#vpsinfinity

I haven't posted here lately (Although this is just a personal blog, so I am fairly sure no one has been sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for the next update - if reading this blog at all.) as I've simply been too busy. 

A very short synopsis of what I've been up to of lately:

VPSInfinity.com has absolutely taken off beyond what I ever imagined it could be. After speaking with one of my competitors, which I had always assumed to be much larger than VPSI, I was told that this project is actually on the same level as them - around the same amount of active servers and clients; however I am still experiencing incredible growth (Adding on an 18th host node tonight!) with no sign of slowing down. (I said this was short, so I'll stop here without going into too much detail!)

For the past few months I have been very interested in Minecraft server hosting. Minecraft is a new game, still in it's beta stages, however it has become very popular over the past few months. Server hosting for this game is exactly as it sounds like, customers who would choose to purchase a plan would have a game server they can connect to and play the game online with friends! I've recently started MCLayer.com (MinecraftLayer.com, both will work of course) and it has gained an incredible interest as well, already nearing about 40-50% of the amount of active VMs (Virtual Machines) as VPSI just after 1 1/2 months! I'm very excited to see where this project takes me.

Of course, classes at UC (University of Cincinnati) have started up again. This is good and bad, as everything comes. The good being I am surrounded yet again by friends and of course my fellow classmates who share the same passion in computing and programming as I do. The bad being you can only learn so much in school, and even then you never truly learn it until you apply it - this is bad because I would love to have the time available again to focus specifically on learning new skills and branching out my current ones, rather than taking certain classes that I'm sure will not benefit me in my goals - but everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt (I think that applies here? Oh well, it does now.)

Of course, this being my sophomore year at UC we are now beginning Professional Practice, which means applications and interviews for co-op positions are starting as well. I'm very excited for this process to start, the Job Fair is actually tomorrow and I've received a few personal calls and emails from potential employers (Résumés were sent earlier online through a program UC has setup to all companies that I had decided were of interest to me) to schedule an interview with them. 

I'm extremely excited to start a co-op position; not only will this provide real experience so I am able to see what the Computer Science field is truly about, but I am also expecting to gain an incredible wealth of knowledge while on the job - and that's what is most exciting, and important, to me. 

I've decided that California, specifically Silicon Valley, is the absolute best place to be for this industry. A company of interest that specifically caught my eye is Zoove - Zoove is a company that deals with online marketing handling branded phone numbers (**, Star-Star, numbers). They seem to be an incredibly forward moving company, and I'm sure have a very active engineering department that is working on the back-end of the program which I would love to be a part of! Earlier today I started working on HireMeZoove.com which I'm hoping will catch wind and let them know of my interest! I really do think that I have a lot to bring to their establishment and hope they consider me!

As stated earlier - This is a personal blog, and I don't expect many to take an interest to it, so you (You being that person that isn't reading this, since even stating this assumes I'm wrong in this case.) may be wondering why I am even bothering to post this now. It's fairly simple actually. Writing is an outlet, outlets leave your mind to really pour out and visualize what is in your subconscious - this can be extremely beneficial as not only does it help to relieve stress, but helps to clear your mind and lets ideas come to life easier! For that reason I am going to try (If I remember, at least.) to make a post once a week, if not more to get those creative juices flowing. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote up an article about my current working status - which hasn't changed since. A few months ago I started a company that sells virtual private servers (VPS). A VPS is exactly what it sounds like - it's a server that one can access, but doesn't have dedicated hardware assigned to it - but instead it is

created in a virtual container. A way I've been describing to those that are not as involved in the "tech scene" is through a real estate metaphor: If a landlord owned an apartment building, one could refer to that building as a physical server. The landlord would then rent out each individual apartment to others for a monthly costs, which you could think of each as a VPS. Not all apartments are the same, even in one single complex. A landlord may have budget apartments, and may have deluxe or larger ones for families. 

When I had first started this company, I drew out my business plan and have stuck to it thus far - which has worked out fairly well for me. What I was doing in the past, was re-selling from another company as it poses the least amount of risk both with there isn't much I can mess up on the software/hardware end, and also from a financial point of view. I had negotiated with a company to receive a 30% discount on their VPS' so every time an order was placed on my own website, I would order a server from this company - receive the login credentials, install all necessary software that I had stated was included, and then after testing to make sure everything was running properly - forward the credentials to my customer who had purchased from me. 

Just recently, within this past week, I have moved to the second phase in my business plan: ordering my own dedicated servers and dividing out the resources myself. Now a real estate metaphor might not make as much sense here, but imagine if I was renting out the entire apartment complex mentioned before and then selling the apartments myself. Keep in mind however, I am paying for the resources regardless of whether they have been sold or not. 

Making the move towards dedicated servers is definitely a larger risk. During the past week, I've put a total of 5 new nodes (Servers) online. Each server has been setup specifically to fit my target niche of customers, which are very, very CPU heavy users. I had originally ordered a 32GB Ram X3460 server (Quad core 2.8Ghz Hyperthreaded to 8) but after just a day or two of testing, I had noticed this was definitely not enough processing power as the servers CPU was being maxed out after having only around 24GB of users added onto it. I contacted my hosting provider and we setup a server specifically to meet my needs: 16GB E3-1230 (Quad core 3.2Ghz Hyperthreaded to 8) which not only cuts the ram in half, instantly doubling the processing power to each user - but also the Sandybridge processor is much more powerful, putting the processing power at about 280% of the original server.

The main reason that I felt the need to move to these dedicated servers, is being the sole "employee" of my company the work was starting to become too tedious, especially trying to handle all of the billing and finances. Working with a third party was also beginning to become difficult. By having my own servers, I have installed two key pieces of software: SolusVM and WHMCS. 

SolusVM is one of the most popular solutions for handling virtual machines (Hint hint: That's what the VM stands for). WHMCS is a billing platform that can now manage all of my clients and ordering. By installing a module from SolusVM for WHMCS, everything is nearly 100% automated - I can now offer instant setup so after my clients purchase, seconds later they will have access to their machine!

Now as I had said earlier, I had installed certain software packages to ensure everything was setup properly for my customers. Obviously if I'm offering instant setup, I wouldn't have a chance to install all the necessary software for each customer. This luckily was a very easy threshold to overcome. I'm using Xen virtualization currently (When I was reselling, I was using OpenVZ. Yes another benefit of switching to dedicated servers, as Xen is much more stable for what I need). However, both with Xen and OpenVZ there is a "things" (hate to use such an indescriptive word) called "templates" that are able to be used. A template is an image of a current system, a "picture" so to say. After doing some research, it was fairly easy to create. First I created my own VPS and installed all the software that was needed and then proceeded with the following steps. (I'll title this with it's own little section in caes someone happens to Google the process)

How to create Xen templates used for SolusVM:

1. Login to your host node.

2. xm shutdown vm101 (Replace vm101 with the proper name of the server you would with to make a template of. If you need to know what servers are running, type "xm list")

3. mount /dev/raid1/vm101_img /mnt (This will mount the VM image onto dom0 (Domain0) Replace raid1 with your volume group and vm101 again with the proper name. To find your volume group, enter the command "pvscan" (Physical Volume Scan) and you will receive an output similar to this: PV /dev/md1   VG VolGroup00   lvm2 [931.41 GB / 789.59 GB free]

In this case, VolGroup00 would be the Volume Group.

4. tar -cf ../centos-5.6-x86_64-customname.tar . (Tar the file, which is similar to zipping it. You must follow SolusVM's naming conventions, found here: http://wiki.solusvm.com/index.php/Xen_Virtualization#SolusVM_Xen_Templates Don't forget about the extra "." at the end of this command!)

5. cd .. (Change directories to the next parent)

6. gzip centos-5.6-x86_64-customname.tar (Gzip the tar file - uses less space and it's necessary for SolusVM. Replace the filename with your own of course.)

7. umount mnt/ (Unmount the VM's image)

8. scp centos-5.6-x86_64-customname.tar.gz root@IPHERE:/home/solusvm/xen/template (Replace IPHERE with the IP of your SolusVM Master machine, as all servers that will be using this template, including the Master server, will need to have the template in this diretory. This will SCP (Secure Copy) the file directly to your other server)

That's it in a nutshell!

Back in February I started up a small business, VPSInfinity.com , that rents out VPS's (Virtual Private Servers) to clients that are choosing to macro games. My clients may do this just to get ahead on their character - but the majority are doing what is called "Gold farming" - this is an action that is generally against the rules of most MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) and involves selling online currency to other players for a real life profit.

My customers generally run macros (bots) on multiple characters on my servers in order to play 24/7 and then gain online currency much faster in order to turn a real life profit. Many choose to rent my servers because you are able to run them 24/7 (A monthly cost of course ranging from $16-58/mo)

Many people have asked me how I find my customers. For this, I try to attack in segments. There are three main "clients" that the macros can run on for the customers' game: Nexus, RSBuddy, and Powerbot. All three of these clients have their own website (Technically speaking, Nexus has multiple websites as they actually distribute via vendors - and I am marketing towards the largest vendor) and forums. On all of the forums I have a link in my signature (which is posted at the end of any message I post) that back-links to my website - this accounts for a lot of traffic as around 50% of my traffic is referring from this website.

The biggest thing that allows me to gain customers however, is that I am always looking - and willing to help others. I have an MSN address dedicated to those who wish to contact me so I can have live support available. My link is always in my status and after helping others I always suggest for them to look at my company as their next choice since I am generally helping those who have elected to go with another provider - who clearly has not been supportive.

Lastly, I - being interested in software development - am a fan of open-source software. I have written a short BASH script (Please do realize I truly do mean short, and simple - it is by no means impressive) in order to setup all of my servers. I have chosen to provide this script to the public so that they can setup their own servers. True - this might sway some to just purchase a cheaper server that is not already setup (Which mine are - they come with the "client" for macroing downloaded and installed, and all of the packages setup and running) and then install the packages theirselves with my script. However this script has advertisements within it - to help set the thought in their mind of considering my company next time.

All-in-all I generally have around 50 customers a month (Some cancel for various reason and more come in every month so it hovers around this number but it has been slowly crawling up) that I am mainly able to handle myself. I have a Help Desk ticket support system thanks to OSTicket and I am able to stay in contact with my customers and help them with any issues there.