Hosting

indolering
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Hosting

Post by indolering »

Right now Namecoin is using a dedicated server @ €50/ to run 3 VMS, one for the PHP website, another for the wiki, and a third for the forum. It was setup by Khal, which is confusing for the current admins. Provisioning sub-accounts is different for each sub-server.

In short: it's overkill, expensive, and a pain to administer especially when granting new users access. I want to reduce the amount of time Domob, Ryan, and Phelix dedicate to maintenance and I think the best way to do that is to move to a shared hosting provider with multi-user accounts, preferably one that would offer automatic updates.

EasyWeb has offered us free hosting. I've also sent emails out to 1984 hosting (which is based in Iceland). Dreamhost offers free hosting to 501(c)3's.

Thoughts?
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domob
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Re: Hosting

Post by domob »

While my opinion shouldn't really count (since I'm not doing any web/admin stuff), I'd suggest to use a VPS (but a single one) instead of shared hosting. It is not really that expensive and access can be given by SSH and/or whatever channels are needed - it would allow us to run a Namecoin node for the block explorer (for instance) in addition to pure web hosting. (Or an automatic build or whatever else may be of use some time.)
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Ben
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Re: Hosting

Post by Ben »

If shared hosting is going to be used it might be worth contacting NearlyFreeSpeech.NET too. They are the best shared hosting provider I have used, and I've used quite a few.
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indolering
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Re: Hosting

Post by indolering »

domob wrote:While my opinion shouldn't really count (since I'm not doing any web/admin stuff), I'd suggest to use a VPS (but a single one) instead of shared hosting. It is not really that expensive and access can be given by SSH and/or whatever channels are needed - it would allow us to run a Namecoin node for the block explorer (for instance) in addition to pure web hosting. (Or an automatic build or whatever else may be of use some time.)
I've got free VPS's through GreenQloud right now, but if we take up EasyWeb on their offer it would be zero cost to us and reduce administrative work.
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indolering
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Re: Hosting

Post by indolering »

Ben wrote:If shared hosting is going to be used it might be worth contacting NearlyFreeSpeech.NET too. They are the best shared hosting provider I have used, and I've used quite a few.
Oh yeah, I used to use NFS back-in-the-day! I'll check it out.
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phelix
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Re: Hosting

Post by phelix »

OVH is expensive but who should administer yet another move? It's quite a bit of work.
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biolizard89
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Re: Hosting

Post by biolizard89 »

phelix wrote:OVH is expensive but who should administer yet another move? It's quite a bit of work.
Consider how much money we lose by staying with something that's unnecessarily expensive, versus how much the time is worth that is spent moving. How much developer time could be paid for by the money we save?
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indolering
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Re: Hosting

Post by indolering »

phelix wrote:OVH is expensive but who should administer yet another move? It's quite a bit of work.
It would take a day, Ryan has access to the forums and I've got access to the wiki. I'll just setup a main account on EasyWEB and see if it has what we need. If so, I'll give you the account info and you can change everything over. Namecoin.org and .info will remain registered at OVH.
biolizard89 wrote: Consider how much money we lose by staying with something that's unnecessarily expensive, versus how much the time is worth that is spent moving. How much developer time could be paid for by the money we save?
Phelix can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it is €50/month, so €600/year or $777. I believe we are still running the Huntercoin block explorer on there, we would need to find a new home for it. I need to talk with GreenQloud before promising a VPS.
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indolering
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Re: Hosting

Post by indolering »

I sent this in a PM, but I thought it might help illustrate why we need to move hosting again,
indolering wrote:
biolizard89 wrote:How much time commitment is actually involved in dealing with the website server? I was under the impression that once the TLS certs and DNS are properly setup (which Ryan was planning on doing this month), most of the work could be done via Github repos. Is this actually something that Ryan+Phelix can't do effectively? (Not making an argument one way or another, I'm just curious.)
Well, there are issues right now as namecoin.org still hasn't been switched over properly and we need to purchase and install certs for SSL.

Even if there are no problems now, maintenance is an ongoing issue which (AFAIK) isn't being actively monitored. I haven't logged into the wiki server in a long time and I wouldn't be surprised if there are not standing security patches for it. We need to move to a managed system where all of that is handled for us.

I would like to skin the forums and wiki at some point, and possibly switch the forums over to Vanilla so we can have a Q&A interface and use their embeddable commenting system for documentation and the eventual NEP system. It would be nice if we could allow an account access to all of those systems instead of creating new accounts for each.
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phelix
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Re: Hosting

Post by phelix »

indolering wrote:
phelix wrote:OVH is expensive but who should administer yet another move? It's quite a bit of work.
It would take a day, Ryan has access to the forums and I've got access to the wiki. I'll just setup a main account on EasyWEB and see if it has what we need. If so, I'll give you the account info and you can change everything over. Namecoin.org and .info will remain registered at OVH.
biolizard89 wrote: Consider how much money we lose by staying with something that's unnecessarily expensive, versus how much the time is worth that is spent moving. How much developer time could be paid for by the money we save?
Phelix can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it is €50/month, so €600/year or $777. I believe we are still running the Huntercoin block explorer on there, we would need to find a new home for it. I need to talk with GreenQloud before promising a VPS.
It's €42 per month. But I expect the move to take much longer than a day - based on how long it took last time.

There is also the namecoin client for the explorer running on the server and some other stuff I am not sure we still need (Jenkins).

http://www.easyweb.com/ ?

As I said before IMHO the server should stay in Europe.

All in all I am for staying at OVH.
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