. This includes but is not limited to if they don't like how you smell, what you are hosting (ask hate groups), or how you treat their staff. It's fairly common industry practice to search servers that are using excessive bandwidth or are out of disk space and just force cancel customers who, while within their service limits technically, they just aren't profitable to keep around.

Usually, the big companies (lunarpages, hostgator, midphase, site5..) have 400-700 customers per box on a quad core server with a raid 10 array that is between 2 - 4TB. They are pretty much limited at that disk array size right now simply due to the time it takes to perform a file system check so it's much cheaper and much more effective to just cancel customers who are using 600GB and paying 6$ a month because even attempting to transfer these accounts to a new server is a pain in the rear end and something that takes close to a week of maxing out both server's connections.

So in short, don't host important or popular files on shared hosting because it's going to get your account pulled because it makes you an easy target.

a llama fucked around with this message at 08:09 on May 21, 2010

Xythar
Dec 22, 2004

echoes of a contemporary nation
Oh yeah, I know that. Shared hosting is cheap for a reason, after all.

I do my important hosting on a VPS which is more what I was thinking about when I mentioned set limits for resources each month. I have a shared account as well but that's pretty much just for hosting some LP videos that I have on my computer anyway so I wouldn't really care if they pulled the plug, I'd just take my $5 a month or whatever it is elsewhere.

Xythar fucked around with this message at 09:31 on May 21, 2010

dexter
Jun 24, 2003

Mortanis posted:

It doesn't look like there's a lot of good options for Windows based VPS setups. The company I work for has all its own hardware for hosting some 500+ website - we build the site, then host it. That's worked fine, but we're looking at losing the hardware due to cost, and maybe switching to VPS based services.

Are there any serious options I should look into? My boss is pretty adamant we move away from having our own hardware, due to a number of factors, but nothing really seems to fit the bill for us cleanly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Rackspace Cloud is doing Windows VMs now. We've been using their Linux product for about six months now and are pretty happy with it.

a llama
Mar 10, 2010

by T. Finn

Xythar posted:

Oh yeah, I know that. Shared hosting is cheap for a reason, after all.

I do my important hosting on a VPS which is more what I was thinking about when I mentioned set limits for resources each month. I have a shared account as well but that's pretty much just for hosting some LP videos that I have on my computer anyway so I wouldn't really care if they pulled the plug, I'd just take my $5 a month or whatever it is elsewhere.

Low-end VPS providers do the EXACT same thing.

Xythar
Dec 22, 2004

echoes of a contemporary nation
Define "low-end". I can't imagine the more reputable VPS providers would have that reputation (or any customers) if they were known to randomly pull the accounts of customers without warning just because they were close to, but not in excess of, their advertised limits. That's crazytown.

The one I'm using currently does their own backups of all their VPSes every second day. To me this policy and a "we can pull your account and delete all your data without warning" policy would seem to be at complete cross purposes, unless I am misunderstanding you.

I mean, publishing the actual limits necessary for the service to be profitable, contacting people to let them know their resource usage is too high and suggesting they upgrade their plan? Fine. Even contacting someone say a month in advance to let them know that they can't offer the service anymore would be more believable than just wiping your data without warning.

Anyway I've had the VPS I have for nearly a year now with no problems so I don't think my resource usage is anything to worry about.

optikalus
Apr 17, 2008

Xythar posted:

Define "low-end". I can't imagine the more reputable VPS providers would have that reputation (or any customers) if they were known to randomly pull the accounts of customers without warning just because they were close to, but not in excess of, their advertised limits. That's crazytown.

Xythar posted:

I mean, publishing the actual limits necessary for the service to be profitable, contacting people to let them know their resource usage is too high and suggesting they upgrade their plan? Fine. Even contacting someone say a month in advance to let them know that they can't offer the service anymore would be more believable than just wiping your data without warning.

It's really only applicable to the 'unlimited' BS hosts. Back to shared hosting, if they don't outright cancel you, they'll just make it uncomfortable for you to be there.. ie. making up new things to charge you for ala Dreamhost.

I have been shared hosting business since 1999, and have never dropped or disconnected a user because they were using more than they were paying for -- let alone using less than they're paying for but more than I'd like. I've upgraded hardware and moved datacenters because of individual customer's usage needs. Obviously, I'm not the norm, but there are good shared hosts out there that you need not worry about whether or not your site will still be up if it becomes popular.

brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.

Gelob posted:

I work at http://www.limestonenetworks.com we are an un-managed dedicated server provider in Dallas. On the subject we do allow IRC as long as your not linking to efnet, linknet, etc. We run a GameSurge.net server as well (Limestone.TX.US.GameSurge.net).
How big are you guys? I'm curious if I've run across your setup at Databank. We have a large cage over there, give me a shout sometime.

micropenis
Jul 19, 2004
An '04 Mac user from the UK. What's worse?
What shared hosting company would be best to host a site with 30+ videos/screencasts? These aren't streamed from YouTube they would be hosted on the web server, probably 40mb per video.

Aleksey
Nov 7, 2005

Braggot posted:

What shared hosting company would be best to host a site with 30+ videos/screencasts? These aren't streamed from YouTube they would be hosted on the web server, probably 40mb per video.

Any company that does not oversell their bandwidth.

DoctorOfLawls
Mar 2, 2001

SA's Brazilian Diplomat
Can someone in the business explain to me how a web site with mostly passive content and tons of "extranet" content - that is, acessible over the web but only to users with the proper credentials, not the general public - could benefit from VPS instead of shared hosting?

eightysixed
Sep 23, 2004

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Braggot posted:

What shared hosting company would be best to host a site with 30+ videos/screencasts? These aren't streamed from YouTube they would be hosted on the web server, probably 40mb per video.

I know BounceWeb supports ffmpeg on their shared hosting plans, but I wouldn't really recommend them for anything professional.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Me Clumsy posted:

Can someone in the business explain to me how a web site with mostly passive content and tons of "extranet" content - that is, acessible over the web but only to users with the proper credentials, not the general public - could benefit from VPS instead of shared hosting?

Usually a VPS will smoke shared hosting

mityas123
Feb 7, 2004
Are there any good sites that are supporting .Net 3.5 or 4.0 and has MVC support? I can't seem to find one that looks legit. Also no more than 10-15$ a month for now.

Edit: I ended up going with winhost.

mityas123 fucked around with this message at 20:08 on May 24, 2010

optikalus
Apr 17, 2008

Bob Morales posted:

Usually a VPS will smoke shared hosting

The only reason for VPS over shared is getting to run your own services. I have yet to see a VPS be able to come anywhere near the performance of my servers.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

optikalus posted:

The only reason for VPS over shared is getting to run your own services. I have yet to see a VPS be able to come anywhere near the performance of my servers.

Well, you do get full access to the server, which can be good or bad, depending on what you want and if you have someone to admin the box for you (if you can't)

But a VPS is going to be quite a bit faster than your 'typical' shared host.

Enjoy
Apr 18, 2009
Does anyone have any recommendations for a European (I'm British) host for gaming? Apparently I'd need about 1Mbit/s upload speed for the games I'd like to run. How much would that cost me per month? Should I stick with a reseller who specialises in gaming?

(Apologies for the repost, I did not see this thread)

optikalus
Apr 17, 2008

Bob Morales posted:

Well, you do get full access to the server, which can be good or bad, depending on what you want and if you have someone to admin the box for you (if you can't)

But a VPS is going to be quite a bit faster than your 'typical' shared host.

You keep saying this, but it just isn't true in my experience. Way smaller margins on VPS than shared hosting, so VPS hardware just isn't as good, and usually way more oversold.

People usually get VPS because they're going to beat on it and don't want to pay for a full dedicated. I would say that the majority of VPS users use their services way more than a typical shared hosting customer.

Aleksey
Nov 7, 2005

optikalus posted:

You keep saying this, but it just isn't true in my experience.

Agreed, there are too many factors.

RiSK
Dec 9, 2006

The Red Rocket Rifle

optikalus posted:

You keep saying this, but it just isn't true in my experience. Way smaller margins on VPS than shared hosting, so VPS hardware just isn't as good, and usually way more oversold.

If you go with a host that has gambit of different hosting options, then this is usually true. If you go with a host that specializes in ONE thing, such as VPS hosting, chances are, you're going to get a MUCH better offering. They typically have a better understanding of how to run ship and keep people happy. At least, the bigger ones usually do.

If you go with a bigger specialty host, you'll probably have better hardware, nodes tweaked and patched to perform significantly better in virtual environments, quieter neighbors (lots of hosts have "offload" nodes for noisy customers), etc. If you know what you're doing, you can cache a whole bunch, tweak Apache, DNS, etc. Likely going to have a much better experience there than on shared.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

optikalus posted:

You keep saying this, but it just isn't true in my experience. Way smaller margins on VPS than shared hosting, so VPS hardware just isn't as good, and usually way more oversold.

People usually get VPS because they're going to beat on it and don't want to pay for a full dedicated. I would say that the majority of VPS users use their services way more than a typical shared hosting customer.

I've never had even 'decent' performance from a big shared host (speaking from GoDaddy, Powweb, and Web.com from the top of my head)

optikalus
Apr 17, 2008

Bob Morales posted:

I've never had even 'decent' performance from a big shared host (speaking from GoDaddy, Powweb, and Web.com from the top of my head)

Those are notoriously bad shared hosts.

eightysixed
Sep 23, 2004

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

optikalus posted:

Those are notoriously bad shared hosts.

On a huge level, nonetheless. I would never consider them for hosting :(

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mugrim
Mar 2, 2007

The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.
I'm looking at starting my own site, specifically for podcasting. Anyone have any recommendations for hosting?

I'm looking at Apis networks as recommended by the thread but I'm trying to learn here from scratch.

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