Slashdot Mirror

John Companies http://www.johncompanies.com/ and Tektonic http://www.tektonic.net/ for unmanaged VPS, ServInt http://www.servint.net/ for managed VPS and NetAccess http://www.nac.net/ for colo.

They're great. They offer the choice of Linux VMs with RedHat or Debian, or FreeBSD VMs. They also support the open source tools that run their stuff by giving discounts to contributors.

Even through I am no longer with them (decided I didn't need a full VHost anymore so I am just with dreamhost.com) I highly recommend them.

http://www.johncompanies.com

I highly recommend "John Companies" (http://www.johncompanies.com/). I had a FreeBSD virtual private server with them for nearly a year. Reasonable price, excellent service, and no outages. With the VPS, you have root inside a FreeBSD jail. You have full control over your jail.

We're customers of the parent organisation, JohnCompanies, and I can't recommend them highly enough. The thing that makes them stand out in my opinion is the support, you don't get clueless newbies reading from an FAQ like you do with every other hosting provider I've ever encountered.

I've been looking for an excuse to try out rsync.net, it seems like an interesting service, for example it offers WebDAV access, which is built into Windows, OS X and KDE.

Yeah, I know I sound like a fanboy or astroturfer, but I don't care, it's really rare to find a company that actually gets it so right when there are so many incompetents around, especially in the hosting business.

They have similar goals, but they're pretty different technically. For example, with Xen you have to partition the memory space quite rigidly - each virtual machine gets 128MB or whatever. They can't borrow from others memory that's not being used. So if you look at a Xen-based virtualization provider like RimuHosting, you'll see that their highest virtualized configuration gives you 320MB of memory. If you look at a Virtuozzo-based one like JohnCompanies, you'll see the other extreme:

[slamb@scooby slamb]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8275068 8206096 68972 0 1696704 1678948
-/+ buffers/cache: 4830444 3444624
Swap: 6144852 4097468 2047384

That's one of the most obvious differences. Another is that Virtuozzo's rather customized kernel tends to lag behind - my virtual server is a 2.4 release that annoyingly lacks NPTL. I imagine that's what they're trying to address with OpenVZ and mainstream kernel inclusion.

(Incidentally, both the hosting companies I linked to are nice places with open source developer discounts.)

There's an insane amount of bitching about how terrible the job market is, how inane and shortsighted HR departments are, blah blah blah.

If that's all true, then those business are ripe for being raped of their marketshare. Start your own business!

It takes virtually NOTHING to startup a company these days... a 1U server of commercial quality runs less than $1,000, hosting can be had for about $100/month and the Operating System is free...

Give yourself a few months worth of beans and/or working part-time, sleep on a couch with a cheapie computer borrowing the DSL service from a neighbor's wifi connection, and you can do a startup for next to NOTHING.

Why aren't you doing it? If YOU are in charge, you can't be fired. If YOU are in charge, you'll be able to use sensible HR policies to get the really good ones, too.

So why are you here whining on Slashdot about how horrible it all is???? If it's half as bad as you claim, you have the opportunity to become RICH!!!!

PS: I'm quite familiar with the startup routine - I haven't had a "job" in some 15 years, and have started quite a few businesses, successfully fed, clothed, raised, and home-schooled my family of 5 kids in one of the more economically depressed counties in California.

Startups can be thrilling! Pull up your sleeves, and don't just "think outside the box", throw the box out altogether. You'd be amazed at what you can accomplish if you:

1) Find something people will pay for,

2) Deliver that something as efficiently as possible, cost-effectively, and with a smile,

3) Wash, rinse, repeat. Before you know it, your clients are almost friends, and do most of your sales work for you by giving referrals...

Contact me if you're curious... I'd be happy to offer my experience to anybody who is serious.

I hosted with JohnCompanies and they were great! Linux and FreeBSD only, either virtual private servers or dedicated boxes, or colo your own, and real Unix admins for support if you need it.

They also offer discounts if you're hosting an open source-related, non-profit, or educational site!

The only reason I left them is that a client allows me to colocate my own servers in his cage for free... if that deal ever goes away, I'm switching back to JohnCompanies in a heartbeat.

I can safely say the only time I click on an ad when online, is when my mouse slips?

I've clicked on an advert and bought something.

It was a small, text-only advert that simply gave the relevent product details: root on a FreeBSD virtual server for $65/mo, no set-up fee. I saw it, I thought it sounded like a good deal, clicked through, their website was simple and clear, so I signed up. They've given excellent service with the best technical support I've ever found in a hosting company, and I've been using them for years now.

I realise this sounds like an advert, but I'm not paid to say this or anything; I think it's a good example of effective advertising - a targeted ad that gives the relevent facts without being obtrusive, followed up with an excellent product. Compared with the "throw yourself at as many eyeballs as you can" approach, I know which I'm willing to tolerate and even give business to, and which I am going to block permanently.

The ads are small, suit the page style, and are 100% connected to the site's content. (Pocket PC games). Why do poeople block them?

What other adverts does that host serve? If the advertiser you use has tame ads for you, but nasty ads elsewhere, ad blockers may well visit one of those other sites first, and block the ad host altogether.

The same applies to what URL you use. If you have them in a directory called /ads/ then I will probably not see any of them, as I have blocked those types of URLs when visiting other sites with abusive ads.

I'll have to echo other posters too - don't use your loan to run this. At the very least, ask for donations, ask for sponsors, and shop around for hosts. My host would give me over 100GB per month for the price you are paying. Looking at your website, if you are shifting that much traffic, moving to a CSS-based design and tuning your HTTP response headers could drop a significant amount of bandwidth use.

IMHO, BSD's jail() is one of the more interesting developments in recent versions -- at least for an internet service provider.

For those of you unfamiliar, check it out. It's very much like User Mode Linux and allows running virtual servers within a larger server. Many colocation/virtual server providers (e.g. take, your, pick) use FreeBSD jails to provide low-cost root-access hosts for customers. This really has revolutionized cost effectiveness of large scale hosting!

There have been various limitations with FreeBSD jails when they first appeared. There were glitches with information leaking across jails. There's a limit to a single IP address, inability to do raw socket operations or even ping/traceroute, and some glitches with a couple system calls used by major applications like Postfix.

But my understanding is that 5.x seriously improves jail support, especially from a resource efficiency perspective. One of my BSD developer buddies also tells me that he's fixing raw socket support. Keep an eye on the jail feature...

try Johncompanies I know a couple of people using them and they are very satisfied.

There are actually providers out there that do this, though I don't know any of them by name

best i've seen so far

JohnCompanies - Collocation Services

thor

I have a open source project myself, which I used to host on sourceforge. However, after having used Sourceforge for six months or so, I decided to go looking for hosting somewhere else. The main reason for doing this was because I always thought the Sourceforge systems are a bit "clunky" and inflexible, and I wanted total freedom in which services to provide, and how to configure them.

After a while I stumbled upon a company called John Companies. These guys provide virtual FreeBSD / Linux servers; you get root on your own system, a unique IP address, and full freedom in what to do with your system.

Now, these guys are professionals - you just know that from day one. The systems are really well run, I have had almost no problems at all (except one network outage because of a couple of busted routers at their network providers). And the support is fantastic - you can ask them about any problem you may have, and they'll usually get back to you at once. Their prices are low too, $65 a month for a freebsd system, but if you are an open source developer they'll even give you a $20 discount.

The only snag, really, is that you'll have to set everything up yourself. This was my main reason for switching from sourceforge anyway, so it wasn't a problem for me - but others may not want to go through all the work.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with John Companies in any way, except being a very, very satisfied customer.

On their page, they say: " Our steep discounts are made possible by technology that allows us to segment Enterprise class servers into multiple, independent servers - each one a completely autonomous system."

Some stats:

$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2059112 2036280 22832 0 178508 346948
-/+ buffers/cache: 1510824 548288
Swap: 4096524 1728660 2367864

/proc/cpuinfo says that the machine has two of "Pentium III (Coppermine) cpu MHz : 864.003 cache size : 256 KB".

I'm planning to give it a harder workout in the future - running JBoss for some experiments. I'm not sure how that will work out, the free RAM seems a bit low.

For the "casual" treatment of customer security, that's true. They don't have a customer ID# and I wonder how they track all the customers on a "personal" level.

• root on your own server
• Full Linux Filesystem
• 4 gigs disk - Up to 10 IPs
• 40 Gigs transfer / Month
• Firewall access
• Unlimited tech support
• They supply the hardware

John advertises his business and responds to queries over at K5. $65/mo for a FreeBSD jail, $75/mo for a Linux virtual machine running under (I think) VMWare. He gives discounts to free software developers.

There are lots of positive testimonials .

• - root on your own server
• - Full Linux Filesystem
• - 4 gigs disk - Up to 10 IPs
• - 40 Gigs transfer / Month
• - Firewall access
• - Unlimited tech support
• - They supply the hardware

The machine that you want a shell on, might be much better connected than your home machine. Why do you think that hosting companies (web hosting, email hosting, virtual-colocating, etc) still exist? There's a good reason Rob doesn't run Slashdot on a PC in his laundry room.

So for the same price, I decided this week to switch to a virtual co-located server at JohnCompanies which is kick-ass fast, and has NO troubles with connectivity. That server is in a controlled environment. I really doubt that any home/small office DSL solution would be economically feasible for the RELIABILITY that you require, if you just need to have one server for web, dns, database and email.

JohnCompanies, a 3-man operation, advertises almost exclusively by word of mouth. For example, there is an excellent discussion here on Kuro5hin.org, which basically sold me on the service.

I've installed my own DNS, I've installed Python, Zope, and more. Apache was a snap to get up and running, as was BIND and other programs. The basic linux service is RedHat 6.2 with a ton of preinstalled packages, with the important ones (ssl, apache, and more) patched to address recent security concerns. I've already got 5 domains running, with both Zope and Apache, and I'm about to move over my personal sites to the second account.

Support is good, usually I get a response within a few hours. Occasionally for some requests, such as adding more zones for them to slave, it's taken a few days, with an apology. But they've always come through, and they know the answers.

I'm currently on JohnCompanies.
They do virtual colo service; that is, you get root on your own virtual server, but you really share hardware with some of their other clients. Works alright, $65/mo is what I'm paying...

I wouldn't say *any* BSD system. I have one of the virtual servers from here, and while it looks and acts ALMOST like a FreeBSD 4.5 machine, there are some things missing... like the kernel, /proc, a lot of devices. I wonder how it works.