2002 • September • 01

Construction on the orbital mind control laser platform has begun

So I took the plunge and snagged a FreeBSD "colocation" account with JohnCompanies, to address my desire for more experimental freedom on a server hosted Somewhere Out There. I may eventually hook up with a few fellow hackers to spread the monthly rent, and I may even consider floating some trial balloon for-pay services - assuming I hack together something I'm presumptious enough to think is worth money. :) But for now, the cost is very affordable for what I get.

So, I haven't dumped my current webhost yet, but I'm slowly going about installing services and software up there, including but not limited to: Apache, mod_perl, PHP4, Tomcat, Jabber, INNd, IRCd and whatever else seems like a good idea (whether or not it actually is a good idea). I might even throw a LiveJournal installation up there.

And, once I come to my senses, I may pare this list down and disable things until I get around to actually doing real things with them. More soon, I hope.

shortname=ooobfc

Archived Comments

Shawn

2002-09-01T04:39:36

Wow. I checked their site, and that seems WAY cheap for a colo box. I'll be very interested to see what you think of their service. Please let us know how it goes.
Sanjay

2002-09-01T06:30:14

I'm also impressed with their specifications. If things work well for you, I'd be interested in "hooking" up with you to share the rent of that server.
l.m.orchard

2002-09-01T13:22:28

I'm not sure, and I haven't asked to be sure, but from what I've read in his descriptions of things, what you get for that price is a jailed FreeBSD partition on a very powerful server box. You do not literally get your own physical server, but except for a handful of oddities, you have your own isolated virtual server. From other things he and others have said, and from the fact that I see he's planning to offer Linux virtual servers as well, I imagine there's more going on in his special sauce than simple FreeBSD jails. So far, I've been impressed with the performance (compiles happen faster than my terminal window can keep up sometimes) and with the support (questions tend to be personally answered in under an hour, sometimes within 10 minutes of an email). We'll see how things keep going.
Shawn

2002-09-01T18:25:55

One more question, if I can pester you again: does this include any kind of backup and media rotation?
l.m.orchard

2002-09-01T19:47:56

I believe he's got one daily backup for each server. Not sure at what time, but there's only ever yesterday's backup.
John

2002-09-02T09:03:16

I've always wondered what technology they use to let them run more than one server on a single physical machine, and if it's something I could do on my own machine at home. That would be very useful for having a server I could break but which would still keep working...
Sanjay

2002-09-03T16:25:52

John, you could easily simulate this using VMWare