6 ms·

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:

by 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?
  - lsc 16y ago
    they have better CPU than I do (and this is unlikely to change... but you know? very few things my customers do are CPU bound.) I also give you fewer VCPU on the lower-end instances. they give you 4, I give you 1. the idea here is to optimize for the worst case (if there is contention, and you have 4 vcpus, that's more context switching and more cache flushes. on the other hand, cpu is usually mostly idle, and in that case more vcpu is more performance. My large instances have more vcpu.) I'm experimenting with my vcpu policy and may bring that more in line with linode. But really, I regard this as relatively unimportant because VPSs are rarely CPU bound. Our disk quality is likely about the same (I use 7500rpm "enterprise" sata, which is about as good as sata gets without getting into the expensive 10K stuff, and if linode was using 10K disk, they'd be advertising the fact.) My ratio of disk to ram is 4 disks in raid 1+0 for every 32GiB ram/8 cores I'm not sure what Linode's ratio is. But Linode has better mechanisms for limiting heavy disk users than I do. (heavy in terms of performance rather than in terms of space... limiting by space is trivial.) My understanding is that they keep iop counters or similar, and first warn, then limit you if you use a lot more iops than most people. I don't do this, and sometimes overall disk performance suffers because of it. But I do plan to emulate Linode in that regard at some point. And, of course, my most noticeable deficiency is that I do manual provisioning, and Linode has a nicely automated setup. but I'm (very slowly) catching up. Now, I'm about half the price, too, but you already knew that.

by mahmud 16y ago

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?
- lsc 16y ago
  they have better CPU than I do (and this is unlikely to change... but you know? very few things my customers do are CPU bound.) I also give you fewer VCPU on the lower-end instances. they give you 4, I give you 1. the idea here is to optimize for the worst case (if there is contention, and you have 4 vcpus, that's more context switching and more cache flushes. on the other hand, cpu is usually mostly idle, and in that case more vcpu is more performance. My large instances have more vcpu.) I'm experimenting with my vcpu policy and may bring that more in line with linode. But really, I regard this as relatively unimportant because VPSs are rarely CPU bound. Our disk quality is likely about the same (I use 7500rpm "enterprise" sata, which is about as good as sata gets without getting into the expensive 10K stuff, and if linode was using 10K disk, they'd be advertising the fact.) My ratio of disk to ram is 4 disks in raid 1+0 for every 32GiB ram/8 cores I'm not sure what Linode's ratio is. But Linode has better mechanisms for limiting heavy disk users than I do. (heavy in terms of performance rather than in terms of space... limiting by space is trivial.) My understanding is that they keep iop counters or similar, and first warn, then limit you if you use a lot more iops than most people. I don't do this, and sometimes overall disk performance suffers because of it. But I do plan to emulate Linode in that regard at some point. And, of course, my most noticeable deficiency is that I do manual provisioning, and Linode has a nicely automated setup. but I'm (very slowly) catching up. Now, I'm about half the price, too, but you already knew that.