3 ms·

I like the look of your service. It always seem to me that when you start pushing these low price-points, the expense of dealing with customer support, DMCA tak

by asb 18y ago

I like the look of your service. It always seem to me that when you start pushing these low price-points, the expense of dealing with customer support, DMCA takedowns, hacking complaints etc would dominate the cost of providing the hardware and bandwidth. I expect this is why Linode and Slicehost don't go below the $20 price point. Do you find this to be a problem - are you valuing your time at a very low value? Perhaps you avoid this to an extent, I expect your low profile and simple web design helps keep away problem customers. I really think it would be worth the investment in time to provide an auto-provisioning system and some more images for the major Linux distributions. Linode gets by booting a standard kernel for all distributions (with the option of pv-grub for your own), which might reduce the support cost and is probably more convenient for most customers. Also, are you running Xen 3.3 now? (the Kernel compatability page on your wiki indicates not, though I thought pv-grub was new to Xen 3.2 or 3.3).

lsc 18y ago
on time, yeah, I'm undervaluing my time some. But one of my skills is that I'm good at picking good people. I've been able to consistently get really good helpers for around $15/hr. Sometimes customers, sometimes friends, always people who either have little paid experience (I will take someone with no paid experience and lots of hobby experience over the other way around any day) or someone who has been underemployed for a while. (a few years after the .com crash I met a sysadmin who worked with me during the bubble years making sandwiches, and hired him for about a year before he got a real job) so if I can get $50-70/hr people (judging from what they get hired away from me for) for $15/hr, I can afford to undervalue time a bit. Key here is automating abuse, though. I will write more about the snort bits.
lsc 18y ago
I'm running 3.3.1 on all new servers. 3.1/3.0.3 (CentOS 5.2) on the old servers. I need to update the kernel compatability. I agree that auto-provisioning is going to be really important. right now, people usually wait a good 12 hours. my current plan is to set it up so that from the PVGRUB menu you can choose the net-install kernels of several different distros. that way, you set it up how you want. (of course, I'll need to setup local mirrors for all of them.)

by asb 18y ago

lsc 18y ago

on time, yeah, I'm undervaluing my time some. But one of my skills is that I'm good at picking good people. I've been able to consistently get really good helpers for around $15/hr. Sometimes customers, sometimes friends, always people who either have little paid experience (I will take someone with no paid experience and lots of hobby experience over the other way around any day) or someone who has been underemployed for a while. (a few years after the .com crash I met a sysadmin who worked with me during the bubble years making sandwiches, and hired him for about a year before he got a real job) so if I can get $50-70/hr people (judging from what they get hired away from me for) for $15/hr, I can afford to undervalue time a bit. Key here is automating abuse, though. I will write more about the snort bits.

lsc 18y ago

I'm running 3.3.1 on all new servers. 3.1/3.0.3 (CentOS 5.2) on the old servers. I need to update the kernel compatability. I agree that auto-provisioning is going to be really important. right now, people usually wait a good 12 hours. my current plan is to set it up so that from the PVGRUB menu you can choose the net-install kernels of several different distros. that way, you set it up how you want. (of course, I'll need to setup local mirrors for all of them.)