[arm-allstar] Hosted Allstar

[Patrick Perdue]

Though I prefer using HamVoIP on a datacenter-located Raspberry Pi (I 
have one of these hosted by Lightwave Networks in Dallas, but want more 
in other places), I've been hosting ASL, XLX and other stuff on Linode 
and Vultr nodes, and it's mostly good. There are lots of other VPS 
offerings in the low-end price bracket from other companies such as 
Upcloud as well.

With Linode specifically, I do sometimes run into situations where the 
host computer is oversold, and performance isn't what it could be. This 
most often occurs in the Newark and Toronto datacenters. I'm going to 
drop Newark as soon as I can get an east coast rPi not on a residential 
provider, and I moved what I had in Toronto to another provider in 
Montreal, which I already had set up mostly for storage purposes.

Years ago, I had some bad traffic shaping experiences with Atlanta, so 
I've never even tried that DC for amateur radio stuff, since I didn't 
like how it performed then, but for the most part, it's been OK 
everywhere else. I've had amateur radio stuff in Linodes in Dallas, 
Fremont, Sydney and London, as well as Newark and Toronto. It gives 
reasonable dahdi_test results as well.

Here is a dahdi_test result from my ASL1.01 node in Fremont just as an 
example.

--- Results after 44 passes ---
Best: 100.000% -- Worst: 99.957% -- Average: 99.994539%

Cumulative Accuracy (not per pass): 99.997

To compare, this is a dahdi_test from my Raspberry Pi 4 in Dallas 
running HamVoIP.

--- Results after 44 passes ---
Best: 99.999% -- Worst: 99.985% -- Average: 99.993871%
Cummulative Accuracy (not per pass): 99.994

So, the VPS had spikes of lower accuracy, but a higher cumulative 
accuracy and average than the Pi, which is pretty good considering how 
many other VM's are on the same physical host. The Pi performs better 
over all.

All this having been said, Linode has recently been acquired by Akamai 
Technologies, so who knows what it's future is. I've been using their 
services since early 2009, and it's been mostly good in that time, with 
very fast and knowledgeable support when you need it, plus some just 
flat out cool stuff that I'd love to understand one day, like Live 
Migration to a new physical host without powering down the existing one. 
Very slick!.

Of course, HamVoIP's resource management is way better than ASL. You'll 
immediately notice that HamVoIP uses substantially less memory than ASL 
just on the surface.

Linode's lowest end VPS, which is fine for digital modes especially, is 
$5/month.

ASL runs OK on these as well, as long as you don't want to serve more 
than about 75 IAX connections. Though it can handle around 125, it 
starts getting a little shaky around 60 or so. Core dumps are far more 
likely to happen for various reasons the more connections you put on the 
system. This isn't a problem with HamVoIP, as a single node can easily 
handle 200 connections with some internal load balancing that isn't 
possible with ASL.

Bandwidth isn't at all the concern here, as even a Nanode will give you 
better than Gigabit throughput in either direction, ,and using g.711 at 
64kb/sec, 100 connections isn't even 0.1% of Gigabit throughput.


On 7/18/2022 1:47 PM, "Darrell Black via ARM-allstar" wrote:

> All, I have been using virmach for about 3 years connecting all my allstar
> nodes together. The recent update has gone really wrong and our host has
> been down for a week now. Who is using a cheap hosting site other then
> virmach that can handle allstar, ysf, hblink services?
>