Once upon a time I setup a centralized service for spam-testing blog/forum-comments in real time, that service is BlogSpam.net.
This was created because the Debian Administration site was getting hammered with bogus comments, as was my personal blog.
Today the unfortunate thing happened, the virtual machine this service was running on ran out of RAM and died - The redis-store that holds all the state has now exceeded the paltry 512Mb allocated to the guest, so OOM killed it.
So I'm at an impasse - I either recode it to use MySQL instead of Redis, or something similar to allow the backing store to exceed the RAM-size, or I shut the thing down.
There seems to be virtually no liklihood somebody would sponsor a host to run the service, because people just don't pay for this kind of service.
I've temporarily given the guest 1Gb of RAM, but that comes at a cost. I've had to shut down my "builder" host - which is used to build Debian packages via pbuilder.
Offering an API, for free, which has become increasingly popular and yet equally gets almost zero feedback or "thanks" is a bit of a double-edged sword. Because it has so many users it provides a better service - but equally costs more to run in terms of time, effort, and attention.
(And I just realized over the weekend that my Flattr account is full of money (~50 euro) that I can't withdraw - since I deleted my paypal account last year. Ooops.)
Meh.
Happy news? I'm avoiding the issue of free service indefinitely with the git-based DNS product which was covering costs and now is .. doing better. (20% off your first months bill with coupon "20PERCENT".)
Tags: blogspam 8 comments
http://ginsys.eu
Not sure if no-one wants to pay for this service. https://www.mollom.com/ has been providing this for a couple of years now.