New Provider Looking for Beta testers - FREE VPS'

Micronode

Hello everyone,

I'm a new provider currently setting up and aiming to launch in Q1 2022
We're providing shared hosting and UK NAT VPS'.

I'm looking for a handful of people to take a free VPS or shared hosting package for the foreseeable future and in return I would like feedback or a knowledgeable article.

I'm mainly looking for people to test our IPv4 HTTP/HTTPS proxy service which allows people to run applications on port 80 from within a NAT VPS and proxy from our proxy service which allows the client to either use http or use https with either their own SSL or letsencrypt.

More can be read about the proxy service in our knowledge base here: https://clients.natvps.uk/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/1/NATVPS-Reverse-Proxy-Server

Please reply if you are interested and I will DM you the details and a 100% off code.

Thanks in advance!
James

ehab

interested, because i can learn something new and keep a free vps "lovely"

feel free to DM

Micronode

@ehab said:
interested, because i can learn something new and keep a free vps "lovely"

feel free to DM

DM'd

vyas

Would be delighted to take a look, great to see information via dm.

I suppose you mean Q1 2022 launch

Micronode

@vyas said:
Would be delighted to take a look, great to see information via dm.

I suppose you mean Q1 2022 launch

Doh its been a long week, yes 2022 I'll DM you in due course.

ehab

@natvps_uk btw, my @vyas friends stays too long in showers you might want to timer the lights.

j/k

glad you'll be my neighbor.

Mason

Hey James -- just saw your ticket. Applied your provider tag and moved this thread to 'Free Offers and Stuff' for better alignment. Welcome aboard and good luck with the beta test!

toumi111

count me in

Micronode

@Mason said:
Hey James -- just saw your ticket. Applied your provider tag and moved this thread to 'Free Offers and Stuff' for better alignment. Welcome aboard and good luck with the beta test!

Thanks @Mason much appreciated!

Micronode

@toumi111 said:
count me in

I'll DM you

Vaviloff

Hey @natvps_uk very interested in exactly the UK NAT VPSes, formerly a client of Quadhost. Also been writing tech documentation at work, so would love to try and, hopefully help with the service.

Micronode

@Vaviloff said:
Hey @natvps_uk very interested in exactly the UK NAT VPSes, formerly a client of Quadhost. Also been writing tech documentation at work, so would love to try and, hopefully help with the service.

I've DM'd you

yoursunny

Do you have IPv6 and IPv9?

Micronode

@yoursunny said:
Do you have IPv6 and IPv9?

All our plans come with a single IPv6 address, Private IPv4 with 20 ports + a dedicated SSH port and a proxy service for port 80 & 443.

Multi_

I would like to participate in the test aswell. I am curious how well your script works. For now I only know providers using their panel like SolusVM to add proxy entries.

Micronode

@Multi_ said:
I would like to participate in the test aswell. I am curious how well your script works. For now I only know providers using their panel like SolusVM to add proxy entries.

I'll DM you details to participate.

To give a brief rundown on how our proxy solution works we run a VM on each node which is configured as a proxy server listening on an external IP and an internal API listening on an internal IP.

The API can be called using curl but to simplify things I created a few basic scripts. I won't go too far into the details on this here but by writing this API it allows us to offer more features e.g SSL and some features which will be ready to release at our q1 2022 launch which include Load balancing and CDN offerings.

yoursunny

How do you authenticate that the requesting user actually own the domain?

Many existing NAT providers would allow any user to claim any domain, if it hasn't been claimed by another user.
This enables a malicious user to claim a domain they do not own.
It would cause damage if the true owner also signs up for your service and receives a container on the same public IPv4.

A potential solution is to require a unique DNS record that contains a system-generated token, to ensure the user owns the domain.
This system has been adopted, among others, Google Search Console, to verify domain ownership.

Micronode

@yoursunny said:
How do you authenticate that the requesting user actually own the domain?

Many existing NAT providers would allow any user to claim any domain, if it hasn't been claimed by another user.
This enables a malicious user to claim a domain they do not own.
It would cause damage if the true owner also signs up for your service and receives a container on the same public IPv4.

A potential solution is to require a unique DNS record that contains a system-generated token, to ensure the user owns the domain.
This system has been adopted, among others, Google Search Console, to verify domain ownership.

At the moment we only check if an A record exists and is pointing and propagated to the proxy server when a user is setting up SSL. Domains can only be added to the proxy once and we perform unique checks to validate this.

There is also a daily cron which removes any domains from the proxy that do not have a valid A record in place.

It is possible for us to enforce a txt record to be created before allowing the domain to be added to the proxy and it is something that we're investigating although we don't want to over complicate things for our clients initially.

If this becomes and issue or we deem it to be needed we actually have the code in place and we can enable the feature.

Multi_

First feedback:

All of your mails regarding registration and creation of the server went right to my Gmail spam folder. Maybe you can check if there are steps you can try to improve your score so they won't appear in spam anymore.

Micronode

@Multi_ said:
First feedback:

All of your mails regarding registration and creation of the server went right to my Gmail spam folder. Maybe you can check if there are steps you can try to improve your score so they won't appear in spam anymore.

I expected this might still be the case. Interestingly they are actually sent from gmail using google workspace! I'm waiting on their support to get back to me but I may end up moving them to our internal SMTP server.

Multi_

Great. Another important thing to change is the autogenerated email sent after creation of the server.

You can access your server using a free simple SSH client program called Putty located at:
http://www.securitytools.net/mirrors/putty/

This is taken from the mail with subject "New NAT Virtual Server Information". Please change the link to download putty as this domain is for sale and someone might grab it to make a fake website and put malicious putty file on it.
Maybe use this: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Thanks!

EDIT: Maybe change the link in the footer of the text "visit our website" from clients.natvps.uk to natvps.uk.

contactwajeeh

Interested

Micronode

@contactwajeeh said:
Interested

DMd

Brueggus

I'd be interested as well. I hold the rank of an "IPv6 Advocate" at OGF and will ensure that your IPv6 fulfills highest quality standards.

Micronode

@Brueggus said:
I'd be interested as well. I hold the rank of an "IPv6 Advocate" at OGF and will ensure that your IPv6 fulfills highest quality standards.

DMd

james50a

Haven't used a nat vps before but would be happy to play around with one for a bit

Micronode

@james50a said:
Haven't used a nat vps before but would be happy to play around with one for a bit

DMd

localhost

@natvps_uk said:
Hello everyone,

I'm a new provider currently setting up and aiming to launch in Q1 2022
We're providing shared hosting and UK NAT VPS'.

I'm looking for a handful of people to take a free VPS or shared hosting package for the foreseeable future and in return I would like feedback or a knowledgeable article.

I'm mainly looking for people to test our IPv4 HTTP/HTTPS proxy service which allows people to run applications on port 80 from within a NAT VPS and proxy from our proxy service which allows the client to either use http or use https with either their own SSL or letsencrypt.

More can be read about the proxy service in our knowledge base here: https://clients.natvps.uk/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/1/NATVPS-Reverse-Proxy-Server

Please reply if you are interested and I will DM you the details and a 100% off code.

Thanks in advance!
James

Hi James, I would love to give this a try and play around a nat vps!

Congratulations and good luck!

Cheers

Micronode

@localhost said:

@natvps_uk said:
Hello everyone,

I'm a new provider currently setting up and aiming to launch in Q1 2022
We're providing shared hosting and UK NAT VPS'.

I'm looking for a handful of people to take a free VPS or shared hosting package for the foreseeable future and in return I would like feedback or a knowledgeable article.

I'm mainly looking for people to test our IPv4 HTTP/HTTPS proxy service which allows people to run applications on port 80 from within a NAT VPS and proxy from our proxy service which allows the client to either use http or use https with either their own SSL or letsencrypt.

More can be read about the proxy service in our knowledge base here: https://clients.natvps.uk/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/1/NATVPS-Reverse-Proxy-Server

Please reply if you are interested and I will DM you the details and a 100% off code.

Thanks in advance!
James

Hi James, I would love to give this a try and play around a nat vps!

Congratulations and good luck!

Cheers

DMd

add_iT

I am interested

Micronode

@ddnang02 said:
I am interested

DMd

valkyrie

I am also interested

kalepond

Interested, thanks!

Micronode

@kalepond said:
Interested, thanks!

DMd

Micronode

Thanks to everyone that has signed up to our public beta testing. I look forward to receiving everyone’s feedback!

The NAT VPS testing will not be taking on anymore testers for now. For everyone that has joined the beta you will have your VPS’ for a minimum of 3 months.

We still have beta testing slots for our shared hosting platform if anyone is interested.

how

I have experience in using NAT VPS. I hope I can help you

Mr_Tom

Where abouts in the UK are these location?

How much IPv6 will they come with?

Micronode

@Mr_Tom said:
Where abouts in the UK are these location?

How much IPv6 will they come with?

They are located in rapidswitch DC5 Maidenhead
They come with a single IPv6 address although I can supply huge numbers of additional address space FOC when requested.
If you'd lie to test one drop me a DM.

Micronode

Based off feedback on the Proxy Service I have added an additional tool for automatically adding lets encrypt certificates. This is in our knowledge base: https://clients.natvps.uk/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/1/NATVPS-Reverse-Proxy-Server

yoursunny

@natvps_uk said:

@yoursunny said:
How do you authenticate that the requesting user actually own the domain?

Many existing NAT providers would allow any user to claim any domain, if it hasn't been claimed by another user.
This enables a malicious user to claim a domain they do not own.
It would cause damage if the true owner also signs up for your service and receives a container on the same public IPv4.

A potential solution is to require a unique DNS record that contains a system-generated token, to ensure the user owns the domain.
This system has been adopted, among others, Google Search Console, to verify domain ownership.

At the moment we only check if an A record exists and is pointing and propagated to the proxy server when a user is setting up SSL. Domains can only be added to the proxy once and we perform unique checks to validate this.

There is also a daily cron which removes any domains from the proxy that do not have a valid A record in place.

It is possible for us to enforce a txt record to be created before allowing the domain to be added to the proxy and it is something that we're investigating although we don't want to over complicate things for our clients initially.

If this becomes and issue or we deem it to be needed we actually have the code in place and we can enable the feature.

I thought about this more.
The TXT record isn't necessary.
Instead, the proxy service can check for AAAA record to determine which container owns the hostname, and then send the traffic into this container.

Push further, it isn't necessary to run any API call altogether.
Instead,

1. Whenever the proxy service receives a request for a hostname it hasn't seen before, it retrieves the AAAA record of this hostname.
2. Based on the AAAA record, it determines which container owns the hostname, and sends traffic to that container's private IPv4 address.
3. The mapping is cached in memory, and rechecked a few seconds before DNS TTL expiration. This avoids the DNS resolution latency incurred for the next request.
4. If a hostname mapping hasn't been requested in last 24 hours, don't recheck it anymore and let its cache entry expire. This limits overhead.
5. Each container is allowed a certain number of cached hostname mappings (e.g. 256). If this limit is exceeded, the cached entries are evicted per LRU algorithm. This prevents the attack where too many hostnames are pointed to a container, overwhelming the cache capacity in proxy service.

This would bring a truly streamlined experience because the user doesn't need to type any commands or fiddle with any control panels.
Put in the A + AAAA records, and it just works.

bsh

@yoursunny said:
Do you have IPv6 and IPv9?

If IPv9-enabled, @yoursunny will offer the OP some pushups

epsilun

-deleted-
late. unfortunately. -_-

warih

Interested if still available

coo

I would like to try this out.

vpsgeek3333

Wish you all the best for your upcoming endeavor! Just a piece of advice: don't use billing automation solutions with unreliable pricing strategies such as WHMCS in this market segment where profit margins are razor thin, if any

Mr_Tom

@natvps_uk said: They come with a single IPv6 address although I can supply huge numbers of additional address space FOC when requested.

Just curious, but do you provide each client an address from a separate /64?

@natvps_uk said: They are located in rapidswitch DC5 Maidenhead

Nice. iomart offered me this as a location instead of York when I was looking recently.