First, I want to say that I was not spending the whole week trying to find out who Joseph was, I really do not have time for that. However, by accident, I have found something interesting and figure I should share with all of you. So Who is Joseph? To be honest, I know as little about him as you, other than the website he left in his comments here and here. I was impressed by the amount of content that the website in his signature contains. Although unfortunately it is offline while I was writing this, and no, I am pretty sure I did not have any server sending any request to this site: Fast Forward to Today… I was browsing on WHT as it is just another lazy Sunday night and I am not really in the mood of doing any work, and stumbled upon this website: http://vpslist.net/. Read More

It was the first thing I did after getting home from my photography class to check my email since I was away for the whole afternoon (classes itself was three hours and add another 3 hours of commute to it), and I saw this dreaded email from UptimeRobot saying 96MB.com is down. I was able to SSH into the server although logging in alone took me a minute. I checked SolusVM panel and the VPS was shown as online, only 80MB of memory was used (out of 96MB) and half of the hard drive space was used. I have rebooted the server and it seems to be up now, I am still trying to read through the access logs and PHP errors to see if it is just because 96MB.com is getting too popular or someone is trying to crash the website. Having said that though, I think I need Read More

Secure Dragon has always offered me some pleasant surprises, and although barely two weeks ago I have reviewed their ultra-low-end 96MB OpenVZ product line, I have received an email that they are offering a Xen ultra-low-end product as well. For 16 USD/year, which is barely 2 USD more than their OpenVZ equivalent offered by Secure Dragon, I decide to give it a shot to see. Basic Information and Set Up As per Secure Dragon’s website, here is the detailed on their new 96MB Xen PV VPS: Note that the swap space offered in this case is pretty big compare to the dedicated memory, which might be helpful if you need to use more than what you are assigned to once a while. However, do note that although in OpenVZ, burstable memory is actually still RAM, in Xen, the swap space is actually hard drive space, therefore it is extremely slow Read More

For those low end VPS fans, 15 seems to be a magic price point for many of the ultra-low-end VPs providers. Many of the companies have tried to shoot at this price point and almost every one of them failed. Most of them either oversold the resources so much that makes the box completely unusable, or the price points becomes so unsustainable that eventually the provider just collect cash and run. Therefore, when Secure Dragon (which has nothing to do with Chinese dragon, I believe) offered a 96MB guaranteed memory low end VPS on LowEndBox.com, and disclaimed “No Overselling!” in bold on their home page, I was instantly curious to see how the performance of such a ultra-low-end VPS would be like. General Information and Sign Up As per the post on LowEndBox, here is the specifications of this low end VPS: On their product homepage, there are actually more Read More

It was almost ironical that less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post (which, now, no longer exists for reasons that I will explain below) celebrating 30-days of uptime with 96MB.com (or the 96MB RAM VPS box it is sitting on), 96MB.com received such a huge visiting volume that the box could no longer hold it through and surrendered with a DB Connection Error screen. Out of panic, I tried to reboot the box, the shutdown was fine, however after I tried to boot it up again, here is the error message that I have got: Filesystem unmounted: sudo /bin/umount /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS config file written: /home/xen/vps2433.vm/vps2433.vm.cfg Filesystem Created: sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_vmswap Filesystem labelled: sudo /sbin/e2label /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg domU_disk_root Filesystem mounted: sudo /bin/mount /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS hostname file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname Files chowned: sudo /bin/chown root:root /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_* File moved: sudo /bin/mv /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt/etc/hostname VPS hosts file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hosts Files chowned: sudo Read More

So, here comes the first post that I have made on this blog, which is running on a Xen VPS with 96MB of RAM. The first question is why did I do it? Inspired by LowEndBox.com, put it simply. I have purchased no less than 5 VPSes from various promotions from this popular site before I noticed that it is literally a one-man blog running on 80MB of RAM! As per here, the website receives about 45k of pageviews daily. (Edit: LowEndAdmin has kindly pointed out to me that as per here, pageview for LEB is about 250K per month, less than 10k per day, thanks LEA!) Therefore, as curious man as I have always been, I decide to try it myself and when I saw this offer listed on the LEB website, I decide to give it a try. Quite frankly speaking, the process of running a web server Read More