Any good ircd hosts?

July 27, 2007 12:54 AM

What are some good, reasonably-price ircd hosts?

I'm looking to get a small ircd started (around 100 users max, maybe a basic eggdrop bot) and am looking for a great host to do so with. Unfortunately, while there are plenty hosting review and rating sites for conventional hosting, finding shell/ircd hosts that are reputable and fairly priced. Where should I be considering?

posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Are you asking about software? Which ircd to use?

Or, about someone to rent you hardware and sell bandwidth?

I suppose you've rejected the idea of using an existing network like FreeNode?
posted by cmiller at 2:16 AM on July 27, 2007

Depending on your level of technical expertise, one awesome thing you can do is just to find a local "ghetto colo" in the area, drop your box in there. Every city seems to have a few of these -- just some place in a data center where they'll just plug your box into a network and throw it off an a rickety shelf somewhere. Ask around in your local linux users group...
posted by ph00dz at 5:33 AM on July 27, 2007

100 users? Seconding just using an existing network.
posted by dmd at 6:36 AM on July 27, 2007

Keep in mind ircd servers tend to become the target of DDoS attacks, so a lot of commercial-grade ircd hosting takes this into account and is reflected in the server pricing. Lots of virtual dedicated server or dedicated server providers disallow hosting of irc for this reason. A few hundred users is really light usage, so you should be fine with even an inexpensive virtual dedicated host, but I have not researched which ones allow irc servers.

With regards to using an existing IRC network, this is most likely your best bet. There's lots of small networks out there that can handle the load and would love to have the extra users/publicity, plus you won't need to worry about any of the server maintenance.

Once you find a server or network that can handle your channels, you can always set up an "irc.yourdomain.com" domain name that forwards to the server/network you're on, if you're worried about that aspect of things.
posted by reptile at 7:15 AM on July 27, 2007

I researched this a little bit a couple of months back and I can offer some thoughts. Upfront disclaimer: I did not choose anyone in particular and my userlist was very, very small (6 people tops). Also, I did not care to run any bots.

Like you, it was tough to find reputable hosts. My concern was that for the hosts I did find they had very shady feelings about them. Either they seemed like they were run by disgruntled users of other IRC nets or they were fairly upfront about wacky stuff going on in their hosts (but were not responsible).

My concern with choosing an existing network was privacy. It concerned me that people I didn't know could do anything with my channel for whatever reason and I had very little control in that regard. IRC does have a well-founded reputation of lawlessness and I felt very concerned that I would wake up one day to find my group's room gone, altered, or one of my members blocked with very little recourse.

In the end I felt the only thing I could _really_ do would be to find some chat software to run on a server at my home office. Ultimately we did _not_ wind up doing anything. If I did it today, I would find something to run on a computer somewhere that could host the chat.
posted by tcv at 7:40 AM on July 27, 2007

For the past year or so I've been using a cheap $5/month shared IRCd hosting server from sh3lls.net to host a Jabber/XMMP chat server (ejabberd).

Minus a couple of short downtimes that looked like network issues, I've been reasonably happy for my $5/month. I have the "IRCD STARTER" package that allows for one server, one background process, 50 MB disk, and 100 connections.

YMMV, I just wanted cheap chat hosting to experiment with and picked the first one I found.

It can seem a bit shady, the Company is in India, the servers are in the US. You can pay with PayPal.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:06 AM on July 27, 2007