hosting advice

[TdC]

dudes, I am looking for an EU based host where I can store my gallery and other online imagery. criteria are: -I can ssh in; -reasonably fast; -reasonably cheap; -supports gallery(2)

I don't particularly need fancy wingwangs like cpanel or whatever.

 

[Cyradix]

I was looking for something like that myself a few weeks ago and I ended up getting a dedicated server...
Big leap, I know.... but I'm very happy with it....

They have nice some cheap ones over here : OVH - Individuals. Hosting and Internet Solutions - OVH individual
They have "basic user" stuff available : Kimsufi - our dedicated servers range from £19.99 /month!
You get a single core, 1GB of memory, 250GB HD server with unlimited traffic for 19 Euro.

Install Apache etc and you have your own web hosting
Now I'm looking at Coppermine Photo Gallery for the gallery part...

Edit : Go for the French site.... the UK site charges the same amount, but in pounds instead of euros http://www.kimsufi.com/

 

[Chilly]

Hello I do hosting for several #fh people. As I cant advertise here all I'll say is PM me or find me on quakenet IRC in #primefarm as Chilly.


LOW LOW PRICES! MUST GO! etc..

 

[dysfunction]

These people are very competitive:

UK shared, reseller, dedicated and managed hosting - Vidahost
UK Reseller Hosting, Multiple Domain Hosting, Personal Hosting and Domains: Heart Internet
Web Hosting - Web Hosting Company UK - Fasthosts

 

[TdC]

cheers guys, started renting an OVH RPS for 17.93e per month.

Specs:
Cpu: atom dual core 1.63ghz
Ram: 1gb
Dsk: 10GB SAN / iSCSI
OS: gentoo


pleased

 

[TdC]

eeee that specific server has a waiting list because they're so popular. trust me to pick the one everyone likes :/

 

[GReaper]

Keep us updated when you get your OVH server, I'm curious at how well it performs - it seems a damn good deal.

 

[TdC]

certainly! I'll have to read up on what to do with Gentoo though heheh. It's not the other one they can install for you, it's their home-grown everything-works variant. I'll have to lock it down and disable everything I don't need / firewall everything besides 22/80/443 and roll with it from there.

I just need a LAMP really, but now I'm thinking about postfix and stuffs. I suppose it will be a general playground/netbackup/blog/picture thing.

 

[gunner440]

Primefarm Internet Services 2007 - it's easy, it's fast.

 

[TdC]

Keep us updated when you get your OVH server, I'm curious at how well it performs - it seems a damn good deal.

currently I am quite pleased:

They validate you via a text message and then a snailmail letter containing a code. once you have entered the code into their authentication service your server is installed within hours. In fact, mine was already up 20 hours before I even got around to logging in. This validation may seem like a pain in the arse to some, but it gives me a sense that they don't like mucking about.

The lickle ATOM based blade runs a dual core ATOM that has hyperthreading, so the installed gentoo sees 4 logical cores:

Spoiler

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1596.166
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3195.02
clflush size : 64

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1596.166
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3192.15
clflush size : 64

processor : 2
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1596.166
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 1
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3192.21
clflush size : 64

processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1596.166
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 1
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3192.21
clflush size : 64

They have a certain amount of stuff preconfigured, eg there is an MRTG set up so you can see some stuff your server is doing, there is a webserver, database, mailer, popper, etc all running out of the box, along with phpMyAdmin, webmin etc if you're so inclined. I'll be turning most of that off.

First thing I did was create a user and disable root logins. Then I turned off the ftp server and disabled it's startup. I've changed some stuff about Apache, installed wordpress and gallery together with some modules for that and the databases they need.

I had to install imagemagick, so I discovered quite by accident that ovh have their own gentoo portage mirror which is already configured in to the local portage, eg I typed sudo emerge imagemagick and was pleasantly surprised to see my lickle blade pull whatever it needed off the mirror at several megabytes per second. Compiling the 12 or so packages it needed was speedy too.

Currently I am uploading a several hundred meg large zipfile with some pics to the server and my upstream is completely maxed out whereas the server is not doing much of anything. I'll let you know if it can max out my 10MBit downstream. I expect it to tbh.

Only thing I am not pleased about is that I can see a large amount of I/O wait in the utilization. This smacks of them having slow SAN for some reason. Other than that I am mostly happy. I'll post more when I have something to offer.

 

[Chilly]

IO wait isnt surprising when in a virtualised environment. And given they are running those things on intel atoms and the price point you can all but guarantee they aint running a fiber channel netapp with the dogs bollocks 15k drives inside providing the storage. If I were kitting out a setup like this I'd slap together a solaris ZFS cluster and run it all from that, slapping in more drives and head units as required.

Stack em high, sell em cheap. Looks like good value to me tho. I'd be interested to see what kind of read bandwidth it can sustain from its datastore to it's NIC.

 

[TdC]

yeah mate they're doing some kind of iSCSI thing. I notice that large disk operations result in a lot of I/O wait, but I haven't run any kind of performance test thing yet. I actually think they may have a decent SAN, but there's going to be a zillion of those blades talking to it. You know it's their most popular product atm, and 92 to a rack, lots of racks, etc, lots of I/O.

It maxed out my downstream yesterday downloading a 380MB file to test. 1.2MB/s out of the server. Ofc that means nothing with one client downloading. Once it's done perhaps I'll let you guys know and we can hammer the shite out of it one evening

 

[Chilly]

happy to help, got 3x100mbits I can throw at it.

 

[TdC]

awesome that should be able to overload it quite nicely heh.

for lack of test suites, I can make a couple of 100mb files and script their downloads or something. Currently I still am pleased: talking to the server maxes out my bandwidth with the box not doing much of anything

To do still: have the domain sent over in DNS, and a few cosmetic things.

 

[MYstIC G]

At last you've seen the wordpress light!

 

[TdC]

they put things in stupid places though :/

 

[MYstIC G]

such as?

 

[TdC]

I find the place where they put the widget controls highly illogical :/

 

[TdC]

have a look if you want. the site currently has no dns mind, and I've only just imported the stuff from the old blog.

 

[MYstIC G]

content thief tbfh!

 

[TdC]

haha I was actually looking for latin

 

[Jupitus]

I'm gonna abuse my mod status and say thank you to Chilly at Primefarm for fixing me up with new hosting and email quickly and professionally in the matter of minutes! :kissit:

 

[gunner440]

I'm gonna abuse my mod status and say thank you to Chilly at Primefarm for fixing me up with new hosting and email quickly and professionally in the matter of minutes! :kissit:

I got an infraction for that :/

 

[TdC]

perhaps it was the how and why that earned you one?

 

[caLLous]

I think I will also be darkening Primefarm's doorstep when my hosting package is up for renewal elsewhere, it seems to do everything I need (which isn't much tbh) for less money than I'm currently paying.

 

[Chilly]

Credit crunch smchredit crunch imo.