I mean, are there any people on this board who have their business dedicated (or partly dedicated) to hosting shells for IRC-bot / bouncer users?

Would like to hear some experiences from you with that kind of service. I am thinking about offering that on a seperate server.

shell is different than using it for IRC purposed. I doubt anyone wants to allow IRC scripts but good luck. Maybe there are a few out there.

Your best bet is searching google for "IRC Shell Providers" there is surprisingly a lot out there. You just have to be careful as a lot of places are ran by kids. I know a few in particualr that are great but I don't want to get in trouble for advertising. A lot of them also can offer web hosting as well to on either the same box or even a different box sometimes depending how they have things setup.


Edit: I mean no disrespect to young people doing hosting, I am only 21. What I meant about kids was, immature, disrespectful people that treat there customers like cra. I have seen admins of the shell server use a users account to take over IRC channels, close your account for no reason, then tell everyone you were using your account for DoS. IRC Shell Business is not a friendly environment so Just be careful. I once offered IRC Shells for a month on an extra server I had colocated. I had used up all my bandwidth within a week because of all the packet kiddies hitting my server.

Thank you frozen and phpjames. I don't need an IRC shell provider, I want to offer that service.

Yes I know, that there are many bad people on IRC abusing shell accounts. But there would be an option to limit their bandwith to 5 GB / month, so that they won't be able to do anything when they reach their limit.

Will have to go deep into that and I just wanted to know the pro's and con's of this business.

;)

Even if you limit there bandwidth you still run the chance of being packeted to death by little botnet kiddies. Say someone is running a bnc or an eggdrop. They make some kid mad at them, next thing you know you got 1000s of ips hitting your box with excess ammounts of data. Their goal is gonna be to knock the server offline so the person can no longer hide behind your boxes ip. Its very hard to trace especially as your company grows. 99% of the time its even impossible to find out which customer of yours is being attacked so you can disable there accounts as most customers(irc) won't admit to being attacked if you offer public vhost lists. The best thing to do is not to have a list of public vhosts, but to have custom create vhosts per customer that way you can keep track of what data goes where. If you can make it in the shell industry thats great as it is very profitable if you can keep DDoS down to a minimum. Make sure you go with an upstream provider that offer filtering. I know I am talking out of order and disorganized. If you would rather have a one on one talk about this you can email me at jesse.lanning@us.army.mil and we can set up a place tp meet on irc.

Thanks frozen for the offer to discuss that with me further.

I will come back to you by eMail tomorrow. Just have a lot of things to do today :(

We offer shell accounts on a totally different box and only a seperate subnet. We do not allow IRC stuff unless it is someone we personally know. There are free places like cyberspace.org that offer shell accounts for free.