titan.fl.us.swiftirc.net – Where it went
“About our old server titan, where it went, why it went and why I didn’t really care.”
In one of the blog comments, someone asked what happened to titan and I had always meant to answer that but never got around to it.
Titan was hosted at a facility called colo4jax, now when we first started using it it was fantastic, everything was always fast and we rarely had an issue. SwiftIRC got DDoSed fairly regularly but aside from the occasional incident that actually knocked out the server it wasn’t really an issue.
However, as time passed things at this facility seemed to go downhill, general speeds were slower, response times from staff were slower, network issues were more common and when we got DDoSed it seemed to go down faster. The network didn’t seem to be being upgraded as more customers turned up.
Frequently the wholesaler/reseller I was buying through was trying to convince me to move to another facility which had an unmetered 100mbit connection instead of a 2TB limit like we had to “save us money on excess fees” or some rubbish. By the time we had gotten to this stage all data intensive applications had been moved elsewhere, not in small part because they kept limiting my switch port to 10mbit…when you average over 50mbit for small periods of the day, limiting to 10mbit is the biggest pain in the arse there is.
Eventually after one particularly large DDoS which took down all the SwiftIRC servers I got a simple email which stated “Unfortunately due to the amount of DDOS attacks this machine attracts, we are forced to terminate the account effective immediately. We wish you luck with your future providers and if you have any need for a provider where DOS is not an issue, please let us know.”.
After arranging to recover the data on the machine (which wasn’t very straightforward) we let it go, service had basically turned to the shit, we had a security issue caused by their staff doing poor vetting and at this time we were paying 2.5x the current retail price for the server. In short, it wasn’t worth it.