15 ms·

Instant Cloud – SSD Bare Metal Servers

171 points by edouardb 12y ago

mijoharas 12y ago
I just get what looks like a mac window div (judging by the class `terminal` I guess it's supposed to be a terminal to the server) saying 'the server refused the connection'.
- edouardb 12y ago
  Try to refresh?
  - mijoharas 12y ago
    Nope, happens every time. ubuntu chrome `net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED`.
drinchev 12y ago
Interesting, without any information for the user ( no credit card required ), it is really interesting how they prevent usage of this box as a hacking machine.
- carlesfe 12y ago
  That was my first thought. But then again, all my private servers have been hacked or under intense attacks by bots, so maybe it is my own brain which is now compromised. Anyway, I think this is a super cool and creative service, kudos to the author. Edit: Possible bug, I get nothing on Safari after 1 minute of waiting: http://i.imgur.com/pKoNPrV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pKoNPrV.jpg Edit 2: Ah, on trying again, I get an error that all servers are busy. Maybe we killed it again, HN :)
  - drinchev 12y ago
    You are right. I've been hacked a couple of times too. What I see the hacker is usually doing is make my machine a DDoS bot that acts on demand. Anyway with a service like this it would be far easier for anyone to make his hacking attempts more untraceable.
- mmahemoff 12y ago
  Techniques other sites use: * CAPTCHA * Require single-sign on via Facebook or Google+ * SMS token * IP throttle No, none of these are remotely watertight and no, not every developer is inclined to connect to their VPS via Facebook (or even has a FB account). Just saying, these are ways other sites try to add a bit of friction to what could otherwise be a runaway script spinning up thousands of servers. And without requiring a credit card.
- windexh8er 12y ago
  Most definitely. Just for fun I logged in, installed nmap, and proceeded to scan my home connection to see if they blocked anything (scanned from 1-65535). If anything this is convenient for getting a public IP quick and they don't restrict any ports. But wait... You can also use SSH as a dynamic SOCKS proxy quick for an ad-hoc VPN. I bounced SSH over to port 443, because why not. Fired up SSH on my local machine with a local dynamic proxy (ssh -D 4444 -p443 ubuntu@212.47.231.xxx), set my proxy on Firefox to localhost:4444 and voila. Free VPN through them for 30 minutes. Not uber fast (server is in France) but usable.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dd3344 12y ago
I put a fork bomb...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Kiro 12y ago
  You are going to jail.
- afandian 12y ago
  I think that's one of the arguments in favour of this approach. Your neighbours on AWS might notice. On individual real servers, they wouldn't.
  - jordanthoms 12y ago
    It's not such an issue these days though - all the non-toy AWS instances have dedicated cores, sometimes dedicated processors.
de_dave 12y ago
Seems like a really smart way to use spare capacity to market your services. Especially so when your services aren't quite the norm (i.e. ARM rather than x86)
dd3344 12y ago
Limiting Fork Bomb In Docker https://devlearnings.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/limiting-fork-bomb-in-docker/ https://devlearnings.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/limiting-fork-...
Filligree 12y ago
Your page breaks the back button, at least on a busy error. Not cool, guys.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- weavie 12y ago
  How so? You can still click the Get My Server button when the error message shows up at the top.
  - Filligree 11y ago
    Yes, but if you press 'back' you get a split-second view of the previous page before being redirected to the error page again. In general, don't use unconditional in-page redirects, whether they be javascript or meta refresh. If you want to do a redirect like that, you can have your server serve a 301 and the browser will collapse history appropriately, but if you must do it in JS then use history.replaceState.
mrmondo 12y ago
A truly great way to demo a product while also making use of unallocated resources. Unfortunately the latency to the servers from Australia is so poor and makes it practically unusable. Here is a trace from my 100Mbit fibre: samm ~ % mtr -n --report 212.47.250.196 Start: Fri Apr 10 19:36:45 2015 HOST: samm-mbp Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- 192.168.0.1 0.0% 10 1.7 2.0 1.6 4.7 0.7 2.|-- 150.101.212.44 0.0% 10 2.7 3.1 2.5 4.2 0.0 3.|-- 150.101.208.65 0.0% 10 5.3 6.9 2.7 38.1 11.0 4.|-- 150.101.33.28 0.0% 10 28.3 20.8 14.6 28.3 5.6 5.|-- 150.101.33.149 0.0% 10 170.6 170.4 170.1 170.8 0.0 6.|-- 62.115.33.97 0.0% 10 170.8 170.8 170.1 171.4 0.0 7.|-- 213.155.135.156 0.0% 10 240.9 240.7 240.2 241.2 0.0 8.|-- 80.91.251.103 0.0% 10 322.3 335.0 321.4 413.3 30.2 9.|-- 213.155.136.209 20.0% 10 319.7 329.8 317.9 355.6 14.4 10.|-- 62.115.40.86 0.0% 10 319.1 319.3 318.7 320.0 0.0 11.|-- 195.154.1.41 0.0% 10 332.5 333.0 332.3 333.9 0.0 12.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 13.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 14.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 15.|-- 212.47.250.196 0.0% 10 395.0 334.8 319.4 395.0 23.5 Edit: Spelling (Typo)
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  I recognise those Internode IPs at a glance. I used to work in the ADL6 data centre. I'm told that traceroute isn't a reliable way to determine end point latency. I can ping 212.47.250.196 and get a round-trip time of ~365ms. That the intermediate hops each take 170 - 333ms to response in the trouceroute is meaningless. Or so I thought? Maybe I'm not sure what you're getting at? (Edit: I mean iiNet. I mean TPG.)
  - mrmondo 12y ago
    That's mtr, not traceroute so it actively measures latency to each hop. You are correct in saying that the connection is from Internode (owned by iiNet). Here's an example from PIPE networks (TPG): root@dev-samm:~ # mtr -n --report 212.47.250.196 HOST: dev-samm Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 0.9 1.1 0.9 2.0 0.3 2.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.6 0.1 3.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 1.1 2.4 1.0 9.1 2.8 4.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 1.1 1.1 1.0 1.3 0.1 5.|-- 203.219.106.21 0.0% 10 2.5 2.8 1.1 4.7 1.1 6.|-- 202.7.171.25 0.0% 10 11.2 13.1 11.2 14.6 1.3 7.|-- 203.29.129.195 0.0% 10 11.1 12.9 11.1 14.7 1.2 8.|-- 64.86.21.53 0.0% 10 210.2 212.2 210.0 229.9 6.2 9.|-- 64.86.21.2 0.0% 10 373.1 373.2 372.9 373.9 0.3 10.|-- 66.198.127.1 0.0% 10 382.3 382.4 382.2 383.1 0.3 11.|-- 66.198.127.6 0.0% 10 382.1 382.0 381.8 382.1 0.1 12.|-- 66.198.70.21 0.0% 10 378.7 379.3 378.5 381.6 1.2 13.|-- 80.231.130.33 0.0% 10 380.6 381.0 380.6 383.0 0.8 14.|-- 80.231.130.86 20.0% 10 373.9 374.1 373.9 374.7 0.2 15.|-- 80.231.154.17 10.0% 10 371.3 371.5 371.3 371.9 0.2 16.|-- 80.231.153.58 10.0% 10 379.4 379.1 378.9 379.4 0.2 17.|-- 5.23.24.6 10.0% 10 354.1 354.4 353.9 355.6 0.5 18.|-- 195.154.1.39 10.0% 10 355.2 355.2 354.9 355.5 0.2 19.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 20.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 21.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 22.|-- 212.47.250.196 10.0% 10 354.5 354.3 354.0 354.9 0.3 A throughput test struggles to obtain 1Mbit: samm ~ % iperf -c 212.47.248.211 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 212.47.248.211, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 129 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 4] local 192.168.0.22 port 56958 connected with 212.47.248.211 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 4] 0.0-11.1 sec 1.38 MBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec
prattbhatt 12y ago
"Oops! All C1 servers are busy, please retry in few minutes :)"
- keyme 12y ago
  And the back button is broken as a result.
growt 12y ago
I made a habit out of measuring the disk performance of cloud servers, so here it is: ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.0101 s, 97.5 MB/s ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nbd0 /dev/nbd0: Timing cached reads: 2180 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1090.44 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.02 seconds = 88.85 MB/sec
- venti 12y ago
  How does that compare to other cloud servers?
  - growt 12y ago
    You can read my comment history for exact numbers. But for SSD storage it's not very good. Better than amazon EC2 though (t2 instance).
    - edouardb 12y ago
      You should have a look to the IOPS instead bandwidth root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randwrite test: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16 fio-2.1.11 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [w(1)] [100.0% done] [0KB/18714KB/0KB /s] [0/4678/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s] root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randread test: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16 fio-2.1.11 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r(1)] [100.0% done] [22307KB/0KB/0KB /s] [5576/0/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s]
ponytech 12y ago
Are there any restrictions on what you can do? Input/output ports blocked?
curiously 12y ago
this is great. I just wish digitalocean would deploy faster. it says 60 seconds but more than often it takes several minutes to load a snapshot or destroying can take ages (since you are still billed for idle and off servers).
Retr0spectrum 12y ago
My session lasted for 35 minutes - The web app closed after 30 but my VNC connection continued, presumably because someone else took my slot.
Lennu 12y ago
Tried it for 30mins. I installed apache2 and made a quick mirror of my personal homepage with wget. After the 30min session the window closed and it told me that session expired. Although the actual server was still up at the ip. About 5 minutes later apache shut down, so I guess the server was destroyed. This is great for experimenting things. You could quickly for example test "sudo rm -rf" at the root and see what it does. Nice one!
- volent 12y ago
  You can already do `docker run -ti ubuntu bash` and not be limited to 30 minutes test :)
  - Lennu 12y ago
    Sure, but you need larger platform than just a browser to do that. I mean, for example total beginners may find this truly helpful.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Sure, but you need larger platform than just a browser to do that. Do you? JSLinux (by Fabrice Bellard) disagrees :) http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/
chetanahuja 12y ago
Back at the office, we were recently talking about the possibility of really cheap (in terms of power requirement) cloud servers which are equivalent of raspberryPi's with soldered on flash cards around the 32-64gig range. I'd bet you can pack a shitload of these in a 1U box and still have power and cooling to spare. The only expensive part might be budgeting for all those ethernet ports on the switch and uplink capacity (for bandwidth intensive servers). One of the engineers tried running our server stack on a raspberry for a laugh.. I was gobsmacked to hear that the whole thing just worked (it's a custom networking protocol stack running in userspace) if just a bit slower than usual. I can imagine making use of loads of ultra-cheap servers distributed all around the world... IF the networking issue can be solved. Perhaps the time is right for a more compact and cheaper wired networking solution... maybe limit the bandwidth to 1Gbps but make it ultra compact with much cheaper electronics. Sigh... a man can dream.
- butwhy 12y ago
  There are companies out there that do raspberry pi colocation. I guess it's just a novelty. Might as well go virtual.
- static_noise 12y ago
  Small systems are good for realtime applications. Then the resources for an application have to be ready all the time. In terms of space/power/reliability/scalability large systems win. Sure a single raspberry doesn't draw much power. But it doesn't provide much computing power either. Throw in a few hundred of those systems and you feel the heat. Still the computing power is comparable to a single rack server. You want to use a RAID6 on the raspberry, sure, can be done but throw in 4 times the number storage devices. Compare that to the rack server with 16 SSDs configured as RAID6 where the data is shared by hundreds of virtual machines. If you compare the "energy per bit" or "energy per operation" the high-powered server CPUs win versus most anything out there. So I'd say: * If you can justify a real server, do use one instead of dozens of "simple machines". * If you can use the cloud do it instead of providing your own hardware. * Exceptions may apply where security or reliability is concerned. (You wouldn't run your heart monitor in the cloud when a small dedicated system does the job.)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Retr0spectrum 12y ago
My password had an "0" in it - I had to guess whether it was a number or a letter.
- icebraining 12y ago
  You should get a better font.
  - krat0sprakhar 12y ago
    The password is in a captcha. Better font wouldn't have helped.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Fair enough. They should get a better font :)
- Omie6541 12y ago
  definitely, I am brute forcing since it has two sticks and I don't know if they are l/I/1 or l
  - astrodust 12y ago
    Note to developers, exclude similar letters from your alphabet when generating passwords or spell them out phonetically.
- gusmd 12y ago
  The same happened to me. Bad font choice, I guess. Tried several times until realized that was the problem.
- y-satellite 12y ago
  My password is illegible. It has a 0, I think, and the letter after it could be an I, L, or maybe a 1, but nothing I've tried so far works. Definitely not ideal if I've wasted 5 minutes of my server's runtime just guessing the password. Edit: Got it finally, 7 minutes in - a line right under the mystery letter made it look like an 'L' when it was actually an 'I'.
nnq 12y ago
Mostly of off-topic, but I have to ask: what's the state of Go compilers for ARM nowadays? Are they generating optimized code on par with x86 ones?
mrsirduke 12y ago
FWIW: We recently talked about their servers, hardware and such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459
jfoster 12y ago
I'm very impressed that it lives up to the promise of getting it "with a click."
ck2 12y ago
If ovh ever puts ssd on their kimsufi, they will blow all the micro-servers out of the water http://www.kimsufi.com/ca/en/index.xml http://www.kimsufi.com/ca/en/index.xml Meanwhile for $42 you can get dedicated SSD http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ The only problem with all of these is no ECC
- pki 12y ago
  and i guess a $60 setup fee
- martius 12y ago
  Kimsufi offers servers with SSDs in France: KS-2 SSD: Atom™ N2800, 4GB of Ram, 40GB SSD, 100 Mbps for 9,99€/month. http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/
jradix 12y ago
Here is the message I have : "All C1 servers are busy, please retry in few minutes :)"
- waitingkuo 12y ago
  got the same message..
Maro 12y ago
No offense, but "30 minutes... with a click" is pretty standard in the age of AWS. It's not a good headline anymore :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
taksintik 12y ago
The tag line "Get your 30 minutes free server" is extremely confusing. Do you mean to say "Get a free server for 30 minutes"?
- arthurfm 12y ago
  I'm confused too, since it could also mean "Get a free server in 30 minutes"?
- mdellabitta 12y ago
  Or it could be "Get your server. 30 minutes are free. If you leave it up, the rest of your usage is not."
kamilafsar 12y ago
Apparently they also have Object storage which seems to be way cheaper than AWS Glacier. €0.02 GB/month, with unlimited requests and transfer https://www.scaleway.com/pricing https://www.scaleway.com/pricing
vorotato 12y ago
Isn't the point of "Cloud" computing, high availability, high uptime? If there's a hardware failure on your "cloud machine" it just fails, and there's no recovery. This sounds like just regular hosting and not cloud hosting, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding how this is set up.
- Gracana 12y ago
  Individual nodes can be unreliable (and therefore very cheap), availability is maintained by distributing load to on-line nodes. That's my understanding of it, anyway.
  - contingencies 12y ago
    The technique is known as 'high availability' (HA) or 'fail over' clustering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster 'Cloud' computing is simply another term meaning "using someone else's infrastructure as a service" (IaaS), which is essentially a restatement of the centralized computing paradigm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing The gaping problems with such paradigms (chiefly survivability/evolvability over time) were well highlighted for large scale, general systems by the internet itself, RFC3439 (2002) puts it thus: Upgrade cost of network complexity: The Internet has smart edges ... and a simple core. Adding an new Internet service is just a matter of distributing an application ... Compare this to voice, where one has to upgrade the entire core. My take: cloud computing is about to get smart edges; cloud providers are about to be commodified; and we are about to effect an appropriately flexible layer of additional abstraction to the entire field of computing that will further push us towards a position in which we treat computation as any other service and networked communication itself as a means of economic exchange.
breakingcups 12y ago
I just get a timeout in the terminal-like window. SSH-ing to it also doesn't work.

171 points by edouardb 12y ago

I just get what looks like a mac window div (judging by the class `terminal` I guess it's supposed to be a terminal to the server) saying 'the server refused the connection'.

edouardb 12y ago
Try to refresh?
- mijoharas 12y ago
  Nope, happens every time. ubuntu chrome `net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED`.

drinchev 12y ago

Interesting, without any information for the user ( no credit card required ), it is really interesting how they prevent usage of this box as a hacking machine.

carlesfe 12y ago
That was my first thought. But then again, all my private servers have been hacked or under intense attacks by bots, so maybe it is my own brain which is now compromised. Anyway, I think this is a super cool and creative service, kudos to the author. Edit: Possible bug, I get nothing on Safari after 1 minute of waiting: http://i.imgur.com/pKoNPrV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pKoNPrV.jpg Edit 2: Ah, on trying again, I get an error that all servers are busy. Maybe we killed it again, HN :)
- drinchev 12y ago
  You are right. I've been hacked a couple of times too. What I see the hacker is usually doing is make my machine a DDoS bot that acts on demand. Anyway with a service like this it would be far easier for anyone to make his hacking attempts more untraceable.
mmahemoff 12y ago
Techniques other sites use: * CAPTCHA * Require single-sign on via Facebook or Google+ * SMS token * IP throttle No, none of these are remotely watertight and no, not every developer is inclined to connect to their VPS via Facebook (or even has a FB account). Just saying, these are ways other sites try to add a bit of friction to what could otherwise be a runaway script spinning up thousands of servers. And without requiring a credit card.
windexh8er 12y ago
Most definitely. Just for fun I logged in, installed nmap, and proceeded to scan my home connection to see if they blocked anything (scanned from 1-65535). If anything this is convenient for getting a public IP quick and they don't restrict any ports. But wait... You can also use SSH as a dynamic SOCKS proxy quick for an ad-hoc VPN. I bounced SSH over to port 443, because why not. Fired up SSH on my local machine with a local dynamic proxy (ssh -D 4444 -p443 ubuntu@212.47.231.xxx), set my proxy on Firefox to localhost:4444 and voila. Free VPN through them for 30 minutes. Not uber fast (server is in France) but usable.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dd3344 12y ago

I put a fork bomb...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Kiro 12y ago
You are going to jail.
afandian 12y ago
I think that's one of the arguments in favour of this approach. Your neighbours on AWS might notice. On individual real servers, they wouldn't.
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  It's not such an issue these days though - all the non-toy AWS instances have dedicated cores, sometimes dedicated processors.

de_dave 12y ago

Seems like a really smart way to use spare capacity to market your services. Especially so when your services aren't quite the norm (i.e. ARM rather than x86)

dd3344 12y ago

Limiting Fork Bomb In Docker https://devlearnings.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/limiting-fork-bomb-in-docker/ https://devlearnings.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/limiting-fork-...

Filligree 12y ago

Your page breaks the back button, at least on a busy error. Not cool, guys.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
weavie 12y ago
How so? You can still click the Get My Server button when the error message shows up at the top.
- Filligree 11y ago
  Yes, but if you press 'back' you get a split-second view of the previous page before being redirected to the error page again. In general, don't use unconditional in-page redirects, whether they be javascript or meta refresh. If you want to do a redirect like that, you can have your server serve a 301 and the browser will collapse history appropriately, but if you must do it in JS then use history.replaceState.

mrmondo 12y ago

A truly great way to demo a product while also making use of unallocated resources. Unfortunately the latency to the servers from Australia is so poor and makes it practically unusable. Here is a trace from my 100Mbit fibre: samm ~ % mtr -n --report 212.47.250.196 Start: Fri Apr 10 19:36:45 2015 HOST: samm-mbp Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- 192.168.0.1 0.0% 10 1.7 2.0 1.6 4.7 0.7 2.|-- 150.101.212.44 0.0% 10 2.7 3.1 2.5 4.2 0.0 3.|-- 150.101.208.65 0.0% 10 5.3 6.9 2.7 38.1 11.0 4.|-- 150.101.33.28 0.0% 10 28.3 20.8 14.6 28.3 5.6 5.|-- 150.101.33.149 0.0% 10 170.6 170.4 170.1 170.8 0.0 6.|-- 62.115.33.97 0.0% 10 170.8 170.8 170.1 171.4 0.0 7.|-- 213.155.135.156 0.0% 10 240.9 240.7 240.2 241.2 0.0 8.|-- 80.91.251.103 0.0% 10 322.3 335.0 321.4 413.3 30.2 9.|-- 213.155.136.209 20.0% 10 319.7 329.8 317.9 355.6 14.4 10.|-- 62.115.40.86 0.0% 10 319.1 319.3 318.7 320.0 0.0 11.|-- 195.154.1.41 0.0% 10 332.5 333.0 332.3 333.9 0.0 12.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 13.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 14.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 15.|-- 212.47.250.196 0.0% 10 395.0 334.8 319.4 395.0 23.5 Edit: Spelling (Typo)

TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
I recognise those Internode IPs at a glance. I used to work in the ADL6 data centre. I'm told that traceroute isn't a reliable way to determine end point latency. I can ping 212.47.250.196 and get a round-trip time of ~365ms. That the intermediate hops each take 170 - 333ms to response in the trouceroute is meaningless. Or so I thought? Maybe I'm not sure what you're getting at? (Edit: I mean iiNet. I mean TPG.)
- mrmondo 12y ago
  That's mtr, not traceroute so it actively measures latency to each hop. You are correct in saying that the connection is from Internode (owned by iiNet). Here's an example from PIPE networks (TPG): root@dev-samm:~ # mtr -n --report 212.47.250.196 HOST: dev-samm Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 0.9 1.1 0.9 2.0 0.3 2.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.6 0.1 3.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 1.1 2.4 1.0 9.1 2.8 4.|-- <removed> 0.0% 10 1.1 1.1 1.0 1.3 0.1 5.|-- 203.219.106.21 0.0% 10 2.5 2.8 1.1 4.7 1.1 6.|-- 202.7.171.25 0.0% 10 11.2 13.1 11.2 14.6 1.3 7.|-- 203.29.129.195 0.0% 10 11.1 12.9 11.1 14.7 1.2 8.|-- 64.86.21.53 0.0% 10 210.2 212.2 210.0 229.9 6.2 9.|-- 64.86.21.2 0.0% 10 373.1 373.2 372.9 373.9 0.3 10.|-- 66.198.127.1 0.0% 10 382.3 382.4 382.2 383.1 0.3 11.|-- 66.198.127.6 0.0% 10 382.1 382.0 381.8 382.1 0.1 12.|-- 66.198.70.21 0.0% 10 378.7 379.3 378.5 381.6 1.2 13.|-- 80.231.130.33 0.0% 10 380.6 381.0 380.6 383.0 0.8 14.|-- 80.231.130.86 20.0% 10 373.9 374.1 373.9 374.7 0.2 15.|-- 80.231.154.17 10.0% 10 371.3 371.5 371.3 371.9 0.2 16.|-- 80.231.153.58 10.0% 10 379.4 379.1 378.9 379.4 0.2 17.|-- 5.23.24.6 10.0% 10 354.1 354.4 353.9 355.6 0.5 18.|-- 195.154.1.39 10.0% 10 355.2 355.2 354.9 355.5 0.2 19.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 20.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 21.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 22.|-- 212.47.250.196 10.0% 10 354.5 354.3 354.0 354.9 0.3 A throughput test struggles to obtain 1Mbit: samm ~ % iperf -c 212.47.248.211 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 212.47.248.211, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 129 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 4] local 192.168.0.22 port 56958 connected with 212.47.248.211 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 4] 0.0-11.1 sec 1.38 MBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec

prattbhatt 12y ago

"Oops! All C1 servers are busy, please retry in few minutes :)"

keyme 12y ago
And the back button is broken as a result.

growt 12y ago

I made a habit out of measuring the disk performance of cloud servers, so here it is: ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.0101 s, 97.5 MB/s ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nbd0 /dev/nbd0: Timing cached reads: 2180 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1090.44 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.02 seconds = 88.85 MB/sec

venti 12y ago
How does that compare to other cloud servers?
- growt 12y ago
  You can read my comment history for exact numbers. But for SSD storage it's not very good. Better than amazon EC2 though (t2 instance).
  - edouardb 12y ago
    You should have a look to the IOPS instead bandwidth root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randwrite test: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16 fio-2.1.11 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [w(1)] [100.0% done] [0KB/18714KB/0KB /s] [0/4678/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s] root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randread test: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16 fio-2.1.11 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r(1)] [100.0% done] [22307KB/0KB/0KB /s] [5576/0/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s]

ponytech 12y ago

Are there any restrictions on what you can do? Input/output ports blocked?

curiously 12y ago

this is great. I just wish digitalocean would deploy faster. it says 60 seconds but more than often it takes several minutes to load a snapshot or destroying can take ages (since you are still billed for idle and off servers).

Retr0spectrum 12y ago

My session lasted for 35 minutes - The web app closed after 30 but my VNC connection continued, presumably because someone else took my slot.

Lennu 12y ago

Tried it for 30mins. I installed apache2 and made a quick mirror of my personal homepage with wget. After the 30min session the window closed and it told me that session expired. Although the actual server was still up at the ip. About 5 minutes later apache shut down, so I guess the server was destroyed. This is great for experimenting things. You could quickly for example test "sudo rm -rf" at the root and see what it does. Nice one!

volent 12y ago
You can already do `docker run -ti ubuntu bash` and not be limited to 30 minutes test :)
- Lennu 12y ago
  Sure, but you need larger platform than just a browser to do that. I mean, for example total beginners may find this truly helpful.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Sure, but you need larger platform than just a browser to do that. Do you? JSLinux (by Fabrice Bellard) disagrees :) http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/

chetanahuja 12y ago

Back at the office, we were recently talking about the possibility of really cheap (in terms of power requirement) cloud servers which are equivalent of raspberryPi's with soldered on flash cards around the 32-64gig range. I'd bet you can pack a shitload of these in a 1U box and still have power and cooling to spare. The only expensive part might be budgeting for all those ethernet ports on the switch and uplink capacity (for bandwidth intensive servers). One of the engineers tried running our server stack on a raspberry for a laugh.. I was gobsmacked to hear that the whole thing just worked (it's a custom networking protocol stack running in userspace) if just a bit slower than usual. I can imagine making use of loads of ultra-cheap servers distributed all around the world... IF the networking issue can be solved. Perhaps the time is right for a more compact and cheaper wired networking solution... maybe limit the bandwidth to 1Gbps but make it ultra compact with much cheaper electronics. Sigh... a man can dream.

butwhy 12y ago
There are companies out there that do raspberry pi colocation. I guess it's just a novelty. Might as well go virtual.
static_noise 12y ago
Small systems are good for realtime applications. Then the resources for an application have to be ready all the time. In terms of space/power/reliability/scalability large systems win. Sure a single raspberry doesn't draw much power. But it doesn't provide much computing power either. Throw in a few hundred of those systems and you feel the heat. Still the computing power is comparable to a single rack server. You want to use a RAID6 on the raspberry, sure, can be done but throw in 4 times the number storage devices. Compare that to the rack server with 16 SSDs configured as RAID6 where the data is shared by hundreds of virtual machines. If you compare the "energy per bit" or "energy per operation" the high-powered server CPUs win versus most anything out there. So I'd say: * If you can justify a real server, do use one instead of dozens of "simple machines". * If you can use the cloud do it instead of providing your own hardware. * Exceptions may apply where security or reliability is concerned. (You wouldn't run your heart monitor in the cloud when a small dedicated system does the job.)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Retr0spectrum 12y ago

My password had an "0" in it - I had to guess whether it was a number or a letter.

icebraining 12y ago
You should get a better font.
- krat0sprakhar 12y ago
  The password is in a captcha. Better font wouldn't have helped.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Fair enough. They should get a better font :)
Omie6541 12y ago
definitely, I am brute forcing since it has two sticks and I don't know if they are l/I/1 or l
- astrodust 12y ago
  Note to developers, exclude similar letters from your alphabet when generating passwords or spell them out phonetically.
gusmd 12y ago
The same happened to me. Bad font choice, I guess. Tried several times until realized that was the problem.
y-satellite 12y ago
My password is illegible. It has a 0, I think, and the letter after it could be an I, L, or maybe a 1, but nothing I've tried so far works. Definitely not ideal if I've wasted 5 minutes of my server's runtime just guessing the password. Edit: Got it finally, 7 minutes in - a line right under the mystery letter made it look like an 'L' when it was actually an 'I'.

nnq 12y ago

Mostly of off-topic, but I have to ask: what's the state of Go compilers for ARM nowadays? Are they generating optimized code on par with x86 ones?

mrsirduke 12y ago

FWIW: We recently talked about their servers, hardware and such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459

jfoster 12y ago

I'm very impressed that it lives up to the promise of getting it "with a click."

ck2 12y ago

If ovh ever puts ssd on their kimsufi, they will blow all the micro-servers out of the water http://www.kimsufi.com/ca/en/index.xml http://www.kimsufi.com/ca/en/index.xml Meanwhile for $42 you can get dedicated SSD http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ The only problem with all of these is no ECC

pki 12y ago
and i guess a $60 setup fee
martius 12y ago
Kimsufi offers servers with SSDs in France: KS-2 SSD: Atom™ N2800, 4GB of Ram, 40GB SSD, 100 Mbps for 9,99€/month. http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/

jradix 12y ago

Here is the message I have : "All C1 servers are busy, please retry in few minutes :)"

waitingkuo 12y ago
got the same message..

Maro 12y ago

No offense, but "30 minutes... with a click" is pretty standard in the age of AWS. It's not a good headline anymore :)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

taksintik 12y ago

The tag line "Get your 30 minutes free server" is extremely confusing. Do you mean to say "Get a free server for 30 minutes"?

arthurfm 12y ago
I'm confused too, since it could also mean "Get a free server in 30 minutes"?
mdellabitta 12y ago
Or it could be "Get your server. 30 minutes are free. If you leave it up, the rest of your usage is not."

kamilafsar 12y ago

Apparently they also have Object storage which seems to be way cheaper than AWS Glacier. €0.02 GB/month, with unlimited requests and transfer https://www.scaleway.com/pricing https://www.scaleway.com/pricing

vorotato 12y ago

Isn't the point of "Cloud" computing, high availability, high uptime? If there's a hardware failure on your "cloud machine" it just fails, and there's no recovery. This sounds like just regular hosting and not cloud hosting, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding how this is set up.

Gracana 12y ago
Individual nodes can be unreliable (and therefore very cheap), availability is maintained by distributing load to on-line nodes. That's my understanding of it, anyway.
- contingencies 12y ago
  The technique is known as 'high availability' (HA) or 'fail over' clustering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster 'Cloud' computing is simply another term meaning "using someone else's infrastructure as a service" (IaaS), which is essentially a restatement of the centralized computing paradigm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing The gaping problems with such paradigms (chiefly survivability/evolvability over time) were well highlighted for large scale, general systems by the internet itself, RFC3439 (2002) puts it thus: Upgrade cost of network complexity: The Internet has smart edges ... and a simple core. Adding an new Internet service is just a matter of distributing an application ... Compare this to voice, where one has to upgrade the entire core. My take: cloud computing is about to get smart edges; cloud providers are about to be commodified; and we are about to effect an appropriately flexible layer of additional abstraction to the entire field of computing that will further push us towards a position in which we treat computation as any other service and networked communication itself as a means of economic exchange.

breakingcups 12y ago

I just get a timeout in the terminal-like window. SSH-ing to it also doesn't work.