Shells?

Moogey · Post by **Moogey** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 3:59 am

Hi, I was wondering if anybody knew of good shells. I found this one site, vitalspeeds, which seems to provide the best deal for the best value.

http://www.vitalspeeds.com/ircd.htm

Does anybody know of any other shells with better value than that?

Thanks in advance!

White_Magic · Post by **White_Magic** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 4:07 am

im not saying these ar ebetter value coz theres no such thing but..

http://www.fdcservers.net/fdcvps.html
http://www.fdcservers.net/dedicated.html

http://www.voodoohosting.com/dedicated.html
http://www.voodoohosting.com/ircd/ircdhosting.html
http://www.voodoohosting.com/specials.html

these r the best ones ive found, for there own special purposes.
(from fdc i have a bot with 1month 0 weeks 3days up time the shell is winxp and the bot is of course a mirc i coded myself)

both have unlimited bandwiths on the shells so theres no restirctions on usage of that, makes things to worry less about (no overage charges etc)

(from voodoo test servers / set up etc and good " leafs ")

Moogey · Post by **Moogey** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:21 pm

Thank you, I appreciate your submissions, but none of those provide better deals than this site.

Anybody else know of shells better than vitalspeeds?

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:09 pm

Generally speaking with shells, you get what you pay for.

White_Magic · Post by **White_Magic** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:18 pm

amen to that w00t, (proved by my bots uptime)

my computer is xp and has to be rebooted daily, my shell has been going for a month solid

Post by **Syzop** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:34 pm

I second that.

Most of these cheap ones are crap.
I've had 5 shells or so now (managed for someone) and 1 of the main problems was the many reboots, such as 1-3 times per month.
Reboots of a webserv really aren't too bad.. say, 5 minutes of downtime (=like 2-3 reboots) per month is usually acceptable.
But for ircservs it's a different story, if you have like 3 reboots per month users will complain.. and rightfully so ;).

I've also had anything from sudden homedir renames (=have to recompile unreal and anope) to complete OS reinstalls, to even sudden switching to a different OS and having all data lost ("we don't do backups"), shells are wonderful really.. ;)

So I tend to stick to dedicated servers if someone really wants a decent network.

Though, I've recently be talking to our sponsor KIRE, which provides more stable ircd hosting (their avg uptime is 2-3 months, which is fine in my eyes). The downside is, that it's double or more the price of cheap shells.

Moogey · Post by **Moogey** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:45 pm

Thanks for the replies.

That's too expensive for me, as I'm 16. Not only that but it doesn't have things I want such as MySQL (that's not everything i'm looking for but one thing, which vitalspeeds does have.)

I frequent an IRC server runned on reverse.net which is only down once or twice a year (by my own observations), but that doesn't offer what I want either.

What I think I'll do is just try out vitalspeeds on a monthly paying cycle and see if I like it. If not, it's only monthly, so I can get another shell. Sound good to you guys?

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:16 am

Yup.

Another suggestion for you, http://www.highuptime.com

Moogey · Post by **Moogey** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:30 am

That looks good except for the user limit of 350 (which is what I'm pretty much limited to at this point.)

What would you guys choose - unlimited users or unlimited bandwidth if you could only have one?

(My choices are 350 users w/ unlimited monthly bandwidth [7/mo @ highuptime] or unlimited users with 8gb monthly bandwidth [9.95/mo @ vitalspeeds])

The "unlimited users" is actually limited to 1024 by UnrealIRC default anyway, right? But 350 users just sounds like such as small number compared to UnrealIRC's max - 1024.

What sounds best?

By the way, this could impact your opinion- I DO intend to have linked servers.

Thanks w00t for the suggestion

Thanks in advance for opinions!

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:51 am

You can recompile to support more users than 1024, and that limit they are mentioning is local users only - ie: 300 users on that one server (really a sensible idea anyway).

Bandwidth, contrary to what many people say, isn't a *huge* factor, you tend to find that irc servers won't chew up lots, unless you're being hit by a ddos or cloneflood, in which case you'll notice spikes.

White_Magic · Post by **White_Magic** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 8:32 am

in my eyes 350 users with unlimited bandwith,
lets be real about one thing, if your server takes off, and ever gets 100 people, someone in there will ahve access to ddos or flood or will know someone to do it for them,

if u take the 8gb and u get a 100~ bot ddos, and it hits u hard, u could face overage charges for exceeding the 8gb width, that`ll cost u more + ur users leaving the network if the ddos doesnt stop.

so 350 users / unlimited bandwith can help that severely, alll u`ll need to worry about is stopping the ddos/floods and keeping ur chatters happy.

350 users is alot to get from a newly started network, if u get that much very quickly i`ll be surprised, but if u allow 1024 connections or ur not restircted thats make its all the more fun for them to load bots etc coz they`ll have the space to do so, at least u can tell ur provider its botnet attacks and they`ll consider helping u if they can

Stealth · Post by **Stealth** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:35 am

http://www.alcatrazmedia.com/hosting/
These people are OK... Every now and then the server gets really laggy and splits off (maybe about once a month), but I can live with that.

ACCOUNT FEATURES:
350MB disk space
6 background processes
600 user limit
E-mail and LIVE! technical support
Web based account statistics
Protection from most D(D)oS attacks via our firewalled network
768Kbit outgoing bandiwdth
UNLIMITED incoming bandwidth and UNLIMITED data transfer
Does NOT include webhosting
IPv6 addresses available upon request!

Eggdrops ARE allowed
Services ARE allowed
IRC bouncers ARE allowed

Moogey · Post by **Moogey** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 8:52 pm

Thanks all for your input! You've all been helpful.

Stealh: I love the deals and I had almost made up my mind about it until I noticed this in the 'Acceptable Use Policy':

With any DoS attack if they happen more than 3 times in a 24 hour period we must close the account being attacked to perserve our quality of service to our other customers. This is NON-NEGOTIABLE.

3 seems like a small number to me, especially for how big I want my network to become in the future. (Yes I understand that's everyone's dream and rarely comes true but that's a different story altogether...)

When the "kiddies" "play" they "play hard"

I've got a couple weeks before I need to make a decision anyway...

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 5:27 am

You'll tend to find quite a few providers will do that, especially the cheaper ones. Whether they put it in their policy or not is another matter entirely..

White_Magic · Post by **White_Magic** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 11:58 am

avoiding DDOS is totally impossible, some companies spent money making there firewalls filter ddos as much as possible but it costs them alot and the cheaper ones just have no chance when faced against a bigger company.