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this is my thought/fear too, as I'm in the same space. Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of jerks signing up with fake

by lsc 16y ago

this is my thought/fear too, as I'm in the same space. Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of jerks signing up with fake names and then running up my bandwidth bills with torrents, then at the end of the month, nobody, ah, "converted" so I am not going to respond with 'free' One of my responses could be to push my larger domains (which are quite a bit cheaper than the competition) or continue focusing on the international market. (I haven't read the fine print of the amazon offer, but I'll eat my hat if they give free accounts to, say, Brazilians.) So yeah; my current attitude is "wait and see" - as of today I'm still selling out servers as fast as I can put them up... if that changes, I'll change something. As for slicehost/linode, my personal guess is that they will both tout their substantial customer support advantages over amazon.

mahmud 16y ago
If you make your services any cheaper, I will personally unsubscribe, since I will no longer think you're in it to make a living, but offering a charity. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax console with drop-down menus for shell commands.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  I just signed up... I've been looking at the prgmr signup page off and on for six months and it's usually backlogged. Glad to finally get in! I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    ...and I just noticed that I can get twice as much for $6 as I do for $5. Whoops. Hopefully I can put in an upgrade request sometime after I get provisioned. Maybe clojure can run in 64mb? I'm skeptical but we'll see.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Go to the IRC channel NOW! :-) God! I love companies with IRC chans.
- lsc 16y ago
  hah. well, I am making a living off of it. the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right? Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me. Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Prices shouldn't follow Moore's law, they should follow demand.
    - lsc 16y ago
      This is a commodity with a low barrier to entry in a mostly free market. If demand pushes price beyond cost + certain amount of profit, you will see more companies entering the market. Cost falls with moors law (yeah, power costs aren't going down... but I can stuff a whole lot more compute power in the same amount of electricity than I could have two years ago.) So, assuming the market is free (which is mostly is) and the barriers to entry are low (and they are very low.) assuming there are customers who care about price (and there are) you should see prices falling towards the cost to provide the service.
      - mahmud 16y ago
        You obviously know your business :-) As far as I am concerned, I would just like to know you're living comfortably, that's all. If you're happy, so am I.
  - pdelgallego 16y ago
    The 8$/month machine sounds very interesting. I'm quite new to VPS. I recently deployed a couple of project for customer in Linode. I am very happy with them, but at the same time, I have some hobby projects of my own that I dont want to host in a 20USD/month machine. How are your VPSs compare to Linode?
tomjen3 16y ago
You already have the cheapest vpses, let Amazon deal with those who won't pay anything. My only complaint so far has been that I can't seem to figure out where I reset my key (I lost the original to a dead computer), while I still have root I don't dare reboot it because if it doesn't come up I can't fix it.
- lsc 16y ago
  we should have gotten you on email. we actually have about half the code to automate that, but we haven't finished integrating it with everything else, so we verify the email by hand, etc...
enneff 16y ago
Let me reiterate what others have said: don't compromise on your current principles. I'm a customer of yours because I know what I need, and with prgmr I pay for what I need and nothing more. It's great.
duck 16y ago
How have I not heard/seen your service before?

by lsc 16y ago

mahmud 16y ago

If you make your services any cheaper, I will personally unsubscribe, since I will no longer think you're in it to make a living, but offering a charity. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax console with drop-down menus for shell commands.

dpritchett 16y ago
I just signed up... I've been looking at the prgmr signup page off and on for six months and it's usually backlogged. Glad to finally get in! I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  ...and I just noticed that I can get twice as much for $6 as I do for $5. Whoops. Hopefully I can put in an upgrade request sometime after I get provisioned. Maybe clojure can run in 64mb? I'm skeptical but we'll see.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Go to the IRC channel NOW! :-) God! I love companies with IRC chans.
lsc 16y ago
hah. well, I am making a living off of it. the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right? Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me. Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which
- mahmud 16y ago
  Prices shouldn't follow Moore's law, they should follow demand.
  - lsc 16y ago
    This is a commodity with a low barrier to entry in a mostly free market. If demand pushes price beyond cost + certain amount of profit, you will see more companies entering the market. Cost falls with moors law (yeah, power costs aren't going down... but I can stuff a whole lot more compute power in the same amount of electricity than I could have two years ago.) So, assuming the market is free (which is mostly is) and the barriers to entry are low (and they are very low.) assuming there are customers who care about price (and there are) you should see prices falling towards the cost to provide the service.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      You obviously know your business :-) As far as I am concerned, I would just like to know you're living comfortably, that's all. If you're happy, so am I.
- pdelgallego 16y ago
  The 8$/month machine sounds very interesting. I'm quite new to VPS. I recently deployed a couple of project for customer in Linode. I am very happy with them, but at the same time, I have some hobby projects of my own that I dont want to host in a 20USD/month machine. How are your VPSs compare to Linode?

tomjen3 16y ago

You already have the cheapest vpses, let Amazon deal with those who won't pay anything. My only complaint so far has been that I can't seem to figure out where I reset my key (I lost the original to a dead computer), while I still have root I don't dare reboot it because if it doesn't come up I can't fix it.

lsc 16y ago
we should have gotten you on email. we actually have about half the code to automate that, but we haven't finished integrating it with everything else, so we verify the email by hand, etc...

enneff 16y ago

Let me reiterate what others have said: don't compromise on your current principles. I'm a customer of yours because I know what I need, and with prgmr I pay for what I need and nothing more. It's great.

duck 16y ago

How have I not heard/seen your service before?