My experience hosting Subsonic thru GigaPros VPS

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I have been using Subsonic on my home machine for a while, with the iPhone and iPad apps (iSub). iSub is great, btw. Amazing app. I use iSub constantly on my iPhone. At work, gym, car, etc. A few of my other family members have the same setup and connect to my server as well.

Anyways, all of my music has been stored on my home machine with port forwarding and DynDNS. It has worked really well up to this point. The only complaint has been the download speed (when downloading an album) is very slow. But that's a rare scenario. Streaming has been fine. If my power or internet go down at home, it wrecks the whole thing, of course. And it doesn't strike me as being very secure.

So, I signed up for the GigaPros hosted VPS Subsonic service since I'd like to get all of this "in the cloud" and not connect through an open port at my house. At $9.95 / month, it is a good deal for 100GB of space. I have a relatively small collection of music (8k songs, 60GB). I'm only using MP3 copies for the server, not FLACs since those are ten times larger. I chose GigaPros, because it looks like the datacenter is in the US (that's where I am).

I figured I could keep a running post going here of my experience, if it helps others decide if they want to do it.

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Signed up through the website. The account payment and setup was done overnight in a matter of hours. They are pretty quick and responsive there. I had a subsonic server up and running super fast.

I've logged into the Subsonic server, reset my password and got it ready to receive music.

The server is accessed through an IP address and a port number. At some point in this process, I'd like to get a domain name pointing to it, but I'll worry about that later.

I'm using WinSCP at the moment for the music upload, but it appears that there are multiple ways to handle that. I just uploaded an album to the music folder, and upload speed from the East Coast USA is very fast. A quick refresh in Subsonic revealed the album, and the tracks are playable. So everything is working.

The only issue at the moment is that the Subsonic version is outdated, so I submitted a ticket to see how to upgrade it to the latest version.

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My ticket was jumped on in about 5 minutes. These guys are fast, that's for sure.

They did a VPS rebuild, which seems to have inadvertently wiped out the installation AND the music and reset it (with a newer version). I'm clarifying with them now. I'm pretty sure there is a way to upgrade just the app, and not have to reset everything.

This is a tip for anyone signing up for this; make sure you get this all figured out before you upload your entire music library!!

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Subsonic is now upgraded to the final 4.6 release. GigaPros did the upgrade based on my Support Ticket. They were able to do it from the Standalone Subsonic installation apparantly, rather than rebuilding the entire VPS. So, my music and settings were spared. That's good news!

It makes the future upgrade path a little trickier since I have to submit a ticket and request them to do it, and to make absolutely sure they don't wipe out and reset the entire VPS.

Still don't know if the upgrade is something I can do myself by just uploading the Subsonic folder and overwriting the existing one. I started a separate thread about how to upgrade on CENTOS. Maybe someone has an idea about that?

EDIT: Thanks for the response. This looks like it is something best left to GigaPros to handle, since it involves starting and stopping services.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9521

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At the moment, uploading my music to the VPS thru WinSCP. This is going to take a while...

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I have finally uploaded all my music to the service. YEAH!

WinSCP isn't my favorite program. The upload speed using the app is terrible. I don't know if it is something I neglected to configure properly, or it's just slow. At any rate, I went back to my old favorite; Beyond Compare. Such a great app. I set up a sync session in the app to sync my local music to the server directly. I have it set on a scheduler every week to update whatever new stuff has been added to my library. Going forward, syncing will only be one or two albums at a time, so this is pretty manageable.

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I have been getting the "cryptic error message" noted here in this thread: http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4258&p=14966&hilit=error+popup%2C+refresh#p14966

I logged into my VPS thru SSH and did a reboot; that solved the issue. So the Error is fixed with a simple reboot right now.

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Configured iSub on my devices and they all connect up just fine to the service. No issues.

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Speed is great. I do notice that my VPS service is quite a bit snappier and more responsive than my local-run used to be. I previously had up to 5 users streaming from a low-end machine at my house. This is much better!

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Just a general *bump* to the thread. After using the service for many months now, I can say I'm extremely satisfied with it. I have 10 friends and family users hitting the server from either the website front-end, or the iSub app for iOS (also excellent). I've never had any slowdown or any issues. I set up a Beyond Compare script to auto-upload my new music to the VPS, and the speed is awesome.

Getting a bit anxious about the upcoming 4.7 release since a lot of stuff seems to be changing. Hopefully the upgrade is seamless and GigaPros can do it without too much trouble. A major question will be how it handles video hosted through the VPS. And the other major question is how do I get more storage!!

[vish]

I used gigapros for near a year too, Very happy with them, had about 12 devices streaming from thier servers without stutter. But I had to send at least 3 tickets before they upgraded my Subsonic server to latest version and first 2 tickets says it was the latest version already, (Yet at top it says "New version 4.x?) Anyways, up for the most part, used Filezilla to upload mp3's and used my own domain name which made things much easier.
Highly recommend.

[bushman4]

I don't trust FileZilla.

Why not? It's just an FTP client...

Glenn

[GJ51]

I don't trust FileZilla.

Why not? It's just an FTP client...

Glenn

Agreed.

We use it almost daily and have done so without any problems for several years.

If there is a valid cause for concern, I'd like to hear what the problem is.

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So after all this time of using GigaPros, I closed it down this week.

There were a couple reasons for canceling it:

GigaPros seems to have an issue with their billing system. I could never figure out what was going on, but I had to constantly setup my automatic payment, and it would constantly fail. I had my service suspended numerous times because payments were never processed on time. I even had support tickets for resetting the auto payment, and they still didn't work right. So, kind of annoying to deal with every month. If you go with them, stay on top of the billing and make sure you payments get processed correctly, and on time. Maybe rather than pulling payments in, push them in from your banks bill-pay.

Their IP address randomly changed on me. I never got a notification or warning (unless I really missed something). One day, the VPS server went down for maintenance, and came back up with a new IP. My domain name was pointed to that IP, so that caused some issues obviously. Still not sure why that happened. I believe it was a server outage on their end, and when they restored it, they changed it.

My library got a little out of control. The 100GB of storage is nice at first, but runs out quickly. You definitely can't use FLACs, or even consider videos. Plus, even if I had unlimited storage like QVIVO, I live in the US. Land of the crippled upload speeds. If I made a tiny tweak to tags, album art, or the organization of my files, I had to re-upload any changes.

I opted to run my own server at my house and not worry about limited storage, or lengthy uploads. Yeah, I know, back to where I started...

MusicCabinet. This add-on is SO COOL. I'm not entirely sure I could set up MusicCabinet on their hosted VPS (CentOS). It is so much easier to set that up on my own machine and tweak things locally, rather than thru the VPS. If you want to use GigaPros, or similar, find out if you can set up the Postgresql server and get it running with the MusicCabinet addon.

I wish the app was managed similar to how WordPress, or other web platforms are managed. Meaning, it would be nice to be able to upgrade it myself without submitting a support ticket.

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Those are some followup thoughts on using a hosted VPS thru GigaPros for Subsonic.

Would I recommend them? Sure. It's $10/mo. It's not so ridiculously expensive that you really have to carefully consider it. And you can cancel anytime. It was plenty fast, and supported multiple users. I don't expect miracles for $10/mo. Give it a try, see if it works for you.

P.S. Oh, and since I mentioned QVIVO above: Don't bother using that. I tested that extensively, and long story short is that its terrible. Roll your own Subsonic + Plex server.