Servarica $29 annually VPS benchmark

June 22, 2023 - 1 min read

ServaRICA is a VPS merchant established back in 2010. Their campus is in Montreal, Canada currently. Their Summer Deal and Black Friday deal is very attractive and I purchased one for benchmarking. Their best seller is obviously, their “Opossum” tier. A year ago, the tier only had IPv6 addresses. That’s right, no IPv4, not even NAT. However, starting from the Black Friday of 2022, IPv4 has been added to every plan.

[NOTICE] Everything back on track

June 20, 2023 - 1 min read

After two months’ suspension, everything is back on track and this blog will continue to update as normal. 两个月后的今天，一切回到了正轨，一切都会像往常一样运作。 -- Frank Ruan, 18:57 Jun. 20, 2023 (China Standard Time)

[NOTICE] Update suspension

May 3, 2023 - 1 min read

This notice is bilingual. (Simplified Chinese & English) Due to some unexpected and unpreventable reasons, me (@orwtmc), and my blog (frank-ruan.com) won’t update until Jun. 20, 2023. Sorry for the inconveniences. 因不可抗力原因，本人（@orwtmc）以及我的博客（frank-ruan.com）将暂停更新，直到2023年6月20日晚间（中国标准时间）。为您带来的不便敬请谅解。 -- Frank Ruan, 19:02 on May 3, 2023 (China Standard Time).

Vultr Free Tier - Is it good enough?

April 15, 2023 - 2 mins read

Vultr is a cloud computing company established back in 2014. Although they entered the industry for just less than 10 years, they really have dominated the “bang for the buck” market along with DigitalOcean and Linode. However, they recently (a few months ago) announced a Free Tier. Users need to debit their account 5$ via Credit Card and enable two-factor authentication. Although they claimed that only Credit Cards would work, actually any method will work, including Alipay, PayPal, Cryptocurrency, etc.

Installing Proxmox VE on OCI

March 18, 2023 - 6 mins read

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a great virtualization platform. And Oracle Cloud Infrastructure seems to provide virtual machines for free forever. The regular x86_64 instance has only 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB RAM. However, the new Ampere instance is aarch64 (arm64) architecture. With 4 Neoverse N1 Cores and 24 GB RAM, we can fire up some decent containers on it. However, Proxmox doesn’t officially provide the tutorial (or even workarounds) to install Proxmox VE on an ARM computer.

My own opinion on the principles of cryptography

March 18, 2023 - 5 mins read

In the modern era, cryptography has become one of the most important part of our digital life. We all know, cryptography is used to encrypt, sign, authenticate. Above all, the most important is of course, the security. We would never want anyone except ourselves (or the recipients, if applicable). So here are some advices based on my own experience. 1. Use proper algorithm. It depends on your needs. For example, would you like to use symmetric or asymmetric?

KURUN Cloud 3$ China-Optimized VPS Benchmark

February 11, 2023 - 2 mins read

KURUN Cloud is a VPS company established back in 2019. They are an LIR of ARIN. From the website, I would guess that a group of Chinese people launches it, but headquartered in California, US. They have a great deal, you get 1 vCPU core, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB Disk for just 3$/month, and very good networking to China (it’s very obvious that this machine is the best choice for proxy.

OVHcloud US 0.97$/month VPS Starter Benchmark

February 11, 2023 - 3 mins read

OVHcloud is a European cloud computing and hosting company. It was founded in 1999 in France and has since expanded to operate globally, with locations in Europe, North America, and Asia. OVHcloud offers a wide range of services, including cloud infrastructure, dedicated servers, web hosting, and domain name registration. The company is known for its innovative technology and commitment to privacy and security, making it a popular choice among businesses and individuals who require reliable and secure hosting solutions.

S/MIME certificates

January 22, 2023 - 5 mins read

A S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) certificate is a type of digital certificate that is used to encrypt and sign email messages. It allows the recipient of the email to verify the identity of the sender, and to ensure that the message has not been tampered with during transit. There are multiple companies that offer S/MIME certificates, such as DigiCert, GlobalSign, Comodo, and GoDaddy. You can also find other providers by searching online.

2022 Final Review

December 31, 2022 - 3 mins read

2022 Final Review This is December 31, 2022, 23:06 PM CST now. 2022 is a pretty terrible year for us, but there were still some noticable events which are worth noting. January: Nothing serious, took final exam of 8A, I remembered that it wasn’t too good. February: Get Chinese New Year, bought Google Workspace for the first time (and then got rid of it). Played Minecraft A LOT, but didn’t actually do anything meaningful.