web hosting: server for sls?

Hi I'm thinking about starting a project that will require a server outside of sl. Preferable I would like to do every thing with one serves. Witch of corse means php, mySQL, e-mail, domain name. I'm not sure what else I should be looking for. I'll probable need to do xml-rpc ping communication, triggered by e-mail. Of corsed tied into the db on the server.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

If you need those things, perl + procmail + mySQL is basically the bareminimums. You can get that from just about any webprovider out there. All XML-RPC is, is a glorified XML wrapper on http POST commands, so it can be done on just about any system that allows you to do scripted web requests.

My recommendation would be go with a VPS or something similiar, like linode. They give you a root shell so you can pretty much abuse it however you want.

I'll put in a plug here for the company that we use at the M2.

http://www.pctechmaster.com/hosting/index.htm has a basic plan called "Web Starter" that is $4.95 a month or $12.95 a quarter and includes all the bells and whistles that most sites would typically need, along with 500 MB of disk space and 75 GB bandwidth per month. Even with 20,000+ copies of the paper being downloaded each month at 5-6 MB each, we're still not coming close to banging our heads on the ceiling.

P2

If you're a do-it-yourself-er, try http://www.unixshell.com. I got one of their cheapest VPSs, and I've been doing apache, mysql, perl, php, icecast MP3 streaming, XMLRPC, receiving email from scripts, etc etc etc. Very satisfied. However, if you're not experienced with sysadminning, this may not be the way to go.

A number of folks in SL (myself included) use Dreamhost. I've only had my account with them for about a month but I'm quite satisfied with their performance. Their mail server is quick to pick up my object's emails. I use LSL email -> .forward.postfixt -> .procmailrc -> php -> XML-RPC. I've not done any mysql stuff but they support that also.

Thanks guys,
I think i'll look into dream hosting. (the the streaming server stuff sounds tempting) I don't have a back ground in server set configuration / maintenance. Witch is why it's important, to me, that the server is read (for sl email/rpc-xml) out of the box. If posable I'd rather focus on the data being passed. Plus if it's popular, hopefully I'll have some peers to talk with. specifically with set up, and the basic e-mail, xml-rpc communication.

I run several sites off DreamHost (all on a single account) and I would highly recommend them. As a freelance web developer I was managing clients websites on a variety of different hosting providers and once I tried DreamHost I switched everything to them. Basically you get the best of both worlds, with a simple interface to configure domain names, e-mail accounts, installing software, etc. and at the same time a full shell account with access to compilers, .htaccess files, crontabs, pretty close to anything you could do with your own co-located server. On my dev site I have my own PHP compiled with all the modules I wanted, using latest versions of all the libraries. On my other sites, I never even had to log in to the terminal to get everything up and running.

Dreamhost tips: There is a post on their Wiki about receiving e-mail with scripts. You create a file called .forward.postfix that contains "|/usr/bin/procmail -t" (including the quotes) and a .procmailrc file containing

DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
SHELL=/bin/sh
VERBOSE=yes
LOGFILE=$HOME/logfile
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/php
PHP=$HOME/php/bin/php

:0
* ^TO_youraddress@yourdomain.com
|$PHP $HOME/email/email.php

That example uses a php binary sitting in ~/php with libraries in ~/php, to get them there you can create the php folder in your home directory, cd to it and run

cp /usr/local/bin/php . for i in `ldd php |awk '{print $3}'`; do cp $i .; done

I created a separate login for all of this so it doesn't interfere with normal e-mail. You can setup a dedicated e-mail address for SL stuff like [email]secondlife@yourdomain.com[/email]. Then you have all e-mail forwarding to an email.php script (which is a system script NOT a web script), which you can follow the example at http://www.evolt.org/article/Incoming_Mail_and_PHP/18/27914/index.html on how to parse an incoming e-mail. After getting the data in to variables you probably want to throw it in a database, but that's a whole separate topic. Also make sure to "chmod 755 email.php" so your e-mail script has permission to execute.

XML-RPC is just a server script; it can be in PHP, Perl, Python, Java, whatever. I posted an example PHP script on these forums under my old moniker Eddy Stryker. If you had the XML-RPC script fetch channel information from the database the e-mail script is dumping to you'd have a complete implementation.

Here's a promo code for Dreamhost, $30 for a year of hosting (marked down from $119.40): MOSTLYFREE

I own a hosting business, and have just gotten pretty interested in SL for the building/scripting abilities. If you're still in need, please contact me via email at xixao3d[at]gmail[dot]com with more details. I can't give you a free domain name, but I can offer free hosting in exchange for scripting assistance, if you're interested.

Please let me know.

I also utilize Dreamhost - currently have 24180 MB of HD and 1191 GB BW for my $9.95 a month (Dreamhost accounts grow per week you have your account - by 160 MB HD and 8 GB BW). One thing to note, however, last summer Dreamhost ended up blocking all of LL's servers at their router and it took several weeks to resolve the issue (both companies were stating the other was doing the blocking). After quite a bit of battling, it did get resolved, but it was not the hottest experience and if wasn't the fact their price is so bloody cheap for what you get (many times over the next respectable cheap host I could find) I would have bailed.

There also is a group in SL of people with Dreamhost accounts (before that situation, there were MANY.. not sure if the number is as high anymore) but none-the-less, I am sure some (such as myself) could still help with SL related ordeals.

...or save yourself $9.95/month and email me...?

Hello all,

I work with my "own" hosting services, but the bad part of that is being across the Atlantic and across the US — this means an impossible-to-remove lag of about 200 ms or so from Linden Lab's colocation facility.

If you have experimented with HTML in 1.9.1, like I did, you'll see it is tremendously fast in replying. I did some timing, and found out that most of the delays I got was the round-trip time from LL's servers to my own!

This is important for "near-real-time" performance of some things that you'll be able to do with HTML (as opposed to via Email...), and thus, I'm considering to (temporarily?) do some hosting as near to Linden Lab as possible, or, failing that, on top of the low-delay US backbone.

Lots of people seem to be using Dreamhost, so I have now one question. Virtual hosting usually suffers from a common problem: you have no control about what the rest of the users are doing with the host server's CPU. I have tried a few solutions, and all of them worked quite well, unless you had the bad luck of being on the same physical host as a "CPU griefer" who would suck up all the memory and CPU cycles by, say, running an intensive CPU-bound utility — like hmm video broadcasting to hundreds of channels

I thus wonder if you have experienced the same with Dreamhost. There are some ways to keep the CPU fairly shared among users (not unlike the system that LL has for giving "fair share" to LSL scripts — but we all know how often griefers are able to create self-replicating objects to bring the database to its knees!) and I wonder how good Dreamhost is in that respect.

(And yes, I was aware of the email problem between LL and Dreamhost last year, and I'm glad it is sorted out; however, email will be much less important as soon as 1.9.1 is launched; I expect HTML use will be the norm, and not email. It's simply way faster, although at the moment you can send slightly less bytes per call — but you can make many more calls in almost-realtime, so that's ok.)

So, is Dreamhost routinely used by "CPU hogs" or not?

Comments are welcome.

Dunno about Dreamhost, but my shared hoster is BlueHost and they apparently have a CPU throttler of some sort. Nothing severe though, the only major time folks get problems is with MySQL exports, and even then not often (I've not had an issue, and its been done from the weblog interface).

They have an open forum, for anyone curious:

http://forum.bluehost.com/

If I were still majorly interested in fiddling with SL my site/domain would not be so quiet atm. Though I have other plans for that, if certain things pan out...

--Alan
:link:

I don't believe Dreamhost has any automatic allocation of CPU time, however supposively they monitor it and if someone is abusing their servers CPU, they issue a warning and port them over to a "purgatory" server. Glancing at top on my account, it appears at least currently the CPU's are about 65% idle. I never really had a CPU speed issue that I witnessed (unless you count when compiled 1/2 of a Linux distro in my home directory to get around their email servers lacking hoards of standard utilities).

One note about the "email problem" - it was not an email problem per say. They completely blocked LL, so llHTTPRequest would have failed (had it existed) also. While it did eventually get resolved (obviously), I (and likewise others) had to send way too many emails to convince them that they really ought to check it out. (Incidently, I usually pull fairly decent email out, rpc in rountrip times with Dreamhost - probably not a whole bunch more than you get from your host via llHTTPRequest)

Thanks for your input, Alondria. It was rather helpful!

Alan, I have also evaluated BlueHost (having been referred to it through a friend)... only the "Business Plan" begins to make some sense for my purposes (shell access as well as MySQL), and in spite of paying 50% additionally per month (when compared to Dreamhost), I get only 1/20th of the monthly bandwidth and 1/20th of the disk space

I wonder how Dreamhost is able to keep their prices so low, though. Thus my post One naturally becomes suspicious about a company that is able to do such "price dumping" and wonders how they're able to manage to survive...

For the record, my previous experiences in virtual machines in Europe were with Amen (a Clara.net company). For €10/mo (VAT not included) they give you unlimited traffic, but only 400 MB of disk space (200 of which used by the OS), 10 MySQL databases (on a separate server; I never managed to find out how much disk space they give you there), and up to a hundred hosted domains. Alas, their data centre is in France and Germany, which makes it hard to deal with the high latency to the US. Also, there are no "throttling" measures on the CPU; you're basically going to live with the notion that others are going to use as much CPU as they can (and with unlimited traffic, almost everyone will be definitely using audio/video streaming... which is quite CPU-intensive). If I remember correctly, the host machine for the virtual servers used to be 4-CPU Xeons with 8 GB of RAM, but I have no idea on how many virtual servers shared the same hardware.

Anyone have any comments on hosts for use with SL other than Dreamhost and Bluehost?

My domain is hosted at phpwebhosting.com which has done me good thus far, although I mainly use it for email. One of these days I want to do something usefull with the web portion. I have access to php and mysql, but have not tried to do anything with SL. I'm unsure how much it could handle SL. I doubt it could even receive incomming emails and respond to them automatically.

On the bright side, however, they do offer me more space than I can use, decent bandwidth, and a nice low price. Not as low as Dreamhost, but still decent.

Dreamhost sounds pretty decent, and I may look into them for other than SL related stuff.

Though the idea of becomming a host provider has always been a dream of mine, and one of these days I'll look into what it would take to start one up.