LES v2 - last update before it goes live

AnthonySmith

Things happened, life, CVE's, work, and time and resources were diverted, so it's been a bit slow but a big push was made over the last week to get almost everything finsihed up.

There are still a few things to do that really need to be fully tested on a live VPS for optimisation and a few tiny but important plugins to finish that would also benefit from being live.

I was just about to spin up another VPS on hetzner to probably end up taking over as the main LES server, then I see that the prices went up +300% they are charging around $20 now for a fairly basic 2GB VPS, its a bit silly, sorry hetzner... you are not LE* anymore, so we need to move.

Looking for recommendations, currently LES lives in Germany, yet looking at traffic patterns, about 70% is north america based, so I am thinking the best option is to look for East Side USA, part of me kind of likes the idea of Ashburn... feels like a good home for old internet things

Does not have to be Ashburn but that would be a bonus, I probably would not want to get any further west than Dallas, though.

Looking for strong recommendations, I was going to put it on quickpacket, but they only do dedicated servers and it feels like LES should really be running on a VPS.

Updates.

Lots of other Ui fixes and theme fixes and also some standardisation, side bar has been updated, more for trending and offers, and a lot of irrelevant or duplicated UI stuff has been removed.

Theme toggles on the top bar now, no password needed, as well as a slider, if you want none of the animations or anything related to karma that has a visual impact, you can have it.

The support system and blog system is built directly into vanilla now also.

It's not really THAT different to how it is now, at the core, it is the foundation and groundwork for a much more self-moderating community; not everything connected to that is in, yet, but the foundation for that to happen is, once live it will become easier to do these updates and have a better test environment.

Once V2 is live, I will start to drop some of the old resources and drop the price, google adverts are still enabled for none logged in users, so far that gave a total of £5.20 over 24 days, so probably about £6.50 by the end of the month.

On that basis, I will be looking for ways to better monetise, probably either in the promoted listings or buy a square type of things, prices will be low, and karma can be used, and it will be open to everyone, but I will try to keep it tasteful and non-flashy as much as possible.

Before any of that, though, I need to work on the numbers, or why would anyone be here

Also as a heads up, part of this rejig is going to make a little bit of a conflicting mess with the old tag system and the new karma system, they can both exist together but it looks a bit funny, I will be starting to remove tags that are not really in use much like the senpi and content creator / writer tags, and reduce the old tag system to functional only.

@yoursunny troll will be turned into a 1 of 1 karma badge, only he will have, unless he decides to pass it on (That will be possible)

We will also have host-specific decorations if you want to show support for specific hosts.

So at some point, without much warning, this place will go into maintenance mode or just offline while I panic and realise what I forgot to consider when migrating everything, hopefully not more than a couple of hours.

That's all for now.

Falzo

Leaseweb. Doesn't offer US anymore, but cheap and reliable. Montreal, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or even London should work well.

Other than that OVH is still decent, though they also raised prices meanwhile.

AnthonySmith

@Falzo said:
Leaseweb. Doesn't offer US anymore, but cheap and reliable. Montreal, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or even London should work well.

Other than that OVH is still decent, though they also raised prices meanwhile.

I used leaseweb VPS recently, it has 8 second latency spikes on the NVMe regularly (not milliseconds), I asked them to move it, after 4 days they finally responded like they were doing me a favour, and they got the latency spikes down to 6 seconds..

Leaseweb are not who they used to be but it was one of my first thoughts which is why I tried them.

Might be OVH but if it is I will probably wait for a low end dedicated as it's more likely to keep it's price.

Falzo

it has 8 second latency spikes on the NVMe regularly (not milliseconds), I asked them to move it, after 4 days they finally responded like they were doing me a favour, and they got the latency spikes down to 6 seconds..

Huh, bummer indeed. Luckily never had such issues, still use them in production.

Hetzner still has the cost optimized instances in Germany. Hiked in price too, but clearly cheaper than US.

mikho

Rumour says that Racknerd is a great company.

AnthonySmith

Whatever happened to secure dragon and @KuJoe ? Not sure why I thought of that just trying to remember the old stable hosts from the LE world.

AnthonySmith

@mikho said:
Rumour says that Racknerd is a great company.

Seems like a solid option 😜

somik

My server on OVH has sudden blackouts for 2 to 3 hours every 3 months or so. Since my previous providers are all 0 downtime, this OVH downtime sticks out like a sore thumb...

mikho

@AnthonySmith said:
Whatever happened to secure dragon and @KuJoe ? Not sure why I thought of that just trying to remember the old stable hosts from the LE world.

Site looks exactly the same as back in the day. You can still order an OVZ VPS.... status page has proper uptime on the KVM-line in Florida.

good old @KuJoe

AnthonySmith

@mikho said:

@AnthonySmith said:
Whatever happened to secure dragon and @KuJoe ? Not sure why I thought of that just trying to remember the old stable hosts from the LE world.

Site looks exactly the same as back in the day. You can still order an OVZ VPS.... status page has proper uptime on the KVM-line in Florida.

good old @KuJoe

Yeah I saw but that's a bit of a concern, that's why I asked, I don't know what I don't know though so no comment.

Jab

I vote for @VirMach so @AnthonySmith will have a personal reason to visit the biggest and longest LES thread.
// On serious note: I have no idea about USA and recent pricing.

AnthonySmith

@Jab said:
I vote for @VirMach so @AnthonySmith will have a personal reason to visit the biggest and longest LES thread.
// On serious note: I have no idea about USA and recent pricing.

I guess that way we can use LES being up or down as an official status indicator of virmach, I like your thinking.

AnthonySmith

Just had the brilliant idea of using RackSRV, would be fitting, considering my first-ever dedi was from Jon at Racksrv and we sort of e-knew each other for like 25 years now.... sad to see they sold in 2022 and things went downhill after Man, my finger has been well off the pulse...

AnthonySmith

Checked AdvinServers as they supported tierhive a lot with Kansas, sadly, even the small plans are massive and NYC is out of stock.

I feel like things are going to end up on Vultr at this rate.

AnthonySmith

There is always @georgedatacenter lets have a look...
out of stock....

Brueggus

How about @MikeA ? Haven't had any issues and he definitely knows what he's doing

AnthonySmith

@Brueggus said:
How about @MikeA ? Haven't had any issues and he definitely knows what he's doing

You know, it's nothing personal to @MikeA, but there is just this black spot in my head that ExtraVM fall into when I try to think of hosts to use or recommendto someone, I have been recommending ExtraVM a bit of reddit recently it always takes me about 5 seconds to remember the name.

Good shout, old is gold. checking.

Edit: of the 2 locations I would consider for LES, all sold out.

AnthonySmith

Dartnode looked like a good option, but I can't see where the "USA East" region covers and when I am being offered not 1 but 2 EOL Debian distributions and no stable ones during checkout, I back out. Nothing personal again, just a line I have.

WSS

I've always had good luck with RamHost. He's 100% Dallas these days. https://ramhost.us/

He hasn't updated the website in probably 20 years. Obviously the prices aren't what they're advertised as. I'd just drop him a note for a quote. Tell him it's for LES. He used to be semi-active on LET.

AnthonySmith

@WSS said:
I've always had good luck with RamHost. He's 100% Dallas these days. https://ramhost.us/

ha, was actually in the first 3 I checked; all sold out. I also checked ramnode, and found they have become and Ai kubernetes, coding, automation application manager with 4 different control panels, also they offer vpn a,d 12 different types of VPS with the same specs in the same location just with different names and prices.... it confused me and I gave up.

as I type this, what about Host.US maybe they still exist.

Edit: seems so but also still offering openVZ and Debian 9... hmm, sad, but, pass.

Not_Oles

Ant, there is the dual E5 128 GB 10G which I have from QuickPacket in Ashburn. Plus also our community E3 from Hosteroid. I suppose you could consider using either or both.

WSS

@AnthonySmith said:

@WSS said:
I've always had good luck with RamHost. He's 100% Dallas these days. https://ramhost.us/

ha, was actually in the first 3 I checked; all sold out. I also checked ramnode, and found they have become and Ai kubernetes, coding, automation application manager with 4 different control panels, also they offer vpn a,d 12 different types of VPS with the same specs in the same location just with different names and prices.... it confused me and I gave up.

Send Robert an email. I'm sure he could find room for LES.

AnthonySmith

@Not_Oles said:
Ant, there is the dual E5 128 GB 10G which I have from QuickPacket in Ashburn. Plus also our community E3 from Hosteroid. I suppose you could consider using either or both.

Thanks for the offer. Trying to keep a degree of separation, I don't want anyone's opinions or words being used against me or the upstream host that is "sponsoring" anything.

I was just remoninded of an old stable... KnownHost. Could be an option.

Jab

@crunchbits time to shine
also https://onidel.com/ is getting good reviews, they crazy level

AnthonySmith

I am just going to get the pre-prod version running on a quick OVH server as I have the account and its deployed in seconds, then that will give me a few more days to make a decision for live, probably going to be knownhost unless anything else comes along.

treesmokah

HostHatch is prem for non-shady projects, and this forum is pretty safe to host.

I would honestly avoid most LowEnd providers like Dasabo, and especially Dartnode if you want to have any kind of support when shit goes down.

Not to say HostHatch support is perfect, they sometimes take time, but they are much more trustworthy for long term. I don't know about US, but for EU they are insanely stable.

MikeA

@AnthonySmith said:
I am just going to get the pre-prod version running on a quick OVH server as I have the account and its deployed in seconds, then that will give me a few more days to make a decision for live, probably going to be knownhost unless anything else comes along.

Unless I'm missing something why not just use OVH? KnownHost is great but they're a managed host, you know what you're doing, no point in paying 8x more (unless they are offering it free?) especially for something you probably make basically nothing off of. Reliability across hosts is practically identical anyway. OVH would be fine, I use them to host one of my control panels and still have some managed servers for a few people on them now. Hell even Contabo would work fine for forums. (point being, save your money )

If you want something let me know and I can reserve space.

AnthonySmith

@MikeA said:

@AnthonySmith said:
I am just going to get the pre-prod version running on a quick OVH server as I have the account and its deployed in seconds, then that will give me a few more days to make a decision for live, probably going to be knownhost unless anything else comes along.

Unless I'm missing something why not just use OVH? KnownHost is great but they're a managed host, you know what you're doing, no point in paying 8x more (unless they are offering it free?) especially for something you probably make basically nothing off of. Reliability across hosts is practically identical anyway. OVH would be fine, I use them to host one of my control panels and still have some managed servers for a few people on them now. Hell even Contabo would work fine for forums. (point being, save your money )

If you want something let me know and I can reserve space.

Thanks, actually knownhost are now offering unmanaged and cheaper than Hetzner haha.

Advin

I would put a +1 for OVH, we use them for certain infrastructure and they are quite reliable.

I have a VPS in their Vint Hill PoP and it was on about 5 years of uptime, before it got brutally murdered by reboots from the CVE. I literally only renewed it because I wanted to see how long I could keep it up for.

I can give you a KVM Standard XS in NJ but yes it's probably overkill for hosting a single website/forum.

MikeA

@AnthonySmith said: Thanks, actually knownhost are now offering unmanaged and cheaper than Hetzner haha.

Oh wow lmao. I was looking in their nav bar but their normal VPS aren't listed in their navigation. Never knew they sold unmanaged VPS. But yeah I guess since Hetzner doesn't sell the budget cost-optimized in the US

ascicode

netcup avoro, not a host dropping random packages.

mikho

Now I remember why Knownhost triggered a memory.... Chris Miller used to work there.
Finally, I can go to sleep and stop thinking about this

AnthonySmith

@mikho said:
Now I remember why Knownhost triggered a memory.... Chris Miller used to work there.
Finally, I can go to sleep and stop thinking about this

Damn it, why do I remember that name?

havoc

@AnthonySmith said: 70% is north america based, so I am thinking the best option is to look for East Side USA

I vote Santa Cruz das Flores.

MikeA

@havoc said:

@AnthonySmith said: 70% is north america based, so I am thinking the best option is to look for East Side USA

I vote Santa Cruz das Flores.

Bermuda is a better option!

AnthonySmith

@havoc said:

@AnthonySmith said: 70% is north america based, so I am thinking the best option is to look for East Side USA

I vote Santa Cruz das Flores.

Haha I think the yes theory guys went there, looks cool. Agreed.

yoursunny

@AnthonySmith said:
Dartnode looked like a good option, but I can't see where the "USA East" region covers and when I am being offered not 1 but 2 EOL Debian distributions and no stable ones during checkout, I back out. Nothing personal again, just a line I have.

Welcome to Daniel fan club.
For the US EAST region, Daniel will setup your machines at Orlando FL, home of the E.T. Adventure.
If you choose a VPS, we are sure you'll enjoy 5 IOPS.
If you choose a dedicated server, you'll experience weeks-long ticket reply time when Daniel escorts E.T. to the Green Planet.

stupidgenius

@AnthonySmith said: Dartnode looked like a good option, but I can't see where the "USA East" region covers and when I am being offered not 1 but 2 EOL Debian distributions and no stable ones during checkout, I back out. Nothing personal again, just a line I have.

US East = Orlando, FL.
Not defending them, because it seems like their support is lacking judging by the thread on the other site. I asked them about adding Debian 13 and they said they put a ticket in for their engineering to look at it. (over a month ago) However, they do support custom ISO mounting in their panel

AnthonySmith

@stupidgenius said:

@AnthonySmith said: Dartnode looked like a good option, but I can't see where the "USA East" region covers and when I am being offered not 1 but 2 EOL Debian distributions and no stable ones during checkout, I back out. Nothing personal again, just a line I have.

US East = Orlando, FL.
Not defending them, because it seems like their support is lacking judging by the thread on the other site. I asked them about adding Debian 13 and they said they put a ticket in for their engineering to look at it. (over a month ago) However, they do support custom ISO mounting in their panel

Thanks, probably wouldn't have worked out.

To be honest one of the things I am looking forward too is full end to end provider reviews, the thing that built lowendtalk to begin with before the corruption and rot took over.

It's things like this that will be captured and covered

I have been reaching out to a lot of hosts recently and to be honest if they can't reply within 24 hours Monday to Friday, I am just not interested.

TierHive can, and we don't even do that full time, and we outright say it's hobby grade and not enterprise, there is no excuse for a small independent host to take more than a day to answer anything, maybe a very few exceptions, certainly not as standard, I just can't take you seriously as a business.

Not aimed at anyone in particular, it just seems that standards have seriously dropped in recent years while prices have gone up ... I don't understand.

MikeA

@AnthonySmith said: Not aimed at anyone in particular, it just seems that standards have seriously dropped in recent years while prices have gone up ... I don't understand.

Yep...

somik

Not sure why no one mentioned it but @AnthonySmith, have you considered CC? I hear they are pretty good

jaden

GreenCloud has some lowend options in Ashburn, although they're not in stock at the moment. Support often responds to tickets in less than a minute. For North America I've had good experiences with HostBilby, Onidel, ServaRica and PureVoltage. It's hard to beat the prices of ServaRica but performance is a little weak. The others sometimes have deals that make a big difference in cost. I would imagine they'd be willing to make a deal for LES.

skorous

@jaden said:
For North America I've had good experiences with HostBilby, Onidel, ServaRica and PureVoltage.

I can second HostBilby. I've also been very happy with them so far.

Fritz

Is it based on Vanilla?

Wonder_Woman

@skorous said:

@jaden said:
For North America I've had good experiences with HostBilby, Onidel, ServaRica and PureVoltage.

I can second HostBilby. I've also been very happy with them so far.

Third for @bingobangobongo

imok

@Wonder_Woman said:

@skorous said:

@jaden said:
For North America I've had good experiences with HostBilby, Onidel, ServaRica and PureVoltage.

I can second HostBilby. I've also been very happy with them so far.

Third for @bingobangobongo

Where are the deals?

daman

VPSDime from @serverian ?

stupidgenius

@jaden said: GreenCloud has some lowend options in Ashburn

They also have some options in NYC https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

bikegremlin

Heard nothing but praise about Knownhost.

Using and swearing by MDDHosting. Their shared hosting is superfast/powerful - worth considering too, besides VPS.

AnthonySmith

Some good suggestions and reminders of names I had forgotten, thanks all.

AnthonySmith

@Fritz said:
Is it based on Vanilla?

Yep, codebase updated for PHP 8.4