I won't be back in the office till Friday and I'll ask my boss if I am allowed to send a screen shot of their server configuration. Most likely he will say yes, but I'd rather be safe then sorry.
Looking forward to it. Please provide a valid cpuid dump.
I know on the ARK it says 1 CPU, though I work at my local ISP and my job title is "Management of TWL Infrastructure" TWL is the name and we have a server that has dual E5-1660 and the OS sees them both on the dual board that I listed above.
Simply because a processor has the same socket does not mean it can be used interchangeably on motherboards. The dual proc mobo specifies, on the manufacturer website that it supports the "E5-2600 v3" family of processors, and the quad proc specifies "E5-4600" and "E5-4600".
If what you say about your employment is correct, then you'd seem fit into one of the (sadly) more common stereotypes of a manager.
+1 to OSTK and ProvisionHost. If you want to start a host... don't. It's largely a matter of luck, timing, and marketing. Unless the stars happened to be aligned for you, you'll end up losing money and time.
I've owned two hosts (before leaving hosting directly and becoming a web-developer full time). The first was fairly sucessful. We had near exponential growth, and grossed in the tens of thousands of dollars per month by the time we were six months in. But, it was a crappy host. Mediocre to crappy servers, indistinguishable for every other host out there except for its rather nice website. That host shut down after seven months of operation due to malicious activity by one of the other co-owners.
So, the others took what we had left and created a new company, in large part so as not to leave the old, existing customers in the dark. Our motto was "Hosting Done Right". We had top-of-the-line hardware (partly colocated), a custom control panel and billing solution (with several features that were unheard of in Mincraft at the time; there have since, in the last ~12 months, been a few others that cropped up with those features), true 24/7 support, a pretty good community, and a nice bit of seed money. Oh yeah, and it was actually a registered LLC, unlike most of the hosting "companies."
And it failed. Five months later, we sold the company and each walked away with about a hundred dollars -- significantly less than if we just had split the seed money between ourselves and shut down entirely.
Moral of the story is: you can make a crappy company or you can make a great company. But it's just luck, and chances luck will not be in your favour (just look at all the old posts in the Other Hosts section). Spend that money you'd use to start a host... take an online university class or something, just use it for groceries. Better than tossing it away.The Minecraft hosting market is not one I'd ever enter willingly again.
> Gets called out lying about specifications
> Says a company who actually owns and colocates their own hardware runs cheap servers from their basement.
> Spews an arseload of fake information
> Says the other company is a troll.
10/10 would buy from. But I'm still a bit fuzzy on how OSTK calling you out on you lie prevents you from running a solid business. It would seem to me that a company who felt the need to lie about their specifications would not be solid in the first place.
Anyhow. It may benefit to you be more professional on their forums, Azgo, if you desire any kind of decent reputation
Base it on a widely available framework (Bootstrap, Foundation, etc) and use the standard classes whenever possible (with customized CSS as needed) so that it can be easily integrated, customized, etc by the end user (host).
There are also seemingly useless pages that could be combined with others or eliminated altogether.
Thanks for the feedback. I already have begun porting it to Bootstrap with a good Grunt-based build system.
Recently I've been contracted to do some drafts for a new Multicraft UI. I know many of you aren't too keen on it in its present state, and I'm looking to see if you have any input to give to improve it. Even the most minor details, tell me and I'll work on them! What could be done differently, be made more intuitive, or improved in some way? Who knows, your suggestion could make it into the next version.
Please tell me your thoughts. Thanks very much for your time!
Recently I've been contracted to do some drafts for a new Multicraft UI. I know many of you aren't too keen on it in its present state, and I'm looking to see if you have any input to give to improve it. Even the most minor details, tell me and I'll work on them! What could be done differently, be made more intuitive, or improved in some way? Who knows, your suggestion could make it into the next version.
Please tell me your thoughts. Thanks very much for your time!
The host's decision whether or not to make their own / buy their own website doesn't directly correlate to the stability of such a company. Its like comparing RamNode and DigitalOcean together due to their billing systems; RamNode uses WHMCS, the latter a custom solution - yet there is no such comparison between stability. In fact, RamNode has been around longer and is debatably a more stable company.
There is no such comparison to be made.
That is a bit of a false analogy fallacy. Both RamNode and DigitalOcean use two great solutions - one an in-house system, and one a globally recognized billing solution. Both are good and widely accepted from the smallest to the largest hosts in the world. There is no one here saying that a custom-made billing system is inheritly superior to a custom one; designing is totally different from the kind of data-heavy and secure development that has to be done at that level. You are right: there is not such comparison to be made.
Hosts who do "own/buy their own website" do tend to be more stable, because they have the resources needed to stand out from the crowd. Look at DigitalOcean, RamNode, McProHosting. I cannot think of any large and stable host that does not use a theme designed particularly for that site. There is certainly no set-in-stone correlation that having a custom site = instant stability, but I think you will be hard pressed to find any large and stable host that uses a stock website theme.
As a web designer I may be a bit biased here... but if a host, which is an web business, isn't stable enough to invest in a good website, why should a customer consider them stable enough to invest their time and money into?
Ah, interesting. That's a neat tool, though I think it's a bit redundant with SSH keys, and could make it hard for multiple people accessing a system. So a rather narrow use case. Something to keep in mind though.
If you really want to go the extra mile, consider something like Duo Two-Factor Authentication for SSH. In fact, use two-factor wherever possible for that extra level of security. Take it to the actual two-factor level and have a physical device that is not your phone that generate the codes.
I think what you're referring to is SSH keys, not two factor authentication (which would be like sending a text message to your phone or using an app to generate login codes; definitely a good idea anyway, for sites like PayPal, Dropbox, Google, and so on). SSH keys should be used. Period. I would never use password authentication on any server. They take all of one minute to install, then another minute to disable password authentication in sshd_config, and that's it.
Never, ever, use password authentication when key-based authentication is available. If you're doing credit card processing on-site, the PCI standard does not allow password-based system, such as FTP (SFTP being the alternative), to even be installed on the system.
Passwords might as well be stored in plain text if you are going to use a weak hashing key, or a weak hashing method. MD5 is absolutely not secure for storing passwords. If it is a quick hashing algorithm, its just as quick to decrypt.
Well, sometimes... WHMCS and Multicraft both use MD5-based hashing systems. It really comes down to how you're hashing them. Both systems use salted MD5 hashes, which are significantly harder to break. Though if you're building a new system you should probably use a better algorithm (PHP55 has a nice function, password_hash, which should be blowfish based) MD5 solutions aren't terrible - it just matters how they're implemented.
I've heard that Crucial SSD's are probably not the best and Samsung SSD's will probably be expensive.
Crucial SSDs are alright - still a ton better than HDDs. I've got one in my computer from about three years ago when 64 GB at $80 was a good deal. It's still chugging along great. Samsung's Pro series SSDs are, of course, more expensive, because they are the single fastest consumer drives out there (not including enterprise orient drives like those of Fusion.io, which are truly incredible). Samsung's Evo series is more of an average performance, but, as Wyatt just mentioned above me, very cheap compared to other drives.
And since most hosts rent, they won't have access to those kinds of storage.
Yes, they will. Welcome to 2014. Terabyte SSDs now routinely sell for under $500; cheap, high-density SSD storage is very much in sight and nearly within the grasp of your average host.
Well something is definitely fishy there, seeing as their "Demo IP" is actually an McProHosting IP (really amazes me how some people still think others can't tell these thing). If it seems to good to be true, chances are it is. Their control panel login is also nonfunctional.
0
Looking forward to it. Please provide a valid cpuid dump.
0
Simply because a processor has the same socket does not mean it can be used interchangeably on motherboards. The dual proc mobo specifies, on the manufacturer website that it supports the "E5-2600 v3" family of processors, and the quad proc specifies "E5-4600" and "E5-4600".
If what you say about your employment is correct, then you'd seem fit into one of the (sadly) more common stereotypes of a manager.
1
1
0
I've owned two hosts (before leaving hosting directly and becoming a web-developer full time). The first was fairly sucessful. We had near exponential growth, and grossed in the tens of thousands of dollars per month by the time we were six months in. But, it was a crappy host. Mediocre to crappy servers, indistinguishable for every other host out there except for its rather nice website. That host shut down after seven months of operation due to malicious activity by one of the other co-owners.
So, the others took what we had left and created a new company, in large part so as not to leave the old, existing customers in the dark. Our motto was "Hosting Done Right". We had top-of-the-line hardware (partly colocated), a custom control panel and billing solution (with several features that were unheard of in Mincraft at the time; there have since, in the last ~12 months, been a few others that cropped up with those features), true 24/7 support, a pretty good community, and a nice bit of seed money. Oh yeah, and it was actually a registered LLC, unlike most of the hosting "companies."
And it failed. Five months later, we sold the company and each walked away with about a hundred dollars -- significantly less than if we just had split the seed money between ourselves and shut down entirely.
Moral of the story is: you can make a crappy company or you can make a great company. But it's just luck, and chances luck will not be in your favour (just look at all the old posts in the Other Hosts section). Spend that money you'd use to start a host... take an online university class or something, just use it for groceries. Better than tossing it away.The Minecraft hosting market is not one I'd ever enter willingly again.
2
> Says a company who actually owns and colocates their own hardware runs cheap servers from their basement.
> Spews an arseload of fake information
> Says the other company is a troll.
10/10 would buy from. But I'm still a bit fuzzy on how OSTK calling you out on you lie prevents you from running a solid business. It would seem to me that a company who felt the need to lie about their specifications would not be solid in the first place.
Anyhow. It may benefit to you be more professional on their forums, Azgo, if you desire any kind of decent reputation
0
Thanks for the feedback. I already have begun porting it to Bootstrap with a good Grunt-based build system.
0
Recently I've been contracted to do some drafts for a new Multicraft UI. I know many of you aren't too keen on it in its present state, and I'm looking to see if you have any input to give to improve it. Even the most minor details, tell me and I'll work on them! What could be done differently, be made more intuitive, or improved in some way? Who knows, your suggestion could make it into the next version.
Please tell me your thoughts. Thanks very much for your time!
0
Recently I've been contracted to do some drafts for a new Multicraft UI. I know many of you aren't too keen on it in its present state, and I'm looking to see if you have any input to give to improve it. Even the most minor details, tell me and I'll work on them! What could be done differently, be made more intuitive, or improved in some way? Who knows, your suggestion could make it into the next version.
Please tell me your thoughts. Thanks very much for your time!
0
That is a bit of a false analogy fallacy. Both RamNode and DigitalOcean use two great solutions - one an in-house system, and one a globally recognized billing solution. Both are good and widely accepted from the smallest to the largest hosts in the world. There is no one here saying that a custom-made billing system is inheritly superior to a custom one; designing is totally different from the kind of data-heavy and secure development that has to be done at that level. You are right: there is not such comparison to be made.
Hosts who do "own/buy their own website" do tend to be more stable, because they have the resources needed to stand out from the crowd. Look at DigitalOcean, RamNode, McProHosting. I cannot think of any large and stable host that does not use a theme designed particularly for that site. There is certainly no set-in-stone correlation that having a custom site = instant stability, but I think you will be hard pressed to find any large and stable host that uses a stock website theme.
0
0
Ah, interesting. That's a neat tool, though I think it's a bit redundant with SSH keys, and could make it hard for multiple people accessing a system. So a rather narrow use case. Something to keep in mind though.
0
I think what you're referring to is SSH keys, not two factor authentication (which would be like sending a text message to your phone or using an app to generate login codes; definitely a good idea anyway, for sites like PayPal, Dropbox, Google, and so on). SSH keys should be used. Period. I would never use password authentication on any server. They take all of one minute to install, then another minute to disable password authentication in sshd_config, and that's it.
Never, ever, use password authentication when key-based authentication is available. If you're doing credit card processing on-site, the PCI standard does not allow password-based system, such as FTP (SFTP being the alternative), to even be installed on the system.
Well, sometimes... WHMCS and Multicraft both use MD5-based hashing systems. It really comes down to how you're hashing them. Both systems use salted MD5 hashes, which are significantly harder to break. Though if you're building a new system you should probably use a better algorithm (PHP55 has a nice function, password_hash, which should be blowfish based) MD5 solutions aren't terrible - it just matters how they're implemented.
0
What... how do you... I don't even... I don't like modern technology either. To the stone age of tape drives and punchcards we go!
Crucial SSDs are alright - still a ton better than HDDs. I've got one in my computer from about three years ago when 64 GB at $80 was a good deal. It's still chugging along great. Samsung's Pro series SSDs are, of course, more expensive, because they are the single fastest consumer drives out there (not including enterprise orient drives like those of Fusion.io, which are truly incredible). Samsung's Evo series is more of an average performance, but, as Wyatt just mentioned above me, very cheap compared to other drives.
Yes, they will. Welcome to 2014. Terabyte SSDs now routinely sell for under $500; cheap, high-density SSD storage is very much in sight and nearly within the grasp of your average host.
0