Some Background…

1^st of February 2008, I took on the moniker “LowEndAdmin” and a picture of an old VIC-20, and wrote the very first blog entry “Hello World“. It has since been quite a ride over the last 4 years. I was a lone blogger back then. I worked as a software architect for a financial software company, and had some general amusement in the world of hosting and virtualisation. A low cost VPS where you get root account + total control was a niche that I rarely saw people writing about, back then at least. So I started blogging about low end VPS hosting with a monthly cost capped at $7/month. I was on the hunt of some cheap servers for my spare time projects at that time anyway. I was looking for servers that were cheap enough so that the cost of hosting can never used as excuses not to get my hands dirty with ideas.

Fast forward 4 years.

LowEndBox.com is quite a different beast these days. It’s often mentioned in other webhosting forums (hmm, I meant WHT). It’s one of the top 3 results when you search “cheap vps” on Google. Rather than scanning through offers sections on WHT, low end providers are jamming my inbox with listing requests every single day. It has built a hard core community over here and at LowEndTalk, where hosting related topics and other non-sense are often discussed. It even endured some nasties. Big thanks for the community for not forsaking the site when it was in trouble.

Just Don’t Have The Time…

However it seems that I’ll be the one deserting the community here.

Despite the apparent “success” of LowEndBox, for the past year it has become more of a liability to me, rather than an enjoyable blog, let alone a useful asset. The amount of work involved in posting escalates. The ever enlarging dead pool means it takes more time to investigate all the n00b providers who sent me requests. Writing dead pool posts itself is actually mentally disturbing, by just thinking about all these scams in the hosting industry. And technical posts? Regarding to fine tuning services for low end systems? These became few and far between, as most people are here just for the cheap “too good to be true” VPS offers.

A blog that was originally set out to help me getting started to work on my side ideas became a big project in itself, where it sucks up valuable time where I could actually do some “work”. This was more of the case over the last 12 months, where I transit from being a faceless employee of a large corporation to being the boss of my own startup. For those who have worked in tech startups you would know how much time your own business demands, not to mention I also have family and church commitments. I often post on LowEndBox way pass 12am wondering, “hey why am I still posting here?” I just don’t have the time.

Nor Enjoying The Community…

Okay. I have to say that I got to “know” some great individuals over the last 4 years on this blog, although “know” does not go beyond a few email exchanges. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with some of you.

At the same time this community is also filled with teenage hosts plotting their next pump ‘n’ dump, and scam artists planning how to defraud a provider. Blogging here for 4 years forced me to see a lot of dark side of hosting business. Many are also quick to shot down a competitor, and people don’t hesitate to label others “scammers”. I too might be at fault here for being extra sceptical and cynical — but I have to admit that it does not make a community enjoyable.

And guess how much that motivates me to keep on writing here? Not much.

Staled Growth of The Websites…

With me severely lacking in time + motivation, unfortunately that it’s the community that suffers. I have to say that LowEndBox actually did not grow much in 2011, in terms of number of visitors and page views. At the same time I know there is so much you can do with a hosting oriented community.

But I don’t have time. That again draws in guilt because I know how much useful this website can be, if I have the time to code these new features and extra functionalities, if I have the time to be more interactive with other community members, if… The websites remain stale because their owner don’t have time nor enough motivation to grow it. Not cool.

I am Taking an Exit…

So, I decided that that’s it for me. I need to move on. Moreover, it’s not just reducing responsibilities and asking for extra hands. I want to be out of here, completely. Just don’t want to think about “I wonder how LowEndBox is doing” when I am taking a break after a long day at work.

I got a few options here.

• Mark Pilgrim-style infosuicide by just shutting down all the sites and replying HTTP/1.0 410 Gone. We will just wake up one morning and LowEndBox is no more. And life moves on.

  Probably not the best solution — even I would agree with that. Although I can see it as an attractive option when nothing else works.

• Sell the sites on Flippa to the highest bidder. This site fetches just ~USD$500 per month on the ads so I guess with 12 to 24 months valuation people might pay $10k for it? Seems to be a small chunk, but at least there’s something for me after blogging here for 4 years.

  However, I think it might not be the best outcome for the community. Whoever buys the site you’ll be sure that they’ll want to have ROI. I don’t want to think about what will happen when the new owner just wants to squeeze every bit of revenue out from this site.

  But then again, (1) everything has a price, and (2) never say never.

• Pass on the baton to the chosen one, to whoever is worthy, or just to the “people”, to the community. “Here is the key”, hmmm I mean the domain EPP code and my root password, take control and let the website be what it meant to be! Grow it, and continue to benefit to the el-cheapo hosting community!

  I guess this might be the preferable outcome. However, whom should I pass the websites to? Who is willing to take up the responsibility? Many are willing to put up their hands I guess, but who would the community trust? A hosting company with lots of insider knowledge? A veteran leader who knows how to manage a community? A carefree college student who has lots of time on his hand? Hmmm. Probably not the last one.

Okay. I have now spelt out my intention and will just let the discussion roll from here. I will try to answer questions in this thread and keep people updated. If you wish to contact me directly, here is the email address: contact@lowendbox.com.

Updates

Thanks for all the people who emailed me their offers. I have already decided on the outcome — I will pass the baton to one community member who has already formed a team to move the sites forward. Announcement will be made in the next couple of days when the dust settles.

• I am running out of time. Apology to all the providers who have emailed me their Christmas specials (and in some cases, just repeats of their previous offers), and sorry I won’t be able to fulfil all your requests. I haven’t even really started on my “Dead Pool November 2011″ post yet (although there were some discussions on last month’s dead pool list at LowEndTalk.com).

• I am also taking a break, and will take my family on a road trip for a few days. 350km drive tomorrow and there are still lots to be packed. There won’t be new blog posts here either, but feel free to continue the discussion at the LowEndTalk site.

The website is still currently hosted at eNetSouth sponsored VMware VPS in Chicago with ColoCrossing. The VPS is actually up, except that it is not usable. Like what terry has described, loadavg continued to climb and VPS is not responding at all.

I did decide to stick with eNetSouth when their San Jose/8×8 servers were failing — I know Brandon is technically competent, has many years of experience, and I do genuinely hope that they’ll eventually put out the fire. However, at the same time my commitment is with the members of LowEndTalk, and I won’t be able to wait for eNetSouth indefinitely to resuscitate their servers.

So,

• I’ll wait for now. Yes I know — LowEndTalk is down, but it’s just a damn community website. Go out & enjoy a day at the beach or at the park.

• However I might move the site tomorrow to a different hosting provider, if LowEndTalk stays off-line. Thanks for all the offers, but I think I’ll choose NOT to be affiliated with a provider this time.

I’m taking some time off computer for now. Have a nice day :)

• Roel from QuickWeb has offered me a new IP that’s not null routed by SoftLayer. I have updated DNS to reflect the changes. Moreover, I am putting CloudFlare in front of LowEndBox.com (as suggested on WHT) to see how it goes.
• Brandon from eNetSouth has suggested to move LowEndTalk from San Jose to Chicago with ColoCrossing with better DDoS mitigation facility. This is currently in progress.

I will keep this blog post updated.

Updated 16 July 21:45 UTC: Looks like LowEndBox.com was attacked again around 4 hours ago (~18:00 UTC), as commented by Roel here. 3.5Gbps peak, although from my Cacti graph the incoming packets was only burst for < 15 minutes — could have been blocked on the router by Cisco Guard. It could be null-routed any time…

Winners

• RamHost (24 votes, not counting 4 negative votes). “RAM IZ DA BEST!!!!!!!!!!” –ViceCheese
• QuickWeb (24 votes, not counting 5 negative votes). “Overall, the quality of bandwidth, the server specs, and performance have exceeded all of my expectations for a LEB” –rajprakash
• BuyVM (24 votes, not counting 7 negative votes). “…awesome IRC Channel and the friendlyness of staff!” — maxexcloo

Yes, they turn out to have exactly the same number of +1 votes. They are also exactly the same as last quarter’s top 3.

Honorable Mentions

These providers have done pretty well in the last poll.

• Hostigation (19 votes, not counting 1 negative vote). “but Hostigation is the next big thing in VPS market” –asim
• VooServers (13 votes, not counting 1 negative vote). “very stable, user friendly service with mature approach” –Spirit
• EvoRack (12 votes, not counting 3 negative votes). “One of the few providers who know IPv6 is important and understand how it works” –rm_

Hopefully we’ll see at least one UK provider getting into the top 3. It’s also great to see so many hosts providing affordable servers and yet never skimp on support.

Anyway. Hacker News is one of more popular tech community. It wasn’t really Slashdot (back in its hey days) nor Digg (its popularity has also been declining), however I think it might still be interesting to see how LowEndBox handled that “spike of traffic”. Remember — it’s on a 80MB “micro VPS” provided by QuickWeb, running current WordPress stable without any caching plugins.

Well. Not really spectacular, is it? I counted that only around 5,000 page views over 12 hours. My VPS struggled a little bit (some caching would have helped as it’s hitting one single page), but it survived without too much trouble. Much better than when someone did a load impact test to DDoS this blog last year. From the discussion on that Hacker News page, I guess not many people actually visited the site or read the content anyway. Thanks to “cdx”, “jack12″, “dmmcintyre3″, “nl” who have tried to defend me on HN, but let me try to answer some questions here.

• My original article was mocking some of the “experts” on WebhostingTalk, when someone asked how much memory is needed to host 18 static websites. Obviously it is not literally limited at 18 static sites. With async/event based web servers, on a low end VPS it’s probably going to be limited at disk IO (assuming not enough memory to cache all frequently used files). But if you want to host 10,000 low traffic static sites?! There shouldn’t be a problem.

• My original article then extended to cover not just static file serving, but actually getting a full stack to run WordPress, since it is probably the most popular open source blogging software. In fact the VPS runs LowEndBox.com is not too different (80MB memory, Nginx instead of Lighttpd), and it did ~40,000 WordPress PHP requests yesterday. As I’ve said in the previous point — number of static websites does not really matter. However, number of full PHP requests on a popular off-the-shelf package would make it a more meaningful comparison (and something can’t be replicated using Amazon S3).

• Pfft. Back in ’97 when I wrote my first “real world” web app, demoing a library category system written in Perl CGI saving data to BerkeleyDB. Whole backend (Linux, Apache, Perl CGI) plus the front end (X11, Netscape Navigator, no window manager though) run on a 486 DX4-75 laptop with 8MB of memory. But that’s beside the point. I want to focus what you can get out from a 64MB VPS, right now.

• I feel disgusted on how someone would perceive that HN posting as “spam”. I have no idea who “tshtf” is on HN and why he chose to post that 2 year old article. As of the affiliation link being questioned in Hacker News, well

  • The only affiliate link I have ever posted on LowEndBox was for VPSLink, when this site was once hosted there. VPSLink used to provide hosting credit (not redeemable to cash) to their “affiliates”. So I was effectively just trying to reduce my hosting cost — that was before any banner ads were introduced to this website. That was when Cameron was still running the show in VPSLink.
  • VPSLink was then purchased by Endurance International in early 2010, and they have also conveniently forgotten about all my hosting credits. D’oh. Those old “affiliate links” obviously don’t work for me any more. Moreover after having issues with Endurance, I had a series of moves. Big thanks to QuickWeb for providing this VPS to me for free to host LowEndBox (and I always need to remember making disclaimers when I post their offers).

  Anyway, I am sure even after a full explanation there will still be people calling “spam”, “shill” or whatever. Quoting one representative of an ex-provider featured here (who is already in deadpool). “Hater gonna hates” :)

Guess what? Getting featured on front page of Hacker News and it actually wasn’t really a good experience. Elitist mentality? Simply ignorant? I have no idea. Or did I just waste an hour posting this non-sense rather than another good low end offer?

So I won’t stop some of you going ahead acquiring those domains (& set up content farm with ads to catch overflowed traffic when people googled “lowendbox”). But whatever those domains ended up used for, I AM NOT affiliated with them.

And instead of buying domains from domain squatter, I have a domain to GIVE AWAY! Here it is:

Yes it is a 4-character dot COM! Yes it has “VPS” in there. Sorry it has number “4″ prefixing “VPS”. Originally I got this one hoping to do something like “looking.4vps.com”, i.e. 4 sounds like “for” in English. However I have never managed to find time to start such site due to busyness. Unfortunately “4″ also sounds like “dead” in Mandarin-Chinese and I don’t think a dead VPS is a good thing :) This domain has been registered since 2007 but has only been collecting dust so it would be good if someone takes over it and puts it into good use. Create a useful website, or sell VPS services/products — whatever.

But whom should I give this domain to? Let’s run a competition :)

• Comment here why you should win this domain name.
• I will pick a winner in the next 48 hours, criteria being that I know the domain will be in good hands (rather than someone who just want to resell the domain itself later for a higher price).
• The winner will have to pay the transfer fee, which is usually 1 year of registration from the registrar of your choice. I will provide the EPP + approving the transfer.

Well. Let the competition start!

I have just looked at my inbox and saw around 10 emails that I have received since late Friday which I have not yet actioned — 10 from various hosting providers trying to have their offers posted here. Looking back I have posted over 30 low end offers since the beginning of this month. A bit excessive I found. Not to mention the amount of time spent on background checks and posting the actual offers. And who knows how many of them are just going to do a “Ben Harper” of RackVM?

Not to mention LowEndBox was supposed to be my “spare time” hobby. Unfortunately my “spare time” has been scarce lately due to some up-coming changes in life. As you can see I really do not have time to post every offer people threw at me. I also hate to see LowEndBox becoming “just a cheap advertisement platform” for the budget hosting providers — although I think it might have already been the case.

Therefore I am going to make some changes here. I will reduce the frequency of posts, and tighten up the criteria.

1. I will not post new offers from providers which I have previously posted over the last 30 days. Those weekly “reminder emails” are getting really annoying. Unless it is an exceptionally good offer — but I’ll be the judge on what is “exceptional”.

2. I will not accept annual payment offers from providers that have been around for less than one year. How can I have any confident that you will finish year 2, when you are still stuck in year 1? I will use domain age as an indicator.

3. Annual payment threshold is now capped at $60/year (~$5/month). People should expect appropriate discount if they are asked to pay for the whole year upfront.

And sorry for those who have already emailed me asking to be “featured” — I don’t really have time to respond to all of you. If you don’t fit the criteria, your request might be silently ignored.

• There won’t be any posting on this blog within the next two weeks. But feel free to discuss about your low end box issues with others in the community at LowEndTalk.com.
• That also means if you are a provider and are thinking of sending me your offers, they probably won’t be posted until a few days before Christmas. Feel free to send them to be regardless (email: contact <at> this.domain), but you might need to make sure that the promo lasts until Christmas.
• I won’t be able to approve new comments (for those who have not commented here before).

So guys, please keep it civil when you post your comments here on LowEndBox :) There might be Internet access there if I can get onto a free WiFi with my phone, but I think I probably should not set my hope too high.

And an early Merry Christmas to everyone :)

• 256MB memory/712MB swap
• 20GB storage
• 1,500GB/month data transfer
• 1x Intel Xeon X3430 core at 2.40GHz
• Ubuntu 10.04 x86 on VMWare
• San Jose data center

This VPS has special price of $7.99/month on eNSCloud’s website, although eNSCloud has been giving LowEndBox readers promotions such as $6.95/month for 400MB VM or $18.75/3 months for 512MB VM. So far so good — 256MB with 1x Xeon core runs LowEndTalk fine with Nginx proxy to 2x gunicorn/Django backend running OSQA. IO performance is pretty decent. San Jose location would be good for Asia Pacific visitors, and hopefully still usable for our European visitors.

I’m interested to get a VPS box to host some git repos + probably mail server in future, and I was looking for ranking for the VPS providers mentioned on lowendtalk, but I couldn’t find any.

Can someone points me to that if it exist, or just give me recommendation for something that is reliable and not expensive?

Sorry for taking your genuine question and making it into something else, Abdel! Instead of people suggesting a VPS provider to suit his need, how about we use the voting feature on OSQA to have regular Low End VPS provider recommendations? Instead of me creating a big table and listing out hosting providers that pays me the most (hey I can see GoDaddy, BlueHost and HostGator there!) It is your turn to recommend your fellow community members a fast, stable and cheap VPS.

I am planning to run it regularly but not as often as once per month — maybe once per quarter. For now, head down to the current recommendation discussion topic, and

• Check whether the provider has already been nominated. If it hasn’t…
• Each individual can nominate ONE provider. Make it an “Answer” to this discussion topic. Please include
  • The name of the provider on the first line + their “low end VPS package” that you recommend (optional)
  • The reason why you wish to nominate this provider and its VPS package.
• Discussion of that provider can be added as comments to that Answer.
• If your preferred provider has already been nominated, then VOTE IT UP!
• As the Answers are sorted by votes by default, the winner (most recommended provider) will stay at top.

Let’s just give this model a try first and see how it works out.

Also please DO NOT post referral/affiliation links (which is the main thing that ruins all these web hosting review sites).

The rational going for a QA site

• Hey, it’s trendy. Quora? StackOverflow?
• Voting, points and badges are fun.
• It fits into the model where people ask question about getting their low end boxes up and running.

That also means providers should not post their offers in LowEndTalk anymore. Which does not work anyway as I have been deleting “ads” that do not fit into our listing criteria (they should probably be called spams). If you get a special offer for LowEndBox readers, contact me with your offers.

The site will be beta-testing for the next couple of days, and switch over in the first week of December.

• Connectivity (whether the website is live)
• IP address changes
• WHOIS record changes (since July 2010)

It is running once an hour scanning over 200+ providers, and then email me the latest changes.

However, wouldn’t it be nice if the community here can use the same tool for research?

So I decided to post the full logs onto Low End Wiki, which was “recently rediscovered” with lots of out-dated data. So how does it work?

• Go to http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki/<provider’s domain> to their page, which you can see historical logs. For example the RackVM.com which died early this month.
• Use the provider tag to show the list of providers that I am currently tracking.
• Use the down tag to get a list of providers that are currently marked as “down”. You will need to go to the provider’s page and see the last log entry for the reason why it’s marked as down. Also note that a provider is marked as down if I failed to retrieve their website twice in a roll, i.e. over 2 hour span.
• At the end of each month, after my dead pool post, I will then remove the dead providers from the tracker. On the wiki the page will remain, but will be listed under the deadpool tag.

Make sense? Provider’s wiki pages are updated automatically via Dokuwiki’s XMLRPC interface. Now use it, but don’t abuse it :)

LowEndBox.com was started back in early 2008 as I was hunting for cheap VPS boxes for my processing nodes for one of the projects I had at that time. Basically the rule was simple — I only wanted to pay up to $7/month for VPS in multiple locations, and I did not really care about memory, disk space and bandwidth. The nodes just need to connect to my DB and MQ (hosted at Linode), download requests, process them and send it back. Done! Any VPS with 64MB memory can do it.

However it turns out “my cheap VPS hosting notepad” has grown in popularity over time. According to Google Analytics it has received 130,000+ page views over the last 30 days from visitors all around the globe (top 3 being US, UK and China). So for the last year or so I have been selling banner ads on this blog via BuySellAds. Due to popularity I have to increase the price of the ads twice (and maybe 3rd time soon). However there is still a long queue of advertisers. When PingVPS gave up their spot 2 days ago, BuySellAds was swarmed by the requests from advertisers (31 waiting on the spot when I last checked). HostVillage got in first, and sorry for others who are still waiting.

(By the way it was a mistake by myself at the beginning to grant Yomura Holdings 4 of the 8 125×125 spots. All ads now need to be approved and I won’t let the same provider take more than 1 ad space.)

BuySellAds has suggested to make dramatic increase on the price — which I think would not suit this niche where I actually promote “cheap” hosting. So what’s from this point onwards?

• I am still taking the “no affiliation sales” stance. I know you guys fought for the advertising spot and sent me heaps of emails each day because it actually converts for you. But I much prefer to keep this blog independent from hosting providers. The only one I am sort-of affiliated to is QuickWeb as they provide this 80MB Xen VPS to me for free. No kickbacks from any sale made here.

• I have suggested to BuySellAds on whether I can increase the number of available slots instead of increasing price (for example, show random 8 out of 12 available spots). So more can have chance. I’ll see what BSA says.

• There is a possibility to move to another platform (Google AdSense?) that supports more dynamic bidding. One potential problem with AdSense is that whoever has the biggest pocket (usually) wins, regardless whether it is in context or not. LowEndBox is about cheap VPS providers, and I don’t want to see Rackspace or LiquidWeb taking over all spots.

Anyway. So here is the message to all potential advertisers — I am working on it! Yet I don’t have enough time in my day so please be patient.

WTF?!!! About 1.5 hours ago the out bound bandwidth utilization of this low end VPS went from ~50kbps to almost 5Mbps! I thought, hurray I have finally made it to the Slashdot. But then I looked through the logs and spotted something else instead. Someone was using Load Impact to “load testing” this very site. Who the @#$% did that?!

I have never used Load Impact before but I’ll be amazed that you can do free denial of service “load testing” on any site you wish on the Internet — 50 simultaneous users are enough to crash some badly configured shared hosting sites. Anyway, this VPS at QuickWeb seems to cope pretty well. Here is the loadavg graph of the same period.

That’s it for today. Guys — don’t kill it while I am away.

Update 10 Hours Later…

Yup. LowEndBox got DDoS’ed.

Here is an updated graph of what was going on.

The big spike of in-bound traffic there 2 hours after someone’s “load test” is caused by floods invalid HTTP requests. It did not last very long, but this VPS becomes irresponsive shortly afterwards. Nginx’s error log got flooded with garbages so it filled up all the available disk space on this VPS (which only has 5GB storage). Access log also got truncated so it is not possible to get the full picture. The site did not come back properly until I free up more space.

• DDoS starts at around 15:31 UTC.
• 64,000+ requests after my logs died at 15:48 UTC.
• Top offenders are from Germany, Uruguay, Vietnam, Russia and Brazil. Most are residential IP addresses.

Someone did asked me 2 days ago that “just wondering what you use for DDoS protection on such a little RAM VPS — or don’t you?”. Okay here is my answer Jack — no I don’t have DDoS protection on this small VPS. Not worthwhile — if I want to spend more effort on it I’ll get a bigger meatier server with more active monitoring.

Now someone can go and boast to his mates on IRC “hey my botnet brought down that site with just 80MB of memory, l33t huh?!”.

Update Another Day Later…

WTF. Can you guys stop?! Someone is dragging down 20Mbips continuously for 2 hours and pretty much disables the site due to too much files opening (I forgot to change the ulimit so it’s only at 1024 file descriptors). Here’s the graph from Cacti:

However the loadavg of the system was pretty constant at below 1. Didn’t run out of the disk space this time :) It’s someone doing a LoadImpact test again from their Stockholm server — but probably with much more severe setting this time.

Time to block them from the firewall.

And here is a question that I am thinking of throwing here for a while. I have been collecting and tracking hosting companies that provide “cheap roots” below a price point. We are getting providers from all over the place — some good, some bad. Some are still going, some have raised price, and some have since fallen into the dead pool. So next time when I have a small project that requires a new low end box — which provider from the ever growing list should I choose?

Here is an idea. Maybe we should have a list of “projects” — web sites, online stores, blogs, whatever that are actually hosted on low end providers, what their statistics is (amount of traffic, how busy the sites are, so no just-another-personal blog should apply), who they are currently hosting with and how long have they been with this low end provider. This is your show off time — tell us how 1337 you are with your memory optimization skillz, and stories on how your cheap VPS coped with being dugg/slashdotted.

I am making a start.

• LowEndBox.com — hosted on QuickWeb.co.nz‘s 80MB Xen VPS in Softlayer/Dallas since a month ago (it’s a courtesy testing VPS so free for me, thanks to Joe @ QuickWeb)
• 27k visitors/month and 92k page views/month according to Google Analytics
• Only use ~1GB of disk space & 20GB/month of data.

Never been dugg/slashdotted although I dare to try that :)

Now, your turn, and I am heading back to work.

Nothing wrong with 2HOST though — it runs perfectly fine. Stable. Fast. But there is one problem — it’s not low end enough. I mean, c’mon 512MB to run a WordPress blog? I might be able to excuse myself if I am running TechCrunch but for Low End Box I think it needs to run on something low-end. Not just in term of price, but also in spec.

So Joe from QuickWeb lent me this Xen VPS in Dallas with the following spec

• 80MB memory/128MB swap
• 5GB storage
• 1TB/month data transfer
• Xen
• Debian 5 Lenny 32bit

So far so good. I am getting one single core of Xeon X3460 @ 2.8GHz. Let’s see how it stands running Low End Box :) Software loaded so far

• Nginx + PHP/FastCGI (1 process) + MySQL
• syslog + cron + xinetd + exim4 + sshd

X3460 is fast enough, and the performance should be on part with 2HOST if the PHP process does not get paged out. I am also running a cron job checking up on providers every now and then to make sure they don’t get included in our monthly dead pool. That’s coded in Python + SQLite and should take ~5MB RSS when its running.

LowEndBox has been hosting on VPSLink for more than a year now — and thanks to Dan L at VPSLink/Spry for sponsoring this blog so I have not really been paying for this Link3 VPS. Their network and stability is also quite good — my VPS always feels fast with 150+ days of uptime currently. However, as some of you might know, VPSLink has been acquired by Endurance International at the end of March. Moreover, all the VPS (I have two with VPSLink, another one that I’ve paid for) are migrating from Seattle to Boston (!!) Hmm, okay. Until you read about all the migration issues including higher latency, 24+ hours of down time, new control panel, unresponsive support, etc. I have just received my 48 hour notice of migration, so I think I better migrate my sites elsewhere first, just in case there’s any unforeseenable disaster.

I have now temporarily moved the site to my Xen VPS at 2HOST.com, which I acquired 12 months ago and now running Debian 5.

I might move back to VPSLink once the migration completes and everything stablise again. However I much prefer to be on a VPS on the west coast (LA, San Jose or Seattle). We’ll see.

First of all. My computer died. It was no where near low end either (Dell Latitude business laptop), but somehow the hard drive just decided to die on me. ddrescue has been running for 2 days and no guarantee that it’s going to be fixed. So far I am counting it as total lost — very frustrated.

On the other hand there is also Easter holidays, which I will be away from computers to actually get near to mountains and beaches for 4 days. I will be back on 6 April and hopefully I’ll be able to borrow a computer somewhere to continue my posting.

Happy Easter everyone!

Yes. Go ahead and DO IT. I know you always wanted it — be the LowEndBox fanboi/fangal! Here is your chance to show off your support on Facebook :)

Update: Now we have 1 fan! Congratulations to Eydrian from TheServerExperts :)