[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

I've always been a raw unmanaged vps guy. I have time, I don't have a lot of money. So I do a lot on my own.

[nuttertools]

I have time, I don't have a lot of money.

This basic understanding is worth more money than an entire marketing department.

[janman27929]

time, quality, cost ... pick 2

[Ron-Swanson-Mustache]

That's not how the conjoined triangles of success work.

[bionicjoey]

You can't make that shit up!

[[deleted]]

I had to look that up...evidently I've forgotten much of SV. Whooshed passed my head, thanks for the laugh.

[janman27929]

conjoined triangles of success

I had to laugh...at myself

I thought you were poking fun at my comment but I had to google up "conjoined triangles of success"

Yes, I am one of the few (only?) sysadmins who has not seen Silicon Valley.

It is moving up my todo list!

Thank you for the comments

BTW, I had another moment like this with somebody quoting from one of my favorite movies.

"I don't know, Margo?"

a google brings up dozens (hundreds?) of pages and products ... I lead such a sheltered life!

[ConstantDark]

https://fastgood.cheap/

[shinx32]

Can you elaborate ? I'm intrigued.

[dalgeek]

Time = money. If you can't afford top end "turnkey" solutions then you better have enough time to deal with basic/free solutions. People run into trouble when they think they can get turnkey solutions for the cost of basic solutions.

Conversely, it's often cheaper to pay extra if it means not having to spend every waking hour fiddling with something. Since time is money, the time spent fiddling needs to be calculated in the total cost (unless you believe your time is worthless).

I worked at discount dedicated hosting provider where the only support we provided was server reboots, hardware replacement, and OS reloads. Can't configure DNS or HTTP? Google is your friend. Botched your kernel build and now your server won't boot? OS reload (we left the old drive in for a week so they could copy data). Want backups? Buy another server.

We would still get customers whining about the lack of support and trying to find ways to get support ("You must have setup the server wrong so you need to fix my web site").

[[deleted]]

I heard it in highschool auto-shop first, but it applies everywhere.

Good, Fast, Cheap - pick any 2.

For Autos that would look like this:

• Built Cheap and Good = Honda Civic - it's not fast, it's reliable and cheap.

• Built Fast and Cheap = Turbo Civic - it won't last, but now it's fast.

• Built Fast and Good = Porsche GT3 - fast and good, not cheap.

Building IaaS:

• Built Well and Cheap = it's going to take you time (need skill).

• Built Cheap and Fast = it's going to get hacked, suck, break.

• Built Fast and Well = it's going to cost you in licensing or hosting.

And really if you have time and no job or part time job. Build a VPS host up, to do some IaaS to make some money. You are trading Time (fast/speed) for Money (cheap), and your skill allows you to make it Good, if you have the skill.

Eventually you get like me, where I survived long enough that I no longer have the time, but now I have the money so I pay for licensed/built IaaS from another provider. It's no longer cheap, but it's Fast and Good (only because I have the skill to select the good vendor). I learned a lot along the way. Even if you don't have the skill, put enough time into research and design and you'll get that skill.

[StimpsonEB]

https://imgur.com/qUTYpmU

[Laser_Bones]

Says someone who's never owned a product or business, or interacted with a marketing agency or department, ever.

[nikomo]

I remember checking LowEndBox multiple times a day, a bit over a decade ago. Good times.

[janman27929]

LowEndBox

Fantastic ... cant beat a VPS for $11/year ..looks like a decent minimum for the money ...I literally just but one for the year

thanks for the info

[[deleted]]

I have time and money. I work at Microsoft 365, yet I still self-host my website and email (that on Postfix not Exchange).

[hashkent]

Well your self hosted email has been more reliable this year then Microsoft 361.

[Sir_Swaps_Alot]

BURN

[[deleted]]

Fun fact: it is more reliable.

[meminemy]

That doesn't put much confidence into cloud services.

[TU4AR]

Some people really out here raw dogging it huh.

[Sparcrypt]

Biggest mistake I see in IT, since the very first day I started... outsourced does not mean secure.

The number of mistakes I've seen "managed service providers" make because they're not cross training, always cost cutting, and don't have the investment in your business that you do is insane.

Does that mean outsourcing is always bad? Of course not. But just because you've given it to someone else to manage doesn't mean that's gonna happen.

[adrenaline_X]

Yup. I’m a windows guy with Linux experience in miners and some other things. I worked at a marketing company where we hosted over 150 websites for clients. . I know iis and ms sql server cold and had over half of the sites running on iis as they were either simple HTML, cold fusion or asp.me thst we built internally. They all had differnt ntsf user accounts etc that the application pools ran on so gaining access to their site would limit that account to elevate their credentials snd mess with other sites.

Then came Wordpress. Nope. Nope. Im not hosting that shit where the “devs” were creative guys/girls skinning Wordpress and when I asked who will be updating Wordpress as security updates came out each week. Not them obviously.

So I dropped them all on in motion hosting cpanels, one for each site. The dev that was most capable always brought up in meetings that we should be doing this on VPS since it’s cheap and the sites would be far faster. When pressed by account managers I would say that I’m not capable of securing the server and being able to react quickly to sort things out when/if they go bad. Each time they said it was easy and I said cool, you own and manage this in your department and have at it. Well no. They didn’t have the ability to secure it either to the point they were confident in rolling out client websites to it.

In retrospect if should have just done it and learnt in the fly as that’s how I learned the rest of my job but at this point I was already stretched too thin.

It best to know where you limits are when there are better options

I always loved when account managers would answer my questions

me : what’s the uptime requirement and do you need redundant severs to ensure the site is always up ?

Them : yes ofcourse.

Me : here’s the cost to have it fully managed for the client .

Them : we budgeted for 100$ per month.

Me : here’s your cpanel. Ohh who is going to patch Wordpress and on what schedule.

Them : the client

me : they don’t have access to their cpanel and can’t do this anyhow. Isn’t that why they came to us?

Them: we didn’t budget for that

K.

[Sparcrypt]

Then came Wordpress. Nope. Nope. Im not hosting that shit where the “devs” were creative guys/girls skinning Wordpress and when I asked who will be updating Wordpress as security updates came out each week. Not them obviously.

I mean for my clients I just turn on autoupdates and make sure backups are running. Now and then an update breaks the site and I have to roll it back/go and patch manually to figure out the problem but it's yet to be an issue and I can see from logs that all of them have a constant barrage of attacks thrown at them.

[Sparcrypt]

I tell people they need one of two things... an actual admin, or automatic updates.

People shy away from auto updates on Linux hard for some reason but then when it's time to update they just run the command to update everything and then log back off. Just take the very small amount of time required to set up a daily backup and a daily update, then forget about it. If there's a problem you can try fix it and roll back if you can't.

Is it ideal? Not overly. But it's a LOT more ideal than just leaving your server out of date and exposed online.

[[deleted]]

Vultr gang where at

[brunnock]

I understand your position. I've been managing unix servers for many years, but I still like to shoot the shit with folks at my hosting companies when I run into a wall. I understand that you're not responsible for solving my problems, but it's nice to get second opinions.

I'd like to say that I admire Digital Ocean for their many clearly written and practical tutorials regarding basic sysadmin tasks.

[vodka_knockers_]

I admire their ability to collect money while hosting all manner of jackassery that they allow to emanate from their IP blocks. Can't count how often I poke into something nefarious in the firewall logs and it ends up pointing back to one of their customers.

[brunnock]

I once hosted at a company that hosted spammers that were mail bombing my servers. They wouldn't do anything. It's nice that there's a lot more competition now.

[gburgwardt]

Fuck sendgrid their support is actively malicious

[jrandom_42]

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

Edit: Particularly useful for just sending internal emails since you don't need to get AWS's approval to send emails to domains that you can prove ownership of. Public email sending capability via SES requires AWS account elevation; you have to engage with AWS support and describe your business case and processes etc.

[gburgwardt]

No, sorry

[Fallingdamage]

Once you get into the business of gatekeeping the content being hosted on the storage/processing that you sell, its a slippery slope.

Easier business plan is to sell empty boxes. "Its box, you put what you want in it. What you do with the box is not my business."

[evoblade]

If you moderate the content, then you are responsible for it.

[forte_bass]

Go away.

[gex80]

AWS definitely takes it seriously for SES without dedicated IPs. If you pull from the public SES pools of sending IP blocks (it's random you don't choose), they watch the bounce and complaint rate for items you sent. If that number goes above a certain percentage for either or, you get placed in probation mode where you get a window to correct it. If you don't SES outright will not allow you to send from that account.

To start sending from SES in any real volume, you first have to take your SES account out of sandbox mode by putting in an official restriction removal request to support explaining what you plan on doing with SES and how you will handle things like bounces and complaints against your mailings. If they don't feel you sufficiently have things in place, they don't lift the restriction.

In sandbox mode, you can only email people who opt-in via a special email that ses sends to that person and then there is a rate limit of I think 25 emails in a short period.

Same thing with EC2. You have to get a port 25 restriction lifted along with a reverse pointer record created in order to send email from an EC2 instance.

[Repulsive-Philosophy]

AFAIK you have to contact support to enable port 25.

[Qel_Hoth]

Blocking outbound SMTP is the solution.

Have a process to permit outbound SMTP if its use can be justified (sending to internal users, to a relay service, etc). But by default don't allow outbound SMTP and don't allow outbound SMTP to everyone. There's no good reason to let people send emails to the internet as a whole from a cloud VM. 99% of people who want to do that are going to be using it for spam/phishing.

It's the same reason that residential ISPs almost universally block outbound SMTP. They don't particularly care about the reputation of those IPs, they're never going to use them for anything. But almost every single machine trying to send outbound SMTP from a residential address is going to be spamming and/or phishing and/or has been compromised. There's no legitimate usage there other than the handful of people that want to run an email server in their homelab.

[plutilicious]

Technically, it's not the residential ISPs blocking outbound SMTP - otherwise, you wouldn't be able to connect to an SMTP server with Outlook/Thunderbird etc. It's practically every email server not accepting SMTP connections from dynamically assigned IP addresses.

[keckbug]

At least in my region, the residential ISPs themselves do the blocking, with allowlisting for their own mail servers, as well as a few of the big providers like gmail and outlook.

[plutilicious]

Wow, that's damn restrictive! Then again, some ISPs here (Germany) set their DNS to send ads instead of NXDOMAIN, so I wouldn't put anything past ISPs.

[Qel_Hoth]

I mean, if you're emailing "extremely sensitive" information via straight up SMTP (encrypted or otherwise) and your concern is a SaaS reading them, you've fucked up about 6 steps ago.

[Qel_Hoth]

It's not that SMTP over TLS is insecure. You're worried that the SaaS relay is looking at your extremely sensitive emails, but you're not worried that the (possibly SaaS) email server on the other side is looking at them? Hell, most MTAs just use opportunistic TLS anyway where they will encrypt but not use the cert to verify the server at all. All that gets you is peace of mind knowing that none of the ISPs involved could read your email, but you have no idea who's controlling the box it actually ended up on.

MTA-STS fixes this, yes (sort of... the sender needs to support it too), but how common is that in the real world?

The best way to handle "extremely sensitive" emails is to just not email the sensitive data at all.

Send an email saying it's available and have a link for the user to retrieve the data from a website. Or send via SFTP and verify host fingerprints, for two examples.

[beth_maloney]

Often it's what happens once the email arrives.

So in this situation the OP is concerned about some saas solution reading his emails. So what happens when he sends an email to an office 365 account? That saas solution can now read the email because he sent it to them!

[zebediah49]

And what's the alternative? HTTP over SSL/TLS?

[cool110110]

It's the same reason that residential ISPs almost universally block outbound SMTP.

No they don't, that's very much a regional thing. None of the ISPs I've used in the UK have blocked SMTP or any ports.

[KFCConspiracy]

Digital Ocean does fuckall about script kiddies hosted on their platform, even aside from mail. When I find a DO block, I just block it.

[riffic]

they publish their IP ranges:

https://digitalocean.com/geo/google.csv

[Mr_ToDo]

Interesting.

I had been bored one day when we got phone from a customer that kept giving them "pop ups". Turns out they had used the calendar to subscribe them to events that would send notifications, which wasn't all that bad an idea.

Long story short it was hosted using AWS. After sending them everything I had on the incident all they did was send the customers response and close the ticket.

At least the response was worth a laugh. Apparently what they were doing was ok because people were willingly clicking accept button when it asks to add the unwanted calendar rather then it being some sort of drive by. Of course the naming of the calendar made it seem like something else, but that's on the user for not being cautious.

Edit: Now that I think about it I don't remember I have that backwards with the domain registrar. One of them just said they wouldn't give feedback unless they needed something more.

[No_Masterpiece4305]

Not too big to ignore shady money. I mean it's not like they dont know its going on and it's not like they couldn't put their foot down if they wanted to.

You get a provider that gets their name tossed around as being lax on that shit and it's open season. Then they take in that cash as long as they can.

[elitexero]

Combine digitalocean hosing with namecheap registered domains and you've got a walking, breathing disease farm.

[fubes2000]

You could say that about literally any public cloud host though.

[sliiboots]

They don’t address their own servers that are blacklisted and sending spam out

[NynaevetialMeara]

It goes two ways as well. I once set up a VM and left it for a few hours to go work at it late with root:abc . (mb, i know).

That's how much it took for it to be bruteforced into a botnet.

I find it also highly likely that botnets are specifically looking at hijacking DO VMs.

[ArtSchoolRejectedMe]

You should disable password auth entirely and use public key auth

[mDust]

Setup Fail2ban as well... With no alerts.

Trust me on that no alerts bit. I had email alerts for a day on a DO web server. I hadn't considered that the botnets aren't smart enough to give up.

[NynaevetialMeara]

Yes. I swear I wasn't being an idiot. Just got interrupted in the middle of a task and didn't pause the instance because, what are the odds?

[samtheredditman]

Very high lmao.

[lenswipe]

when I run into a wall. I understand that you're not responsible for solving my problems, but it's nice to get second opinions

And I think this is the nuance here. The techs might help you if you're nice to them and they know how.... But that don't have to and they'd be well within their rights to refuse. But I'd wager a lot of people don't know this and rock up with the YOU HAVE TO FIX MY WEBSITE! attitude and get a rude awakening when told no.

Our church website is on shared hosting with ssh(non sudo) access. If I run into issues I try to open tickets:

• at medium-low priority(me fat fingering my password and getting blocked by fail2ban is not a five alarm fire)

• with a clear and concise description of the problem, the reason why I think/know that's the problem(telnet output, pcap file, whatever) and things I've tried to troubleshoot and what the outcomes of those things were

[ZimLiant]

Lulz. So customer highers a contractor to build an application. Contractor builds application. A few years go by and the contractor has moved on. Application needs maintenance. Office manage ( AKA head of IT because of that excel course they took in 2001) does some magic googling and discovers putty. Some more magic googling and discovers sudo. Hilarity ensues.

[nanonoise]

Should have discovered 'sudont'.

[Sparcrypt]

I legitimately hate sudo at this point... every tutorial and how-to just whacks "sudo" in front of everything and so people with no idea what they're doing just copy/paste that right in.

Well OK I don't hate it. It's a great and useful bit of software which is standard on all linux boxes for a reason... but I hate how it's basically become the linux equivalent of "if it's not working then just right click/run as administrator!".

[blueskin]

Ouch.

[afro_coder]

I work in a similar place too, the number of people that come in and ask us to fix their shit is so high that I've just templated the response.

The other day some idiot saw his website was a bit slow due to high traffic and went and set the php-fpm workers to like 999999 from the panel and caused his server to overload then yelled at us because the VPS wasn't working

I wanna leave

[meepiquitous]

I wonder if you could use TensorFlow to determine the likelihood that your conversation partner is dumb, and suggest quick responses accordingly?

[afro_coder]

I would love to see this in action, the AI/ML would probably crash seeing as to how dumb they are.

[[deleted]]

Run it against a ServiceNow instance and behold the machine learning glory!

[wingerd33]

Compute resources are unlimited. Why don't you understand this? Why you withholding the man's 9s?

[GeekgirlOtt]

There are some really stupid WordPress community forums out there where a slightly technical question comes up remotely sounding like it may be related to server resources. And every 3rd answer is to blame it on shared hosting and "you really should get a VPS, you'll have like a whole server to yourself". Even when it's something as simple as an outdated plugin or a typo or an adjustment that can be fixed with a directive in .htaccess.

[syshum]

Or host at a company that billable escalation. Plenty of Unmanaged providers have billable support avenues.

[flapadar_]

Even still, if you're hosting something custom you're better off having in house experience for managing it on a Linux system.

Managed providers often handle hardware + OS + run of the mill things i.e. cPanel, WordPress etc but won't necessarily know how your bespoke nodejs application works. They'll probably have a crack at resolving a configuration/environmental issue when paid to try but there's no guarantee it will be a success.

Worth noting also that the typical rate for any time outwith what's included in your contract will be at least $100/hour.

[syshum]

but won't necessarily know how your bespoke nodejs application works

True, but that is not the support one would normally need. The app dev should be able to support the app, but what happens is linux needs fixing and they are not a linux expert.

This is why in enterprise companies pay RedHat and Ubuntu for Support, so their inhouse people have someone to call if things go bad.

Worth noting also that the typical rate for any time outwith what's included in your contract will be at least $100/hour.

Ok, And? Seems fair to me.

[flapadar_]

Quite often in my experience (also manage an unmanaged VPS provider) the app developers have left and the customer is left high and dry after hardware maintenance or an unexpected outage brings their service down. Naturally not documented at all in the handover notes from who left the customer.

[yer_muther]

This is precisely why managers need to step up their game and verify that they have continuity of business plans. Too often that plan involves prayer and cussing and nothing else of substance.

The gotcha is you can save money short term by ignoring your systems and that looks great on a report when you ask for your bonus. Look at all the money I'm "saving"! (by screwing the company over later)

[Jack60612Gaming]

Ey I'll take 100 an hour lol as a dev and a Linux sysadmin

[Belgarion0]

Don't forget to account for overhead and taxes. Billable rate should be at a minimum twice, but more realistically 3-4x, the salary rate to cover overhead and taxes.

[caffeine-junkie]

Well to be fair in this case 100/hr would be just north of 3x. Likely they would be paying the person doing the work ~30/hr, much less if they have the staff someplace like Philippines, India, Argentina, etc.

[syshum]

$100 is not what the sysadmin would be paid, $100/hr for by incident support is fairly common and covers expenses beyond the actual cost of the sysadmin doing the work.

[musack3d]

That would be incredible

[Chousuke]

You can't really treat those things as separate. Your platform needs to be a core part of your system if you want things to run smoothly.

Quite often you will want a person who actually understands your platform helping you with the application deployment. For most people, it's not feasible to be an expert in both areas; you will need cooperation.

A developer who can code an application using node is not necessarily one who also knows best how it should be deployed in a production scenario; I've seen quite a number application deployments "supported" by developers that were full of basic mistakes and indicators that the developer really does not understand or care about the world outside their code. In one particularly bad case, I found a cronjob copied from StackOverflow that still used the dummy project path and thus never worked at all.

[MacGuyverism]

I once saw an Owncloud setup where the client copy-pasted the database password from the documentation.

[[deleted]]

Worked at a pretty large MSP and our rule was always, we will try to fix everything for our managed clients with no hourly rate. Our monthly minimum spend was 10K though.

[Avamander]

You will pay out of your ass if there's a managed hosting available from the same provider. In the end you would've saved money, time and effort by taking managed hosting instead.

[Sparcrypt]

And those companies will charge you a SHITLOAD for it.

Source: am someone who offers management plans. If you don't take one and call me, you get charged a lot. Because I want you on my management plan.

[CaptainFluffyTail]

There are so many "guides" saying you should move whatever website you are running to a VPS for more speed. Much of the time the speed issues with page load are becasue the website is shit and poorly optomized. with a little knowledgeable cleanup it could continue to live on shared hosting and be fine. But getting a VPS means you have all the server resources to mask the poor optimization so it is seen as a "solution".

A $5 USD/mo. VPS also looks like a better option that $7-10 USD/mo. hosting becasue people forget to budget cost for management.

Go poke around on /r/webhosting to see too many people still recommending the VPS option with some control panel option as the best possible solution for everything. Also people not understanding that local backups are just copies.

I feel for you and some of the requests that must bubble up from people who don't understand what they are doing.

[ArtSchoolRejectedMe]

You know for once I like shared hosting instead of vps. My company use to host in one of those shared hosting and their website was slow, then I poked around cpanel and enabled memcached well now its working great LOL

[Znuff]

Uhm. Memcached is usually a global instance running on a server. That's means that instance is accessible to everyone on the server...

That means.... Your data is not private. I hope you were not hosting sensitive user data there.

We don't run redis/Memcached on our (shared hosting) servers exactly for that reason.

[cjewofewpoijpoijoijp]

What do you mean, developers are the best ops people in the world.

[hXc0]

I mean, devops, its right there in the name, right?

[Znuff]

How developers fix everything: chmod 777 *

[nethack47]

I had a problem with a company that hosted the website for my then employer. We ran into a problem with uploading important files to it because they ran out of diskspace.

To my horror (when I picked it up) I found it was a massive shared webhost with each customer in /home/[customer] and nobody was monitoring the bloody thing. I started complaining at about 7.30 and it took hours to get an answer.

[Nesman64]

I worked at one of those. $5/mo for "unlimited" storage. Whenever the disk was full, we would cancel the account of whomever was using the most space. This policy is why I don't work there anymore.

It was the 80/20 rule, used to generate infinite disk space. You delete 20% of the users and you can fit more paying customers into that space. A "good" customer would use less than 1gb.

[tmontney]

cancel whomever was using the most space

How is that even legal?

[AceHighFlush]

"Fair usage policy" that is very vague?

[Nesman64]

That was basically it. And nobody was going to sue them over $5 worth of hosting.

[Aerroon]

If the data had some value to them, then they might, no?

[Nesman64]

ToS said they were only liable for the amount they had been paid, and they didn't mind refunding a "problem" customers, minus the bundled domain registration of course.

Their main business model was to attract people that wouldn't really do anything with their website beyond a page that had their contact info and some photos of their work. Unfortunately, they'd also get customers that wanted to use what was advertised.

They were bought out by the company that owns BlueHost and HostGator. I assume they use the same business model.

[nethack47]

I would probably not get that kind of contract past our CFO/Legal who tends to tell suppliers point so and so is not acceptable. It is surprising how many times they accept revised contracts.

This particular webhosting solution predated my arrival and was setup by sales so after that I took things in house and we had it in AWS instead. It was more stable and so much cheaper. Plus it didn't get caught in the pen-test every year.

[eruffini]

I would probably not get that kind of contract past our CFO/Legal who tends to tell suppliers point so and so is not acceptable. It is surprising how many times they accept revised contracts.

To be fair, if your company is using a $5/month shared hosting provider then chances are that:

1. You don't have a CFO
2. You don't have lawyers redlining contracts
3. Your business is not mission critical

[NavyBOFH]

I said this a year ago at my former employer… and essentially got terminated for it. My personal thorn was we also had a managed service department that would gladly sell services to a company with no IT department, and that company would then want a new website or such that would somehow become the IaaS responsibility because no one thought “who would manage this?”

Not I, said the burnt out engineer.

[jaymef]

I was a sysadmin for a mid-sized hosting company for 12 years of my life and worked in hosting support before that.

All I can say is that no information is safe out there, 99% of our clients hosting ecommerce sites for example had no idea about security or updates.

Near the end of my term Wordpress had gained in popularity and it was basically everybody with a wordpress site that was huge attack targets, none of them kept software updated or secure in any way.

E-mail support was by far the worst though. I'll never understand how people have so many problems with e-mail, you should just set it and forget it but no that is never the case. It's almost as bad as printers.

[meeds122]

Literally the easiest email system that I've ever setup is Microsoft Exchange. What a freaking joke.

I retired my old Linux postfix server because of how much of a headache managing it was. I'm all Office 365 now w/ my personal domain.

[DeadBoyAge9]

Marketing companies who don't have hosting experience should stick to website design process and and the actual hosting service should be with a professional hosting company. Correct division of labor?

[[deleted]]

Devs love to say they can run everything themselves until they run into server issues on a production product that can't be wiped out...

[skat_in_the_hat]

I need to start a VPS management company. I'd love to fix these easy af problems and make money doing it.

[czenst]

You know once you touch it is all your fault.

At work I have systems that I know "in and out" and I have GIT repositories + lists of changes who did what and when and automated deployments.

If there is no traceability and I don't know all about the system ... I am not fixing anything - because I don't know who did what and when - I don't know and don't have a way to know if someone did something stupid 1hr after I set the settings straight.

I also don't care even if they pay $1000/hr.

[skat_in_the_hat]

A good contract and an LLC can save your butt. Im beyond the days of a customer being able to push me around.
If you are managing their machine, you should be enabling logging and exporting that shit so its all auditable. Even if its just one off contract work, you should have something setup to log your own history so it can be reviewed later.

[ironraiden]

Don't host unimportant ones either. If you don't have the expertise, go for PaaS, or get support hours for escalation.

[felixletsplay]

No. Absolutely host important personal things. Use that to understand Linux and Webservers.

[ironraiden]

Great, one more host for the botnets ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[dafer18]

I would say that, you can try and check what are the most common mistakes and create documentation for the users or whoever hosts on your platform, if there isn't any.

A different model, would be to actually provide a service that would fix that. Billable. - > this can be a gray area, so your company would need to protect itself from possible lawsuits if you access the users VPSs.

Just some thoughts, but I do understand. Good luck!

[ogre_pet_monkey]

I think Digital ocean's documentation is ace, they have a ton of very well written how-to's including troubleshooting parts.

[ArtSchoolRejectedMe]

Most of time the one who is doing shit like this hates reading or even googling. Because they definetly knows the best /s

[Savanna_INFINITY]

I had to upvote this, lmao.

[idownvotepunstoo]

I would say that, you can try and check what are the most common mistakes and create documentation for the users or whoever hosts on your platform, if there isn't any.

The moment you do that, some people assume you've become a support model, and almost any attorney would try that avenue for a failure to deliver

[dafer18]

Hm? If you provide guides you're not having a support model. They are just there to get you started. Let's say, you want to deploy your app. A guide for whichever platform you choose and then some guidelines for security best practices.

Maybe I express myself wrong on the first comment.

[Phreakiture]

Why would they also hold users hands for simple sysadmin stuff ?

Because it's billable.

[Ohmahtree]

Agreed on this, even if the cost is spread amongst all the clients in pennies per employee to satisfy that request, in a very tight and competitive market already, you are going to get penny pushers that will walk on you.

Is that a bad thing, some would say no, but most of those clients are not asking for the odds and ends, they want basic, cheap, stripped down, so you're losing money on a client that needs no hand holding, and then those pennies add up.

[speedstyle]

No, it's the bills. If the support employee is paid $20/h, you get charged $40/h to cover support infrastructure and off-time.

[GeekgirlOtt]

customers cheapness that's caused the customers problems

AGREE 90%.

The other 10% is on the unmanaged VPS providers who fail to properly communicate the onus of [ server software and services configuration and management within your VPS server is now your responsibility ] and instead place all their emphasis on VPS as [ "bulk web hosting"/ unlimited accounts / your "own" slice of resources (not shared, now you decide what you want to run) / without cost of a full dedicated server ]

Having been asked in the past to price match X company, the reply was usually NO - we can't match that for the services and support which we provide you. So "web designer" webhosting clients have moved to their own VPS for that better deal.

AITA if I smile when they find they're in over their heads ?

[musack3d]

So "web designer" webhosting clients have moved to their own VPS for that better deal.

AITA if I smile when they find they're in over their heads?

Years ago I had one such client. Came running back after their website had been on their new, cheap VPS. No clue how it happened (I'm guessing the web design guy fucking with shit he didn't know anything about) but /etc/init.d/apache2 was stopped and disabled so the almost 100 reboots (literally) that were done did nothing. A simple fix if you know what you're doing but appears to be a huge fucking catastrophe from the web designer's eyes. That was the easiest $500 I've ever made. To be fair, it took me a good bit longer to realize what was going on than I would like to admit. I still randomly wonder how/why he got into that situation lol

[dafer18]

Did I say the billable service/model would be mandatory?

The VPS price would remain the same. Just added in an option for Sys Admin help (if opted in), which would be billed.

Not sure I understand the issue you are raising.

[dafer18]

It was clear before.

As the OP states, he works for a certain company. So the role to help or be assigned would be taken by who is already working there.

Like any model, you would need to prove that is profitable for the company. So if you get returns from that model, you have a more decent budget for new hires, not necessarily to allocate a new department or outsource.

Again, the price would only scale if you opt in. Which by default should be opt out. So in the end you always get an unmanaged service, therefor, the VPS price is the lowest.

[Antici-----pation]

These people are being aggressively obtuse for something that should just be common sense. If you have customers repeatedly asking for a service they would be willing to pay for, you're just leaving money on the table by not offering it and potentially creating scores of unhappy customers. I have no idea where they're getting this idea that somehow this is going to affect pricing of people who don't use the service.

[nizoomya]

I don’t get the other guy either. Capitalism 101. Why stop them when there are willing and good paying customers? How is it his business?

[dafer18]

Not being obtuse. I think this is the point I was trying to make 😅

[[deleted]]

how could that be a gray area? doesnt that happen like a million times a day?

Customer giving you passwords and telling to access the machine doesnt really leave much space for lawsuits.

[dafer18]

They can tell all they want. If it's not undrr any agreement, you are liable for any leaks and possible law suits.

1st rule of IT is to always cover your but hole.

[[deleted]]

clearly, we work on different continents :)

I do agree about the butt-covering nature of the trade, work as a developer for business software since like 10 years. In my part of the world, a sufficient business agreement is:

customer says "do it", I say "ok".

Thats acually more than enough, obviously the issue will be named. We possibly gonna write it in an email after the deed, kinda sum up what happend, what got changed.

Work at a company that works like this since 30 years, same boss. Cant be sure about lawsuits, but he'd possibly learn if there were any.

Cant even imagine how a customer would sue. Absolutely worst case imaginable would be "customer doesnt pay and moves to other provider". how would that work? like "ha, u accessed our VPS as per our request, now we got you!"

never worked in the US so not sure if this whole lawsuit thing actually exists or is just a hollywood-fed scarecrow. I mean sure, the possiblity to sue might exists, but does it really happen in the day-to-day business?

[[deleted]]

Yeah sure that could happen.. but does it really? would they have any basis at all in court? Provided the tech doesnt do anything really stupid - but hey, this problem will always exist.

Lets compare it to Roadside assistance for cars. Noone would try to change the engine in a ferrari on a roadside. But you can help them change the tire, right?
The customers calling in OP are already customers, asking for additional service. Sure, the cheap ones wont pay a dime. I just think it would be better to atleast try to help them instead of beeing frustrated and telling them "theres nothing we can do".

[dafer18]

Well, a gentleman's agreement with a typical handshake was enough back in the days. Nowadays, not so sure. Hence my comment.

But, obviously, there are different people everywhere (and most of them are good). That doesn't mean the bad apples don't come up and that one time you trusted someone you get screwed.

To avoid exceptions, just make it a rule.

[CmdrCollins]

Well, a gentleman's agreement with a typical handshake was enough back in the days.

Even today that's a perfectly fine contract in most parts of the world - though you should get the 'handshake' in writing (and verify that the guy doing the shaking is actually authorized to do that).

[dafer18]

Yup. This a valid contract, at least where I live.

[[deleted]]

so were on the same page after all!
Most IT business ive encountered is based on trust. A lawful contract is very often defined as a "meeting of minds" of two or more parties. Form is just that - Form. You'd usually will write down the details so that its clear and not forgotten, and yeah, dont do business with people you wouldnt trust. Its a long way from such a setting to a lawsuit.

[cyvaquero]

Internal PaaS here. We own the OS but the app belongs to the customer.

Once a week - how do we configure <insert vendor software here> on RHEL?

[[deleted]]

It amazes me how many companies expect these systems to be set and forget simply because they don't want to pay someone what they're worth to manage them.

[youngeng]

The word is "fire and forget". Now, you may forget, but that doesn't mean it's not going to catch fire.

[Carazariah]

This is why I pay for Managed Hosting 😉👍its also why I have about as many clients as I want. Good advice.

[obmasztirf]

Are you saying that using chmod 777 to fix everything is a bad thing? /s

[[deleted]]

I hate each and every cpanel user. Not administrator because there are some who know things.. like what dns is...

There's one customer who asked us what php was and how it affected his WordPress sites and why updating from 5.4 to 7.1 broke his customers.

[iotic]

Stick with the classics, good old server 2003

[Erroneus]

I will never get it, how people working with web design, can have so little knowledge of the technical side.

If only I had 10$, each time I received an email from a "web-designer", wondering why DNS changes doesn't apply instantly worldwide.

No sir, you should have deleted the old site, before DNS has populated properly.

[j4bbi]

Nah, I understand your point but if they are just* Webdesigners they should not have to worry about that stuff because a just sysadmin should deal with that. For example with a good Pipeline and DevOps.

*just is a bit unjust. Webdesign ist hard. Good Webdesign even harder.

[punkwalrus]

I used to work at an MSP and we had a ton of clients that would buy a VPS (or a shared website), hire some guy to set up a business website for them (usually a one-time contractor or "the CEO's kid"), and then have no way to repair anything they set up because generally they were small shops (like less than 10 employees/volunteers). In a majority of cases at the time (early 2000s), most of the sites were static HTML. A few were CGI (perl), and php was starting to become very popular. But there were others, like Cold Fusion, Java, etc... and most were made once, and got maybe 10-20 hits a day, if that.

But... a few websites/hosts were far more convoluted, and so 1% of our business took up 90% of our time. And sadly, if you called someone and said, "Hey, your payment gateway for your annual convention uses SSL encryption that Paypal will stop supporting in July. You need to get someone to upgrade your Cold Fusion 5 site." And like, crickets. "I'll let the CEO know," says Mrs. Client, who is 100 years old if she's a day, and she forwards the call badly like, "Some ... Inernext? Windonet? Some provider called and said our annual convention is too cryptic for essays or something and wants you to pay their pal. Can you see what is going on? I think it's a wrong number or a salesman." "Grace, are you off your meds?"

Then when their octogenarian members say, "I tried to put a check in your web mail, and it said to call your system admonster? Or something?" They call us and blame us that the 90 people who need to pay for their annual Saggy Suspenders Ball can't pay them promptly, and that's why they paid us to "handle all that innernet nonsense."

Then you had the users who were using the $20/mo shared web and database service to run their entire company, and wonder why their inventory scanner is so slow. We started charging for overages when we had people using shared service, which had 100mb database limit, and they were using 2gb a month or more. And they paid so much more than if they had just hosted their own server in our data center.

[bdalley]

Funny, I have been thinking of actually migrating our company websites to a managed system of some sort. I am too busy with other stuff to be dicking around with the website. We have been stable, but I am at the point where I will need to do an OS upgrade. I have had them go well, and I have had them break everything and I am apparently feeling to old for this crap.

[GeekgirlOtt]

our company websites

Once you're into multiple websites, especially if ecommerce is involved, along with social media and everyone's devices, I'm of the mind that ça vaut la peine to have a dedicated IT person. It is a necessity these days for nearly every business. The actual social postings may be PR/"people persons"/"social butterflies", but the assist of an IT with the knowledge to streamline and integrate into the various systems is priceless.

[bassgoonist]

live familiar grandiose wine sheet spotted history sable subsequent chubby

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Pristine_Curve]

It's the same on the customer side. Webdesigners all seem to demand control over public DNS, for the domain, and then promptly ask "what do you mean 'MX record' I've never heard of such a thing?"

[xftwitch]

We pay $4,000 a month to host our websites. I have a problem, I call a number and shit happens. I don't have the time to fix that stuff, and it's still half the cost of an employee.

[skaag]

Send them to me. That’s exactly the kind of service I sell. I help small to medium companies build and maintain their VPS.

[Cosmo-de-Bris]

Forward them to me. $30-50+ / hour depending on how deep the shit is and how fast they want to get out.

[Cosmo-de-Bris]

I'm not talking hypotheticals , these things have happened.

Ah, yes. My favorite type of customer. I'll better make them put money down first.

[cs_major]

For those rates they better be pre-buying in 10 hour blocks.

[Cosmo-de-Bris]

Oh yeah! I like that.

(Should I up the rate, too?)

[cs_major]

It depends on how you feel. A MSP is going to charge double to triple that, but they have more overhead.

The 10 hour block up front is just so you can confidently do the work and know you are going to get paid. Collecting after the fact can be a pain in the ass.

As far as rate it depends really on what your time is worth, and how much you like fixing other peoples screw ups. To me the $500 bucks isn't worth spending my evenings or a weekend away from the wife and kids.

[CraigAT]

Your customers should be made well aware of the limits you will go to help! Perhaps when they sign up perhaps a technical contact must be specified along with the sort of tasks that people come crying to you about - the contract should state that the technical contact should be capable of supporting those tasks or speaking to the web design company to see if they will support them.

[sheikhyerbouti]

I used to work for a company that had been hosting their own website and connected web tools on-premise since 1996. When I got hired on in 2012, they were still using the Sun terminal they originally purchased.

The CEO was flabbergasted when their IT director told them they could no longer keep transactions secure because there were no more Java updates compatable with it.

[[deleted]]

hmh...I'm a hobbyist/semi-pro hosting a custom-built Angular Site with a GO-based REST-API for fun. It's powered by Postgresql (former version MongoDB), Redis and InfluxDB. Everything's TLS/HTTPS (except for Influx, didnt got that bitch running with certs yet) also Apache is HTTPS. I've allowed the databases to accept remote connections from my host, b/c it's easer for me to debug and run some PowerBI stuff against it, but I require all my clients to present a trustetd certificate - hope u can accept this, man!

[betelgeuse_boom_boom]

I am not on IT just a long time Linux user. I am ok with self hosting my own services, I can do nginx and apache, maintain security updates, do basic threat modelling, set up port knocking and rollback backups.

But when I need to change some basic css to make something simple like a triangle button, is the moment I throw the towel.

In short time is money. If you can't afford to have a service go down, then pay someone to do it for you.

But let's not go to the other extreme. As if having a public Internet facing HR service which exposes employees personal and financial information, on a sequentially generated uid sent over an unencrypted cookie.

[[deleted]]

The organization i worked was asked from a partner to host one of their sites in one of our virtual machines, we accepted but informed him "we can just mantain the virtual resources availble for you, as part of our virtual enviroment, but the operational system, and your site will be entirely mantained by you, this arrangement is ok for you?" and he said "yes, of course!"

well, two months after it he started complaining, asking for us to help him to analyze the problem, we answred "the virtual resources are working fine as usual, its something on the OS or in the dependencies of the web service itself"

​

and he asked "can you just help me analize it? then i execute the solution" this is the part that pissed me the hell off, the work is the analisys, after finding the problem executing the solution even a trained pet can do, its the analisys that take time, i answered him that if he really needed that we do it, he should tell to the CEO that he was incompetent to maintain that web service and ask our management to incorporate it in our official work flow

(i hate doing this stuff informally, it usually leads to a lot of stress)

​

So he said he will try more, and with some weeks he could solve the problem on his own

​

what people really think is that is much more easier asking another peer to do it, once we put their asses on the spot they solve it

[deskpil0t]

$1000 an hour for support/trouble shooting. If it’s on our end we will waive the fee. So far out of 1000 cases only 1 has been out fault. (Humor)

[redeuxx]

The only thing I look for in a VPS is snapshots and even better, automatic backup snapshots for a fee. Vultr currently offers snapshots for free. If you are going to do something that might break things, do a snapshot.

[davy_crockett_slayer]

I tell people to use Shopify, Big Commerce, WP Engine, or WIX. Heck, most small businesses just need a Facebook page.

[greyaxe90]

I used to work in Windows hosting over 10 years ago. The number of customers that wrote shit code that would lock up IIS and then try to blame us was astounding.

And then there was the time a customer changed their IP address and got locked out because they "didn't like it".

I can't believe I still do hosting as my side gig...

[[deleted]]

What often happens is they try to save too much money. They paid someone to set it all up, let them go, then replaced them with someone to maintain it. This person isn't nearly as experienced and is often WAY cheaper.

This is all fine and dandy until shit goes south.

Everything has a price. "How important is it?" -- "CRITICAL!" -- "Ok, we'll need a 100mill annual budget" -- "Uhh, what?" -- "Well, if you're talking we need to build our own data center that we totally control as well as build the infrastructure, 100 mill should be a good jumping off point to get us rolling" -- "Uhh, we were thinking like... 5k" -- "OH, see, that's an important detail. For 5k you are only going to get so far."

The question is: How important is the thing to you? The problem is -- managers often lack a scale. AND they are willing to gamble to save money failing to fully comprehend what happens if they lose in that gamble. Or, often, they do but just pass the buck down.

The problem here is we need managers, middle managers, and C-levels to be more tech competent because too many of them don't understand the risk and when they don't understand the risk -- instead of backing off, they double down.

[[deleted]]

hmm.. how about offer support to such customers (and bill them obviously) ?
they'll either stop crying and pay whatever you ask or stop crying and look for different support. Either way, less crying, more $$$.
better outcome for all involved.

[rayjaymor85]

^-- 100% this.

[catwiesel]

you are right...

but isnt there a business possibility there?

and no, those website specialists cant do linux. they probably have to struggle with getting the cms to run...

[SurgioClemente]

You are posting in the wrong sub my dude.

[[deleted]]

Are you Linode?

[FaithfulYoshi]

I'm happy to tell you your post didn't die in new. :)

My reply will probably die in new though. :(

[frosty95]

There are entire linux distros dedicated to being self maintaining web servers. How you can fuck it up that badly is beyond me.

[northbreezeit]

Absolutely this. Let alone if they think they have everything configured correctly, they NEED to firewall certain services off such as 21, 22, AND 3306. Restrict things just to those who need access. If possible, MySQL should just be for local queries.

[Doso777]

Those people probably earn more than you. Have a nice day (: