Chicago VPS

[Crawford Sausage Company]

I'm going to move my web stuff to a vps and someone
showed me one at chicagovps.net for $1/month. The
last time I shopped for these they were like $30/month.

Does anyone know if Chicago VPS is any good? I don't
get that much traffic with all my sites combined, probably
less than 10G/month and compared to my current situation
no one can have worse bandwidth than me now.

I'll probably have to install everything from scratch
so I have been in sendmail hell relearning how to install it
on a Fedora 21 VM.

<minor rant>
Instead of eth0 and eth1 all the new distros made new
names like enp0s3 and p7p1 which make no sense and
broke many of my scripts.
</minor rant>

[Bruce Esquibel]

Post by Crawford Sausage Company
Does anyone know if Chicago VPS is any good? I don't
get that much traffic with all my sites combined, probably
less than 10G/month and compared to my current situation
no one can have worse bandwidth than me now.

If it's the place I'm thinking of, if you aren't going to do mail services
there, it probably will work.

Again, if it's the one I'm thinking of, they more or less cater to spammers,
scam artists and mlm schemes. I've seen alot of complaints against them
along those lines. It's not a Chicago business as far as I know, is some
national company or franchise operation.

If you go look at a whois server, they have a private registration and
probably need it. Assume whatever IP address(es) they assign your server is
probably already on a shit load of blacklists.

-bruce
***@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

Post by Bruce Esquibel

Post by Crawford Sausage Company
Does anyone know if Chicago VPS is any good? I don't
get that much traffic with all my sites combined, probably
less than 10G/month and compared to my current situation
no one can have worse bandwidth than me now.

If it's the place I'm thinking of, if you aren't going to do mail services
there, it probably will work.
Again, if it's the one I'm thinking of, they more or less cater to spammers,
scam artists and mlm schemes. I've seen alot of complaints against them
along those lines. It's not a Chicago business as far as I know, is some
national company or franchise operation.
If you go look at a whois server, they have a private registration and
probably need it. Assume whatever IP address(es) they assign your server is
probably already on a shit load of blacklists.
-bruce

Does this mean they get blocked at the ISP level? This is my main email
for stuff like banks which is mostly incoming. If I meet someone and they
send me an email first does that have any effect on these filters? I'm
not sending email to random people and I should be in the contact list
of most people I exchange email with. I white list domains as well.

The $1/month is a teaser to get you shopping. I think I'll need at
least the $10/month package but that seems like pretty cheap too. I
don't need all the hard drive space, like who puts 500G of stuff on
a cloud hard drive. It's RAM that's important.

Here is their whois info:

Domain Name: CHICAGOVPS.NET
Registry Domain ID: 1608502027_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Update Date: 2015-04-01T23:25:45Z
Creation Date: 2010-07-27T21:03:35Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2016-07-27T21:03:35Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: ***@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: [phone]
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant Street: DomainsByProxy.com
Registrant Street: 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
Registrant City: Scottsdale
Registrant State/Province: Arizona
Registrant Postal Code: 85260
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: [phone]
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: [phone]
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: ***@domainsbyproxy.com
Registry Admin ID:
Admin Name: Registration Private
Admin Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Admin Street: DomainsByProxy.com
Admin Street: 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
Admin City: Scottsdale
Admin State/Province: Arizona
Admin Postal Code: 85260
Admin Country: US
Admin Phone: [phone]
Admin Phone Ext:
Admin Fax: [phone]
Admin Fax Ext:
Admin Email: ***@domainsbyproxy.com
Registry Tech ID:
Tech Name: Registration Private
Tech Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Tech Street: DomainsByProxy.com
Tech Street: 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
Tech City: Scottsdale
Tech State/Province: Arizona
Tech Postal Code: 85260
Tech Country: US
Tech Phone: [phone]
Tech Phone Ext:
Tech Fax: [phone]
Tech Fax Ext:
Tech Email: ***@domainsbyproxy.com
Name Server: TIM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: VERA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned

[Bruce Esquibel]

Post by Crawford Sausage Company
Does this mean they get blocked at the ISP level? This is my main email
for stuff like banks which is mostly incoming. If I meet someone and they
send me an email first does that have any effect on these filters? I'm
not sending email to random people and I should be in the contact list
of most people I exchange email with. I white list domains as well.

The main effect you would see is if you send mail out (or relay thru) the
ip address they assign your vps. Most of the spam filters will check that
and if it's listed like on spamhaus, it'll be dropped or bounced back.

But of course, all of that depends on what (if anything) the destination is
using for spam filtering. It may not make any difference at all. As far as
inbound mail and your website, nothing to worry about there at all.
Yeah I know, it's all private registration. Doesn't that seem odd to you for
a business selling web services to do that?

I mean the price is right with them, but I'd try to find out what they do
when something goes wrong and how long it takes. I've known people who used
these kind of services and are surprised when they had to be making their
own backups and configuration settings. The host will guarantee something, 3
hours, 12, within a day they'll get you back online, but only as it was the
day you started. A fresh install. Even then it might be a different image,
updated and not quite plug and play as it was.

There are more reliable companies out there, like Digital Ocean and Linode,
which I think the ftupet people use for "the box" these days.

Even if chicagovps isn't the spam operation I think it was, they were one of
the "isp in a box" outfits where there is no real company behind it, they
leased hardware in a data center and sell the services from there. So I'm
sure there is someone somewhere that can reboot machines and set up
instances via remote, but everything else is "someone elses problem".

It's cheap for a reason.

-bruce
***@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

Post by Bruce Esquibel

Post by Crawford Sausage Company
Does this mean they get blocked at the ISP level? This is my main email
for stuff like banks which is mostly incoming. If I meet someone and they
send me an email first does that have any effect on these filters? I'm
not sending email to random people and I should be in the contact list
of most people I exchange email with. I white list domains as well.

The main effect you would see is if you send mail out (or relay thru) the
ip address they assign your vps. Most of the spam filters will check that
and if it's listed like on spamhaus, it'll be dropped or bounced back.
But of course, all of that depends on what (if anything) the destination is
using for spam filtering. It may not make any difference at all. As far as
inbound mail and your website, nothing to worry about there at all.
Yeah I know, it's all private registration. Doesn't that seem odd to you for
a business selling web services to do that?
I mean the price is right with them, but I'd try to find out what they do
when something goes wrong and how long it takes. I've known people who used
these kind of services and are surprised when they had to be making their
own backups and configuration settings. The host will guarantee something, 3
hours, 12, within a day they'll get you back online, but only as it was the
day you started. A fresh install. Even then it might be a different image,
updated and not quite plug and play as it was.
There are more reliable companies out there, like Digital Ocean and Linode,
which I think the ftupet people use for "the box" these days.
Even if chicagovps isn't the spam operation I think it was, they were one of
the "isp in a box" outfits where there is no real company behind it, they
leased hardware in a data center and sell the services from there. So I'm
sure there is someone somewhere that can reboot machines and set up
instances via remote, but everything else is "someone elses problem".
It's cheap for a reason.
-bruce

I heard good things about Linode. Someone pointed
me to this $1/month deal because he's running some proxy using only
128M RAM apparently so I got the bug to look into this again.

The ChicagoVPS site says they don't do backups and I don't mind that
but having to rebuild the server every time some outage happens
would be a PITA.

[Geoff Gass]

Post by Crawford Sausage Company

Post by Bruce Esquibel
There are more reliable companies out there, like Digital Ocean and Linode,
which I think the ftupet people use for "the box" these days.
Even if chicagovps isn't the spam operation I think it was, they were one of
the "isp in a box" outfits where there is no real company behind it, they
leased hardware in a data center and sell the services from there. So I'm
sure there is someone somewhere that can reboot machines and set up
instances via remote, but everything else is "someone elses problem".
It's cheap for a reason.
-bruce

I heard good things about Linode. Someone pointed
me to this $1/month deal because he's running some proxy using only
128M RAM apparently so I got the bug to look into this again.
The ChicagoVPS site says they don't do backups and I don't mind that
but having to rebuild the server every time some outage happens
would be a PITA.

At $10/month, Linode is a steal. Very reliable, never any email/spam issues.
Caveat that backups are extra. I just do it myself by rsyncing important stuff
to home. For $1/month, I would suspect you'll get what you pay for.