So... I found something the other day.  It's a host called SSDnodes. At first, they seem too good to be true, but upon some quick research, there are some major red flags here. These guys claim they don't oversell, but I'm not so sure when I look at their prices. They are very seriously misleading the market.

$110/year for 32GB of RAM and 8 CPU core access on KVM?  What?

Hold up here. KVM doesn't let you oversell RAM and disk easily. Almost no provider ever tries it. It's definitely possible, but there are performance problems when you do, and it's a very bad idea to even try it. 

CPU? That's another story. Most hosts do oversell the CPU, but for good reason (and it'd be unrealistic not to). This is because most VPSs aren't going to be using even 1/10 of their CPU most of the time, so they generally put more VPSs on the server to avoid pricing themselves into oblivion. (This can be avoided with "dedicated VPSs" - but they are generally pretty pricey).

But there is no such thing as 32GB of RAM for less than $10/month. It doesn't exist. No other provider even comes close. It's literally, quite literally, not even financially feasible, especially when you aren't supposed to oversell these things. 

So that means they are probably overselling RAM and disk anyway (fishy) or are doing something else. 

I dug up some reviews and I noticed two things: 

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.ssdnodes.com

I smell fake reviews when I see them. And trust me, they are obvious here. Almost all of the reviews are either an unequivocal stay away or a poorly written 5-star review, but the real kicker here is that the 5-star reviews were all written in a two day time span. And there are a ton of them. 

Take a look at the reviews for Ramnode (the host that we use here at Makestation): https://www.trustpilot.com/review/ramnode.com

Ramnode is a real, well-acclaimed provider. They are reputable and have a reliable track record, so let's compare for a second. They've been around since 2012, have hundreds of nodes and five data centers, and generally have a pretty stellar track record among the webmaster community.

Let's compare their reviews. A quick look, and the reviews here are quite a bit different than the reviews you see for SSDnodes. They are spaced out. They have good reviews and the owner interacts with their customers. They don't have 80+ 5-star reviews over a span of 1-2 days. Overall, it seems much more legit (and it is).

So we've seen the reviews for a legit provider. Let's compare their actual VPSs and price points and add up the numbers.

Firstly, Ramnode doesn't even offer 32GB VPSs (this would be incredibly infeasable given the general size of most host nodes). Actually, they technically do as VDS servers, but those run you about $160/month and they give you TOTAL dedicated access to the entire server, usually powered by an E3 processor and 32GB of RAM. 

To do the math, an E3 server with 32GB of RAM generally runs $2K to $3K. Colocation costs are about $50/month/server. A server of this type would likely remain deployed for about 3-5 years or so. At $160/month, that's $1920/year * 3 years = $5760, minus ~$1800 in colocation costs, and that equals out to about $4,000 in total revenue, and approximately $1-2K in profit over a three year period (plus further use across other services after this period). This is enough to afford to pay for the server and to have enough profit margin in order to make their business sustainable. 

That's Ramnode. That's a real provider that is in the market of affordable, reliable VPSs. That's a real price point. 

So when SSDnodes is offering this for less than $10/month? I don't buy it. It's literally impossible for them not to lose MASSIVE amounts of money, especially when they talk about using "Xeon Gold CPUs" and (supposedly) offering dedicated, guaranteed, pre-allocated RAM and disk. It's simply not possible. Not anywhere close. The math doesn't add up. 

Then again, they claim they don't oversell CPUs. That's also a lie, because almost every VPS provider does, including DigitalOcean, Linode, and AWS. Sure, your CPU load is "low" when the reviews show that you suspend any VPS as soon as they start using CPU power. They seem to do this after the 14 day refund period is up, and since they require 3-year contracts, they've basically gotten your money and provided no services in return. That would do it.

So I did some more digging into the reviews. 

https://www.blogtipstricks.com/ssdnodes-review/
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/15...e-are-they
https://www.whtop.com/review/ssdnodes.com
https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1801672 (with benchmarks) 

And they promise "10x page load speeds" when you switch to their NVME over their SSD ones. News flash: Web files are cached in RAM. Only a very small percentage of page loads go to the hard drive on the vast majority of websites. No NVME is going to increase page load performance by a noticeable factor if you have sufficient RAM.

Safe to say, I think something is fishy about this. KVM can't be oversold (in terms of RAM or disk) unless they ghetto-rig it to do so. No reputable provider ever does this, and if they do, there are usually some severe performance consequences. They aren't offering 32GB of RAM without something fishy going on. It is one of the most eerie web hosts I have ever seen, and believe me, I have seen plenty.

But now I'm curious. I will probably buy a VPS sometime later this year just to bench it. And I'm fairly certain that after the 14 day refund is up, they'll throttle the hell out of it, because there's no other way they can afford to do this.

Actually, benching it is gonna be a little more tricky than I anticipated. Just found out they autocharge you for renewals without your permission and bury it within the TOS, and they don't allow you to delete your payment info within WHCMS despite the software itself supporting this. Oh and they charge you $150 if you try to do a charge back on their fraudulent billing... Time to get a prepaid card I suppose.

Happy Birthday, Darvince
Enjoy the day and let yourself be celebrated.
Birthday greetings Tc4me

I want to buy an external hard drive for the PS4, but which one?

SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD external hard drive 1TB (SSD external 2.5 inches, 550 MB / s transfer rates, shockproof, AES encryption, water and dust resistant) € 160.87
or
Seagate Expansion Portable, portable external hard drive, 4 TB, 2.5 inch, USB 3.0, PC, Xbox, PS4, model no .: STEA4000400, 2019 Edition

or do you have a better idea?

Ready for the terrain :-)

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Hy forum professionals, I installed the same Shoutbox, runs great, I changed the 'allow_imgcode' => 0 to 1 in the dvz_shoutbox.php, that pictures can also be displayed via bbcode, works, but unfortunately I fail at the css to reduce the pictures, could you help me? 

lg Tc4me

So, I found out I'm getting put on Academic probation. I wasn't able to withdraw, wasn't able to keep up, so they flunked me on the semester and are putting this on my transcript. 

I'm pretty upset. It's the last thing I needed. 

How is yours handling the pandemic?

If you have a PS4 and a PSPlus subscription, you can pick up the game for free and play it whenever you have your subscription active.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/grab-t...0-6476628/
It'll officially become available on May 5th, once April's games go back to their original respective prices.

Hello all, 

Recently, someone requested a plugin on the MyBB community support forum to hide images from guests. There was a plugin for MyBB 1.4 that did exactly this, but there doesn't seem to be a 1.8.x-compatible plugin for it yet.

I ported it (by request) to MyBB 1.8, but I can't really post it there because of the approval process through their mod database. As such, I'm going to post it here in case anyone stumbles upon it and finds a use for it.

To Install:  
Simply upload the contents of the zip archive to your forum root. 

Original plugin written by Dragonfever. 


  Hide Images to Guests.zip (Size: 3.62 KB / Downloads: 327)

So now it is really crazy, Samsung S20 with 4 cams ??? What is coming Samsung S40 would be my idea with X Ultra-Cam made by Tc4me

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READ THE BETA ANNOUNCEMENT POST HERE:

(May 8th, 2020 at 1:42 AM)Lain Wrote: Hey folks, back again with a brand-new special-edition limited-time-only update.

The Colour Picker has officially entered its BETA stages.

I've fixed most of the issues from the Alpha version including-but-not-limited-to:

• UserCP styling
  
• New posts/threads
  
• Post-views
  
• Anything on the index pages that wasn't quite up to my personal standards.
  

While I was at it, I decided to rewrite a generous portion of the code so that porting over to the light-theme would be relatively hiccup-free. I'll need to do some more testing on the light theme before I can fully port it over, but that'll probably happen within the next few days at best.

But not only does this release include bugfixes and slight mods to make it work globally across the site.
This release also includes a new feature!

ALL THE GREEN LINKS FROM THE STANDARD DARK THEME ALSO CHANGE COLOURS RELATIVE TO YOUR SELECTED ACCENT COLOR!

But no, they don't just change to the same colour. They're offset slightly to add a bit of variance to the site.

Some colours work better than others, and ideally once we finally hit the full release, I'll probably be adding an option to set the link colours separately from the typical accent/header colours. Right now it's a fixed value, offset from the colour you select, so if you choose a green accent like I generally think looks nice, the links unfortunately take on a weird cream-coloured yellow. But for colours like blue, pink/purple, red, orange, it seems to work just about as well as I was hoping.

Here's a couple screenshots of index pages:
https://i.imgur.com/eCqqjMZ.png (Green)
https://i.imgur.com/iyOKNuC.png (Pink/Purple)
https://i.imgur.com/cVDprIP.png (Blue)
Not gonna embed them because they're all full size and I don't want to break formatting too much.


So give it a shot.
Play around with it, and if you find something that should be themed but isn't themed properly, then please let me know so I can push a fix ASAP.
I may really need all your help with this one because of the change I mentioned that'll help me port stuff over. If no bugs are found, I'll end up deleting a pretty big chunk of code which will improve performance. Right now, the theme runs on the newer portable code, so I need to know if it's breaking anything.

I'm also open for more suggestions. I've got time to implement new theming options if needed, only taking two classes this semester.

Cheers.

• New post pages aren't perfect
  
• UserCP has not been worked on.
  
• Misc pages are probably also unstyled.
  
• 'Hidden' pages like the RSS generator, shoutbox archive, etc. are probably also unthemed.