Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

You'd think from the prices (which initially were the lowest in the biz, or almost). At some point, without warning we got switched to a limited virtual machine from what I can tell, along with a price increase. They've shut down the board a couple times when I've uploaded somthing like a raspberry pi image (a couple GB) and then tried to download it. "Unlimited storage and bandwidth" they say, but...at least they haven't dinged us on storage - there's way past a tB up here in various places.
Which is making it really difficult to change providers....without losing all of this.

I did manage to negotiate a discount by threatening to cancel - and shades of the telecom oligopoly,. they woke up and offered me a better deal - only TWICE what they are charging new customers...

If I could get better bandwidth here, I'd just host this myself...a little odroid would probably do this fine and not even draw real noticeable power. But with 100 kB upload speed from here ( one megabit)...that's not happening. The local phone co keeps saying I can co-lo there, but somehow we can never get to the point of making a deal...I just get "sure, that's possible" from some low level tech and no one ever gets back to me. That'd be ideal - according to them, they have "too cheap to meter" bandwidth at the local shop - a major backbone comes right through here...but you know, "issues" like letting some guy (me) on their internal network.
I'd be careful too if I were them - they don't have a track record of being on the ball, and are still paying for past mistakes (like answering HELO on their email server so we could all get more spam).

I am, BTW, hosting another phpbb on my lan, not for fusion per se, but just my sysadmin notes to self, with a 4 tB disk to store whole system images for my LAN of things and so on. An Odroid HC2 handles that with aplomb, saturates my 1 Gb network easily.

[Rex Allers]

That bill for hosting seems pretty high to me. How long is that amount paying for?

I have seen a couple times where I couldn't get to your site for a day or so. Doesn't seem like you are getting much service for your money.

I haven't done it, but don't some hosting companies have a way to migrate your site data directly, so you don't have to be the middleman?

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, I forgot to say that's 3 years. Still high, considering. Given my combined income is around $1400 a month...ow. The bill is higher if done on a year by year basis.

They are resistant to migrating. The price to get them to put it on a drive is out of my reach right now. A download would take a year at my speeds.
I've been unhappy with them for awhile on that "new meaning for unlimited" stuff. I'd like to be able to share linux images, it's not like the readership here would pound too much bandwidth doing that.
The reason the site goes down has been under discussion, but it coincides with their backup schedule. And it's always fixed by
going to the admin part of things and rechecking the "enable forums" box...
It's once or twice gone down intermittently with "can't get to database" but comes back up on its own pretty quick on that one.

I guess I need to do some research. I saw a youtube video on consolodation in the hosting community, seems like a lot of outfits are being bought up by one
that always results in worse service.
Kind of like the medical biz around here - you have two choices and both are effectively incompetent price fixing pieces of a duopoly. Like telecom but you can drive to the "competition" in only half an hour - only one MD practice is self-owned in a 60 mile radius....

So I guess I have to somehow find all that out again and see if someone out there will migrate - there's a lot up here many don't know about in the /data url, as well as this board (the rest I don't think anyone cares about). But then...I just paid and no way I'd get that back...

[Bob Reite]

I saw a youtube video on consolodation in the hosting community, seems like a lot of outfits are being bought up by one
that always results in worse service.

That's what happened with Hostgator. They had pretty good service till they got bought out by someone. They did NOT change their name, so I had no idea why all of a sudden service got bad. It was email that was the real issue. It was a "shared server" for that which the new company no longer policed for spammers, so my email started getting blacklisted. I complained, took them TWO MONTHS to finally admit it was a shared server and if I wanted it better, I'd have to pay $200 a month for a dedicated server. I told them to pound sand and decided to host myself. At least where I am I can get reasonable bandwidth for a reasonable price. Between the electric bill going up $20 a month from running servers here, and another $15 a month for a 5 IP address block, I'm still paying $5 a month less than I was paying Hostgator for less hard drive space.

As far as migrating things, not a problem, as I always had a full backup of my sites on a local machine.

[johnf]

Doug Bob
I have gone to protonmail
hosted in switzerland secure encrypted offshoot of Cern
this is free for an email account
if you want to host you pay a few euros/month
check them out

[Bob Reite]

I like the idea of end-to-end encryption, although your correspondent(s) would also have to be using proton mail to ensure that the mail is truly encrypted end-to-end, unless the correspondent supples you with his PGP public key, then you can use the "Encrypt for Outside Users" feature.

[Doug Coulter]

Well, mail isn't the real issue here - hosting this site is. I could "go on" about end to end encryption and what it does or doesn't buy you...let's say side-channels are a lot easier to do than most realize and it's all about key management. If you have that, a simple bit of code I wrote works fine. No state actor brute forces much of anything - they just steal the keys...
Which is trivially easy if you can get into a machine (See shadow brokers and friends, defcon, all skiddies...and lots more) and/or if your "end to end" encryption code keeps the keys in memory, which it must at some point - for longer than required. Only the really good hackers can always get the keys on well done code, of which there is none. If your encryption is written in say, Java, or my fave, perl, you don't even control what's in ram when and any claim otherwise is BS. And of course, it has to be plaintext at some point in your GPU for both ends, where it's super easy to steal.
It's a dream that ain't gonna come true, not even considering things like Intel's management engine, AMD's equivalent thing...and so on. It only takes one crack, the attacker has all the advantages.
Your only real defense is that they don't care about you.

https://researchasahobby.com/full-list- ... es-brands/
Is a site listing all the companies quietly owned by EIG, and why that stinks. GoDaddy owns many of the rest - still looking for that list, no one really wants this known as the competition laws aren't quite as lenient for web hosts as for telecoms (who have more lobbying money - the actual law makes little difference when you own the cops as it were).
Which is why the US pays more for internet than any other place on earth, or one of the biggest reasons. The big boys simply avoid one another's territories so there is effectively zero competition and they can charge as they please and give rotten service - Verizon hasn't kept any of the rollout promises governments have subsidized, for example (and are in court over it, but always somehow get things put off forever) - Comcast is the most disliked outfit on earth, even exceeding the US congress in badness...and so on.

Our host is among the EIG slaves.

Current list...the site updates this, so they claim

Looking for one that's still independent and likely to remain so.

[Bob Reite]

Ah! It was exactly when EIG bought out Hostgator that the support went to hell. I'm on Comcast, no other choice where I live, but they have been OK for me.

I maintain that you must have physical control of your machine to have any chance of being safe. "Cloud Computing" is totally insecure as there are known exploits for getting to the hypervisor from a virtual machine instance.

[Donovan Ready]

I maintain that you must have physical control of your machine to have any chance of being safe.

As I have done for years. My now-defunct forum had uptime at 95% for ten years. The server was next to my bed, and I became aware of fan changes or power drops in my sleep.

Glad I'm over that shit, frankly.

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, the security biz maxim is "if they have physical access, game over", and this is obviously true - no DRM works for example, as legit buyers have to have a way to get to plaintext. But that way has to be on the media you give physical access to. Tons of examples.

But your machine can be safe in the bedroom (and running on the huge UPS I call my off grid solar system) and you can still lose. Any way of compromising any part of the chain and you're done (hope that fork doesn't hurt too bad!). Some Adobe exploit? Or any of the infamous other ones? Doesn't matter how someone gets a key logger, screen scraper, privilege escalation into your stuff, there are myriad ways.

Your only real security these days is perhaps no one caring enough to penetrate your walls. Which is, for better or worse, usually true - paranoid as many are, the possibly depressing truth is that actually no one cares at all - even if you think they're out to get you (just to bolster your ego that it'd be worth doing?).

All that means talk of end to end encryption is a nice fantasy - and by attempting it you're hanging a red cape in front of a bull and attracting attention, telling anyone who does see your bits that *you* think you have something to hide and might be worth more attention than the average stream of bits....

A loose quote from Asimov's Foundation series. A teenage girl, whip smart (Arcadia "Arkady" Darell) catches one of her father's conspiracy sneaking around under her bedroom window. After pointing out she can have him done in by hollering rape or equivalent, she points out that if you want to keep a secret, you don't put highly visible duct tape on your mouth and slink around - you act like a normal person and talk just as much - just about something else.

So here we are....
(and yes, I'm having a little fun at everyone's expense, hope the bill isn't too high)