4 ms·

> The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also 500MB swap space. Every MB counts!

by raid2000 3y ago

layer8 3y ago
> It's kind of fun to read about the state of "VPS hosting" from those days. Lots of downtime. Unexpected reboots. Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.
- raid2000 3y ago
  Maybe they were trying to save money. There's another quote where Satoshi suggests being frugal: > It might be a long time before we get another donation like that, we should save a lot of it.
- wolrah 3y ago
  > Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me. Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few years back. Even then it was online and working fine internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside world. The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.
swozey 3y ago
I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have to call/ticket in to manage your site. I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price range. And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in 2009..
- ajross 3y ago
  > Why so cheap? It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is about right. Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school, same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast" to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800 MHz DSP cores.
  - swozey 3y ago
    I mean, I just said I was in this business back then. I was probably 22 and making a whole $40k in my first "real" engineering job at Hostway, then Hostgator, then Rackspace, etc. And I owned multiple servers. A $40 VPS was not a big ask in 2009. I absolutely didn't make FAANG salary nor did 99.9% of our VPS customers. We used to stick 1-3k customers on one $350/month dell poweredge. We had millions of customers with VPS of various pricing and traffic and businesses. > Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. I'm so confused by this statement. I've been in datacenters since 2005, if we ever had a "omg fast cpus" moment anywhere in that time line it was when AMD Epyc came out around 2016 and we could push massive PCIE bandwidth for vfio/etc. Beyond that we've been sitting on various 2-4ghz xeons for 25 years. I'm confused on the 486 comparison. I had a 486 when I was 8, 31 years ago. TWO THOUSAND AND NINE 2 0 0 9 "Before the SV balloon in salaries".. dude, we're talking under a $100/month... In 2009. Your comment makes it sound like this was the yesteryear of computers, like 1988 or something, this comment has me so confused. The entire thread is them talking about putting a tiddlywiki+phpbb on a VPS. This, aside from LAMP/etc stacks were the most common hosting product sold and were usually $5-10/mo plans. I have a feeling they're actually using one of those scammy "free" webhosts you used to be able to get off of somethingawful, etc. that would disappear after 2 months and were probably CSAM vectors. It's just a very strange level of frugality, which is mentioned in this HN thread elsewhere. It sounds like they were only using donations to move forward, nothing wrong with that, just interesting how low skill/researched their infrastructure stuff is for someone who seemingly can create a thing like bitcoin.

> The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also 500MB swap space. Every MB counts!

> It's kind of fun to read about the state of "VPS hosting" from those days. Lots of downtime. Unexpected reboots. Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.

raid2000 3y ago
Maybe they were trying to save money. There's another quote where Satoshi suggests being frugal: > It might be a long time before we get another donation like that, we should save a lot of it.
wolrah 3y ago
> Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me. Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few years back. Even then it was online and working fine internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside world. The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.

swozey 3y ago

I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have to call/ticket in to manage your site. I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price range. And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in 2009..

ajross 3y ago
> Why so cheap? It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is about right. Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school, same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast" to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800 MHz DSP cores.
- swozey 3y ago
  I mean, I just said I was in this business back then. I was probably 22 and making a whole $40k in my first "real" engineering job at Hostway, then Hostgator, then Rackspace, etc. And I owned multiple servers. A $40 VPS was not a big ask in 2009. I absolutely didn't make FAANG salary nor did 99.9% of our VPS customers. We used to stick 1-3k customers on one $350/month dell poweredge. We had millions of customers with VPS of various pricing and traffic and businesses. > Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. I'm so confused by this statement. I've been in datacenters since 2005, if we ever had a "omg fast cpus" moment anywhere in that time line it was when AMD Epyc came out around 2016 and we could push massive PCIE bandwidth for vfio/etc. Beyond that we've been sitting on various 2-4ghz xeons for 25 years. I'm confused on the 486 comparison. I had a 486 when I was 8, 31 years ago. TWO THOUSAND AND NINE 2 0 0 9 "Before the SV balloon in salaries".. dude, we're talking under a $100/month... In 2009. Your comment makes it sound like this was the yesteryear of computers, like 1988 or something, this comment has me so confused. The entire thread is them talking about putting a tiddlywiki+phpbb on a VPS. This, aside from LAMP/etc stacks were the most common hosting product sold and were usually $5-10/mo plans. I have a feeling they're actually using one of those scammy "free" webhosts you used to be able to get off of somethingawful, etc. that would disappear after 2 months and were probably CSAM vectors. It's just a very strange level of frugality, which is mentioned in this HN thread elsewhere. It sounds like they were only using donations to move forward, nothing wrong with that, just interesting how low skill/researched their infrastructure stuff is for someone who seemingly can create a thing like bitcoin.