Forums General Discussion Where To Get An IRC Server

Airfreshner,

I have, along with three mates of mine, hosted our own IRC network with our own connections, servers and running UnrealIRCd which is one of the more popular IRCd's out there.

I have to say that I do have a soft spot for Conference Room (CR) as I used to be an administrator on a network owned by a large ISP who used that software. In recent years though, CR has become somewhat of a multi-purpose application that does many things and does them well but at around $7,500 in my local currency, it is wayyyyyy out of the price range for our little operation.

So the only logical choice for us was Unreal IRCd and Anope Services as both packages run well on Unix and Windows boxes. Forget anything said about OS preferences - the "Windows is unstable" yarn is a bit stale and really only applied to non-NT versions anyway because FAT32 is a dreadful filesystem. In our experience (and we have hosted chats for large corporations) both our Windows Services server and Unix IRC nodes perform equally well.

Some of the long-standing members of this forum will remember lengthy and heated debates between myself and one of the Unreal IRCd coders, Codemastr but that doesn't change the fact that I do believe Unreal is a good product, especially since it doesn't cost anything.

Of course, as some here have said, you can lease space on a Unix shell provider to host your server, though if your internet connection is strong enough, be adventurous and host it yourself. You will need a domain name, static IP and DNS hosting though, but DNS hosting can be done by you too, if you know how to set it up.

Pros: More control to you, no costs for hosting, gain knowledge of hosting Internet services.
Cons: There is a lot to learn, time consuming to set up, you have to run the server 24/7 or risk upsetting your user base, your ISP may disapprove - read their AUP before making a decision.

Ghozer: RFC stands for "Request For Comment". Nothing in that phrase implies that a standard exists for anything. Unreal IRCd is an RFC1492-compatible IRCd and any added function does not detract from that fact.