Avatars went missing (sort of)
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OMG
I can’t believe the amazing patience of that judge.
One hears so many stories about horrible judges, this guy is testament that there are good ones.
I seriously could not deal with that. But clearly, this judge is used to dealing with people like this.
[quote=The Author Guy;3480]I am actually very lucky in that as an S-Corp in IT, all my favorite hobbies are business expenses because I also use them for clients. [/quote]
Just a corp, not the settler, agent or the individual?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRySQ8rSs9E[/youtube]
We tried to move our clients first from their own geographically distributed data centers to a kind of a standard conceptual application model on those data centers, as well as standard OS versions, which made moving groups of applications out of their data center and into the cloud that much easier. I don’t know how good a ROI we could have discussed with the clients without that step.
I’m lucky in that I started using AWS early for my private stuff. Got all the great anecdotes about how they randomly dropped blocks across _all_ of their SAN-backed filesystems because of the missing checksum bug when it hit, which I’ve always been careful to relate to my customers before THEIR architects make THEIR decision which THEY own, not myself or my employer, to use a particular cloud resource. That way, _when_ the shit hits the fan, I can councel patience with a large vendor like AWS, since their scale provides them with the interesting advantage of being better at learning from their own fuck-ups, than normal hosts.
I’m not getting your business model – are you charging for support services, and passing through the resource billing to a cloud provider with a small cut? Because the investment and risk offset required to set up this kind of a product, even with a pre-existing customer base, in an environment where hardware is changing, software is changing, and you’re competing against giants who might accidentally crunch your product with a poorly worded press release, would be hard to pay off through ever cheaper resource billing.
Pages
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-haswell and
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex
contain cheap servers WITHOUT ECC, good for your private stuff like a CMS-based website, forum and their databases, buthttps://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-px
is required for any serious stuff, where ECC RAM is a basic necessity.They also have a server hosting auction model for their older hardware: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market
The same is true for my clients; this is a first foray for them to go through me for anything.
My clients have all either hosted themselves internally, or used third party colocation or dedicated hosting packages and now dedicate virtualizations.
ATT, QWEST, various other old school hosters, now days SungardAS Enterprise Cloud, AWS, Rackspace….lots of people like Rackspace, I’m ambivalent, but they have a lot of different options and models so very different companies can find a fit with them.
SungardAS, for financial services is sort of the gold standard. It costs a fortune and is procedure-ally bound as hell, everything is at least a 5 person job; it’s change management hell, but that’s what people are paying for.
I had a client who I transitioned from 24K/month at ATT to about 7K/month at AWS; we tested and tested/vetted, moved in and the first freaking week we were their the SAN in their NE-US data center went down, taking all the “indpendent zones” down for 2+ days.
Needless to say, we then started moving to SungardAS which was about 10-12K/month. Worked great until they were acquired and then we moved everything to Rackspace because that’s where the new parent company was.
I am going to push this for my smaller clients, or larger clients who want cheaper dev or dr Protection.
I can CloudProtect any windows server (physical or VM) with very low resource replication agent on a 3 hour sync to my cloud for peanuts.
I am working overtime to bring up linux based solutions as well. Looked at Docker, but not so sure how it works in an non docker environment, so currently testing TurnkeyLinuxLXC and messing with Bitnami Images and Webuzo.
Just glanced at your link. Holy bananas; their dedicated server pricing is unbelievable! Going to be checking these guys out.
My plan is to rent out cloud blocks of resources
1) vLan with FW appliance, private class-C, unlimited IPsec branch office tunnels, unlimited openVPN users $50/month (including basic support and 50 Gb outbound/month) Inbound data free, additional outbound data $0.04/Gb
2) RAM, vCPU, DiskSpace all by chunks
a) $10/vCPU/month
b) $10/GB RAM/month, including Windows Server licensing (discount for linux)
c) $10/100 GB RAIN storage/month (which will include so many IOPS, but you can add more IOPS for more money)
You can reserve extra data for snapshots
d) Option to CloudProtect on a different hypervisor
e) option for an HTML5 client RDP serverYou order what you want and that is reserved and dedicated to you, and you slice it and dice it into however many vms of whatever type you want.
I plan to provide some standard linux container options as well as allowing custom OVA/OVF files.Really looking to target smaller dev teams and individuals on top of my actual clients.
Mine is served from Gravatar, as is appropriate.
Azure IaaS networking is dogshit compared to AWS and Google Cloud.
It sounds like it might also be possible that a saved IP address is used as a part of an avatar image URL hash, which has changed for the hash check code, but not the hash generation code which pulls the IP from cache, DB or conf.
Actually, that cloud consultant model is very important. There is so much changing in the space and these platforms move/change so fast that it can become bewildering for people in the corporate environment, who have a lot of other stuff on their plate to follow it. Much like using network security consultants to ensure ones network/systems are safe. I have a lot of friends that do that, and they are pouring over the latest security bulletins and working on patches, it takes a lot of dedication and attention.
I see the same thing coming quickly in the cloud space; particularly for customers that are somewhat agnostic. In the old days, most companies focused on a particular set of brands Dell, HP, IBM and similar Software vendors, and just tunnel visioned and trusted them and did what they did. Now, the cloud has decentralized everything a great deal as well, and even within a single provider like AWS there are so many options, so many gotchas that having a navigator is critical to success, and that is a service level that AWS is not in the business of providing.
Rackspace, for larger clients, will do that sort of service level, but then again you are tunneled into their view(s) of the universe. It’s a lot to disentangle.
My model is actually pretty simple and I am not building from scratch I have gone with a whitebox cloud provider that has a platform and scaling already in place and I am repackaging and selling their product as a channel partner, basically.
I bought a specially modified hyper visor that is in their enterprise cluster (like a condo) I therefore “own” X CPU’s, Y GB RAM, and the internal drives/ssd’s that act as caching devices for the RAIN. This includes 24×7 technical support for the cloud platform and full hardware support for a bit too long of a period of time.
I then resell outbound bandwidth, hard disk space on the RAIN on a usage basis, and if I want Windows licensing (for which they have a per GB RAM pricing model worked out) MS SPLA licenses or I can use my own. I also resell from them common infrastructure public IP’s and a few other software licenses (FW appliance, CloudProtect Agent+lower tier storage for the backup server replication)
Since my node is in a cluster, if my node goes down, they can roll me onto another node; further if growth comes faster than I can add nodes, they can rent me resources on other nodes for a bit higher cost until I can add the next node (and that’s me coming up with the capital) Similarly, I can cloudprotect vm’s on my node on other nodes (that is included in the cloud protect price I pay)
Their platform is highly customized based on ESXi 5.5 now, going to 6.0 which they have built their web based management system around the ESXi API.
From a hardware perspective, they roll new machines into the infrastructure with new generations each year or so. Each year it’s a very specific standard server unit that they’ve optimized to work with their proprietary RAIN (which is why disk performance is better than I’ve seen at most other providers for the same money)
How I upgrade is by adding additional hypervisors of the new platform each year and people OK with older platforms stay on the older hypervisors. Which is really what they do/did in the dedicated server space.
The target audience is really the SMB market and channel partners like myself; except that most of my money making clients are a bit bigger than their target audience, which is why I mainly push for using it as a cheaper backup/test/dev environment, not production.
It’s also not designed/targeted for the really dynamic stuff you can do at AWS, spinning up VM’s on the fly. The target is really that segment that used to rent dedicated whitebox servers but now wants to be on the cloud.
My goal is to come up with a very simple pricing model that is cheaper/more cost upfront/easy to use than what they can get from most cloud providers. I.e. create something that I or someone like myself could use and get a good value out of.
I am still working on balancing out my support cost vs cheapness. For example that FW/vlan includes some of my time per month assisting people (not much but some) plus my markup. I don’t know yet how much of my time will be taken up, I’d like to get the entry price cheaper, but am concerned about getting bogged down.
In theory, I get enough documentation down, I want the platform to be very self driven/automated. It actually is, but there is the learning curve and good documentation is critical to keep support calls/requests down.
My biggest goal is to cover my costs and get another revenue stream that is stable. Books are one such stream, this is another. As an independent consultant, I am getting tired of the feast or famine model and am trying to build more stable baseline income streams.
And for that, the CloudProtect business will probably be best. I’ll give people a preconfigured vlan with all VPN connections ready to go, replicate all their servers into it in cold standby mode, and then let it run until disaster strikes; that’s very low overhead–just monthly testing of the VM’s which I can shift to the client’s support team. You have an upfront setup, which I bill as a consultant and then just a stable revenue stream.
If you lost mine, I will be very displeased. That image was especially created for me, and is my property.
I am displeased. My image is missing, you are depriving people of my stern countenance!
Repair this immediately!
I have decided that Gravatar is run by demons. It is now very clear to me.
As noted earlier, T-A-G and Wylan got their gravatar avatars to work easily; mine refused to work. I just got the gravatar logo.
Turns out the gravatar demons are case sensitive. My email on this site was Lenamare at astlan dot net; at gravatar it was lenamare at astlan dot net
On a whim, I changed the capitalization of my name in my email address here, and voila, the demons at gravatar finally got around to doing my bidding.
](*,) So typical of demons. If I had realized I was dealing with demons, then, obviously, this would have been the first thing I would have checked.
I guess after the whole Exador thing, I should not be surprised that demons are running around all over the place pretending to be human.
Oh, these vile and treacherous creatures, they tax me, they truly tax me!
Hah!
I have finally and fastidiously flouted your failed fixings of this faulty forum feature!
By clearing my DNN avatar (main site) the forum is automatically pulling my gravatar based upon my email address!
I have gravatar working for me; I changed my gravatar and it changed here.
Still not doing it for Lenamare though.
That’s what it looks like, that’s what I figured, you don’t seem to have anything set.
The DNN Avatar selector lets you choose to upload from a URL, but that appears to just load it into the system like a file upload which shows up broken.
Tried that for Lenamare.
Going to try unsetting my avatar both in the forum and on main site to see if my gravatar just shows up.
[quote=The Author Guy;3487]What did you do for it to work, did you just register http://www.astlan.net on your gravatar profile and DNN pulls it in automatically?[/quote]
I don’t remember doing anything in particular, I think it just worked, once I’d used the same email address I’d registered with Gravatar while it wasn’t part of WordPress yet.
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