Seems like they do not have much interest or they are still celebrating the New Year.

Or, your email is one of the thousands they get every day...

Ok, I may be a little impatient, with all the pending doom.

Willi

Spoke to Sales..... nice Lady "celia", she is on duty 10pm to 4am UK Time (she is based in the US - 24hr Shift Pattern))

I explained in very (very) Broad outline what the Site was, and pointed her at the current BOINCStats addy. She is standing by for you to call her

Her direct Email Addy:

alice.panzer@1and1.com

The slight delay has been them working through the New Year Break backlog. She is happy to take a call direct or via Email addy. There should be an Email from her in your BOINCStats Maibox

Regards
Zy

So that's that.

In other news: an Amazon representative called me last Monday and I explained AWS was too expensive and too slow. He ignored the "too slow" part and he is now "investigating" options to lower the price for the database IOPS. I haven't heard back yet.

Re 1and1 .... oh well, it was worth a spin, they are a good Provider.

Willi,

maybe you don't know the german Hosting provider "Hetzner Online". It's a real established company with great support and fair prices. But they don't provide cloud service. I know them from our companie, we have 2 metal and one vps from them.

Bare Metal Server
The EX40 Hybrid costs abour 71€ per month incl. 21% VAT (one time setup 71€)
Core i7-4770
32Gb RAM
2x 2TB
2x 240 GB SSD

or the professional PX Serie
PX61 ~72€ per month incl. 21%VAT
Xeon E3-1275 v5
64 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
2x 4TB

PX61 SSD
same as above but with 2x 480GB SSD

Maybe its worth to take look at the Dedicted Server list or maybe also on their server market
All Server having 100 GB external Backup Storage

I've never let you know that Amazon never came back with a better price.

Recent hardware failures made me look again at current pricing for Amazon AWS and Google Cloud (Azure and Softlayer don't support MySQL, only in VM itself) and it still has a hefty price tag. Maybe next year. Would be great if one of the big players wants to sponsor BS in their cloud .

Edit:
Just the database instance:

I started a test with Google Cloud. If I understand Google's pricing correctly and if I commit to a three year contract I expect that expenses will remain close the to current budget.

Updates are already running and the performance is just a little bit less than the metal servers. I'll let this run for a week and then next week I'll set up the webserver and see how that goes.

Interesting! Let us know the results. If you need some help with testing or monitoring, send a pm.

The daily update was six minutes slower on the cloud than on the metal (taking one hour en 36 minutes). Truth be told, the metal updater was also running the challenges at the same time so when that is running on the cloud it may be a bit slower. But I'm happy with the result, it's not as bad as the AWS test last year.

Running the BOINC stats failed. Individual projects completed without problem but combined stalled. The process to combine all hosts was running but still not finished after nine hours. This process uses a lot of memory and while it seems there was enough of free memory (by using a swapfile) it seems it was not enough.

Back to the drawing board I guess. Did you give the virtual server the same amount of RAM and swapfile size as the metal one? Maybe other changes like different OS-(sub ) versions or application-versions? Could be a needle-haystack situation...

Not quite. The metal server is running MariaDB and is also running the scripts. It has eight AMD Opteron Magny-Cours cores @ 2.3GHz, 32GB ram and 40GB swap.

At Google Cloud MySQL is running on a SQL instance with four Intel Xeon cores and 15GB ram. The scripts are running on a compute engine with four Intel Xeon Haswell cores, 15GB ram and 30GB swap. Since it is split over two serves I expect to need less ram per server.

Upgrading either of them doubles the number of cores and ram, however the price also doubles. The current configuration should cost around €300 per month. I'll have to add at least one webserver to that bringing it to around €340 per month.

So, I'll optimize first, if that fails I'll upgrade.

Update: Turns out the current cost is already €14 per day.

The website is online at https://boincstats.eu (not a clickable url because I don't want crawlers visiting it yet).

There are lots of issues because not all data is copied yet.

I have not copied BAM! accounts yet to prevent accidents with project updates and other nasty stuff so you can't log in.

If you find issues with stuff that should work (page produces at least some data) then please don't post it here but in the BETA test subforum instead. If you don't have access request it.

After some optimization the host update now completes without problems and in about the same time as the metal server.

I've found a huge problem with the stats update on de cloud server. History is messed up. History copied from the metal server is OK but additions are totally wrong.

I compared the code with the metal server but since I didn't change it I didn't expect to find anything. Added some debug code though.

Since there are no changes in code two causes remain (that I can think of):
* MySQL doesn't play along
* Something changed in Perl.

As for Perl, at work I also work with Perl and I got some warnings there when running code on the latest version of Ubuntu. Didn't get those here though.

So, I'm puzzled, can't find a good explanation yet.

Fixed.

Currently at €15.00 €17.50 with one DB server, one update server and one (probably under powered) webserver.

That makes it €110 €185 more expensive per month.

If I take into account that once every three years all harddrives have to be replaced which costs ~€2000 -> €55 per month.
And if I take into account that the metal servers are six years old and will need to be replaced somewhere in the next five years which will cost a gazillion. Or probably somewhere in the order of €10000.

Then I think Google Cloud may not such a bad idea.

Thoughts anyone?

Sounds like it might be the direction to go, what would be the tentative timeline for the change? Could anything be recouped from the hardware?

As soon as possible because as soon as the $300 free trial runs out I'm paying double. Only $130 left.


I'll try to sell the hardware but it's pretty much only datacenter grade stuff. And who would want to buy six year old Intel servers (although nothing is wrong with them at the moment and they are pretty decent, compared to modern servers they're just space heaters). The update server is a custom build Opteron which probably nobody wants. So I could try to sell them whole or in parts but it won't be a gold mine. Would you buy an SSD which ran in a busy webserver for over a year?

Then there's the two firewall servers. Four years old, previous gen Intel servers.

Support hardware: a IP-KVM and a PDU which both don't work in modern browsers because they do not support current SSL encryption and/or Java (I use the KVM in a VM with an old Java version, the PDU via TELNET), an ATS (1 year old, top grade device!) and a 16 port not-managed 1GBit network switch. And a bunch of diverse cables.

Cloud relieves you of the hassle/responsibility for the bare metal parts of BOINCstats. On the other hand you loose some flexibility in selecting parts on which you know BOINCstats behaves well. Or get them for free from a sponsor .

So yes, Cloud seems to be the most future proof solution imho.