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FreeMach™ - Free VPS Service Wrap-Up & VirMach Review
tl;dr: I won a free VirMach dedi last year and provided 10 free VPSes to LETers on it. Service is wrapping up; it went swell; and VirMach is a great provider. Thanks to all!
With the fury of the #GiveSomethingBackDecember campaign going on as of late, I thought I'd write up a post to bring some attention to a soon-to-be-concluding year-long effort to give something back to the LET community. First things first, let me thank @VirMach for sponsoring the server for a year and providing stellar services!
FreeMach™ Background
FreeMach™ is a free service providing ten free 3GB KVM VPSes to LET members that was enabled by a sponsored E3 unmanaged VirMach server won during the 2017 Provider Poll. Here is a link to the original thread announcing the service. The service was offered because when I won the free server for a year, I did not have a purpose in mind. I didn't want it to go to waste idling (or mining) away, thus I decided to give back to LET and try to gain a little hosting experience along the way.
A Year In Review
FreeMach Selection Process & Supported Projects:
With over 75 applications to choose from, the resources were in high demand. Even after sifting out the apps that didn't meet the requirements, I had a hard time deciding which proposed uses to accept.
There were over 20 LET users that received a VM over the course of the year, with some giving up their machines when they no longer had a use for them. The first VMs were set up towards the end of January, with VMs being reprovisioned along the way. Some projects that the service enabled:
- GeoDNS Load Balancing
- EasyEngine Testing
- Private File Sharing
- MariaDB Galera Cluster
- NodeJS App Development
- Non-Profit University Organization's Website
- Rancher
- IPv6 He.net Tunnel Testing
- Hindi Community Website
- Control Panel Development
- Video Encoding Tool Testing and Development
- and a quite a bit more...
No Abuse:
There were zero cases of abuse for the duration of the service. Perhaps I just got lucky, or the FraudRecord + intended usage screening helped weed out potential abusers. Everyone that I interacted with to setup, deploy, and support their VMs were great to work with and thankfully didn't cause me any unnecessary headaches!
Support:
Throughout the project, I provided best effort support. I'd like to think I did a decent job and quickly responded / handled issues as they arose. Most of the time the "tickets" were for reinstalls and the like and not anything wrong with the service itself. Others can chime in if they feel differently, but I think it was a resounding success and I got to get a slight taste of what it's like to be a provider.
Review Of @VirMach As A Provider
Support:
Besides asking for the IPMI details to do the initial Proxmox install, there was only one occasion that I reached out for support. This occured a couple months back. We ran out of bandwidth as I wasn't keeping a close eye on usage -- completely my fault. Once we hit the cap, I was notified of suspense. I opted to pay a few bills out of pocket to cover the expenses of adding additional bandwidth to keep the service up and running for the clients. Syed was very helpful and got the server back up and running in no time with the added bandwidth cap.
Uptime:
There were two instances of downtime, one of which was related to the bandwidth overage discussed above (so the fault was on my end). The second instance of downtime was for a scheduled maintenance event where the node had to be rebooted to address some hanging VNC console issues within Proxmox (a complete reboot thankfully fixed the issue).
Here is the HetrixTools uptime report: https://hetrixtools.com/report/uptime/a5b832d6bc468d9b0cc2b2d37dda13af/
(January and most of February is left out due to only onboarding with HetrixTools this year - thanks @HBAndrei!)
Machine Snappiness & Network
The machine itself was flawless. The dual 1TB HDDs had good I/O speeds when configured in RAID0 (YOLO!) and handled all 10 VMs running simultaneously quite well. SMART stats show the disks are still healthy and aren't showing any signs of issues. The CPU is an E3-1240v3, which has plenty of processing power to handle what's thrown at it. So much so that I invited a friend to use it for video encoding when CPU usage was staying relatively low.
No major network issues arose during the year. I capped each VM to 250Mbps to avoid network congestion, but besides that, clients had free reign. In the last month or so, we discovered some connectivity issues to Google Drive (reaching only a meg or two per second), but didn't get a chance to dig into that further. Other CC Buffalo services didn't have the issue, so I chalked it up to something up with my machine's configuration or IP space. No biggie.
Some Stats & Graphs
Network:
CPU Usage:
Load Average:
RAM Usage:
Conclusion
I'd like to thank @VirMach again for their sponsored prize and for always proving great performance and great support! I'd like to thank @Harzem for allowing me to sign up with FraudRecord to enable the applicant screening. And a thank you to all the participants of the FreeMach service, whether you were only with us for a single month or were with us for the entire duration of the project! Hopefully the service enabled you guys to complete your goals and projects. I'd certainly like to keep you guys on using the resources, but unfortunately the service is set to terminate (as expected) in mid-January.
I may down the road do some side work, either providing VPS / game server services, or as support/sysadmin for another provider -- we'll see. This has been a great experience and I'm thankful to be a part of the LET community. We've got some good folks here, not just popcorn-stuffing drama-fiends.
I have another project that I'm working on that will provide a free service to LETers. Hopefully I can wrap that up soon so I can have some beta users test it out and give feedback. More details will be posted at a later date.
Till next time!
Cheers,
-Mason
P.S. To FreeMach Users: You should have already received an email by the time you see this thread about what to expect as we get closer to our deadpool date. As always, feel free to reach out to me with any issues or concerns. And please keep on using the service to your heart's content until service closure. Also, if any FreeMach users want to leave a remark about the service and how terrible or good it was or what it helped you accomplish, please feel free!
Comments
I wonder who caused that huge network spike?
Sorry for the bandwidth outage! Thanks for the free VM bud, it's been a pleasure to use 
Cheers, anytime!
and no worries about the bandwidth. As you can tell we needed some heavy bandwidth users anyway 
I saw a bunch of letters and pictures.
Ahh yes, thanks for the prefect tl;dr to summarize the above
Delicious amount of wankery itt, thanks OP!
All for you, sweet p
You are awesome! Thanks
Thanks for taking part!!
Hope the service was of some value for you!
Really awesome project, you gave it an excellent use. Proud!
It would be awesome if in the spirit of #givesomethingbackdecember and considering the use it got and lack of abuse that it could be sponsored for another year.
Calling all hosts!!
One very generous provider did reach out at the start of the project offering a dedi to run free NAT VPSes on. But ultimately I turned it down since I don't have a WHMCS or Blesta license to do auto provisioning, and managing two nodes would have been too much work at the time.
Fair enough! I overlooked the management overhead there.. lol
This will only make things faster. Didn't Jack have both at one point for his freeb?
My thoughts exactly. Had I had it, I would've run both nodes. Jack had WHMCS and Virtualizor. I had asked him about it before starting up the service, but didn't want to be spending money monthly on a pro bono project
Sorry, we just accidentally extended your free service by a year. What will you do next?
Wow! That's incredibly kind of you! Of course the project must continue!!
Okay so now we need a year's license for virtualizor and whmcs... Can anyone match @VirMach generous offer??
Is there any employee from VirMach here, accepting bribe for the location SSD32G lifetime (easter egg) offer? That would be awesome to make a fork of FreeMach project.
@MasonR #FreeMachMustLive
i wish i can see who is behind @VirMach?
i had a vm from FreeMach couple of times and it was great... also MasonR ready to help.
long live long live Long Live the FreeMach machine ....
It's time to reveal.
@MikePT, lets wait and see.
@MikePT, you look different? Have you changed your hair?
These PR stunts on LET, getting more and more interesting.
I heard @Ho-ost is going to give away his company next for GiveSomethingBackDecember
Good luck with my budget.
@VirMach did 😁