Hurrah You're Back up & Running...

I can't tell you how glad I am to see that you're back. Believe me, you were sorely missed. One would hope that there are no repeats of this in the near future.

Yours Truly,
NIMHmaniac

It was an uncomfortably long outage, indeed. Any word on what exactly caused it?

Motherboard went out, freaking MSI didn't actually try to fix it, I had to buy a new one and wait for it to get shipped... in other words, it should've been a week shorter than it was, but stuff happened.

Wow, it's not nearly old enough to be having failures. I'm still using the $99 Fry's box (800mhz VIA C3) I got second hand five years ago as my server. It's probably around 7 years old now, and despite five of them being 24/7 operation, it hasn't had any failures.

Yeah, well, I'm never buying MSI again, so there's that. :P

I've been quite satisfied with my K9A2CF. Added some heatsinks on the voltage transistors and it handles my Phenom 9850 just fine.

That said, I'd seriously stick with actual server boards for something like this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131134

That seems reasonably priced, for instance.

I've been quite satisfied with my K9A2CF. Added some heatsinks on the voltage transistors and it handles my Phenom 9850 just fine.

Honestly, my beef isn't with the quality of MSI boards--I wouldn't be surprised if I just happened onto an unlucky one or something--but with the way they handled my RMA. I sent the thing in, they apparently did nothing more than put it in a different box and send it back to me. liANDli they didn't tell me why they didn't fix it, most of all. So, I won't be getting MSI boards because their customer service = EPIC FAIL. I'm gonna email them once I get a spare moment and tell them what happened, but seriously, the only way they'll get off my blacklist is if they pay for shipping of my defective board to them, and they actually lifixli whatever is wrong, or replace the board.

That said, I'd seriously stick with actual server boards for something like this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131134

That seems reasonably priced, for instance.

For something that generates no revenue for me, price is something of an issue. :P Though I have been tossing around the idea of starting a blog and running AdWords on it. Been meaning to do the blog anyway; adwords would be icing. n.n Been also thinking of moving to a VPS instead of mucking around with running my own server off of a residential-class cable connection; that way I don't have to deal with the hardware at all.

Oh, thought you had it in a colocation facility or something. In that case, 1and1 seems to run about $30/month for a virtual server.

As for the customer service, wow, that's pathetic. I don't usually pay much attention to warranties, cause stuff I get my hands on often winds up modded rather quickly. :twisted:

Oh, thought you had it in a colocation facility or something. In that case, 1and1 seems to run about $30/month for a virtual server.

No such luck. Basically, it's my old machine (with new parts in it) running off a cable connection with my DNS CNAMEd to thornvalley.dyndns.org. Like I said, I either need to become a lot richer than I am or find a way to make money off the server before it makes much sense to move to something I'm paying for.

As far as VPSs go, a friend recommended this one to me: http://www.serverpoint.com/english/vps-hosting.phtml

I don't think that I could host Thorn Valley on less than 20 GB of disk space (though I'm curious if they include the space the OS takes up on the VPS in their counts).

That looks like a good price to me. As to disk space, I'd sure hope they don't count the OS footprint against you. Even a fairly heavyweight Linux server distro shouldn't take more than 2-3gb though. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with running an old spare machine as a home server. I've been doing it for over five years, and really haven't had any trouble (excluding occasional ISP failures). Then again, besides messing with stuff, I just run ngircd on it.

I suppose if you must, then a few unobtrusive Google text only ads might work to bring some revenue. Big obnoxious flash-based banner ads don't work as good, ordinary people leave the site and techies start using ad-blocking software.

I'm glad to see this site back up and running, I thought it would be gone! Like how the Big NIMH Page died out, with no notice from the creator.

Glad to see ya back Thorn Valley! :D