It’s so cool to see something one designed (I did the original sketch and Everaldo did the final polished design) come to life as a cute little conference giveaway ..

We have several methods of stopping the fraudster from gaining access to an account, and even so once a while one of them manages to get by, usually our post-sale fraud measures catch them within a few hours anyway.

While those numbers are abysmal, the real mind boggling fact is .. those few that do get by, they never do anything with their account … so .. what is the point ?

If people are going to try to buy hosting with a stolen credit card, you’d expect them to use it to further exploit other revenue streams, be SPAM or hosting fake baking logins, but on the cases that we seen go by, the accounts just sit there, a VPS is created by nothing is ever uploaded, or in most cases even accessed (using it to try and access other VM’s is also out of the question, we use Xen in a cloud setup, you just cant see who is around you).

So it begs the question .. why ? why would anybody steal somebody else’s identity and card details to buy something they never use ?

I guess for some people this is just a sick game to see how far they can go … unfortunately it is a costly game for providers, as they the ones who have to invest in yet more costly fraud prevention technology and pay the premiums for dealing on a high risk merchant market, of course those extra costs then have to be filtered down to the mass public who buys their stuff legit, AKA .. the rest of us.

So my advise, if you know anybody who steals CC info, dont bother reporting them to the authorities … beat them up instead, make sure to break a few typing fingers …

Yes .. I advocate violence towards a fraudster…

The idea is to place some nice text explaining what Cloud Servers are and why people should but it.

He did it, but he called it SPAM !!

No respect I tell ya…

But it seems that for some people we might have as well put a few prices on a cork-board and trow darts at it, where it landed .. that was the price.

It’s not that simple, when pricing a product of this magnitude (a Cloud) one needs first to gather all the costs associated with deploying and maintaining the product, then you need to account for the growth period (remember, one will deploy a cloud system that costed millions of dollars to setup, but you will have 0 clients that first day .. with $0 revenue incoming), it takes months, sometimes years, to recuperate initial costs, while at the same time you have staff and ongoing expenses that ned to be meet as well.

Not, if you compare the traditional VPS market, a traditional VPS provider will buy or lease a server, costing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand and sell out “chunks” of that server, very minimal initial capex and usually they will break even within weeks.

How in the world then do people expect Cloud computing to be priced identical to standard VPS ?, it’s simple .. in general people dont !, those who cannot afford it do !.

It seems that we have now a new generation of people that believe if there is something in the internet that they cannot afford it, then the price is wrong, sorry, but thats not the case, sometimes your budget only really allows for mediocre.

I have instead focused on asking those people who “actually” signed up and their reaction could not be any more different, they love the product and they believe (like us) the pricing is actually it’ strongest point, the initial cost these days for anybody to get into a cloud setup is the hundreds of dollars per month, we reduced it to $30 !!!.

My team and I get demoralized when we read of people blasting us because we dont match the price of a traditional VPS setup, and for a while we did try to see if the math added up, could be be any cheaper ?, no, it does not add up, why would we sell at a loss ?, we are competitively priced and will stop dwelling on what a few leeches are screaming about and concentrate on providing a great product for those people who see the real value of our offering.

I too sometimes browse ebay for that elusive DB9 for a VW Bug price … but it’s just not going to happen.

Ok, we calling it a “Public Beta”, but it only means we are still missing a few bits, what’s there is solid and working fine !

I am incredibly proud with what we achieved there, going “Cloud” for a VPS setting was a risky new idea, but once that once it sunk in, we knew we had a winner, and above all, we knew we had cracked the trend of things to come.

Now I wish I could say it’s “DONE” .. but it’s not yet, still have loads of ideas and cool features to add, man this has been fun

A grand design .. better see some awards for it !!

Texturing in Modo, I cant say it’s hard, but I prefer the way lightwave does it, hopefully with the upcoming versions it will get better, I was also a bit disappointed with the lack of “Glow”.

Next I will try painting on the textures, to give it a bit of an worn-off look in some areas, I still need to make the belt, tools and more detailing, but it’s getting there

Since MODO was built by the old Lightwave team (and I am a LW fan) I found it allot easier to jump into it, sure nought I am still looking around trying to find the location for certain tools, but it sure was easier than Maya.

This is the result of an hour or so of modeling while learning Modo .. still allot of work to go

Back in the day, say first half of this decade, one of the problems that afflicted sysadmins, such as myself at the time, was downtime.

We hated the fact that when a machine went down, somebody had to run all the way to the DC and check what the problem was, this was especially a problem when you where the one that had to do it, I remember having to drive to the DC at 2:00 AM to fix an hardware failure, just to drive back at 5:00 AM for a fault in the same machine.

Yes, with the years advances where made, for once DC’s started to hire more than just mere NocMonkey’s, and a hole culture of DC’s targeting the Web Hosts emerged, but still, to pay $125 for a reboot and a FSCK was something many of us where not comfortable with, or even could afford, luckily the advent of KVM over IP and IPMI made our lives easier, but still, on a more serious problem, it was still you out of bed at 4:00 AM on a cold winter night rushing to the DC while customers complained on every forum they could find.

Yes, some people will say that a Web Host should have 24×7 staff and own their own DC, or pay the DC to fix the problem, but thats just not the real world, many Hosts out there cannot afford the 24×7, and if they have to pay allot of Tech fee’s to the DC, they simply cant afford to offer those dime-a-dozen ubercheap hosting plans that everybody loves, but complains when things go wrong, heck I remember when I owned my own Small DC back in 2002-2005, in the beginning when lights went out at 7:00 PM the place was empty, we could not afford “on site 24×7″ when we opened it.

So as I glaze at the upcoming VPS.NET platform, and test the fail-over ability that allows a server to take over and boot the client’s virtual machines from a failed server, in a matter of seconds .. all I can think of is all those late nights almost 10 years ago, when I wished I had such a system, how good it would have felt to wake up to a system notice page about a failure that was self-fixed, turn around and go back to sleep …