IRC Servers in Australia
We’ve only had 1 IRC server in Australia since we started running IRC networks, this isn’t a coincidence. Data prices here are ridiculous.
Since investigating IRC opportunities in this part of the world I’ve only found 1 consumer offer that really accommodated running a server for SwiftIRC and this was the group that hosted zeus for a while. With these guys they used old rubbishy hardware and a shared unmetered port to try and save money, considering they no longer operate a VPS service (but the company appears to still exist and operate as a datacentre) I’d say this didn’t work out very well.
Our experience was pretty poor and I don’t think this was reflective of the company or of enterprise internet in Australia in general, for us we had the fibre link to the (very new) data facility attacked by contractors who didn’t dial before they dug (for non Australians, www.1100.com.au) and at that stage there wasn’t a second route…well not for the VPS trunk anyway. Then we had issues with the openvz virtualisation software that the host was running, several bugs conflicted with how their organisation was working and we caused a couple of the crashes ourselves.
Ignoring poor luck with small data operators and crappy software, running an IRC server here is still quite difficult, a lot of hosts won’t let you do it (it’s just like America), there is a much stronger emphasis on web applications in Australia than other hosting with voice services and then game servers being the next biggest contenders for the average consumer.
To successfully maintain an IRC presence in this part of the world you’re really looking at one of 3 options:
1) Pay heaps. We’re talking $250/m for 20gb of decent data in a location that doesn’t hate IRC. Depending on your host they might rape you when DDoS comes along but when you’re paying that sort of price for so little data they tend to work with you a bit more than their American counterparts.
2) Discounts from a wholesaler, from experience quite a few colo companies and network managers are willing to offer pretty decent discounts to community and free access services like a public IRC network. But even then you’re talking a pretty reasonable chunk of money, you would be better off getting a few US/EU servers instead.
3) Know people. Hosting from a corporate data room would work, heaps of large companies have massive data connections which are fairly idle and if you know the right people you could probably get away with running an IRC server out of one of them, after all it doesn’t use too much bandwidth and virtually no cpu/ram. Universities would be the best target for this, although I haven’t tried with them so I don’t know how friendly they are to the idea over here.
At the end of the day it’s just not worth it, IRC doesn’t really offer many benefits from low latency (especially when it has to communicate with an overseas hub anyway) like websites or game servers do and when the cost is equivalent to several servers in other locations which mostly represent far more users than Australia (or New Zealand or anywhere else around here) does the economics just tell you not to bother.
Hosting in Oceania is incredibly expensive and if you find a good deal, it’s often too good to be true. I’ve experienced one very good provider however.
SiteHost (based in New Zealand)
http://www.sitehost.co.nz/
The owner knows his stuff, and has attended the national “hacker” (white hat, don’t worry!) convention and has given presentations. He’s no 20 year old trying to make a quick buck in the reseller market.
The servers are good, and the pricing is quite reasonable considering location and bandwidth costs.
Now, international data is incredibly expensive. Any overages will rip your wallet to shreds. But the interesting thing with SiteHost is they allow “Free national bandwidth.”
So, it could be possible to simply only allow IPs from within New Zealand to connect to the server and you wouldn’t occur many/any overages. I’m of course excluding the link to other servers, and at $3 per gigabyte to add additional data to the plan it’s definitely not going to come cheap.
That’s just my 2 cents.
(Note: prices on the website and quoted here are in New Zealand dollars. For example, NZD$30 roughly converts to NZD$20).
Most internet end points in NZ are reachable through the Auckland Peering Exchange (part of NZIX) so the cost of that is fairly negligible. Transit to hosts on the Telecom network and others who choose not to peer in Auckland is probably makes up a fairly big chunk of that monthly fee.
PIPE and WAIX in Australia are similarly well connected and suffer similar limitations (Telstra, Verizon, Optus and AAPT refuse to peer…although AAPT is possibly still announcing some routes to WAIX) and for quite some time “Free PIPE” was a fairly significant feature to internet services here. Unfortunately since the average connection speed has increased somewhat this is progressively becoming rarer and it is quite uncommon to find this anymore due to the increased cost of provision. NZ will most likely find this to be the case soon too for the providers who make heavy use of peering at internet exchanges.
$3/gb excess is fairly common in this part of the world on a pay as you go basis, I would assume that if you were anticipating more and paid in advance you would get quite a hefty discount on that. Although based on the method of marketing I guess they might not have too many international heavy customers and that might not be possible.