Blockland Glass Hosting Service [Closing]

Author Topic: Blockland Glass Hosting Service [Closing]  (Read 54790 times)

It's closing? You could've have the power to change blockland forever and you just give it up? loving disgusting.

It's closing? You could've have the power to change blockland forever and you just give it up? loving disgusting.
shut the forget up

It's closing? You could've have the power to change blockland forever and you just give it up? loving disgusting.

please explain how a low priced hosting service performing at a loss could have changed Blockland forever?

i think its sarcastic since its excessively hostile for barely any reason, and hotpocket isnt a habitual toxic user


please explain how a low priced hosting service performing at a loss could have changed Blockland forever?
People want to be spoonfed.


It's closing? You could've have the power to change blockland forever and you just give it up? loving disgusting.
>blockland
>forever
lol!!!!!

Sad, Hosted four times with this and had almost flawless results. Gonna miss :(
This service allowed me to host my servers easily with the performance I needed, and I'd really like to salute Jincux's work and thank him for keeping this alive for the time it lasted. Thank you for your quick technical support and all the help, really gonna miss it.
Thanks for the kind words and I'm glad you guys enjoyed the service. Closing down is bittersweet.


Do we get refunds if our subscriptions are still active?
All active subscriptions were cancelled yesterday and all servers will have expired by August 31st. None of the 'token' servers have stockpiled past August 31st either.


wonder how much it costed u but im not surprised it end like that
next is blglass closing?

It wasn't consistently negative, hugged the break-even line pretty closely. My low-overhead approach somewhat doomed the system. Glass Hosting would automatically rent out a server from Linode and then host two Blockland servers on it. This process itself was buggy because Linode limited disk image sizes, meaning I needed a full installation and startup script to install all the needed software on the newly rented server, which never seemed to work consistently. With this system, I could easily end up with two half-full servers, which totaled as a loss of money. The entire system wasn't built with much central infrastructure, a lot more weight was placed on the nodes then there should've been - complicating stuff like wrapper configuration and file transfers. The relatively complicated file transfer made it difficult to promote "server migrations" that would've eliminated having two empty net-negative servers.

The panel was a bit of a pain. I used Socket.io which is a pain and a half more than it should've been. Users would visit the panel at host.blocklandglass.com, which would then connect to their server at ny##.host.blocklandglass.com. However, some of the forms of connections that socket.io chose to use really didn't like being on a different domain, all at the implementation level (so cross-origin settings weren't helping). Socket.io would sometimes lock up on the server side for no apparent reason, requiring a restart.

Managing a dozen security certificates and software that couldn't hot-reload the certificate when it renewed was a huge pain (and is actively occurring right now, as all the certificates are expiring).

Glass itself isn't going anywhere for the time being - it's secure for at least the next year, going to re-evaluate and see if it's worth renewing then. My current long-term plan is to keep Glass together as a content repository even if Blockland doesn't continue. Would definitely downscale, Glass Live would be cut in that scenario (which would only occur if the player count justifies it). Although, all of non-hosting Glass is open source, so anyone is free to host it if I were to stop.
« Last Edit: July 30, 2018, 08:16:42 PM by Scout31 »

cant wait to buy this and have it shut down 5 days later.
really exceededy expectations tbh. Lasted 1.8 years more than I predictef

the explanation satisfy me
was great work tho!

Ive always wanted to start my own hosting service but the idea of having to offer competitive prices makes me want to puke. $7 a month is stuff, especially since you'll probably have 5-6 clients every month. The amount of time it takes to set up and maintain basically makes the entire service a net loss.

I'd charge $15 per month and everyone would probably hate me and someone would come along with a better price and monopolize hosting until they shut down a month later

I also once had an idea to rent out server space to other hosts to use for a certain amount of days. The average serve r popularity lifetime is like 2-5 days so instead of just paying $7 for a week of players and three weeks of 0/32 you could just pay like a dollar for a 4 day slot and once that ends it switches over to someone else who would hopefully host a different more entertaining server

I thought of doing this with some friends once but it required some planning so we ditched the idea

I also once had an idea to rent out server space to other hosts to use for a certain amount of days. The average serve r popularity lifetime is like 2-5 days so instead of just paying $7 for a week of players and three weeks of 0/32 you could just pay like a dollar for a 4 day slot and once that ends it switches over to someone else who would hopefully host a different more entertaining server

I thought of doing this with some friends once but it required some planning so we ditched the idea
i was thinking about doing something similar as i've got a pretty much always-idle 4 core 4GB RAM server (mostly got it for storage reasons), i could easily rent out 7-10 slots for servers (could host 7 at once just fine) for a week at a time.
of course i wouldn't make it as in-depth as glass would, maybe just a custom shell, temporary accounts, and sftp. these things don't have to have a big major detailed gui lol

Ive always wanted to start my own hosting service but the idea of having to offer competitive prices makes me want to puke. $7 a month is stuff, especially since you'll probably have 5-6 clients every month. The amount of time it takes to set up and maintain basically makes the entire service a net loss.

I'd charge $15 per month and everyone would probably hate me and someone would come along with a better price and monopolize hosting until they shut down a month later

I think there were around ~25 clients max, ~15 recently. Always in flux though, at least half of those were expiring regularly within the month with a roughly equal amount beginning to fill their spots. A higher price definitely does allow for a better service, can front better hardware, less nervous of an operation all around.

It's hard seeing the big established hosting services (Minecraft's market is a great example) offering impossibly low prices that owning their own hardware and colocation can allow them to offer. Trying to raise prices incentivizes a cheaper competitor, and with such a small community, that can easily mean a good chunk of clients, meaning the entire operation stops being feasible. Granted, the small community also means competition is less likely.