FreeMach™ - VirMach - End of Year 3 Report
This is a continuation of the yearly service review/reports for the FreeMach™ service now that yet another year has passed. Big thank you goes out to VirMach for sponsoring this server for the third year in a row!
Cross-posted to HostedTalk: https://hostedtalk.net/t/freemach-virmach-end-of-year-3-report/
FreeMach Overview
FreeMach™ is a free service providing free KVM VPSes to community members that was enabled by a sponsored E3 unmanaged VirMach server won during the LET 2017 Provider Poll. The service was offered because when I won the free server for a year, I did not have a purpose in mind. I didn’t want it to go to waste idling away, thus I decided to give back to the community. The project now has two locations, with the second sponsored node running in Sofia, BG, thanks to the wonderful folks over at AlphaVPS.
Here are some example projects that are/have been running on FreeMach –
- GeoDNS Load Balancing
- EasyEngine Testing
- Private File Sharing
- MariaDB Galera Cluster
- NodeJS App Development
- Non-Profit University Organization’s Website
- Rancher Testing
- IPv6 HE.net Tunnel Testing
- Hindi Community Website
- Control Panel Development
- Video Encoding Tool Testing and Development
- Web IDE / Dev Environment for School Projects
- Automated Build of Android Projects
- VOIP Module Development
- Mirror for Open Source Virtualization Platform Distributions
- Personal Media Server
- and a quite a bit more…
VirMach Review
As in the past, VirMach has been rock solid – both with hardware and with support! Not much to say, really, other than the one hardware issue that was encountered in April of this year was resolved in a very timely and professional manner. A failed PDU had brought the server offline for a short period of time. Unfortunately, it happened in the middle of the night while I was sleeping, but after sending in a ticket in the morning, the issue was corrected and the server was back up and running in just a few hours. Couldn’t really ask for better support on an unmanaged service.
Hardware-wise the server has been chugging along nicely and is able to keep up with all the tenets’ activities. Disks are in good shape (36k hours, no reallocated sectors). Network has been solid with some short-lived blips here and there, but nothing major. Only other ticket I have submitted in the past year was for a rDNS entry, which was quickly handled by support staff in a few hours time.
Two instances of system downtime were the previous PDU incident already mentioned and when the system was upgraded to Proxmox v6 in Late Summer/Early Fall.
Server Usage
As is tradition, here’s some stats and graphs for the past year. Fairly light usage overall. Most of the projects running on the node don’t seem to be very resource intensive.
Uptime report: https://hetrixtools.com/report/uptime/a5b832d6bc468d9b0cc2b2d37dda13af/
Network:
CPU:
Load Avg:
Memory:
System I/O:
Conclusion
A HUGE thank you goes out to VirMach again for sponsoring this server for the FreeMach project for the third year in a row and for giving a home to many users with a wide variety of interesting projects. I’d like to thank all the participants of the FreeMach service, I hope the VMs have treated you well and have helped you achieve some of your goals.
I’ll gladly keep the project going for yet another year if VirMach decides to bless us with their generosity again this year. However, I do realize with COVID and other things going on that circumstances change, so regardless of whether or not the project gets another extension, VirMach deserves a lot of praise and love for keeping this project going for three years!
Cheers!,
-Mason
P.S. End of Year 2 Report for the EU1 (AlphaVPS - Sofia, BG) node will be posted in March 2021.
FreeMach is sponsored by VirMach (sponsored US location), AlphaVPS (sponsored EU location), and ProxCP (sponsored VM Control Panel).
Comments
What a great project. Long may it continue.
I skimmed this on my phone so maybe I missed it but was the server just free for the first year only?
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
i think the real star here is Mason - high five
Thanks! I hope it does!
After the first year, VirMach has renewed the sponsorship on a year-by-year basis. Current sponsorship period covers through 18 Jan 2021.
Thank you, my friend!
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
Thank you @Mason for keeping the project alive.
Hot off the press... VirMach will continue sponsorship of the FreeMach project!
Viva la VirMach!
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
Congratulations @Mason on the project,
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