4 ms·

Second shameless plug on this page: if running your own linux kernel or BSD is really important to you, http://prgmr.com http://prgmr.com can do that and we hav

by sn 13y ago

Second shameless plug on this page: if running your own linux kernel or BSD is really important to you, http://prgmr.com http://prgmr.com can do that and we have out of band console access so you can debug why it's not working (I was having problems with that when I was checking whether some linux+xen bugs were also present on ec2.) At this time we only support xen paravirtualization(PV) though, which almost, but not quite, all major distributions have. Notably we can't run 64-bit freebsd right now because they only have HVM support. I'd like to change that but it needs more testing first. Here is a partial list of distributions supporting xen: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/DomU_Support_for_Xen http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/DomU_Support_for_Xen Really any linux distribution with a modern kernel can be made to support it though as support has been in mainline for a long time now.

zx2c4 13y ago
Actually, I really would love to use prgmr. The thing is, the price point is super far from Digital Ocean. Compare https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ to http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html . The difference is a bit of a joke. If you're able to provide competitive pricing, I'd be thrilled though.
- lsc 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm working on it. I announced upgrades to some of my customers several years back, and failed to deliver many of said upgrades, so I'm not going to give hard dates... but I recognize that competitive pricing is a prerequisite to the survival of the company, and I'm working towards that end. As is industry standard, I'm upgrading existing customers (e.g. they stay on the same price plan, but they get more resources) before I offer those new price plans to the general public. I have maybe... 1/3rd of my customers upgraded to the plan I promised several years back (that has more disk and less ram than the plan I am upgrading to now.) A big part of the problem is that I made a huge business mistake a year ago that cost me most of the money I would have used for upgrades. But, I've got a few options on the table, one of which is just consulting for a while; if I go with used hardware, I'm within $50K of having enough hardware to upgrade everyone to "competitive, but not great" pricing. - that's maybe 3 months of full-time contracting work. Completely reasonable. Of course, used hardware is a lot like 'technical debt' - pay me now or pay me later, but it might make sense, just to get the monkey off my back. (That, and dealing with hardware problems is part of my core skillset; I can probably eek more reliability out of used garbage than most companies can.) I'm talking 2-3x that for new hardware, which is a lot less realistic without some sort of loan or lease, something I should look into, but eh. I am thinking that used hardware until I'm competitive, then start buying new hardware once I start getting new customers on board might be the best way to go. The company is vastly easier to run when it's slowly growing rather than slowly shrinking.

by sn 13y ago

zx2c4 13y ago

Actually, I really would love to use prgmr. The thing is, the price point is super far from Digital Ocean. Compare https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ to http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html . The difference is a bit of a joke. If you're able to provide competitive pricing, I'd be thrilled though.

lsc 13y ago
Yeah, I'm working on it. I announced upgrades to some of my customers several years back, and failed to deliver many of said upgrades, so I'm not going to give hard dates... but I recognize that competitive pricing is a prerequisite to the survival of the company, and I'm working towards that end. As is industry standard, I'm upgrading existing customers (e.g. they stay on the same price plan, but they get more resources) before I offer those new price plans to the general public. I have maybe... 1/3rd of my customers upgraded to the plan I promised several years back (that has more disk and less ram than the plan I am upgrading to now.) A big part of the problem is that I made a huge business mistake a year ago that cost me most of the money I would have used for upgrades. But, I've got a few options on the table, one of which is just consulting for a while; if I go with used hardware, I'm within $50K of having enough hardware to upgrade everyone to "competitive, but not great" pricing. - that's maybe 3 months of full-time contracting work. Completely reasonable. Of course, used hardware is a lot like 'technical debt' - pay me now or pay me later, but it might make sense, just to get the monkey off my back. (That, and dealing with hardware problems is part of my core skillset; I can probably eek more reliability out of used garbage than most companies can.) I'm talking 2-3x that for new hardware, which is a lot less realistic without some sort of loan or lease, something I should look into, but eh. I am thinking that used hardware until I'm competitive, then start buying new hardware once I start getting new customers on board might be the best way to go. The company is vastly easier to run when it's slowly growing rather than slowly shrinking.