Question: how a person can provide VPS host srevices without being a reseller? Did you own the hardware? I am super interested. Hey, I even would pay for a series of articles about this!
I used to do site/vps hosting (millions of sites); we just bought slightly older 1U rack servers off ebay (and later our rack neighbour in the hosting room, who always had to buy the latest for his clients allowed us to buy of him) and kept filling local racks. We paid for a large bad quality bandwidth pipe for the large bandwidth eaters and good quality for the smaller traffic properties; we served some % of traffic per host through the good and after that through the bad. The porn / warez or whatever people didn't care and the business or hobby folk were happy as well.
In the end it got too much work with that many servers, something is always broken ; we had some virtualisation and failover stuff, but you have to go and repair it. We were basically two fulltime guys + some freelance and that meant getting into a car and driving for an hour every other day, storm or ice on the roads, christmas or birthday, doesn't matter. It made good money and we sold nicely, but servers are loud and we have been so often there for hours that even with ear protection I think it messed something up. Also crawling in small spaces for wiring etc isn't great for your body. I did learn a lot about Linux and the popular packages; we had our own patches and versions of most to shield from 0-days and save processing waste to put more on one machine without it degrading quality.
I would not do it with reselling ; you have no control; when the police called us for illegal/child materials and so on, we were in charge of removing/blocking that; if you resell, they will likely first just shutdown everything you have and then ask you for an explanation. And after a few time delete you and that's it. Or when there is something wrong technically, you are left holding the bag anyway as many will just blame you (and then after 'some time' your service 'suddenly' is back). You can hire much more expensive stuff with much better support but in our experience, that does not help much when there is a LOT of abuse (and with millions of sites, you have a lot of abuse that you cannot check).
Abuse complaints come to the IP address owner. If you have your own IP addresses, you don't need to worry about having your vendor terminate your account for abuse.
This is something I'd love to know, too. I like servers, infrastructure, and terminals, so doing something like this has been in the back of my head for a while now
When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal use due to it being expensive and complicated.
Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on half the salary, it's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.
For providers like us, we have to lease IPv4. We came long after IPv4 was already depleted. IPv4 prices did go down. Despite that, the $15/year 128MB BuyVM plan is long-gone.
But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.
For countries, if you meaning connecting to VPS, lot of countries have good IPv6 connectivity now.
For me both ISPs I use have native v6. This will differ from person to person.
It is inconcievably stupid that github, run by a massive tech company like Microsoft, has not migrated to ipv6. They're single-handedly holding back adoption.
There may indeed be some tracking that MS does via IPv4, but it's not a good way to do it.
I suspect any such tracking is essentially just some cruft that snuck in (either their own or legislative) in the early 2000s, and nobody thinks it's their problem to make go away.
That said, that IPv4 is a poor way to do tracking doesn't guarantee there's no manager demanding it: any corporation eventually gets someone with no technical knowledge demanding bad solutions.
Responsibility and controls. If the host/dc assigns a dedicated addresses the contract can be essentially "the customer assumes all liability behind traffic". With NAT/LB you need at the very least quite robust, evidence-grade monitoring mechanisms tagging all traffic and keeping historical data. In practice, some for of active abuse prevention is required, otherwise huge chunk of your address space is going to effectively linger in blacklist limbo.
That is, if being unreachable below "presentation layer" is acceptable in the first place, but I guess the question kind of presupposes this.
I am very hopeful of CXMT. But then then it could take a while for them to ramp up production. Maybe by then, the AI bubble would've burst.
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
We can certainly do with less plastic junk and fast fashion. But on the high end it hard to argue that cheaper Chinese products are ever a bad thing.
If corporations in western (aligned) countries stopped feeding sovereign wealth funds and private equity with profits and actually invested something maybe they could compete with China more closely, even with whatever shenanigans the CPC get up to with state support.
We use ASRock Rack servers, mainly because the only option for our industry are OEMs like Supermicro and ASRock. Dell and HPE are non-starters, except for our "storage" offering.
Back in 2019, HPE was a good midrange option. Then came ASRock Rack who obliterated HPE with the X470D4U, relegating HPE to high-end enterprise servers. But also made Ryzen-based VPS hosts including yours truly, BuyVM, et al.
The funny thing is, I used eSIM on a Pixel 3, since it was the easiest way to activate on Sprint. Now, no big carrier will use a Pixel 3's eSIM.
But then on Sprint, they tried to copy the CDMA activation system on LTE whereas everyone else just used SIM cards directly. Sprint was very progressive on eSIM even if they were slow to VoLTE.
My Pixel 3 moved to a physical SIM due to switching to T-Mobile 3 months before the merger, and I've mostly used physical SIMs before the Pixel 10 Pro outside of international travel. I avoid MVNOs as my primary service because of the specter of eSIM-only phones, and that was pre-Pixel 10.
And yes, if my Pixel 10 Pro had a physical SIM card slot I'd use it.
At the present moment I live in a place in NYC without fiber. Manhattan row townhomes are notoriously hard for Verizon to install FiOS in. I chose 5G over DOCSIS simply because of upload speeds.
T-Mobile (both TMHI and Calyx Sprout SIM) has 40-75 Mbps uploads versus 20-35 on Spectrum.
It also helps that I use a L2TP VPN to a BGP VPS to get myself a public IPv4, otherwise I'd have Spectrum for no CGNAT.
Yes, I'd much rather have fiber with symmetrical speeds and low latency. Heck, if Spectrum had high split or even mid split I'd have that.
Cable hyped their "10G" upgrades but it's basically vaporware while non-cable ISPs actually showed up with fiber and/or 5G. Trump's tariffs are also punishing cable ISPs.
When I had CenturyLink, I replaced the ONT via a JTAG cable on the new ONT. The stock CL ONT (Calix 716GE-I R2) had a 16384 connection limit, which prevented me from running high-bandwidth Tor relays. The new ONT (Calix 803G) did not.
Calix for some reason makes it easy to clone some models.
Now I'm in NYC with Verizon Fios where I don't need a cloned ONT. Woo! The Verizon ONT is big and has a huge power brick, presumably because of RFoG alongside GPON.
That's very cool, but just to point out: that's not JTAG, it's serial (UART).
JTAG is a much lower level protocol, typically used for hardware or low-level software debugging. Serial/UART gives you a command-line interface to the software that's running.
Using a JTAG interface is a lot more complicated. If you're interested in playing with it, check out OpenOCD.
There is a mis-feature on the ONT called "Broadcom Packet Flow Cache". It apparently speeds up TCP sessions but at the expense of allowing a large amount of then.
Lumen fortunately moved off these ONTs. However, the new Smart NIDs have their fair share of issues from what I heard. I moved out of Lumen territory so have no experience with them.
Modern AT&T isn't really Ma Bell, it's SBC who bought AT&T and kept the AT&T name. That's why AT&T is based in Dallas and not New Jersey.
Ma Bell today is really AT&T, Verizon and parts of Lumen, Frontier and Consolidated.
AT&T also is worth less than Verizon due to bad mergers (DirecTV and non-cable Time Warner) which added a lot of debt, money that should've been used for fiber and 5G or even a bidding war against T-Mobile for Sprint if you had to buy your competitor.
I work for (current) AT&T, in Atlanta. SBC also bought Atlanta-based BellSouth in 2006, and some of my coworkers who are ex-BellSouth complain that working for this company hasn't been the same since. But I haven't heard that as much lately - a lot of those people have retired by now.
re: some of my coworkers who are ex-BellSouth complain that working for this company hasn't been the same since.
That would be correct and only natural. I started with Michigan Bell in 1977, went through divestiture, the assembly of Ameritech, then SWBT/SBC. The Bell System / along with Western Electric/Bell Labs was a great place to be. You could spread out the SD's to work on problems and end up talking with engineers/programmers. My bosses went from being in Michigan, to Wisconsin, to St. Louis, to NJ. So, yes, the jobs have changed, the coworkers have changed, the jobs have changed. Plus, we all missed Ed Whitacre when he retired.
Dont forget the takeover of Cingular. That always seemed to be when the old DNA was comprehensively switched out for the new. No more ATT with sleepy offices in San Antonio, now it was a mobile company based out of Dallas.
Yep - those were around the same time so I think people might find it hard to disentangle the two, especially when they’re just complaining instead of trying to do serious corporate history.
Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000 servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers.
I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.