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The IncogNET thread - Discussion, news and updates.
Figured we'd do one of these too. LowEndTalk is a commercial platform, so might as well get our money's worth and let you see what exactly we've been up to.
I won't bore you with a full change-log and history, but starting from August:
- August 1st: IncogVPN launched (Twitter)
- August 10th: Can now create custom firewall plans in your VPS control panel. (Though this is a virtualizor update, not ours) (Twitter)
- August 23rd: Created "TU.GL", a URL shortening service for shits-n-gigs (Twitter)
- August 23rd: Had our subreddit banned shortly after creating it. Still unresolved. Thanks, reddit. (Twitter)
- August 28th: A big improvement to our default DNS system used by domain name customers was put into production. The free DNS is 4 unicast DDoS protected servers using different TLDs for each nameserver domain, ideally increasing the resiliency of the product. (anycast setup is still a work in progress) ( Twitter )
- August 31: New Netherlands KVM stock. ( Twitter )
- September 5th: Started using IFTTT to cross post Twitter announcements to both or Mastodon and Telegram channel ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 7th: Completed a big Kansas City, Missouri expansion. This involved moving gear from our old rack and colocation provider to our new rack and colo provider, all under the same roof. This move will help accommodate planned growth in this location. Still some more work to do in this location before we begin offering Virtual Servers and other services here. Currently only housing a small number of blade customers and is part of our VPN and DNS locations in production use. ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 10th: Anycast network teaser. Still a work in progress and trying to fix weird routing issues where some (for example) Los Angeles or west coast traffic likes to go through... South Carolina? Currently testing this on Vultr. We don't want to allocate an entire /24 for just a few DNS servers, so we're looking into utilizing it to it's fullest for domain name DNS, public resolver (ad-blocking and non-adblocking), and maybe even something like a WAF or very small CDN. It's all pretty much experiemental at this point. Anycast DNS will certainly happen, but maybe at a smaller scale. We'll see. ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 11th: Didn't forget
- September 12th: Woke up to some great news, that our .ST Accreditation we had been working on for a couple weeks and waiting for an update was finally approved. This has already been a very big thing for us and we've sold a lot more domains between then and now. This means IncogNET is now an official registrar for the .ST ccTLD and we're currently offering it at the lowest cost of any other registrar. ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 17th: The website TLDes.com which compares the pricing of hundreds of different TLDs from different registrars added us. We are still the cheapest .ST: https://tldes.com/st ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 15th: Paid our BilohBucks to regain Patron Provider status.
- September 19th: Made a ton of WHMCS updates. I decided to login as a end-user and go through the system and realized I really hate the flow of things. Took a deep dive course on WHMCS hooks and made some changes including: Promotional banner rotation to the sidebar to promote any sort of deals we want clients to see, added the credit balance back to the Client Area homepage. It used to exist ages ago as a 3rd party module but we removed it due to security concerns and realized it was pretty simple to show the same info via a hook, soo..... Also took the Services / Domains / Tickets / Invoices status and tally and placed it on additional pages other than just the client area homepage. It's pretty vital info and the direct links to other places of interest within the portal are handy and relevant. Fixed some UI stuff on the Submit Ticket page, namely making the department list two columns instead of one. There were a couple more things we did only available from the admin side of things that were basically just quality of life improvements. Still a few things to do and some I may need to read more documentation or reach out to WHMCS directly for. ( No announcement )
- September 19th: Sent some things to Kansas City to prepare for some other things.
- September 20th: We made a new site: https://dotST.st - Basically just makes it easier to search for a handful of available .ST domains and automatically add them to your IncogNET cart. ( Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram )
- September 21st: In preparation of finalizing our CentralNIC integration, (We're a CentralNIC accredited registrar, too) I went ahead and secured the https://dotGD.gd , https://dotGL.gl, https://dotVG.vg, https://dotFO.fo, and https://dotBH.bh ... Some of these TLDs we'll be offering at or nearest the lowest available pricing (Using TLDes as a reference). ( No announcement, LET got it first )
- September 22nd: About to attach more storage to our VPS Control Panel just to have more available storage for OS templates and so we can offer more default ISO options AND increase the storage that customers can use to temporarily store a custom ISO for installation (as well as the length of time we store it for you). This is just a nice little update that makes your experience better. (Will get to it after I get more caffeine flowing through me)
Still to do:
- Update our website with new information related to .ST and some promos.
- More stock for Virtual Servers.
- Migrate Texas shared hosting customers to Kansas City. Our Texas Shared hosting service is the only thing we offer publicly that is not on our own network. Was waiting until after the above mentioned move to complete this migration.
- Finalize accreditation steps for Identity Digital. We've been on-boarded, but I still need to do some things first.
- Catch up on support tickets... There are a lot of very old tickets but we're working on getting to them, newer tickets have been getting quicker responses than normal.
- Create more knowledge base documentation
- Take our blog down and just start using the WHMCS announcements feature to replace it. Pointless having two systems that aren't really being used for anything. Looks bad to have both sit relatively vacant, so will instead start making WHMCS announcements.
- Better backup setup. Most end-user backups (shared hosting, VPS) are stored with a provider with 1Gbps ports. All of our VPS nodes in the US and Netherlands have 10Gbps connectivity (We just cap you at 5Gbps) so the 1Gbps port on the backup side is a bit of a bottleneck causing slower backups and restores than we'd like. May need to migrate to a new provider and purge data after X-amount of time to make it possible, though. Still weighing our options on that front.
- Still working on MyPrivateInbox. Haven't made much progress as of late but working on some interesting proof of concept setups that I don't want to go into full detail here.
Am I doing this right? Figure anything noteworthy I'll just post in this thread, similar to how I do for Twitter / Mastodon / Telegram.
Comments
Nice. Great provider.
Edit: eh I missed the fact that the VPN service is now live. Was waiting for it during the testing phase here in LET.
Long live IncogNET, one of the few providers actually trying to do things differently (and in a good way).
Wishing you continued success!
I hadn't paid my BilohBucks yet so don't believe I could make the announcement here.
WHMCS sucks for product bundles, but there is a way to get a highly discounted rate for the VPN service via the bundle which we had to create a guide for: https://portal.incognet.io/knowledgebase/46/How-to-order-a-product-bundle-of-all-IncogVPN-locations.html
m y i m love incognet
m y love more if manndude check dm
Haven't tested much your finished VPN service yet (since last time it broke my router xD, that's on me since I messed up with some settings) but tests went flawless. Impressive performance.
you guys are up there with BuyVM for me, ive been using your shared hosting for my wiki for years now, and i appreciate the service extension you guys provided me with so we'll likely be with you for many years to come.
i've also been using IncogVPN since the 2022 beta, and it's now my primary VPN when hopping through EU/UAE. i wonder if you guys will ever look at MASQUE as an alternative to Wireguard? Cloudflare recently made the move and having all my traffic appear as HTTPS (including DNS) seems to work even on the most restrictive environments which might be a solid KSP for you: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/
another thing i'd love to get is port forwarding. i did open a ticket about it and i'm not sure if its possible on my gratis Pro plan
I love you habibi
Thanks for the kind words. I'll look more into MASQUE and other methods. We started with Wireguard because it more or less a household protocol name and it's well known. We get some tickets about, "Hi my country is oppressive, Wireguard is blocked!" and sadly there is nothing to offer. I've experimented with a few different things in the past in regards to trying to beat these systems but I'm not sure how to test them without booking a flight to Turkmenistan or being detained in visiting China. For those requests I just tell everybody: I2P and Tor are your friends.
If you'll write a port forwarding guide I can use in our Knowledge Base I'll do it for free.
Oh yeah, your signature has reminded me:
We're also planning on an affiliate program BUT it'll be restricted only to maybe a handful of people, at least at first. The idea by only allowing approved people access to it is controlling where the brand is represented. (Mainly, I don't want to attract affiliates that will promote sales in non-English speaking platforms or questionable forums, etc)
You have someone here you can use
Boinkless Hump.
(Oxymoron of the day).
Done, I have a (draft) working guide for Wireguard on Debian 12 using my IncogNET Netherlands VPS forwarding to my Netcup Austria VPS. I can write both a final guide for IncogVPN with the provided wg.conf as well as a howto for VPS users from the ground up if they want to roll their own server.
If you'd like, I can send you the draft via DM, get my IncogVPN port forwarding enabled and finish the guide for IncogVPN wg.conf profiles?
I'll follow up with the rest of the thread shortly.
Update September 22nd:
Virtualizor in maintenance mode at the moment. Added some block storage to the server and migrated all OS templates, ISOs and end-user ISOs over to it.
End User ISO limits have changed: Max size remains the same ( 8192MB ), but the number of end-user ISOs you can have has increased to 3. I can't think of a scenario where you may need to have 3 different ISOs available unless it's just to test different ones, but hey, your usage is your concern. Now you can upload 3 to have, for whatever your needs may be.
Before the end user ISOs self-deleted after 12 hours. This was seen as a fair value to allow you time to install your OS from ISO and fix any issues you may encounter. Well, now you can have it mounted for 24 hours.
Current OS templates available:
almalinux-8.3-x86_64,almalinux-8.4-x86_64,almalinux-8.5-x86_64,almalinux-8.6-x86_64,almalinux-8.7-x86_64,almalinux-8.8-x86_64,almalinux-8.9-x86_64,almalinux-9.0-x86_64,almalinux-9.1-x86_64,almalinux-9.2-x86_64,almalinux-9.3-x86_64,almalinux-9.4-x86_64,centos-6.10-x86_64,centos-7.8-x86_64,centos-7.9-x86_64,centos-8-x86_64,centos-8.2-x86_64,centos-8.9-x86_64,centos-9.3-x86_64,debian-8.7-x86_64,debian-9.4-x86_64,debian-10-x86_64,debian-11-x86_64,debian-12-x86_64,fedora-34-x86_64,oracle-8.6-x86_64,oracle-8.8-x86_64,oracle-8.9-x86_64,oracle-9.2-x86_64,oracle-9.3-x86_64,oracle-9.4-x86_64,rocky-8.4-x86_64,rocky-8.6-x86_64,rocky-8.7-x86_64,rocky-8.8-x86_64,rocky-8.9-x86_64,rocky-9.1-x86_64,rocky-9.2-x86_64,rocky-9.3-x86_64,scientific-7.4-x86_64,suse-13.1-x86_64,suse-15.1-x86_64,ubuntu-18.04-x86_64,ubuntu-20.04-x86_64,ubuntu-22.04-x86_64,ubuntu-24.04-x86_64,windows-2016-scsi-virtio,windows-2019-scsi-virtio,windows-2022-scsi-virtioCurrent ISO list:
2024.09.01-archlinux-x86_64.iso,alpine-standard-3.20.3-x86_64.iso,debian-12.7.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso,FreeBSD-14.1-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso,netboot.xyz.iso,openbsd75.iso,systemrescue-11.02-amd64.iso,ubuntu-24.04.1-desktop-amd64.isoAny others that you'd like to see? Remember, you're free to download your own and we'll store it for up to 24 hours for you to install from. I'm only wanting to have a small handful of default ISOs, common ones that are popular for quick access.
It's a small update, but worth doing. Doesn't cost us much more to offer a little more convenience for you.
At some point in the future we want to have some premade OS templates available too which is another reason why we did this, but that'll be announced at a later date. So far I've only made one for my personal use which is basically just Debian, Xanmod Kernel and a few packages pre-installed.
Oh yeah...
https://tldes.com/fo
https://tldes.com/vg
😬
+rep good no bullshit provider. Have seen incognet's name is some popular and some privacy friendly projects. Smooth exp with renting domains. Got very nice domains. Very happy and will surely get more domains from him. The only annoying thing [this is not upto them] is that Spamhaus sometimes will give -ve rep to domains.
I recommend incognet
VPS in KC ever going to be a thing?
Yep! Not sure when exactly, but it's most certainly on the roadmap. Hardware is expensive though and this is our first location where we 100% own all of the hardware and network gear, everywhere else we rent/lease.
On the domain front, reached out to nic.moe to because I know some of you are weebs. Was surprised to not see only a few accredited registrars: https://nic.moe/en/registrars/
Congrats on your enhancements and progress towards furthering things, @MannDude
@MannDude lmk!
Sweet!
After Terrahost bailed, seems like there's only a handful of providers that even serve the area anymore and unless you're looking for a dedi with decade old hardware, you're totally out of luck.
You could throw in the latest NetBSD ISO.
Also you'll need to "bore us with a full change-log and history."
How will you distinguish this service from ones like @Jar 's?
edit: I haven't bought any mxrouting plan yet, and I'd prefer to buy MPI's services due to presumed crypto support and heightened privacy features (server side encryption possible?)
Currently my custom domains are not being used for email, though I would like them to be.
Hm, why do you keep OS subversions? For example:
rocky-9.1-x86_64, rocky-9.2-x86_64, rocky-9.3-x86_64
Are those versions are radically different? I guess those who install 9.1 just upgrade to 9.3
there are other forums, NOT so famous but lots of us are there too
Yeah, I was really hoping we'd have been ready by then. Kansas City has been a money pit for us since we've been 'technically' operating there for a year but haven't quite gotten it 'production ready' the way we'd like. I feel like we missed a great opportunity when they pulled out but was severely limited in what we could do to step into place.
Aside from the features you'd expect like being able to pay with crypto and webmail access via Tor and I2P, we'll also be hosting outside of the USA, encrypted storage and encryption at rest as well as PGP via Enigma. I've been quite busy with other things as of late, but have been experimenting with mounting the required local keystores remotely, accessing them over Tor or Yggdrasil to obscure the actual locations of them. I'll circle back to all of this in the nearish future. Roundcube will, by default, have the additional features like email scheduling (write now, send on a timer you schedule) and a few other things by default.
It won't be ProtonMail, it won't be MXRoute. It'll be its own thing, I'm making sure of it.
I've spoken to @jar since him and I are what I'd consider friends before moving forward with all of this and got his blessing and he was even kind enough to share some of his own resources for my reference. We service different segments of the market so there is room for the both of us. Email is something we have been asked about somewhat often over the years and it fits in with our mission.
Honestly? I just grabbed them all because they're available via Virtualizor and I have the increased storage space now. The versioning, I agree, is a bit nuts.
I'm active there too, but I try to use it less for commercial purposes and more for community. I still post some deals there. The most recent and final IncogVPN beta, I believe, was offered to them first, before LowEndTalk
Thanks! I'm "always grinding" or whatever the kids say.
Will do! Out and about at the moment but when I get back to my desk I'll give you a PM.
When do you think you'll have an idea for MPI pricing and tiers?
Just be sure to "bring the receipts"
NetBSD-10.0-amd64.iso added.
UPDATE TIME
Failover page. It's only purpose is to show something other than a browser based error page if there is a hiccup with our upstream that hosts our main site / portal. Also displaying the 'light mode' logo which was just recently created.
Still working on some anycast stuff in my spare time. Below is the current results and you'll see some oddness here and there. How one test location with multiple POPs (Like Chicago, for example) can have wildly different results. Well, one routes to the local Chicago POP and the other likes to go to Atlanta or Dallas. There is a Miami POP but the Miami test location routes Atlanta. I'm not sure what actual home / residential ISPs would do, as this is all I have to test with currently. Sort of a new area for me since I'm mostly hands off the network stuff. But still, not bad results. Most of the global population centers have pretty low latency to the anycast network and it will likely improve. Using Vultr for this for access to many POPs and scalability.
Okay, via RIPE Atlas showing over 500 POPs are 20ms or less (275 POPs 10ms or less!). Not bad. Will improve.