[conspire] command-line ISPs, self-hosting, etc.

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Wed Feb 9 14:30:59 PST 2005


Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com):

[You're looking for a replacement classic-style Unixey shell provider
and virtual host for your domain, mail, and Web pages.  You have modest
PHP needs and want a reasonable disk quota and disk quota and mail
policy.]

I'm hoping some other subscriber can suggest a solution along those
lines, because I personally have no recent relevant experience.  Given
our current situation 11 1/2 years into The September That Never Ended[1], 
all of to classic old-school shell providers I remember from caveman
days are defunct or bought out and lobotomised by Verio [spit] or
EarthLink [spit] around 1995-98.


I used to see really good things about BDCSI, http://www.bdcsi.net/ : 
The note about them being "Now owned and operated by CN Internet Sales
Co." might be ominous; I don't know.

There are a number of colo centres offering software-based virthosting,
using something functionally equivalent to VMware (but not using
literally VMware), such that you "have root" on a virtual box that is
time-sliced with others running on the same underlying hardware.
(Sorry, I don't have names to pass along.)


The main point of my reply:

> I'm looking to either move or make the leap to having ixian.com hosted
> here at home, or to move first, then, down the road, host myself at home
> once I figure out all the ins and outs.

I just wanted to encourage that thought, based on my own experience: 
linuxmafia.com, deirdre.org, fuzzyorange.com, and probably some others
I'm blanking on all live physically in our living room, all sharing the
household 128 kbps aDSL link.  We have five fixed public IPs and packet
transport from Raw Bandwidth Communications (aka Tsoft), and couldn't be
happier.  I vaguely recall that Raw Bandwidth also offers us a couple of
other sundry services, but we don't use them:  All we care about is the
IP addresses and routing of our packets over the ATM cloud -- and
they're incredibly reliable at that.

There are of course a bunch of details to attend to:  DNS, your routing, 
MTA and Web setup, and so on.  You're welcome to get examples of all of
that from my setup, if you ever need it.  (Of course, you would _not_
want to shut off your pair.com service and then build a replacement in a
panic:  You would build and test a prototype setup, and then cut over
your DNS when it works to your satisfaction.)


[1] Q.v.: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html




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