The Cloud

My Experience with Cloud At Cost VPS

I’ll try to remember to do an update post if things iron out but I wanted to throw out my experience so far with Cloud At Cost, a VPS provider that charges a one time upfront fee for their VPS, as opposed to a monthly subscription or other reoccurring cost.  They had a sale for Black Friday, 90% off (later 80% off).  This meant that for $7, you could buy a VPS, for life.

This seems really really “too good to be true”.  So I did some research.  First, apparently Cloud at Cost has some horrible uptime and shouldn’t be used for anything production level.  I can live with that, it’s cheaper than buying another Pi for a project server, and this one’s in the cloud!

I also read one report that the servers are insecure and CloudAtCost has cancelled accounts for lifetime subscribers for hosting malicious software, after the servers were hacked due to C@C’s poor server security.  This mostly means, nothing production or crucial.  It’s something I can accept the risk of for the cost.

I opted for two of the tier 3 servers at $14 each.  This got me 2x servers with the following specs, 4 cores each, 2GB of RAM each, and 40GB of space each.  What’s notable though is that as near as I can tell, you pay for e cores, RAM, and HD space, it all just pools together in the end and you can build as many servers as you’d like.

That’s what I chose, and paid for.  On my user dashboard it shows that I have 2 products (the ones I chose listed).  Weirdly, I received several additional invoice emails, though I never ordered more, nor was I charged for more nor does my account say I have more.  When I log into the control panel to manage my servers, It shows I have available 28 cores, 14GB of RAM, and 240 GB of hard drive space.  Basically, it’s like I have 6 servers, instead of 2.  I have no idea if they will realize what happened and scale my resources back or not but I went ahead and kept things within the range I paid for, for now.

It took forever to get the initial purchase set up and available as well, though I’m blaming that on the Black Friday sale.

The interface of the site leaves a LOT to be desired.  There is a user dashboard that tells what you’ve purchased at members.cloudatcost.com.  Managing the servers actually occurs at panel.cloudatcost.com.  There isn’t an obvious link between these two sites that I could find.  Also, the panel site said it used your same password but it didn’t work and I had to do a reset to access the control panel.

The servers also took a good while to get spun up, though I’m blaming Black Friday again.  I created one Windows 7 Ultimate server and one Ubuntu 14.04 server.  I was thinking of using the Windows server to run some Corrade bots in Second Life.  Not sure yet on the Ubuntu server.  I could access both servers via the console but networking seems to be offline on both since I couldn’t ping out to anything.  I tried to set up Remote Desktop on the Windows 7 server but since networking is not working, I couldn’t access it.  The same for SSH on the Ubuntu server.

I checked around and others on Reddit had the issue and it seems to be part of the problems this provider has and should resolve itself… eventually.

So the initial experience has been interesting, for sure, and I can definitely say I won’t be putting anything that NEEDS to be up on these servers, like any sort of website for example.

 

 

Good Security is Inconveniet…

… but it’s only mildly inconvenient.

I’ve recently gone through several steps to ensure better security and privacy of my online services.  These are pretty simple steps that anyone can manage.

On a security standpoint, I’ve enabled two factor authentication on any service I use that supports it.  Two Factor Authentication is essentially a system that requires every service to use two passwords, one that the user has set up and knows, the other which is randomly generated and sent to the user by some means at the time of log in.

Examples… I have the Battlenet authenticator on my World of Warcraft account and a Microsoft Authenticator on my Microsoft account.  Both of these services had an app that runs on my phone which will randomly generate a code (well, it’s not really random, it’s based on some encryption algorithms).  When I log into either service, I must use my phone to view the code and enter the code into the application.  Slightly inconvenient, but I tend to have my phone anyway.

Other services, such as Google will send me a text message with the code I need to enter.  Some, such as Steam and origin will send an email.

This can make things slightly inconvenient.  To log into Origin, for example, I would need to enter my Origin information into the application, then it will ask for a code.  I then would need to log into my email which will also require authentication.

This is also made more complicated by additional privacy measures I’ve implemented.  Sites remember this log in data using cookies.  Cookies have been around for a while but are essentially small bits of code that are left on a user’s machine in order to identify them.

I’ve set up my machines to forget cookies when I close the browser.  This means that each time I start fresh, the log in dance has to begin from scratch.

It also means that no one could access my data if the machine were physically accessed.  Not as critical with a desktop in my basement but more important on a laptop that could be lost or stolen.  Leaving those cookies could mean someone else would have access to my emails or possibly more important data like bank information, because I’d left a cookie enabled.

This also increases my privacy.  The primary examples of of tracking with cookies are Google and Facebook.  If I stay logged in n Facebook, then travel to other sites, Facebook can track my path across the web using the cookie they left on my computer.  If there is no cookie, there is no tracking.  These large companies are increasingly becoming more aggressive and intrusive with their advertising tracking, and it’s not something I really care to partake in.

Overall it’s slightly more inconvenient to access my data, but I can feel pretty good that way fewer people have access or potential access to it.

How Google Taught Me to Hate The Cloud

Well, that was quick.  I guess.

As I tend to ramble on about here, I am a fickle indecisive mess when it comes to how to best manage all of my digital data.  I have been pushing more and more to "The cloud", cloud services, cloud hosting, cloud cloud cloud. 

I secretly hate the phrase "The Cloud" by the way.  I despise it.  It’s "Online" or "The Internet", the cloud is a really annoying buzzword.  I believe it stems somewhat from The internet being depicted as a could on line diagrams.  This comes from drawing network maps and wanting an easy way to represent the World Wide Web.  The Internet isn’t a cloud really at all.  It’s basically a huge clump of fibers and copper hooked between a shitload of routers of various sizes transmitting flashes of light and electricity between each other.  The Web is a better analogy then the Cloud but spiders are creepy.  Hell, calling it "A Series of Tubes" is actually more accurate than a cloud.  Even the RF involved with WiFi isn’t a disperes clump of like molecules floating in space.  Those transmissions are still a "virtual series of imaginary tubes" at their core.

But whatever.

The point is, I have been heavily advocating the use of the Internet for a while.  Maybe I’m just getting tired of it, but I find lately I care less and less about it.  This has permeated all aspects of what I do for my hobbies and non work life.  Despite the best efforts of loads of Internet Citizens, the web is slowly transforming from the crazy fun Wild Wild West into some sort of locked down internment camp.

There are ads everywhere.  i keep getting emails about "leaks" and "hacks" at websites that I’ve used in the past.  There is increasing tension around the idea of corporate and government surveillance of the bits in the name of stopping piracy or terrorism.   It’s just quickly becoming a scary mess.

Then there is the closing of Google Reader.

I’ve experienced sites being closed on me before.  I generally don’t care since it’s a service I never used (most likely because no one else was using it this, why it was closing).  I’ve even experienced this via Google.  I used to use Google Tasks and Google Wave, both have been gone for a while.  But Wave was gimmicky and a limited option and was eventually superseded by Google Docs.  Tasks wasn’t a major loss, there are probably a hundred different Tasks Manager methods and programs out there, many of which are superior to Google Tasks.

There are no good Google Reader alternatives.  Maybe there will be, but there isn’t anything quite as good.  I do not want to use Google Plus or replace my RSS with a bunch of cluttered Twitter and Facebook feeds (which often contain extraneous microblog posts and clutter my own stream). 

I also really like and need RSS.  I like small time blogs.  i don’t have time to regularly check to see if Bob’s Toy Blogger updated it’s once a month update, but I can add it to my RSS feed and wait for an update to slide in.  i feel like Google’s killing of RSS not only hurts the people who rely on it to get news, but it hurts the small time people like myself who rely on it to make it convenient to get their posts out. 

I can see where Google is going here.  It’s all Google+ now.  Reader will be replaced with a cluttered filtered Google Plus stream that is useless.  The real take away I’ve gotten is even Google, whom i relied on above all else, is not reliable to be there.

It makes me question my current online backup strategy completely.  I’ve already consolidated a lot fo my document level data into Evernote.  My Google Docs is empty, I feed news articles I want to keep into Evernote.  I store bits of code for the few times I ever do any coding.  I save stories and my own writing there.  It’s all there.  I realize this is kind of an "all in one basket" mindset that may not be good either.  There are several ways to backup Evernote however and, more importantly, Evernote is in the business of selling note taking software.  They don’t have social ads and email and virtual drives and video hosting and a thousand services, they pretty much just do <hankhill>Evernote and Evernote Accessories<hankhill>.

Also it means less data in the hands of Google, which is becoming increasingly less trustworthy.

There is some residual distrust created as well.  I’m using Skydrive to backup files, but Windows 8 is universally loathed and Office 365 is just as overpriced as normal Office.  I know Microsoft is a huge company that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but I do foresee them floundering a bit in the coming future as the wheels come off the mistake that was Windows 8.  I can see a service that is probably mostly a money loser like Skydrive hitting the cutting room floor when the shit hits the fan over there.

I’ve been pretty loyal to Flickr for years and I’ve found some tools to automate bulk uploads to use it as a secondary backup but Yahoo is a company that’s more of a mess than any other large tech company I can think of and Flickr is a definitely money loser for them (high bandwidth + dwindling user base is always a problem).

So one additional little bit fueling my Cloud distrust comes from my recent push to get more organized with my data.  I’ve been going through my thousands of book marks, sorting them into an online Delicious clone I set up or clipping them to Evernote for archival.  This of course leads to some dead links.  It’s a subtle reminder that this data will not be there forever.