This September 10th SatelliteGuys will be celebrating our 18th Birthday!
When we first started we were hosted on shared servers, then we rented a dedicated server then in 2008 we purchased our first own server. The cost for it was around $5000. That server got us on our feet and in our own! It ran great until 2011 when we ran out of drive space and started having problems with the raid controller.
In addition at that time we decided to move our server from Dallas Texas to Lansing Michigan. The hosting price was less per month, the service was faster and we had a 10 U of rack space to put in as many servers that would fit into that 10 U Space.
We ordered the new server to be shipped to Michigan direct from Dell so that we could transfer the site from Texas to the new much beefier Dell server. Believe it or not with all costs involved we paid almost $10,000 for that server. That server went direct to LiquidWeb I never ever got to see it or touch it.
We would eventually have 3 servers there including one that was given to me that we used backups to. Over time I had someone go and fix our old original server and put new drives in it and a new raid card. I started using that old server for backup and hosting our websites such as my weather station. We also used it to host the Shoutcast servers we use to broadcast SatelliteGuys radio to. It became a nice utility server!
When I had our original server fixed I had a spare server just sitting there unused so I invited Trip and his website RabbitEars.Info over and we hosted their site for many years at no cost as a service to TV lovers everywhere.
The new Dell server we ordered served us well in fact it worked flawlessly for us until we powered it off in February of this year.
In February I started thinking about hosting SatelliteGuys groom my home on my Gigabit fiber connection. I started looking around for a machine we could use for running it from home. Because technology has changed so much over the past ten years I figured we could host it using a powerful i9 machine with fast solid state drives. But then I had another big issue issue as we have been having issues with power due to some major car accidents in the area. Then I also have issues with our dog unplugging things as well. Can you imagine SatelliteGuys going down and I have to leave to leave work because the dogs unplugged the router or server? No thanks I want us online 24/7!
So I decided to look around. First I looked at dedicated servers from our current host and found I could get a dedicated server or cloud server for cheaper then I was paying now and with better specs then we were using. I almost went with them then my wife asked me if I looked at hosting elsewhere.
She’s a genius. So I looked around and found hosting at a number of places and found many different offerings. But I a problem I wasn’t sure what I needed for us. So I rented a bunch of different servers tried VPS servers, Tried Cloud servers and tried dedicated servers. I went with dedicate servers because they offered me full root access so I was able to setup the server the way I liked. Others offered SSH access but it was a simple jailshell so I could not do much. For example our search on SatelliteGuys uses software called ElasticSearch, well on those servers they would not allow me to install it (or anything)
Once I decided on dedicated then I had to choose what specs would work for us. I rented dedicated servers going from the cheapest and working my way up until I was happy and thing were running faster than our then current site. I was happy with it except for one thing the server only had 16 GB of ram and I wanted at least 32. So I ordered a 32 GB server which was the exact specs except for the memory. And spent forever setting it to match the 16 GB server for setup and had a ton of issues with it. Was getting segmentation errors and other kernel errors. I contacted the ISP who took a look at the server and decided the memory was bad and swapped out the memory. (Too bad they could just put 32 GB of ram in the other server I configured) After the memory swap the errors went away but there was still something strange with it and pages were loading up slower then our old Dell server. So I said the hell with it and canceled the 32 GB server and kept us on the 16 GB server we are on now.
The performance on this server is excellent and we haven’t had no issues with it except me trying to see if I can push a little more out of it and then crashing things for a few moments at a time. The monthly costs of hosting are now just over half of what we were paying before and we have a faster server, more hard drive space and have moved to a full gigabit uplink.
Anyways because we consolidated things we unfortunately had to set RabbitEars from our hosting. Tripp was worried as he didn’t have the money to host it himself and his site which is all custom written by hand (and the code is not really too optimized) uses a lot of CPU resources. I told him I would help him find another host and was successful with asking Dave Wallace who many of you know here as WallyHTS. Well Dave owns his own ISP in Kentucky and agreed to host RabbitEars at no charge. He even found an old unused server for them to use as Trip is working on building his own. Thanks to Dave RabbitEars is still part of the SatelliteGuys forum.
Once Trip moved everything from the old server to his new home his server admin who lives in Michigan did me a favor and picked up our old servers and shipped them back to me (thanks Russ!)
Well today they arrived. The box was heavily damaged but the contents inside were safely packed in what seemed like two miles of bubble wrap. I just unpacked them and this was the first time ever I have seen or touched the Dell server.
I opened up both servers and was shocked to see these machines which were basically untouched all these years not have a single spec of dust in them at all. So below you see both servers that served us the let 10 years. All of your SatelliteGuys browsing over that time have come from one of those machines. Amazing to think or all the people who accessed those machines over the years!
So that’s a look back at our server history and the servers that have delivered SatelliteGuys all these years.
Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys
When we first started we were hosted on shared servers, then we rented a dedicated server then in 2008 we purchased our first own server. The cost for it was around $5000. That server got us on our feet and in our own! It ran great until 2011 when we ran out of drive space and started having problems with the raid controller.
In addition at that time we decided to move our server from Dallas Texas to Lansing Michigan. The hosting price was less per month, the service was faster and we had a 10 U of rack space to put in as many servers that would fit into that 10 U Space.
We ordered the new server to be shipped to Michigan direct from Dell so that we could transfer the site from Texas to the new much beefier Dell server. Believe it or not with all costs involved we paid almost $10,000 for that server. That server went direct to LiquidWeb I never ever got to see it or touch it.
We would eventually have 3 servers there including one that was given to me that we used backups to. Over time I had someone go and fix our old original server and put new drives in it and a new raid card. I started using that old server for backup and hosting our websites such as my weather station. We also used it to host the Shoutcast servers we use to broadcast SatelliteGuys radio to. It became a nice utility server!
When I had our original server fixed I had a spare server just sitting there unused so I invited Trip and his website RabbitEars.Info over and we hosted their site for many years at no cost as a service to TV lovers everywhere.
The new Dell server we ordered served us well in fact it worked flawlessly for us until we powered it off in February of this year.
In February I started thinking about hosting SatelliteGuys groom my home on my Gigabit fiber connection. I started looking around for a machine we could use for running it from home. Because technology has changed so much over the past ten years I figured we could host it using a powerful i9 machine with fast solid state drives. But then I had another big issue issue as we have been having issues with power due to some major car accidents in the area. Then I also have issues with our dog unplugging things as well. Can you imagine SatelliteGuys going down and I have to leave to leave work because the dogs unplugged the router or server? No thanks I want us online 24/7!
So I decided to look around. First I looked at dedicated servers from our current host and found I could get a dedicated server or cloud server for cheaper then I was paying now and with better specs then we were using. I almost went with them then my wife asked me if I looked at hosting elsewhere.
She’s a genius. So I looked around and found hosting at a number of places and found many different offerings. But I a problem I wasn’t sure what I needed for us. So I rented a bunch of different servers tried VPS servers, Tried Cloud servers and tried dedicated servers. I went with dedicate servers because they offered me full root access so I was able to setup the server the way I liked. Others offered SSH access but it was a simple jailshell so I could not do much. For example our search on SatelliteGuys uses software called ElasticSearch, well on those servers they would not allow me to install it (or anything)
Once I decided on dedicated then I had to choose what specs would work for us. I rented dedicated servers going from the cheapest and working my way up until I was happy and thing were running faster than our then current site. I was happy with it except for one thing the server only had 16 GB of ram and I wanted at least 32. So I ordered a 32 GB server which was the exact specs except for the memory. And spent forever setting it to match the 16 GB server for setup and had a ton of issues with it. Was getting segmentation errors and other kernel errors. I contacted the ISP who took a look at the server and decided the memory was bad and swapped out the memory. (Too bad they could just put 32 GB of ram in the other server I configured) After the memory swap the errors went away but there was still something strange with it and pages were loading up slower then our old Dell server. So I said the hell with it and canceled the 32 GB server and kept us on the 16 GB server we are on now.
The performance on this server is excellent and we haven’t had no issues with it except me trying to see if I can push a little more out of it and then crashing things for a few moments at a time. The monthly costs of hosting are now just over half of what we were paying before and we have a faster server, more hard drive space and have moved to a full gigabit uplink.
Anyways because we consolidated things we unfortunately had to set RabbitEars from our hosting. Tripp was worried as he didn’t have the money to host it himself and his site which is all custom written by hand (and the code is not really too optimized) uses a lot of CPU resources. I told him I would help him find another host and was successful with asking Dave Wallace who many of you know here as WallyHTS. Well Dave owns his own ISP in Kentucky and agreed to host RabbitEars at no charge. He even found an old unused server for them to use as Trip is working on building his own. Thanks to Dave RabbitEars is still part of the SatelliteGuys forum.
Once Trip moved everything from the old server to his new home his server admin who lives in Michigan did me a favor and picked up our old servers and shipped them back to me (thanks Russ!)
Well today they arrived. The box was heavily damaged but the contents inside were safely packed in what seemed like two miles of bubble wrap. I just unpacked them and this was the first time ever I have seen or touched the Dell server.
I opened up both servers and was shocked to see these machines which were basically untouched all these years not have a single spec of dust in them at all. So below you see both servers that served us the let 10 years. All of your SatelliteGuys browsing over that time have come from one of those machines. Amazing to think or all the people who accessed those machines over the years!
So that’s a look back at our server history and the servers that have delivered SatelliteGuys all these years.
Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys
Last edited:
