Benefits
With MetalVPS you can:
see how many VPSes there are on your Node, how many other VPSes besides yours are running, and how your Node is performing,
understand and modify the entire software stack which runs your VPS,
conveniently run a lot of pre-installed software directly on the Node. For example, there are several graphical desktop systems including KDE and XFCE. Also, command line terminal hackers will find the OpenBSD ksh shell in addition to bash. For the curious, there's Chaitin's Lisp interpreter, MIT's Xv6 Operating System, and tons more. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is there via plan9port. Docker is installed. There is a 100 GB primary partition for debootstrap, LinuxFromScratch, etc. We would love for you to add to the pile!
You also can:
- study up on installing dedicated servers by accessing the HP iLO interface.
And, by far the best, you can:
- enjoy talking with and learning from your MetalVPS neighbors!
Disadvantages
Our wonderful piece of shite antique server, Darkstar, performs about half as fast single threaded as the four core VPS you can get for free from Oracle Cloud. Multithreaded, Darkstar's sixteen cores outperform the free VPS.
MetalVPS has no billing panel and no server control panel. It's all command line until you install a GUI or activate whatever pre-installed GUI you want. MetalVPS has no onboarding and no knowledge base. But many messages fly around, including PMs here on LET, email, and Signal App.
MetalVPS is ephemeral. It might blow up! We might reinstall the Node. Frequent reboots are required for updates. Long running services are discouraged.
No warranty. No service level agreement. Not for business use. For sure you need your own backups because MetalVPS doesn't do them for you.
Who
With a lot of help from the MetalVPS neighbors, MetalVPS is a project of @Not_Oles a/k/a Tom Miller a/k/a the clueless™ guy.
As of this writing, there are six MetalVPS neighbors of whom four have sudo privileges.
Most of the neighbors don't log in very often. @Not_Oles visits multiple times per day.
Where
Darkstar is happily colocated with @Ian_Dot_Tech of Level One Servers in Dallas, Texas USA.
Why
Why not? It's fun to play with and learn about servers, operating systems, and the internet.
Pricing
MetalVPS costs $20.22 per month. Free or lower cost accounts sometimes are possible. No payment is due until your account is set up and you are 100% satisfied. Payments available via Paypal and Stripe.
How it works
MetalVPS is White Hat!
Today, Darkstar is running the full "everything" version of Slackware64-current. Slackware64-current requires reboots at least every week or ten days for kernel updates.
Darkstar VPSes can be made with Qemu KVM compiled directly out of git. LXC also is available.
Darkstar accounts can be delivered with a Debian sid VPS already set up and running. Delivery might take awhile!
Darkstar node specs
Server: HP BL460c G6
CPU: 2 x Xeon L5630 4-Core = 8 cores = 16 threads
RAM: 48 GB DDR3 ECC
Hard Drive: 2 x 400GB SAS SSD, Hardware RAID 1
IP Addresses: IPv4/29, IPv6/64
Connection: 1 GBit/s port
Bandwidth: 10 TB
Datacenter: Colocated with Level One Servers inside Carrier-1, Dallas, Texas, USA 🇺🇸
More information
Please check MetalVPS.com or comment here if you need additional information!
Thanks very much!