help: Dedicated server hosting - esp Zope

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

You know how it is - you just want a few things:

[] limited shell access
[] ability to run java server applications
[*] an installed Zope or similar CMS (content mgmt system) - you don’t even care if they install it themselves and only give you limited access, as long as you can have the damn thing

and the world’s hosting companies (especially cheapo USA ones) run away screaming unless you go for a dedicated/co-lo server. But then you have all the pain of trying to find someone reasonably-priced, with moderately good quality, who won’t steal your domain use you as a spam-host and then sue you for the priviledge.

And even if you find someone on recommendation, you know that you could be paying 10 times the going rate, or that you’re probably being raped (metaphorically) on excess-bandwidth charges or similar.

But what can you do? The big boys are offering everything (including piece of mind) but wiht a min spend of $2000 per month, and you know you can get dedicated server hosting for under $50 a month.

Does anyone have any recommendations, positive or negative? I’m looking for somewhere to move JGF to, and add user-accounts etc, which means I either need Python (lets you run Zope, and all the systems like Plone that are based on Zope) or I need Java (so I can run a custom server). Co-incidetnally a friend who runs a multi-million-hit site is being screwed by 1-and-1 at the moment, and is also looking for somewhere new - although he needs a “managed” server, where he doesn’t have to install and maintain the server himself, but can install whatever CGI etc he likes and has a dedicated CPU for his website (uses a log of CGI!).

#2

Endolf an I just recently organised a server (for newdawn projects) after rather alot of research. Our requirements were:

  • Direct control of the server
  • Dedicated machine
  • Wads and Wads of allowed bandwidth

We ended up going to http://www.spry.com with a dedicated box, 1000GB/month traffic allowance. It runs linux, we have direct shell access (root). The machine spec is pretty good (good enough to run our servers at least, its where Mini Adventure currently runs). Generally, I’ve been pretty impressed.

EDIT: Oh, it costs about $100 a month, which is ~55 quid. Not bad.

Kev

#3

Thanks for that.

Entirely by accident, I just discovered a UK hosting company in LINX that does a cheap Zope-hosting package - openia.com. Obviously I can’t comment on quality, reliability, or even whether their system works at all. But it looks like a good offer on paper…

#4

[quote]We ended up going to http://www.spry.com with a dedicated box, 1000GB/month traffic allowance.
[/quote]
Correct, except we went with www.servermatrix.com :), It has no web interface though, not by default, I think the VPS we looked at at spry.com did, but it’s not a dedicated server, which is what we wanted.

Cheers

Endolf

#5

Ooopsie! :slight_smile:

EDIT: Ain’t I just the organised one.

Kev

#6

hehe I also note they are doing 1200GB for the same price we pay for 1000GB, doh! :slight_smile:

Endolf

#7

Puppy Games is looking to move to a Linux server by servermatrix - $79/mo as opposed to the extortionate $150 we pay for our Win2k theplanet server.

There are 2 snags:

  1. I haven’t got a clue about Linux - all my (many) experiences with it are something that just doesn’t ever fekking work properly in many obscure irritating ways

  2. It’s still vastly in excess of what we need - we would really like to share the server with a few others to split the cost (we only make $20 in sales a month so the cost is prohibitive). The reason we need a “dedicated” server is because we run a few custom Java services.

Anybody has any offers, drop me a line.

Cas :slight_smile:

#8

SM are apparently just part of ThePlanet.com - although I couldn’t see any info on the nature of the relationship (spin-out? ???). They do look like a great deal if you need that kind of b/w…

Spry currently claim to have “Un-managed Dedicated Servers starting at $99.95” - are you saying these aren’t actually DS’s?

#9

Hi
We didn’t look at their dedicated ones as we didn’t want to spend $100 a month, (and you have to call sales to get any info on them it seemed), we looked at the silver hosting, gold server and platinum server products. And yes, ServerMatrix is related to theplanet, the ip of our box is on theplanet, the ‘welcome to server matrix’ stuff came back twice, once from them and once from theplanet :). theplanet.com seems to be more aimed at much larger server requirements than server matrix, but beyond that I have no clue :slight_smile:

Endolf

#10

Bandwidth from theplanet seems awful. People are typically getting 7-10kb/sec from it :confused:

Cas :slight_smile:

#11

Well server matrix quite happily game me 200k/s the other day, so I can’t complain :), that wasn’t to my flat in the UK though, not sure what the transatlantic link is like.

Endolf

#12

I have a dedicated server with Servermatrix since october and I couldn’t be happier.
Service has always been swift and accurate for me (ok, there was one incident with reverse DNS, but that’s about it)

My total downtime has been about 5 minutes ever since I got started there.

If you got any questions about them, feel free to ask me (or better yet, use their forums…the people are helpful)

And yes, Servermatrix is the “budget” segment of Theplanet.
But don’t let the budget part scare you off…it really is good.

EDIT: I have heard only 2 complaints about speed so far, both could be traced back to a odd connection or a temporary problem with one of the pipelines.
I’m transatlantic and get solid 125 ms pings and 250 kb/s downloads (my ADSL max)

#13

What about this? http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=OnLin;action=display;num=1085322747;start=9#9

#14

an question with www.spry.com - they say that with the gold plan you don’t get java - surely that means that it’s just not preconfigured as you have root access and you could do it yourself ???

They also say you don’t have unlimited virtual hosts (hosted domains) but that’s odd, becasue again you have root access.

Strange…

Will.

#15

Cas, did you find all the sharers you wanted in the end? And if not, what kind of spare resource are you currently running at? (perhaps I could share with you for a few months as a staging point for JGF v.3 - without the full feature set, it’s not going to be resource-heavy, but I do need to run a custom webserver).

Anyway, that aside, I’ve given up on Zope now. I am bringing my extensive expertise in CMS’s (going back to 1997) to bear upon a custom java CMS for JGF. It’s going well so far on my home LAN, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been in the wrong business the last few years - perhaps I should have been selling corporate CMS’s instead?

PS if anyone here might benefit from a cheap, fast, ultra-easy-to-maintain CMS (or, more likely, you know a company that might), please contact me. If I can sell a few licenses for it then the money will go to adding JGF features faster.

PPS in case it’s not obvious, this is a spin-off product from the GrexEngine - so I get the networking and much of the admin and management side for free :). Just have to add the CMS-specific features

#16

I finally found a good + free CMS, hiding over at Apache.org (why oh why do OSS programmers think it’s “cool” to give their projects nonsensical names so that you never find them unless you already know the name? It’s a level of arrogance that only someone like MS could really get away with - and even they don’t do it; the internal codenames are NEVER used in marketing, they go with nice easy names, so that Windows 95 was followed by Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP - easy for the consumer to know they’re all the same product, and most of the time to tell which is more recent too).

It’s called Cocoon, and although it’s a bit sucky as a CMS, it’s based on a brilliant design: it uses SAX events to build a one-way-only service-architecture pipeline.

Which probably doesn’t mean much to people here, but basically it forces the system to always be conceptually easy to configure and maintain, and also makes inter-module communication excessively efficient.

It’s a pity that none of the 15-odd core developers appear to know how to make a CMS, otherwise it could be excellent. As it is, the CMS part is still under wraps, and although you can use Cocoon as a standalone CMS, it’s very sparse featured (reflecting the lack of CMS experts on the team).

Anyway, it’s fundamentally fast, efficient, and easy to maintain - which places it a few leagues ahead of 99% of the competition.

Conveniently, since it’s XML + XSLT based, it would also be particularly easy to convert JGF to it quickly. Which leaves me with the dilemma that I could get JGF converted very quickly and up and running on a CMS, but then adding any interesting features would take much longer (because of the lack of any/all “serious” CMS features with cocoon). For instance, it would be extremely painful to implement a jardiff server on top of cocoon…whereas with the grexengine services I’m using it’s almost effortless. Guess I’ll probably go with the “harder up front, easier / faster in the long term”

#17

[quote]Cas, did you find all the sharers you wanted in the end? And if not, what kind of spare resource are you currently running at? (perhaps I could share with you for a few months as a staging point for JGF v.3 - without the full feature set, it’s not going to be resource-heavy, but I do need to run a custom webserver).
[/quote]
…?