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"If you want to order it, use 'view source' to find the commented-out link."
- koko775 15y agoI use prgmr and they are fantastic for the geek who knows how to handle themselves. You also get a pretty decent /64 IPv6 allocation. Their hardware console was enough for me to install Arch Linux despite no official support for it. It's pretty sweet.
- nrkn 15y agoOr looking at the other links, noting that the number in pkgpart=x increments by 2 for each package in the list, open the 2nd link and decrement by 2 to get the 64m package.
- kapitalx 15y agoOr you can just select it on the drop down list of any other page. The pkgpart seems to only preselect the item in the dropdown.
- keithah 15y agoThey seem really expensive. I use buyvm.net and love them.
- dchest 15y agoI don't see any Xen options on this site.
- IgorPartola 15y agoI am a fan and a customer of ThrustVPS. They are similarly priced but with a lot more network transfer allocation. No native IPv6 though.
- xiaomai 15y agoI was a satisfied customer of thrust too but their support staff has become really terrible. They broke my reverse DNS and it took a week to get it fixed (they kept closing my ticket saying it was fixed without verifying that it was. Turns out they had missed a period somewhere further up in the bind file. The prices were great though.
- vasco 15y agoEverything is out of stock
- minsight 15y agoI've been a customer for years. They're a great operation. Their owner is on hacker news with username lsc.
- vasco 15y agoI believe you, but I was gonna give them I try and apparently I can't!
- oso96_2000 15y agoIt's kind of hard to find stock on buyvm since everytime they got something new, it's selled soooo fast. Sometimes you can find some stock on their irc channel and their mailing list. 've been a customer since about a year ago and can't be happier.
- marekmroz 15y agoOther than their "We've got stock" events that happen probably 3-4 times a year, the best option to get a hold of a buyvm vps is to hit up the irc channel. Often they have some available when other people cancel their accounts. If you don't want to try this route, follow @FrantechCA on twitter and watch for announcements. Stock sells out in a matter of days, especially their smaller instances. You can also check out www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com . Not shilling, I just went through this to get on a $15/year OVZ and thought it may help whomever is interested.
- whimsy 15y agolsc owns buyvm, too? I don't think that's true.
- lsc 15y agoThere may be some confusion in this thread. I own prgmr.com, but not buyvm.net Also, I am not (quite? it looks like I might be by the end of tonight) out of stock.
- c16 15y agoBuyvm client here too, great service though always sold out.
- lsc 15y agomake sure you are comparing to the KVM prices; OpenVZ is cheaper because allocated ram is... not comparable to allocated ram in xen or kvm. It is a fair criticism, though; the KVM prices are comparable to Xen prices, and in that department, they have me beat for guests smaller than 1024M.[1] And you are right that it is time for me to increase my ram per dollar (and my transit per dollar) to remain in the niche where I live. I'm working on it, and you can be sure that existing customers will get that upgrade before I offer it to new users. [1]I price things at a flat fee per customer ($4) then a cost per unit of ram ($1 for every 64M ram) - I find that there are many providers that beat me on the low end but that I beat on the high end. This is in part an artefact of my manual processes, (or rather, an artefact of how manual per-user processes altered my pricing choices.)
- slug 15y agoI would prefer more disk per dollar though. Besides that I'm a happy customer.
- Maxious 15y agoAgreed. I am constantly playing package management musical chairs.
- dpritchett 15y agoSame here. I have found myself using Rackspace Cloud for my newer projects because I get more disk for my $11 and their Ubuntu provisioning is very low effort on my part. KVM offers a bit more control than I need. I still have a soft spot for my first prgmr box though.
- lsc 15y agoMy plan in the upgrade was to offer people a choice between significantly more disk and significantly faster disk, but the way things have been shaping up (we're very slowly upgrading the customers that I re-ip'd) we've only had one or the other available at a time.
- venkyk 15y agoI rather wish they had worded it as 'We assume you are not stupid'. Or they are assuming wrong in my case?
- jaysonelliot 15y ago"We assume you are not stupid" means they are making an assumption of intelligence, whereas "we don't assume you are stupid" means they make no assumption one way or the other. I wonder which is more appropriate?
- hellerbarde 15y agospot on +1
- venkyk 15y agoI see your point. However, I keep reading it as "We don't (have to) assume you are stupid. (We know so)".
- lsc 15y agoMy intent was to say, in a positive way, "If you are unwilling to learn how a serial console works, or how OpenSSH public key authentication works, I'll refund your money and send you to Linode."
- WiseWeasel 15y agoAs a stupid person, I was offended.
- afhof 15y agoHmm, there seem to be a number of syntax errors highlighted when viewing the source code. If I was inviting people to view the source, I would probably want it to be clean. Here's validator output: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fprgmr.com%2Fxen%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fprgmr.com%2Fx...
- ricardobeat 15y agoThe only actual error in there is the 'anchor' attribute (should be 'name'), the rest is just warnings for self-closing <br/> tags and unencoded ampersands. Not that bad, considering it's still using an HTML 4 doctype.
- lsc 15y agoto be fair, I fixed a few real errors after I was pointed at this link; I was distracted by a meeting about more bandwidth before I could comment.
- nknight 15y agoSpeaking of bandwidth... Are you really not losing money on $1.15/mbps overage? How many 10gbps ports did it take before you got Cogent down that low?
- lsc 15y ago5 gigs on a 10G port. $5000 one time setup for the 10G port. $0.65/mbps on the commit, $1.15/mbps on overage. That's my cost, so i guess I'm losing a tiny bit on my time, setup fees and equipment, but right now, I just want someone to split some of the monthlies with me. I really, really want that 10G port, though, as at those overages, I can oversubscribe my own commit, and if I oversubscribe too aggressively or one of my customers grows unexpectedly, just paying the overages won't be that big of a deal. Bandwidth gets cheaper all the time, and I've been pestering them forever. I actually haven't inked that deal, and probably won't if nobody takes me up on it; I really only need about a gigabit, and I can get $1/Mbps bandwidth all day long. I have to decide by Tuesday or so. So far? nobody else seems interested, which tells me this isn't all that unusual of a deal. One guy I asked went off and is now getting his own line from Cogent. Oh, also note, Cogent just wants the 5g commit from me. If I'm willing to pay the setup fees $2500 for a 1g port, $5000 for a 10G port) they will let me have 1G ports at that price; I just need a lot of 'em. Turns out, though, selling bandwidth is harder than I thought.
- jwallaceparker 15y agoThat "view source" line make this the most incredible VPS service landing page I've ever seen.
- mlntn 15y agoI had a strange experience with these guys. I signed up and didn't get anything back. When I sent an e-mail two days later telling them to just forget it and cancel my account, they told me they were busy and didn't get around to setting up my VPS. Just weird...
- _delirium 15y agoIirc, it's basically two people, the owner and an employee, and the owner does most things himself, from assembling servers to setting up accounts. Provisioning in particular he admits is currently rather suboptimal. I've had a good experience overall, though.
- damncabbage 15y agoSeems like a non-automated or a semi-automated provisioning on their side; I wonder what else isn't automated.
- bricestacey 15y agoBilling is not automated. I'm months overdue and I just got a personal email asking if I still wanted my account. It doesn't matter. Prgmr is hands down the best hobby VPS provider (I can't comment for other scenarios).
- whimsy 15y agoActually, billing is pretty automated, but shutting down your account is not.
- lsc 15y agoYup. big problems in that department. Most things are semi-automated. I do have it setup so that once a user is setup, they can boot into a rescue image, change the kernel, access the serial console, etc... without my help, though. But, it is a pretty big problem if someone needs a new instance right away, or if someone needs an upgrade right away, and for system problems that don't hit my pager (though we're working on improving that one.)
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoCan't recommend prgmr enough.
- state 15y agoAgree completely. The small size is part of what makes them great.
- j79 15y agoThey also provide the option in the select list when you checkout. Of course, asking a user to "View Source" seems more geeky!
- nicksergeant 15y agoIf you're thinking about it, do it. I've had the new Snipt on Prgmr for a month or so now and I've been 100% happy (and my wallet's happier, too). Customer service is excellent, better value than Slicehost, Linode, etc.
- dudus 15y agoI really love the tone they use on the status blog http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/ http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/ eg: = update on rehnquist well, it's down again, so I don't know what the heck is going on. I'm going to swap to new hardware this evening (will involve a graceful shutdown) Note, until then, all new provisioning is on hold.
- lsc 15y agohah. I keep getting told I need to dilute that with more positive entries or something. I'm actually embarrassed that I never gave a final update on Rehnquist; I usually do. I set it to 'bank sparing' mode, and it's been stable ever since. (The spare is standing by, but I have at least as many questions about that hardware as this. Expect some serious entries about burn-in and hardware testing from me in the next weeks; I have a whole lot of used hardware that I'm renting out for unixsurplus as dedicated servers.)
- jtchang 15y agoI have a prgmr instance and don't have any issues with it. It is a great box to play around with and the cheapest you can possibly get. You kinda have to know what you are doing but they nailed their target audience.
- frisco 15y agoI've been running a fair amount of infrastructure with them for a while now and I can't possibly recommend them highly enough. I remember there was a time a couple years ago when there was a queue to get a box with Luke. You have to know what you're doing and there are no training wheels attached, but they're awesome and has always been hugely helpful. I figured I'd just start out on them (being cheap) and eventually move off: but networking's been rock solid, and over the past couple years I've been able to work with them to get custom boxes for specific needs. Once I got a SMART condition warning on a dedicated box and they were on it basically instantly. They know how to manage their network, they're colo'd in multiple top-tier DCs, and the prices are just impossible to beat. I'm able to run infrastructure comprising ~500GB RAM for literally 3% of the cost of EC2, with hugely better disk io to boot.
- zred 15y agoI'm not trying to dissuade you from using prgmr, but EC2's reserved instance pricing makes it a lot more competitive. You can get the 3.75GB medium instance for $55/mo (1-year commitment including the up-front fee as a monthly cost) which compares nicely against prgmr's $68/mo 4GB instance ($14.67/GB vs $17/GB). In fact, I'm wondering how you came about your "I'm able to run infrastructure comprising ~500GB RAM for literally 3% of the cost of EC2" calculation at all. Even without reserved instances, Amazon has their 3.75GB instance available for $115/mo (or $30.67/GB). At $17/GB, prgmr is more than half the price (~55%). That is a savings, but certainly nowhere near 3% of the cost. IIRC, prgmr charges $4 plus $1 per 64MB of RAM. Assuming that they'd sell you a 500GB instance, that would be $8,004/mo. Since you'd probably have to spread it over more machines, it would likely be a bit higher. Anyway, even without dipping into reserve pricing (using the quad XL high-mem instances), you can get 500GB of RAM for $9,000-$10,000. Again, prgmr is a bit of a savings, but in the 10-20% range. And here's the big point. If you're using AWS for on-demand instances in that range, you're likely to want the hourly billing and rely on the fact that Amazon has much greater scale. Prgmr can have a queue for more capacity so clearly they're not accommodating someone like Netflix who needs 1,000+ boxes to do encoding for a week when a new platform comes out and then shuts them down until a new platform comes out. If you're running a more predictable infrastructure (which it has to be to an extent to go with a smaller player), then you can use Amazon's reserved instances. Amazon's reserved instances beat prgmr on price. Now, I didn't calculate in storage or bandwidth into Amazon's costs, but even with those additional charges, I don't see how you came upon prgmr being 3% of the cost of EC2. For my own personal server, I have an EC2 Micro instance with 1-year heavy utilization. That means that I pay $8.77/mo for 613MB RAM - a discount against prgmr's $12. Now, I have to add storage to that - the 12GB that prgmr offers would cost an additional $1.20 - and bandwidth, but I don't break $12 for my usage. If I wanted to commit to three years, the cost would be even less - $6.38/mo. None of this is to take anything away from Luke - he's literally written "The Book of Xen". That said, Amazon's pricing isn't much more expensive. Their reserved instances can be a good bit cheaper. Amazon also has the scale to accommodate you more easily. Prgmr can't keep thousands of spare boxes on hand and they (as you noted) have had queues for instances. Amazon is by no means the be-all and end-all of Xen instances, but it's pricing isn't that bad (and in fact can be better) and there are advantages to using a company with Amazon's scale.
- KaeseEs 15y agoI must say that for no-frills hosting, prgmr has really done right by me. I was broke and didn't pay for a few months and they were able to set my vps right back up once i had cash, despite the fact i was no longer using the same credit card or email address; they really went the extra mile in terms of taking time to check who i was and once my identity was established, helping me out.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoView source is so 2006, cool kids use the Javascript console to modify web pages as they please. document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<!--|-->/g,'')
- mouseroot 15y ago$(body).html().replace(/<!--|-->/g,'');
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoMultiple errors, it should be: $("body").html(function(i,h){return h.replace(/<!--|-->/g,'')}) jQuery is awesome (is even my nickname!) but sometimes plain Javascript does the trick pretty well.
- mouseroot 15y agoyea i tried it in the firefox console after i posted it. it felt wrong and lol it was
- lell 15y agoWhat's the js to make a site editable with your cursor (you can click on text in a <p> and then you get a cursor in it where you can insert more text, also changes your mouse cursor to indicate that you can edit, over text)? I saw it here on hn once in the comments, but then I couldn't find it again later when I needed it. (I had also saved it in a vim window but forgotten to save it, ugh!)
- DuoSRX 15y agojavascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';document.designMode='on';void 0
- peterwwillis 15y agoI don't care how reliable the hoster is, $5 for those specs is excessive in this market. Go to http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/ and look at all the deals. Almost all of them are $5 or less a month at twice the specs. Concerned about reliability? The cost of one beer at a restaurant will buy you a second box at a different hoster.
- rweir 15y agoor you can just spend those two beers on prgrmr, or 3 beers at linode? for tech people in the West, the amount of money is so small, why would you bother going with the absolute bottom of the market?
- lsc 15y agoThere are... different markets. I have a whole lot of customers in the area; probably the majority. I do often meet customers at social events, and yeah, they usually don't have the tiny guests, and they usually think I'm super cheap. I mean, here in silicon valley? even mediocre Engineers pull six figures. (well, mediocre Engineers that can find employment in silicon valley; generally, but not always, that means significantly above average by the standards of most places.) so the difference between five bucks and three bucks is not a beer, it's what goes in the tip jar after you get your latte. Nobody is going to notice, and none of those people are going to buy my five dollar plan when I give you twice the ram/disk for six dollars, and really, most of those people are going for the $12 or $20 plan. I mean, having extra ram is kinda nice. But on IRC, I meet kids from Alabama or Minnesota... or China or Myanmar. They're making less than ten bucks an hour, if they are lucky, working at wal-mart or best buy or what have you, and trying to learn about computers. I know a couple of these people starting hosting companies. Some of them are pretty good, others, well, they are interested in learning, and that's good too... but for them? that difference between three bucks and five every month is worth spending some time on. So yeah, it's a market that I owned once, but that market has... passed me by. (and really, a lot of the people in that market seem kinda angry that I'm not keeping up with the times... which I guess I could take as a complement?) I will put some effort into it again, at some point, but it's not my current highest priority. The comment that gave this hn post it's title was actually me trying to get those people to quit buying my five dollar account, because while in '05, I had images that worked okay on it, today, out of box it just does not work very well. I didn't disable ordering on it completely mostly for irrational reasons. I am pleased and surprised that other people found it this amusing.
- gergles 15y agoI am also a happy prgmr customer, and love that the machines are hosted in a top-tier datacenter and that support is responsive and knows what they are doing. The provisioning isn't automated and there's no usage monitor (for transfer), but I assume that Luke would be reasonable in the event that someone ever went over.
- aangjie 15y agoHmm.. Am a little confused with the payment page options. Do i have use the purchase additional package option to pay ? I just registered and was asked to the billing/payment page to pay. But there doesn't seem to be a simple pay button/link/tab.
- moconnor 15y ago"Please note; this means all plans come with $4/month worth of support." I can't help wondering how much support that is.
- _delirium 15y agoI take that to be a coy way of saying "not very much at all". If the person responding is making even $20/hr, then $4/mo of support is 12 minutes/month of support. :) That said I've had no complaints with support from them when needed. It just has to clearly be about things on their end; they aren't going to help with sysadmin issues on your box.
- lsc 15y agocoy? I was going for blunt and self-depricating. The thing was that I didn't want people buying the bigger instances thinking they'd get big product support. Without putting you on my pager (which is going to cost you more than $68 a month) we simply don't have that capability. But yeah. responding in a reasonable period of time is something I am working very hard on, but to be completely honest? it's something we fail at... a lot. Person for person, I think we stack up very well against any other front line support... but there's essentially two of us, and yeah, the wait times quite often render the knowledge moot. Nick and I fight about this; Nick thinks it's better to not say anything until you can say something definite. I think it's best to say 'I'm working on it, doing X, Y and Z' - but compared to 'real companies' both nick and I are on the side of "it doesn't really count until you fix it" whereas most big companies have SLAs that reset the clock when they respond and get a level 1 person working on it.
- ghshephard 15y agoSomething is confusing - nobody measures bandwidth in GiB, and _almost_ nobody measures disk space in GiB. It's useful that they emphasized the unit, otherwise 99% of their (educated) customers would have assumed 10 (network/disk) Gigabytes was 1.0 * 10^9 bytes. The only use of GiB that I seen commonly is in Memory. Every other use of "Giga" is the SI reference.
- lsc 15y agonobody measures bandwidth in GiB, sure, and next time I boost the bandwidth allocations, I might move those to GB, as that's what all the tools report. (I'd wait until I boost bandwidth allocations enough that it wasn't reducing the allocation) However, there is much confusion with disk space in GiB vs GB. Hard drives are sold in GB, but most of the time, within an OS, space is most often reported in GiB like ram, so a 1tb drive is rather less than one TiB. I really do allocate disk space in GiB, not in GB, so I think it's appropriate to market it as such.
- ghshephard 15y agoIt would be interesting to do an audit of modern operating systems to see if this is true. OS X has reported in GB for a while now. I wonder what windows 7 does. Regardless - I very much appreciate the use of GiB when that's what is meant. Classy.
- ghshephard 15y agoIt would be interesting to do an audit of modern operating systems to see if this is true. OS X has reported in GB for a while now. I wonder what windows 7 does - that would cover 95%+ of the desktop environments.
- tosbourn 15y agoThere are surely accessibility concerns over hiding links in comments.
- kolkey 15y agoThis is a very clever piece of blatant advertising. I think I'll buy some.
- PaulHoule 15y agoI'd be more excited if it was a 64GB instance rather than 64MB.