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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, t

by 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.

ajross 3y ago
You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean, I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were better choices, there always are. But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.
- swozey 3y ago
  I was just rhetorically reflecting on how strange it was that those specs is what they were using when they clearly aren't a 12 year old child or Russian warez slinger who can't get a VPS elsewhere and can afford something beyond a free or $10/mo VPS, WHILE they're arguing about how they're running out of memory on the VPS when compiling. And .. I assume that they're technically savvy since they created bitcoin, although I have absolutely no idea what that entailed. Those specs for a VPS are absolutely pathetic even for 2009 era Xeon computing. I had quad xeons poweredges with 128gb+ ram under my desk as workstations when customers stopped paying their bills in 2009 when I worked at Hostway. VPS were leased with either dedicated cores or shared cores, shared probably around $20-40 then dedi core $60-250+. Datacenters either used Vmware g/esx or Virtuzzo. I worked at all of the largest webhosts in the USA (not Hetzner etc in Europe) from I think 2005-2015 so I'm pretty familiar with that era of hosting. The guy who owns the webhost they're using can't even spell his competitor Linodes url/name. It's like they went to some random IRC channel and picked whatever free VPS host they could, which is a horrible idea. Whoever owned that VPS could absolutely figure out who these people were and interact with any file on their system he wanted to. I bet if someone tracked down whoever is the in that email talking about his webhost, they could track that email thread back and figure everyone out. But fraud at webhosts was absolutely rampant back then so there is the possibility the entire group faked their identities if they even HAD to identify at a fly-by-night webhost (narrator: they didn't). When we took down Windows + Linux servers for CSAM, warez, fraud, etc we'd often log into them before wiping them and they'd have IRC, ICQ, etc open on the server and we'd be able to take down an entire group by going through their logs/etc that were still on the server. $7.99 at HOSTGATOR who back then was the biggest (outside of godaddy) budget webhost barely got you a free shared cPanel account on a server with another 2000 customers to lag your site down. It was basically an sftp account with a cpanel login, that's it. The webhost in question here doesn't even give them a login, they have to communicate and have things done by their "customer support" (probably a call center India full of sysadmins, they were huge back then). A $9.99 VPS in 2009? oof. Even more to the point of this thread, it shows that the tech/operations/infra skills of that team are .. not very impressive. One guy didn't know linux at all and the "Linux guy" is the one picking a free VPS at a shady webhost that can't even compile his code. So that takes a lot of SRE/types off the "who made bitcoin" list. And this wasn't like, "Linux is super rare" world. It was 2009. I had been using Linux since the 90s when I wasn't even 10. We had hundreds of Linux sysengineers at each of these companies and we had no problem hiring them. 2009 hostgator SHARED (NOT! vps/dedi) pricing, $7.95, although they didn't have VPS back then so can't compare that. A dual xeon dedi is $219/mo, IIRC VPS started around $30-60 whenever that got added. https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostgator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostga... https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostga...

by swozey 3y ago

ajross 3y ago

You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean, I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were better choices, there always are. But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.

swozey 3y ago
I was just rhetorically reflecting on how strange it was that those specs is what they were using when they clearly aren't a 12 year old child or Russian warez slinger who can't get a VPS elsewhere and can afford something beyond a free or $10/mo VPS, WHILE they're arguing about how they're running out of memory on the VPS when compiling. And .. I assume that they're technically savvy since they created bitcoin, although I have absolutely no idea what that entailed. Those specs for a VPS are absolutely pathetic even for 2009 era Xeon computing. I had quad xeons poweredges with 128gb+ ram under my desk as workstations when customers stopped paying their bills in 2009 when I worked at Hostway. VPS were leased with either dedicated cores or shared cores, shared probably around $20-40 then dedi core $60-250+. Datacenters either used Vmware g/esx or Virtuzzo. I worked at all of the largest webhosts in the USA (not Hetzner etc in Europe) from I think 2005-2015 so I'm pretty familiar with that era of hosting. The guy who owns the webhost they're using can't even spell his competitor Linodes url/name. It's like they went to some random IRC channel and picked whatever free VPS host they could, which is a horrible idea. Whoever owned that VPS could absolutely figure out who these people were and interact with any file on their system he wanted to. I bet if someone tracked down whoever is the in that email talking about his webhost, they could track that email thread back and figure everyone out. But fraud at webhosts was absolutely rampant back then so there is the possibility the entire group faked their identities if they even HAD to identify at a fly-by-night webhost (narrator: they didn't). When we took down Windows + Linux servers for CSAM, warez, fraud, etc we'd often log into them before wiping them and they'd have IRC, ICQ, etc open on the server and we'd be able to take down an entire group by going through their logs/etc that were still on the server. $7.99 at HOSTGATOR who back then was the biggest (outside of godaddy) budget webhost barely got you a free shared cPanel account on a server with another 2000 customers to lag your site down. It was basically an sftp account with a cpanel login, that's it. The webhost in question here doesn't even give them a login, they have to communicate and have things done by their "customer support" (probably a call center India full of sysadmins, they were huge back then). A $9.99 VPS in 2009? oof. Even more to the point of this thread, it shows that the tech/operations/infra skills of that team are .. not very impressive. One guy didn't know linux at all and the "Linux guy" is the one picking a free VPS at a shady webhost that can't even compile his code. So that takes a lot of SRE/types off the "who made bitcoin" list. And this wasn't like, "Linux is super rare" world. It was 2009. I had been using Linux since the 90s when I wasn't even 10. We had hundreds of Linux sysengineers at each of these companies and we had no problem hiring them. 2009 hostgator SHARED (NOT! vps/dedi) pricing, $7.95, although they didn't have VPS back then so can't compare that. A dual xeon dedi is $219/mo, IIRC VPS started around $30-60 whenever that got added. https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostgator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostga... https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostga...