I've spent some time looking at it... the problem is mostly organizational. getting atoms in rackmount form factors usually adds considerably to the price (and often sticks you with a shitty power supply that means your tiny atom eats 50watts, making it uneconomical) but without the rackmount form factor, sticking a reasonable number of those in a rack quickly becomes a nightmare of a ratsnest.
I'm not saying it's impossible, it just is going to take some work to build a proper rack, and even then, you are probably going to want to take the 'if it fails, cut power and leave it' approach which doesn't do as well with the 'send me your server, I host it' model.
or, maybe they are just really careful stacking it? I don't know. There is a whole lot of demand for cheap co-lo on dedicated boxes.
I'd rather have a VPS on an extremely powerful box with redundant power, etc. It's like being mayor in a rich country instead of being a third world dictator (the dedicated low power box).
The problem is, there are no good standards on VPS provision of CPU time. Memory and disk space are easy to count, but guarantees of CPU are harder to come by and pin down.
actually, the opposite is true. it's really easy for me to give you a certain cpu 'weight' that guarantees a certain minimum and defines who is allowed to burst when it's time to burst; see the free chapter of my book for more info http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - but disk usage, well, disk usage is much harder to limit. I can use IONICE to kindof manage disk bandwidth, but really it's seeks that are the problem, and figuring out who is using more than their share of those is quite difficult.
(Disk space, as opposed to disk performance, sure, that's easy. But space, without performance, is so cheap as to hardly matter at all.)
It's easy for you to give me "weight" or certain percentages, but that's not as easy to decipher as a buyer as the memory, bandwidth, and disk space limits.
Amazon attempt to define things with their "Compute Units" as being equivalent to a single core 1.0GHz 2007 Opteron (or whatever it is), but most VPS providers don't give good demonstrations or examples of the sort of power you're guaranteed to get. Pure megahertz don't help, but even something like "roughly equivalent to a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo" would be a massive help to buyers.
(Even Amazon's compute units can be hard to figure out. How does a 1 GHz Opteron from 2007 compare to, say, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo? These are things buyers are thinking about and looking up endless Tom's Hardware charts for :-))
Hm. well, first, if you want to compare different cpu architectures, that's really hard, because the effectiveness varies massively by what sort of tasks are performed... so this is a task that requires so much fudge factor I'd call it more marketing than engineering, and ignore it.
Hm. But what If I mentioned the minimum and maximum? I can do that... so, for example, on a 256MiB VPS, you are probably on a server with 8 cores and 32GiB ram. (now, personally, I steal 1 core and 1GiB ram for the dom0, but you could squeeze that some, though I wouldn't recommend giving the dom0 less than one core.)
so, uh, you have a total of 124 domains, right? and 7 cores, so each domain gets, what, 5% or so of a core at minimum, and then 100% of the number of vcpus given at maximum.
now, if the provider was simply up front about how much ram they put on a box, the user can figure this all out for themselves (in a xen system /proc/cpuinfo will give you information about the real cpu)
But yes, this could be made much more clear. But even so, it'd probably not result in anything that is usefully comparable to a dedicated server, and really, the performance bottleneck we usually see is disk; if you use 2 or 4 spindles for those 124 accounts, well, disk sucks pretty badly for everyone. But this is the nature of small VPSs.
(so really, giving you specs about my disks might be better; or just making public graphs of CPU and Disk usage on servers. But I have a hell of a time convincing people that anything but the CPU matters, so that might be a waste of time.)
I guess the bigger point I was trying to make is that if you are running on a small-ram VPS, you almost certainly will hit performance problems due to disk I/O before you will hit performance problems due to CPU usage, so being able to compare CPU is of, ah, limited utility.
yeah, if you have some sheet metal skills and a Chinese factory, it's definitely an opportunity. Note, though, the vast majority of people buying in this space are the large corps who don't care as much about money as your brand, so, uh, good luck, I guess?
Honestly, I don't know enough about the costs involved with making chassis to know if there is much margin in the conventional server chassis business.
I can kind of imagine a system where you setup a "service" per pad. You might configure a database on an individual pad which is dedicated to that task only, or a mail account, or whatever you need. Then plug the pad into the rack slot for safe keeping and powering - actual communications are all wireless. I imagine this not unlike how "crystals" and other such things are used on a lot of scifi shows where they have to pull the crystal/pad thing and tap on them a bit to reprogram them...
Granted, it's probably easier to just have a remote tool (ssh, web interface, etc) to reconfigure services like we do now all in one place (and from any physical location), but there's something very compelling about being able to just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI, and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
but there's something very compelling about being able to
just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI,
and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
Yes, like disabling the cognitive circuits of an AI gone bad..
I feel like instead of opening up the bulkhead, pulling out crystals, and rearranging, future sci-fi spaceship repairs should happen via ipad juggling.
Um, you should probably mention it's a joke someplace other than on the "Sign up" page. The way it is now, the only people who find out it's a joke are the people stupid enough to want to use it and the people smart enough to know that no one would ever, ever run a service like that.
There's a whole big chunk of your customers that will fall into a middle range: they'll be smart enough to know that this is a terrible idea, but gullible enough to believe that you would try it. They certainly won't click on the "sign up" link, and therefore may not be let in on the joke. And you really don't want your smarter customers thinking that you're actually selling this service.
And then there are the people who will think, "Oh God, this is a terrible idea. My boss will make me use this. And he's probably already heard of it. Shit, I'd better go recommend it to him right away."
Really? This was worth 4 downvotes? I'm not being offensive or stupid or uptight, I'm just expressing my opinion. I know it's a joke. My point is that, when I first saw it, I didn't immediately recognize the joke. If I hadn't clicked the Sign Up page, I probably would have left the site without fully getting the joke. If a potential customer didn't get the joke, it might leave them with a bad opinion of the company. (edit: by company, I mean Mac Mini Colocation, not this fake sub-business)
I know how we love our nerdy humor, but all I'm saying is that companies have to be a little bit careful not to inadvertently let inside jokes hurt business.
I agree, but I can't imagine a moderation/karma system that humans would use differently. So either we can accept that it works that way or build something better. (I don't have any ideas for the latter, btw.)
I'm no apple fan, but how is Mac OS X (I'm assuming Server Edition) not up to the task of being a hosting platform? It's basically a LAMP stack minus the L. We're not talking about Facebook or Google levels of traffic here either.
There's nothing wrong with it as such; there's just no reason to bother with it. It's certainly better than Windows. Linux is just easier to strip down to a lean server configuration, and happens to be free.
The hardware is compact, cheap, reasonably powerful, efficient, and they are willing to colo it for a pittance. I would consider buying one of these, maxing out the ram, installing linux on one of these, and hosting it with them. It would pay for itself in less than year in terms of savings compared to a low end dedicated server, and have more firepower to boot.
I'm surprised that they are actually offering mac minis as a hosting service. Is there any reason to use one instead of a linux box running the same software on superior hardware for the same cost?
Cocoa + Quicktime provide very powerful APIs for video/audio processing. I don't know of any legally clean way to say, encode AAC files and provide them to your users without paying a royalty rate. You could just have the server run a script that passes it through Quicktime Pro.
"A linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X" is a contradiction. It runs either one or the other, I think the OP was noting that the same price can get you much better hardware if you are willing to ditch the Mac, which is true.
In this case though, they are offering to serve an OS X desktop environment, not just web sites, so there's one thing that can't be done (well) on Linux.
The scary bit is that my web server is still an old 600MHz machine, whereas my phone now has a 1 GHz CPU. There has to be a new way of of hosting in there.
Expect service interruption on new years eve, football games etc when they use them as a giant screen... Or maybe they could just use them as decoration in a night club, or as lighting on highways...
Oh and it is forbidden to send sexy emails on you iPad mail server, it could be used to remove the software from the app store. That means you will have to unregister from that viagra mailing list that keeps sending you offers.
I actually have a faulty iPhone 2G with a damaged LCD/digitiser. Fortunately it has SSH and VNC enabled, so I wonder what server I could make out of an old iPhone. Talk about stealth ;) 400MHz ARM, 128MB RAM - surely I can do something with this?
This gives a cool idea for side project. Port http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php to Android and use Nexus One as web server. I wonder if somebody has already done this.
Nokia S60 has been able to run Apache with mod_python for a few years[1] and I've used a jailbroken iPod Touch running apache and php to demo web apps previously.
