[colug-432] shell account hosting?

[Michael Yanovich]

Personally I use a VPS for connecting to IRC. I host a few websites off
of it but I have Weechat running inside tmux.

I use Linode ( https://www.linode.com/ ) right now. It's $20 a month and
offers some basic stuff like 512MB of RAM, 20GB of hard disk space,
200GB monthly transfer (outgoing only now), IPv6 subnet (/112) only 4096
addresses.

Though recently I signed up for another VPS (
www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq7 ) that is about half the
cost: €7.90 (euros) per month (~ $10.24) and it comes with better specs
than the Linode I have: 512MB of RAM, 20 GB hard disk space, 1 Terabyte
of monthly transfer, IPv6 subnet (/64).

Linode does have excellent support and they are speedy. But if you are
only looking to do IRC then I'd go with the Hetzenr. It's about half the
price. Though, $10/mo itself does seem a bit much for just doing IRC,
though you get a full Linux box to play with (full root on both VPSes)
so you could host websites, tinker around with new applications, use it
as a SSH SOCKS5 proxy. I guess if you choose one of these you'll justify
the price yourself in terms of what you are going to do with it beyond
just IRC.

As far as the free shell providers go I would highly avoid them because
many large IRC networks either have limits of IRC connections from these
boxes (and many of these boxes only have 1 IP address) or they will flat
out ban the IP address. Like you pointed out, this is usually due to
abuse from rogue users on these boxes. If you want to avoid the hassle
of these restrictions I'd get a VPS.

The only problem I've run into with Linode and freenode is that if you
connect via IPv6 you might get an error saying "too many connections."
This is because freenode, and many other IRC networks, assumes that
everyone is assigned a /64 IPv6 subnet however Linode (as of right now)
only hands out a /112 (4096 addresses) which means you and a bunch of
other people will overlap in the same /64 and these networks will
throttle the number of connections. I haven't connected to an IRC
network from Hetzner as I've been working on other things with it. I
haven't had the chance to play around with configuring IPv6 on it. (I've
really only been screwing around with Apache)

Also if the cost of a VPS is too much, how much would you consider a
"good" amount for paying for just a shell account? (limited in the sense
of preventing abuse and running things to crash the system) I've played
with the idea of creating a shell account host. Any input would be
greatly appreciated.

On 01/19/2012 04:38 PM, Rick Hornsby wrote:
> 
> I'm currently in a venue that is blocking outbound traffic on 6667, which is preventing us from using the chatroom for the radio show we're hosting from the location.  I tried getting around it by using a SOCKS5 proxy through my shell account on dream host, but apparently the IRC server blocks inbound connections from dreamhost ("proxy abuse").  The IRC server is hosted by a third party, so I can't make any configuration changes to the server itself.
> 
> I've been looking around for the last few minutes for a shell account I could pay for, but all I'm finding is "free" aka "doesn't work", is extremely limited, or is advertising as "great for botnets" type stuff.  Obviously, not what I'm looking for.
> 
> Are there any reputable places to find such a thing?  I don't mind paying for it, but the price can't be excessive.
> 
> thanks guys
> -rick
> _______________________________________________
> colug-432 mailing list
> colug-432 at colug.net
> http://lists.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug-432

-- 
Michael Yanovich
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