On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

Hi all!

I am looking for hosting that support Arch. Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price), so official Arch Linux support is required.

So far the list include:  http://www.slicehost.com/  http://vpslink.com/ (a subsidiary of http://www.spry.com/)  http://www.vpsville.com/arch-vps (also .co.uk and .co.ca)  http://www.linode.com/  http://lylix.net/  https://www.sevenl.net/ (they have donated a server for Arch,    and provide a dedicated hosting with Arch too)

If there is someone who has experience with these providers - I would be very thankful for information.

Also if someone knows about other providers that could join the list - let me know.

-- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

I've been managing a client's Linode 360 (running Arch) for the past 8 months or so. I can honestly say that they provide an excellent, very stable and packed with features [1], service. I've never had any issues with their Arch template either and they also made an Arch 2009.02 template available for installation recently. I've heard good things about Slicehost as well, but I don't have any personal experience with them. ---- http://www.linode.com/features.cfm

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Aaron Griffin wrote:

I use slicehost and haven't had any issues. Their over-the-intertubes recovery console is great.

Aside, though, I believe Linode is just slightly more for your money though

+1 for slicehost, running Arch on mine and have had absolutely no issue with it. Well worth the money. -- Callan Barrett

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 04:09:01PM +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

Hi all!

I am looking for hosting that support Arch. Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price), so official Arch Linux support is required.

So far the list include: http://www.slicehost.com/ http://vpslink.com/ (a subsidiary of http://www.spry.com/) http://www.vpsville.com/arch-vps (also .co.uk and .co.ca) http://www.linode.com/ http://lylix.net/ https://www.sevenl.net/ (they have donated a server for Arch, and provide a dedicated hosting with Arch too)

If there is someone who has experience with these providers - I would be very thankful for information.

Also if someone knows about other providers that could join the list - let me know.

-- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

I highly recommend Slicehost. I've used them to host various Arch servers for the past year and a half or so, and I've never had a problem. $20 US a month for a 256mb slice isn't that bad either - especially if you're running Arch. :) Corin

The issues i've had were hardware related, and sevenl was great about them. I really have no complaints,and would/will use them again. I've talked to them on the phone and dealt via email both, every time they were very courteous and helpful. I've dealt with alot of hosting companies before, and had several different dedicated servers with different hosts, and sevenl has been so far one of the best. I had an account with slicehost before as well, i did not like the way the kernel updates were handled, so elected not to continue using them, however they were not bad to work with. For my money, i have to say sevenl is probably the best bang for the buck. Crouse On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Daenyth Blank wrote:

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:38, Crouse wrote:

...

hmmmmm I use

https://www.sevenl.net/all-dedicated-servers

It's not a VPS, it's a dedicated private server. Running Arch. I use it for archlinux.me and others, costs about $55 month. I get the whole machine this way ;)

Crouse.

Arch-games uses SevenL too. Haven't had any issues with them, and their connection is super fast.

Well, that's leaps and bounds better than it was before ;) Very good to know, thank you for mentioning that. Crouse On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Pierre Chapuis wrote:

Le Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:10:15 -0500, Crouse a écrit :

...

I had an account with slicehost before as well, i did not like the way the kernel updates were handled, so elected not to continue using them, however they were not bad to work with.

They have just changed that! http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/9/22/kernels-in-the-slicemanager

I use SliceHost too and I'm as happy as I could be.

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 01:38:15AM +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

* Found an interesting provider: http://openhosting.com/ which uses KVM and has an interesting pricing scheme.

I hope to get things ready for deployment around December-January. Until then I'm close to start with VPSVille UK and use its 8$ plan as a sandbox. When demands for a hosting will rise I may move to Linode.

-- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич) Thank you for the openhosting link . They only charge for the bandwidth used and that's cool .

I contacted VPSVille yesterday wondering what arch(s) do they support .They have both 32bit & 64bit kernels but unlike Debian Ubuntu and CentOS , they only offer i686 Arch templates (and that piece of info took the support people sometime to figure out!!) I wish Arch was a choice in serverpronto.com offerings .

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 01:38, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 16:09, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

...

Hi all!

I am looking for hosting that support Arch. Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price), so official Arch Linux support is required.

[skipped]

I hope to get things ready for deployment around December-January. Until then I'm close to start with VPSVille UK and use its 8$ plan as a sandbox. When demands for a hosting will rise I may move to Linode.

So, here's my experience with VPSVille UK: * the registration is ultrafast, I paid with PayPal and got the account in a minute * root access via ssh is allowed but the machine is initially stopped * there are some .pacnew/.pacsave files in /etc * there is an empty /fastboot directory * installed packages include base, base-devel groups, openssh and vim (vim brings some x11 libs, python and ruby) * package versions are from 2009-02-18 * rc.conf has: HARDWARECLOCK="localtime" TIMEZONE="Canada/Pacific" (thus the date is invalid) . . . DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond sshd) . . . lo="lo 127.0.0.1" INTERFACES=( "lo" "venet0" "venet0_0" "venet0_0" ) venet0="venet0 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.255 broadcast 0.0.0.0" rt_venet0="-net <ip> netmask 255.255.255.255 dev venet0" rt_default="default gw <ip>" ROUTES=( "rt_venet0" "rt_default" ) venet0_0="venet0:0 <ip> netmask 255.255.255.255 broadcast 0.0.0.0" * more info: # uname -a Linux <hostname> 2.6.18-128.2.1.el5.028stab064.7 #1 SMP Wed Aug 26 15:47:17 MSD 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux # ls /dev console fd initctl null pts shm stdin tty zero core full log ptmx random stderr stdout urandom # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on none 5.9G 0 5.9G 0% /dev/shm # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 65536 8956 56580 0 0 0 -/+ buffers/cache: 8956 56580 Swap: 0 0 0 Will be playing with it this weekend. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:53, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 01:38, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

...

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 16:09, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

...

Hi all!

I am looking for hosting that support Arch. Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price), so official Arch Linux support is required.

[skipped]

...

I hope to get things ready for deployment around December-January. Until then I'm close to start with VPSVille UK and use its 8$ plan as a sandbox. When demands for a hosting will rise I may move to Linode.

So, here's my experience with VPSVille UK:

[skipped] More experience: * downloaded files from ftp.archlinux.org at ~40-70 MB/s * the VPS is running under OpenVZ * the control panel is primitive * it is possible to do some advanced things with it though, like creating TAP/TUN or FUSE devices * multiple backup snapshots are not possible * only direct SSH connection is possible (i.e. no web terminal) * no rescue environment available * for some reason the time was broken even after I fixed rc.conf and rebooted, so I replaced /etc/localtime manually (cannot confirm if this works - see the end of the message) * Arch Linux template is of bad quality: besides .pac* files in /etc I mentioned earlier it also has a typo in hosts.allow that results in ssh access denied after system update, and the worst - the local pacman database is broken (specifically libarchive and pacman package entries) and to update the system you have to temporary disable SyncFirst in pacman.conf otherwise pacman won't update itself due to false file conflicts (--force will have no effect due to SyncFirst); all this because it was updated from 0.8. I've complained on the forums, will see if they will update the template (obviously I've fixed the system, but it would be nice to have a correctly built template for new installs so users won't have to spent their time on fixing these problems). And yesterday I started getting errors about inability to allocate PTY when trying to login via ssh, so I cannot login anymore. Though I'm not sure it the problem is on their side, or it's somehow caused by Arch update (udev, maybe?). Their support responds quickly though. I tried only forum so far, now filed a ticket in their support system. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Phillip Smith wrote:

...

...

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 16:09, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

...

I am looking for hosting that support Arch. Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price) so official Arch Linux support is required.

I have 3 Arch VPS' with Linode. They have been excellent, good community, price and support.

Check out slicehost.com <--- they support Arch and they are proper VPS. I have tried Linode & VPSVille and neither of them compare to Slicehost. Plug over. -- Dave ------------- root@crankyadmin.net cranky@archlinux.us

2009/10/6 Sebastian Köhler :

Roman Kyrylych wrote:  > And yesterday I started getting errors about inability to allocate PTY

...

when trying to login via ssh, so I cannot login anymore. Though I'm not sure it the problem is on their side, or it's somehow caused by Arch update (udev, maybe?).

Got a reply from support very quickly: "Unfortunately some update you installed on Arch has broken this. I've recreated the devices for you and the script will now work from our control panel as well."

My vps runs on xen and this udev update http://www.archlinux.org/news/457/ killed my arch vps too.

But my provider temporally replaced the Arch Kernel with a newer Debian Kernel so i could compile a new Kernel with Xen support.

LOL! How could I forget about this one? :-) $ uname -a Linux x.vps8ecf0be2.com 2.6.18-128.2.1.el5.028stab064.7 #1 SMP Wed Aug 26 15:47:17 MSD 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 12:58, Roman Kyrylych wrote:

2009/10/6 Sebastian Köhler :

...

Roman Kyrylych wrote:  > And yesterday I started getting errors about inability to allocate PTY

...

when trying to login via ssh, so I cannot login anymore. Though I'm not sure it the problem is on their side, or it's somehow caused by Arch update (udev, maybe?).

Got a reply from support very quickly: "Unfortunately some update you installed on Arch has broken this. I've recreated the devices for you and the script will now work from our control panel as well."

...

My vps runs on xen and this udev update http://www.archlinux.org/news/457/ killed my arch vps too.

But my provider temporally replaced the Arch Kernel with a newer Debian Kernel so i could compile a new Kernel with Xen support.

LOL! How could I forget about this one? :-)

$ uname -a Linux x.vps8ecf0be2.com 2.6.18-128.2.1.el5.028stab064.7 #1 SMP Wed Aug 26 15:47:17 MSD 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Turned out that this was not the case. The problem was caused by installing /sbin/udevadm when udev was updated (as I see the admin have renamed udevadm to _udevadm). Initscripts check for /sbin/udevadm to see if udev should be used or static /dev is in place. And because after update /sbin/udevadm was created - the /dev was broken by udev after reboot. So the solution is to remove the udev package (it's not needed anyway) and put it into IgnorePkg so it's not installed on system update. Actually, udev should probably be in optdepends of initscripts instead of depends. The support staff fixed the "Reset Terminal Devices" script to also take care of ptys. That was very quick. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

2009/10/6 Sebastian Köhler :

Roman Kyrylych wrote:

...

LOL! How could I forget about this one? :-)

Actually I think it's kinda stupid that udev now needs 2.6.24  while the official arch xen domu kernel in the "xen" package still is 2.6.18...

1. Remember the xen package is in [community], so although somewhat official, it isn't in [extra] 2. Xen was originally based around this hacked kernel with no obvious update path, they are working to get the pv_opts kernel to be the preferred method 3. We aren't using an Arch dom0 on our main (virtualized) Arch server, so you probably shouldn't either. :) The domU is Arch, however, running the Debian provided domU kernel. -Dan

Roman Kyrylych wrote:

Will definitely use some more advanced (and less cheap) hosting in the future. Linode, SliceHost and VPS.net both look as good candidates. (VPS.net does not have Arch template, but is possible to create custom template once installed).

You should check out some german providers. Because of the high competition on the german market vps and dedicated servers belong to the cheapest in the western hemisphere. For example the SliceHost "512 slice" costs 38$ in germany the same configuration costs around 7€ to 10€ many of those offers include unlimited traffic.

Roman Kyrylych wrote:

Please suggest some german providers with English site & control panel.

Unfortunately all providers I know of providing arch vps don't have english websites.

I would prefer a hosting in Europe to any hosting in USA.

It always depends on what you want to host :)

Roman Kyrylych wrote:

Okay, then suggest some good German-speaking VPS hostings. So far only http://goekal-it.de/ was proposed. in addition to goekal i know http://z-technologies.de