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As a software developer, I agree 100%. A dev that doesn't know the basics of sysadmin/devops stuff, how to configure CI pipelines, how to deploy small applications, configure reverse proxies etc, isn't a proper developer.
Writing code is one of the smallest and easiest parts of the job. Coordinating everything, designing a system that can scale etc is much more important and depends on someone's non programming skills.
Pretty much.
Also code robustness is much more important than features.
For PMSS, probs 90% of the work is making sure things work.
One loud person was adamant PMSS sucks because of lack of features and we should move to swizzin', backend is worthless and has no value etc.
Well, 90% of the work is in the backend and making sure things work, and as few users can break it as possible. Considering how unstable rtorrent for example is, and they keep inventing better idiots the more you try to idiot proof stuff, it's insane how stable stuff works actually.
Swizzin' while it offers a lot of features, even that loud person's supposedly honed and well built system was half broken, and it has none of the backend stuff -- the stuff that truly matters as a hosting provider.
You don't get code which doesn't need maintenance for decades by sheer accident without knowing anything of the lower levels.
nevermind, "our outdated crap which we should abandon" has avoided a lot of stability and especially security issues exactly because we move a bit slow on the updates, let others beta test the bleeding edge (right now that is Deb11/Deb12, we are still on Deb10!) and secure it.
Everytime we introduce new features it causes a myriad of tickets and stability issues, every single time.
Even as tiny feature change as changing the 502 error message has caused a lot of tickets lately. Because it changed, and people don't understand it at a glance. Junior developer (which i mentioned) made it, and didn't follow instructions, i didn't double check. I have to now go back myself and redo that
I did have a seedbox with Pulsed Media. I found the service to be very unreliable. Definitely not worth the money. Never again. I went back to a premium provider seedboxes.cc. Sticking with them.
The price I was paying was low during promotional period on first sign but after that I wouldn't of stayed longer as it just was able to deliver decent uptime for me.
I find pulsed media good for the price.
If can take slightly longer to set up the *ARRS than other providers but not by much, prob takes about 10 minutes to set it up. Which if you don't know what you are doing could be an issue.
I find it good for a set up and leave it system. Since setting mine up think the only time I've had to change anything was to do with my change my rclone copy command (nothing to do with pulsed media).
One thing I couldn't get working was rclone mount as it needed fuse3, so meant sonaar/radaar somethings downloaded an item I already had (minor issue).
Overall it's good for the price and has generous bandwidth allowance
I think it's the best around for the amount you pay. Network is able to push whatever you throw at it, you can go pretty nuts with it, especially P2P is outstanding. Their products are well priced and was delivered within ~1h. The lack of IPv6 is justified for everything you do get. Support was <24hours for non-critical. Knowing they have been around since forever, they know their shit and do it well. Certainly high in my top 10 providers
You won’t get a cheaper NVMe dedicated server as from PulsedMedia.
As far as a friend told me, their peering and speed is even better as Hetzner, from PM to Leaseweb NL.
Their offers are absolutely recommendable.
My 2 cents:
a) Direct speeds down/up is fine on my MD.
b) p2p down is great, usually full gbit, but upload on p2p sux big time, no idea why. Some kind of shaping/priority is my guess. Not tested Deluge as I dont know how to properly use 2 libtorrent branches on same system (1.x and 2.x)
c) No rdns possible... (promised "later").
What sort of upload speeds are you seeing out of curiosity?
At least anything which starts with 2 digits in megabytes (XX megabytes).
+1 for @PulsedMedia
Nice offers! Keep it up!
I'm guessing it's peering, most other seedboxes are in NL so I would assume other peers in NL are selected over peers in Finland. I'm no bittorrent expert though
I think most are at OVH so France will be your best bet
wow guys! Thanks for the kind words! ^_^
You hear those far far far too rarely. Typically on this side the only metric you have is "are users renewing?", and you only hear about the negative. Sometimes it gets scary when it's eerie quiet on helpdesk too, makes you think "are people even using these?", then you go check BW graphs for example.
Very much appreciated!
Thanks @lowenduser1 @IHA_User @Jamph @host_c
-Aleksi
We don't do any shaping at all. It's your settings.
Since your network performance is excellent otherwise, it's definitively with your torrent setup or those particular torrents. Networking is difficult; https://wiki.pulsedmedia.com/index.php/Network_Diagnostics#Common_Misconceptions
OVH does insane shaping shenanigans indeed, they keep forcing connections to slower peers. Cost cutting i guess, so they can sell the premium BW which comes with more peers / routes apparently.
@PulsedMedia I rent an excellent MD server from you. I'm thinking of moving a project into but whenever I do to other providers, I often reinstall a few times be it due to bonking or be it due to incompetence.
How often is too often when it comes to ticketing for reinstallations?
I can migrate this over a month or even more. Just wanting to know how many tickets is too many
Morning, so I wanted to chime in, why do so many people want to hate on providers like @PulsedMedia ? I mean they don't have IPv6, or rDNS, or a reboot/reinstall button. So, what are you using your seed box for that is so legal that you need those services? I am sorry but come on, most of us get seedboxs for sailing the high seas. If we were not doing so we would not be asking for DMCA free boxes/locations. I mean truly your legal so why don't you get a vps/dedi over in the States here and set one up yourself? Wouldn't you get all those features your demanding? I mean personally I have several seedboxes that are over at Racknerd that are being used for 100% legal needs/reasons and I have had not one problem. I also have a seedbox at PM for those same legal needs, and I have a personal box, that is being used for personal needs.
Bandwidth, I agree that p2p speeds are great, I can download a Ubuntu ISO via p2p in a matter of moments which is amazing, but when move my new found treasures I only pull about 150/200MB/sec to my other server here in the States. Ok so what? It takes 10 minutes to move my new found treasure? Again setup your seedbox in a location closer to you, then your problems will be done.
Or here is another idea, do it yourself, do it better. Oh and do it in a DMCA free location too, and oh please do it for less then $10/month.
I am sorry but PM + Yify is truly an amazing pairing, @PulsedMedia please keep up the amazing work, and I hope nothing but continued success for you guys.
I'm seeding the Ubuntu ISOs from PMs network, you're welcome 😊
But also, they're pretty decent machines for databases and not seedboxes, hence why people want them to have the features of other dedicated servers.
Couple is fine, as long as it's not a 4TB model (those need installing manually essentially still ... Uh, so much work!)
We really need to automate this stuff, part of reason we haven't added stock in a while.
People are drawn to negativity. People want to be loud on negative stuff.
Never on the positive.
This is evolutionary, in the ancient times it meant survival "There's lions there! Don't go there!", or "These fish caused me to vomit all night long, don't eat them". People would want to listen for their safety.
those are for the dedis.
Albeit, admittedly, it would be nice if users could clear their seedboxes and start fresh from the panel, those requests are so rare we haven't bothered.
Thank You Very Much! And we shall
Infact, so much that when i work on this MD server project i tend to vision things for 30 years, and soon we'll move to ~new hardware only with the goal that average node would live on for 15 years before replacement // however long a person finds value from it // however long it functions.
Don't forget, every negative person seem to think they can operate a (esp seedbox) hosting business better than the actual provider
It's easy and the provider is just a bunch of morons!
To the point, that one such person claimed that backend code and processes are worthless
[insert troll face here]
Back to real world; All the value is in the backend processes, and perfect working day for me personally is one i'm extremely bored at. Why you ask? Everything works.
The MD servers are normal dedicated servers, we just haven't gotten around to automating them, the hardware design has taken all time. Also off the shelf solutions none of them work quite like we'd like to work them, but i think we are forced to go with one, and disappoint users 5 years down the road when most of the features get removed to get stuff running the way we like it. There's some curious features i'd like to do, and off the shelf stuff just doesn't bend to our will to accomplish those
Some of those features are essentially imaging/templating Dedis (like you'd do a VM!), Automated backups, autoreplacement of failed servers, automatic full testing of a server, migration to another server (so you could scale up or down!) etc.
It's all doable, but there's zero existing solutions, to the point that the fundamental requirements to make that happen everyone shuns away, despite there not being any reason to.
But alas, we simply don't have the development resources right now. It's extremely difficult to hire competent coders, extremely difficult. Most of the time the new hires cause more damage than they solve, and i have to personally go in and fix stuff.
To be honest, I never particularly liked PM because of the low-end service quality. Earlier on in the thread, they commented how no one purchases their "free" seedboxes anymore. But even clicking on the link to add it to my cart took them 23 seconds to load.
I actually wanted to check out how many services I had with them over the years, but after logging into my client area in a whopping 44 seconds, clicking on the Services tab gives me an error 503 after 1 minute of waiting. It is possible that these load times deter other future customers as they are indicative of the performance of their shared machines.
I have purchased low-end seedboxes from them several times: auction boxes with 250GB, low bandwidth storage boxes, and those performed... adequately at best, sometimes, not at all. I've never had to restart rTorrent and ruTorrent manually so many times at any other provider; on PulsedMedia, I had to do it almost daily. Sometimes, I got a HnR warning for a torrent being unseeded for two days, and of course, rTorrent was crashed for two days, no automatic restart, nothing.
I added like 20 torrents at once to start seeding, the box was unresponsive for several hours. My Ultraseedbox machine, on the other hand (same category, cheapest option!) handled 32 torrents being downloaded at once, with full speed.
In one case, I also had a ticket that was waiting for an answer for a whole week, and other times I just wasn't really satisfied with the tone of the answers - one time, the web panel was timing out constantly for hours, and when I could load ruTorrent, torrents were only running at like 700kbps down (with plenty of popular, well-seeded torrents). The answer I got was "That being said, that server indeed has some load. Nature of entry level shared servers. For more performance you want to be looking at Dragon-R or M10G."
I mean, I understand exactly what I purchased, but the whole experience left a weird taste in my mouth. And for entry level seedboxes, they aren't particularly cheap or competitive anymore either; I got a cheaper AND better performing server at Ultra.cc without all of these issues. Everything loads super fast, client area, seedbox control panel, ruTorrent interface, the torrents are running at great speeds, no weird errors, no surprise 4x pricing.
I opened and I would like to close with the statement that my experience is only based on their entry level shared seedboxes. Dedicated users might have a completely different view, and that is fine. But in the shared market, I don't think PM deserves to be particularly high up on any list.
Yeah, i think you are pretty much describing the cold reality there. Personally i have no formal education (i just ended up with IT at the end of the 90s/early 2000s as that was what i was good at and back then everyone even knowing where the power button was would get hired anyways) and i was kinda shocked when i was helping a bit with my neighbor's bachelor preparation and witnessed a university IT class for the first time...
It's obviously not the kid's fault (you can't really offer education in some field expecting a ton of preexisting knowledge after all) but most of them will likely be someone's headache once they finish as they seemingly only get taught the bare minimum in relation to just about anything. It might be a little better with the more specialized types of studies (like someone going for application developer will be - hopefully - at least somewhat proficient in coding) but in general i felt the whole thing to be very demotivatingly shallow.
I mean, jeez... we were getting raised eyebrows because i located a missing (not really - it turned it was just that noone had bothered to tell students they were not supposed to use libraries as it was assumed that they wouldn't know how anyways...) library and added it to the build process.
A computer science degree is just that - a science degree. You're not studying a trade. And with the sheer amount of maths and cs theory that makes up 90% of the curriculum there really only is so much practical development that they can teach you. If a student manages to cheat his way through the few practical development projects he has to do (which often are in groups), he can totally graduate with a Bachelor's having very little programming experience.
Regarding sysadmin stuff, it's practically not taught at all. If anything students teach it to themselves if their projects require it. But most of that stuff is trivial compared to cs/maths so any graduate should be able to become a good sysadmin within a short period of time.
I wouldn't call it being the "bare minimum" taught. The depth of operating system theory taught, for example, will probably exceed any self-taught sysadmin's knowledge. Many universities require students to implement parts of or full kernels themselves, have a deep understanding of scheduling, memory allocation algorithms, etc.
But you don't get taught "this is how you configure a systemd service" or "this is how you set up a static ip address on debian"
Sounds about right. It's not really just programming though. It was rather that everything seemed to have been touched about 5 minutes just to move on to the next topic. I'm not really sure what had taken up so much time as i wasn't involved for the most part but as you say it probably wasn't anything practical. One thing that had ended up with me a bit earlier was an assignment to write something in a fictional assembler language... Not only was the whole thing completely pointless (why not take an existing language?) but it really wasn't possible to definitely solve the assignment as the operations weren't well defined and we basically had to guess what the expected solution was (i've actually written a fair bit of real assembler code).
Well, personally i don't really get the whole obsession with math in IT. Yeah, it's helpful to have some basic understanding but outside a couple niches you'll likely never need any kind of advanced math knowledge at all.
As to how easy it'll be to become proficient at system administration with nothing but those basics will likely depend a lot on the actual person and how much they were relating to the subject in their free time. For those which limited their exposure to the actual courses i'd guess they'd basically start at zero. Sure, a lot of the learning process comes down to learning how to help yourself but given that something as banal as being able to use
findto actually find text in files seemed to be a major feat i'd guess it would take some time to even get used to CLI, let alone getting accustomed to the various systems.I'm not sure if this would be some kind of specialized studies but in the environment i saw i'm 100% positive that excepting any kind of complex software construct would have been just hopeless. I guess there likely was something that touched those topics but as purely abstract theory i somewhat doubt this will be more than some mumbo jumbo which you memorize until your exam is done. What would someone make from knowing about allocation strategies when the person in question has never actually dealt with memory allocation in general? The most advanced code i've seen was basically: Read value, do some basic calculation, print result.
I'm not wanting to diss CS students. I just feel that (especially with the shortened time allocated in recent years) they don't really get a lot of actual hands on experience and are released to the field knowing fairly well that they'll need to do a good amount of education on their own (or at the mercy of their future employers).
It's even worse outside of universities. I have a friend who's actually a fully qualified sysadmin, well... on paper. In reality he's doing printer support and is scared to even look at job offers in the field as he knows fully well that he doesn't know shit about 90% what's going to be expected from him. I'd love to say that he's some kind of exception but he really isn't.
It's taught for academia and private research. The people developing crazy game engines and ray tracers need fancy maths. So do cryptographers. In the general IT industry of course you rarely need more than basic high school maths.
The main purpose of a Bachelor's degree is to prepare students for further studies, Master's and Dissertation. People who just want a Programming or Sysadmin or whatever Bootcamp should be looking for those kinds of programs instead of Universities. It's unfortunate that the university/academia route has for a long time been considered the default for getting into regular IT jobs.
I think universities intentionally don't even attempt to prepare students for software engineering positions. It's such a vast field and skills largely come down to having thousands of hours of experience. Universities can't substitute that. At least in my experience they've made it clear that whatever they're teaching is a mere introduction to spike your interest and you are 100% expected to delve deeper on your own time.
We made the huge mistake on putting our billing to ARM based servers. It's total crapola. About to change back to x86 / Ryzen 7000 series server.
Ought to be sorted out soon(ish) (in real world terms, not internet. So more than 3 seconds
)
What did you expect for something which costed you probably 1/5th of next option up?
This, or expectations of super performance for no money at all, is part of the reason we don't really do those really low cost, because of users expecting 50€/Month service level on 2€/Month price.
This is false, there is couple levels of autorestarting.
So your rtorrent didn't crash, it stopped responding to xmlrpc API. Very common, this issue has existed over a decade and will never get fixed.
We have number of users having 10 000+ torrents.
Service level matters. Server you get matters.
That is correct. Pay for a children's bicycle, get a children's bicycle. Pay for a sports car, get a sports car. No paying for used children's bicycle and getting a brand new sports car.
So you bought the cheapest possible entry level thing, on a special with high demand, a lot of users all at once settling in. Did you expect it to perform say at 20Gbps NVMe RAID10 level?
If you don't like low end stuff, don't buy lowend. Really that simple. We have the M10G SSD and Dragon-R options for that reason. Got the money? Get the performance.
Clearly you do not understand if you compare this to say the 50Gbps NVMe offers.
Keyword here: 4x pricing
So you are on the 50Gbps NVMe most likely, 15€/4=3.75€/month.
3.75€/Month for your service means we receive from that approximately 2.75-3€ per month, and support alone accounts for about 1€ of the operating cost, power is likely around the 8W mark or 1€/Month mark -- leaving only 1.75€ for the performance, capacity and profit margin. There's a reason you have a hard time to find anything sub-10€/Month with us anymore which has good value ratio. We can't do it. Obviously neither can our competitors too, since 10€/Mo seems to be the bare minimum.
By the sounds of it you are on 250GiB HDD plan, which is extremely tiny, and meant originally only as a trial you move on to a proper plan to.
People like you are the reason we stopped putting any effort on driving the costs lower on Seedboxes. You simply cannot deliver high performance below certain price point, certain costs are static, like support, TRX Base fee etc.
You are dragging the whole company reputation through mud because you took plan which is the absolutely cheapest ever we could('nt) possibly do, and then people used heavier than we expected to, and finish it off comparing to a 50Gbps NVMe service with extremely low traffic cap.
Thank you for confirming (once again) that we shouldn't provide any seedboxes sub-10€ a month, perhaps 15€ a month.
Granted, there's been issues since energy crisis and the new VM platform, turns out even still now KVM is a ... bit shaky with the level of I/O performance our userbase asks for sometimes.
The level of performance each server sees varies greatly depending on the users, some do annoying things like 4KiB random I/O @ 100%.
This is the reason, to best of my knowledge, every other competitor does individual drives only, no raid what-so-ever, no redundancy ever. No big peaks, but also less headache when there's a user who thinks it's a good idea to run FIO 4KiB 128threads 24/7
Hence also the VM route, to get smaller base units since the whole backend would need to be recoded to separately single baremetal server into a multitude of individual drives. RAID also allows us to provide larger accounts (who else has 32TB seedbox option? or 40TB i think our max is currently), and the bonus quotas are easier to provide as well.
Bulk of our users are on RAID5/RAID10, comparatively few are on the RAID0 entry-level stuff you are on, despite the huge outcry in community that we suck for not providing RAID0. Well we did, turns out it's not quite so in demand and over time people tend to upgrade to RAID5 based M10G series, which also happens to have newer servers, less users per drive on average etc. at the relatively not that much higher price point.
Yeah, like i've said, niche topics. Besides i'd highly doubt anyone coming out of there to know enough vector math to build a 3D engine anyways. That's actually something, which in my opinion could be fully skipped. If you really need it, it's hardly more than a bunch of equations after all.
That's pretty much it. Getting a bachelors degree is kind of the default route into IT (i doubt even 10% of the course would continue studying after getting their bachelor). Admittedly there's another type of school, which will have a more hands on approach (unsurprisingly as half the time will be spent in some company) but it's really just a second choice often times just taken by those lacking the requirements to go to university. Beyond that i wouldn't know any viable alternative.
Even if you were ready to pay some kind of alternate education 100% out of your own pocket you probably won't get further than a bunch of certifications, so for 99% of people it comes down to university or FH (i have no idea how to translate this into English) with FH being hands down the better choice if you are planning to start working afterwards but it's sadly not that popular.
Like i've said it's not just development. It rather seems topics are generally somewhat fast forwarded through. I don't think anyone expects universities to spit out hardened developers or experts in any shape or form and getting anywhere near that is sure to need a personal investment but given it's actually what's regarded as higher education i'd still expect a bit more than what a somewhat determined person can do with google. Besides what i've seen is probably not that likely to spark interest in my opinion. My guess would be it rather frustrates people.
What? Linear Algebra (vector math) is not just a bunch of equations and strongly carries over into analysis, statistics etc. Any decent university's Linear Algebra exams will be 80% proofs and 20% just applying theorems.
In general, the logical thinking and formalization of problems that maths teaches strongly carries over into theoretical cs and even practical programming I've found.
If you want to write an academic paper that's probably true but for a random 3D engine it's not so much the case.
Well, i've been programming since i've been about 10 years old and i pretty much hate math. You are probably right in that there's similar approaches and being good at one will help you with the other but i wouldn't say that there's any necessities.