EVE Technology Lab

o7 Dear fellow capsuleers.

As most of you may have heard BattleClinic is closing down.
In the light of that announcement, people from the EVE community, started asking what will happen to EVEMon, which is hosted by BattleClinic for almost a decade.
There were some tweets here and there and an interest from the community to provide new accommodations for EVEMon arose.

At that time, I was not ready to answer questions about what are the requirements for hosting EVEMon.
I stragled for some time with EVEMon's code base to decouple it from BattleClinic services so it can run smoothly on the post-BattleClinic era.
And I say "I" because for some years now the EVEMon Development Team is a one-man team, me.
Sure we had some people contributing here and there but no one stacked around for long.
With that out of my chest, let's move on.

As soon as I was ready with the code base, version 2.2.2 was released, which is the last release from the BattleClinic repo account.
On January 1st 2016 the repo will close.
Our new repo is now on the EVEMon Dev Team account, still on BitBucket.

Important!!! Upgrade as soon as possible to 2.2.2 as versions prior to that will not get any updates anymore.

In the mean time, I was looking into the hosting requirements, cost of a domain name, type of hosting servers, location of host provider, etc, just to get my head around how much it costs to publish a free product.
Well, the cost isn't prohibited but still it can't beat the free hosting services we were enjoying all these years, thanks to BattleClinic.

So, as I promised people from the EVE community, who contacted me, offering hosting services, here is a list of our "NEED-WANT" (reference to the TV-Show 'Defiance').


"NEED"

1. A server to host the presentation page and forums (application server).


2. A server to host the database (database server).


3. A server to host our development environment (development server).

"WANT"

1. First and foremost, the hosting services should be for free.
This may come as a surprise to some of you but I'm not willing to trade the free-hosting services we were enjoying from BattleClinic all these years, to a paid one.
After all, I don't own EVEMon.


2. Administrator (root) access to the servers.
This is vital if you don't want me bothering you constantly.


3. Regarding the type of the needed servers, this is where the headache begins.

3.1 As I'm mostly a .NET/C# guy, with RL experience on Windows Servers, IIS, ASP.NET and .NET applications in general, I would prefer all servers to have Windows Server 2012 R2 as the installed OS, at least.

The plan is to use:
a. The new ASP.NET 5 (which is btw cross-platform when targeting the CoreCLR) for the presentation site.
b. YAF.NET for the forums (which is what EVE Forums use, so the users will be familiar with it).
c. TeamCity for the CI (in order to restore the distribution of the Snapshot builds).

Now, some of you would say that using Linux servers would be much more preferable.
My knowledge with Linux is at an infant level, and besides the license cost, I'm not sure if I can agree with that.
I took the time to setup up a Linux server on a VM and play around with it.
The first think I noticed is the low impact on the RAM usage as a Linux server doesn't use a GUI environment (not that it can use one but it's not recommended).
I could counter that argument with using Windows Server 2012 R2 Core though.

3.2 The other major issue is the database server.
YAF.NET needs an SQL Server instance to function so the use of an alternative free database server is out of the question.
Why use YAF.NET in the first place, you may ask.
As I said, I'm a .NET guy and I know my way around .NET better than any other language.
Sure I could start learning Node.js or even Python (which I have a grasp but not in a great extent), but this will take me some time to get at a comfortable level.
Some of you may say, there is also the option to use Docker on Linux.
Still evaluating this option and I need more info on that, so if you have any, please share.

3.3 As for the development server, the experience with hosting TeamCity on Linux didn't went well, when BattleClinic switched servers.

3.4 The repo and the distribution of EVEMon will continue to be done via BitBucket (they use CDN from Amazon S3), so there is no need for that.

If all the above fail, there is also the choice to not host EVEMon anywhere.
To be honest with you I don't think that EVEMon's reputation and acceptance will suffer from not having a representation site and forums.
Look at all the other 3rd party software like, EFT and EWA, to mention some, that don't have one.
Still alive and kicking.

If you have any further questions, I would be more than willing to answer them.

"Live long and prosper." (reference to the TV-Show and movies "Star Trek")
Spock (Leonard Nemoy)

"May the force be with you" (reference to the movies "Star Wars")

"Fly safe" (reference to the MMORPG "EVE Online")

Long time EVEMon user here. I am very fond and have lots of respect for this software.

But if you don't have already an easy access to established servers, why do you even need all the hassle of setting up and running them all? Github (and I believe Bitbucket too, though I am less familiar with its public facing services) offers you everything needed for running an open source project like EVEMon. Many successful projects do this.

Use the readme markdown file as the front facing description, help, links, release notes etc. Host the binaries on github, have a wiki for the community to update and maintain, use the issue tracker as forum replacement for bug reports, questions, and feature requests. The auto updater can download updates and EVE database directly from github.

One login for everything, free, tested and just works. Focus on developing this great tool instead of administrating the support infrastructures. Everyone wins.

Do you need physical servers or is virtual ok ?

Well, if you share your plans with the community, there are a lot of smart people here who may come up with suggestions for the optimal and most cost effective solution.

Running 3 Windows based servers sounds like an awful lot of overhead for a community website for an open source project of EVEMon's scale. Especially considering that more optimized tried and true solutions exist, like github. Or that this entire project can fit into a single smallest Amazon EC2 instance (free for a year, then something like 15$ a month).

This is not just hosting space you are talking about, you need someone who already owns Windows Server and SQL Server licenses (which have their costs) and give you admin access (on live servers with their own software running on it, I would never give that to anyone for my own servers). Relying on a someone to offer you these means that there is some good chance you will need to switch hosts from time to time again for various reasons. You are even better off paying for it and accepting donations from the community to cover the costs. You won't need to rely on someone else's server that may or may not be available for you tomorrow.

As someone who developed and administrated both Windows/SQL Server/.Net stack and Linux/Open source stack, I'd risk and say that despite you having a lot of Windows/.Net experience, these technologies are far from optimal for open source or small startup projects. I think you are better off looking into Linux/MySql/Node/Python/PHP/Wordpress/whatever to accomplish this, even if it means some learning curve. The experience you gain from this can never hurt and it will be a LOT easier to find hosting and maintaining these servers for your project.

wait... so essentially all you need is a forum and some sort of presentation page where people can click the big download button?
Or am I missing something here?

Please keep this thread clean and on topic. Desmont was clear in his request, if you don't like it you don't have to support it, there is however no need to derail the thread. You're of course welcome to believe his request is absurd but please take the posting of said thoughts elsewhere.

Running Windows Server Datacenter on the Host gives unlimited Free Windows licenses for all VM's, so its no priblem providng that. And I would guess SQL Express is good enough for this, so that part is also Free.
Meaning, it could be of no cost providing this service. Or use MSDN licenses, as its developer environment where no one us making any money.

If my manager had not given me **** for hosting a Minecraft server (for my son) some time ago on some old spare hardware at our office, I would host this for you. (They found it during an external security audit, ooops).

You can't share MSDN services

"MSDN subscriptions are only offered per individual, there are no “team” subscriptions or sharing of subscription benefits. "

What you're asking for will risk the users account and break microsoft's TOS.

The servers you listed with Windows will cost a few hundred dollars per month with a decent bandwidth plan at any legit datacenter. I don't think you're grasping what you're asking for because you've been spoiled by battleclinics hospitality. And they didn't do it because they liked you as much as they did it because it drew web traffic to their services.

OK, trying to get this somehow back to useful suggestions ...

Desmont, like you, I'm basically an all Windows guy, so I know where you're coming from.

That said, if you're afraid of using any Linux based server for your forum/hosting site(s) - fear not, both are as easy as it can get. I've been running our RL and EVE's corporation forum on SMF for close to a decade now without ever having any issue. SMF can be installed with zero Linux knowledge. And SMF gets bonus points for a working EVE mod (so you can create "special access" categories.

Not sure what you need the SQL server for, so that may still be an issue.