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What do you do with all the LEB's lying around?
As some of you probably know, I write reviews on LEBs and although most of the providers understand and offered me a refund after I write to them and ask for a refund after publishing the review (and thus nothing would be changed unless it is my own error), I did have a few that I just like the boxes so much and does not want to cancel them. This, of course, is on top of the all the good deals that I have got from LEB/LET and WHT over the years, which some of deals are unlikely to come back again.
So now I have a whole bunch of LEBs of varying size sitting at various places in North America and Europe and doing nothing (some of them probably have not been touched and forgotten for a long time). It is difficult for me to just cancel them knowing the good deal that I have got, however it is also a waste of resources (fortunately I still have enough pocket money to spend on LEBs) on my end.
I am sure a lot of you are having similar situations here, so what do you do with your LEBs that are just lying around?
Comments
just wasting energy and giving some coins to the provider
it's like giving them a tip ;D
I keep a network map of all the services I need, and sort them out to VM's/etc. Every so often I update the list to see if I need to add or remove any VMs to the list... but it's not very often I have some sitting in limbo for more than a month or two.
I run a storage grid off them, along with some other things: http://wiki.cryto.net/doku.php?id=about
Run idle doing nothing. As Aldryic said, I keep a list with specs, costs, uses to see what I can do.
@joepie91: Interesting work, but that is a public/shared storage though correct? I do have a few VPS with large hard drive space running ownCloud for my private dropbox and a few more running Crashplan for backup, but what you do seems to have gone far beyond that! How did you build this grid?
@Aldryic now I know why you were in the army and I am not, you always like to keep things in order and checking over your shoulders do you?
Hah. Aye, the discipline required was a perfect environment for my OCD to flourish in :P
just wait until a right projects comes around....
@jcaleb that's what I told myself when I bought them too, except now I have more and more LEBs and less and less time to even spend on 96mb, let alone new projects
@96mb i went to a meeting last night, and if that goes well, all my idle LEB wont be enough to support them =( may need to sign up for more.... hopefully it pushes through
edit:
while waiting for project, you can use them as backup of backups. and also study platform, temporary hosting of ideas that you want to demo., e.g. i did icecast lately, and trying livestream video with help of ihatetony
It's semi-public. It is technically only available for use to non-profit projects, and the introducer FURL (which you need to connect) can only be gotten on request. I am planning on opening this up a bit more in the future, but it's quite tricky to deal with abuse with the current setup, so I have to put a bit of effort into setting up an abuse-proof system. It also doesn't just consist of my LEBs, quite a few people donate left-over storage space on their own servers by hooking it up to the grid. There's over 3TB total storage space right now. It all runs on Tahoe-LAFS (http://www.tahoe-lafs.org/)
I do a lot of testing, lota lota testing. Unfortunately will have to wait till I get a dedi server before I can do stress testing, so that VPS6 doesn't slap me for being a bad neighbor
I stuffed everything onto my 512MB Buyvm VPS, and canceled all my other virtual servers six months ago. I haven't looked back since, it's so much nicer to have a single good VPS instead of a whole bunch of underused crappier VPSs.
Xen?
Almost always start as impulse buys and then they graduate to legitimate uses over time if I find sustained performance to be acceptable. Quite often I just grab a deal I know won't be available forever and just use it to test web server configurations, when what I'm really watching is how happy I am with them for a month or two. I typically only keep exceptional vps systems on my shelf. Smart shopping around here can land you some crazy good systems, but in a moment of need you may not be able to just grab one (take BuyVM and Hostigation for examples) that stands above mediocre.
@joepie91 I have just read their Trac page and it is pretty impressive, interesting idea to build your own cloud of some sorts I guess
And forgot to mention, your VPS comparison table is pretty cool!
@jarland That is how I ended up with more and more VPS, some of those are just too difficult to let go!
I keep an excel document that outlines location, provider, memory etc with that I am currently using the vps for (if anything)
I then will play around with different things here and there, varnish as of late.
I actually make a little money each month for hosting someone's website that gets a decent amount of page views. They were used to paying $250 a month for a dedicated server which really wasn't that great (can't remember exact specs, AMD dual core 2gb ram sticks in my mind) but we went ahead and bought 3 vps on the same node, had one for db, two for php and then set up a few varnish servers. Cost, not even $250 a year lol
Their site actually runs faster now.
@Regs
That's very nice ... you did that for free just for the recurring?
I usually use them for testing, before i install that program/application to the VPS where i host my gameservers on
Let's just say that I gave them a much better deal than what they were getting at the time
I back them up, obsessively.
Then I monitor the backups, obsessively.
Then I monitor the monitors, obsessively.
In my free time, I audit their firewall rules.
Hmm.. mind sharing what you consider difficult to let go? maybe list some specs and price? been thinking about pruning my VPS list but yeah it's some what a hard choice cause they all seem to be a good deal.
How about giving them to charity, "loaning" them off or selling/auctioning them off ?
@tmn29a: Charity: "Hi, I have some VPS to donate to the under-privileged families"...does not sounds too right
"loaning": I do not want to get kicked off a provider because my loaner decide to use the VPS as a spam machine/porn server
selling/auction: The reason why I kept them is because those are really good offers
@earl: To be honest I do not even have all in my head right now, but an example would be RocketVPS, I had one of their 50% off VPS which I believe they no longer allow any discount on the cheapest plan they have, and definitely no more 50% off.
@96mb you're so lucky getting rocket 50% discount. how did you do that? just happened to be in the right forum at the right time?
@jcaleb: yap, that was definitely my lucky day, I rarely check forums at work but happened to be a slow day that day and decided to take a look on WHT, and I was literally sitting there and go like...come on, my PC, go faster!!!! LOL
That's why I keep it although I have no use of it currently. xD
Hmm.. is RocketVPS a good company? never really heard of them.. anyways they seem to be having a sale now, 30% off recurring discount for the first 25 orders on rs2 and above plan, but even with the discount it's still above $7.
Most of the VPS that I have a hard time of letting go are mostly $2 and under, had some good deals from ipxcore bluevm and vpscheap..