I have a prgmr instance and don't have any issues with it. It is a great box to play around with and the cheapest you can possibly get. You kinda have to know what you are doing but they nailed their target audience.
I've been running a fair amount of infrastructure with them for a while now and I can't possibly recommend them highly enough. I remember there was a time a couple years ago when there was a queue to get a box with Luke. You have to know what you're doing and there are no training wheels attached, but they're awesome and has always been hugely helpful. I figured I'd just start out on them (being cheap) and eventually move off: but networking's been rock solid, and over the past couple years I've been able to work with them to get custom boxes for specific needs. Once I got a SMART condition warning on a dedicated box and they were on it basically instantly.
They know how to manage their network, they're colo'd in multiple top-tier DCs, and the prices are just impossible to beat. I'm able to run infrastructure comprising ~500GB RAM for literally 3% of the cost of EC2, with hugely better disk io to boot.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from using prgmr, but EC2's reserved instance pricing makes it a lot more competitive. You can get the 3.75GB medium instance for $55/mo (1-year commitment including the up-front fee as a monthly cost) which compares nicely against prgmr's $68/mo 4GB instance ($14.67/GB vs $17/GB).
In fact, I'm wondering how you came about your "I'm able to run infrastructure comprising ~500GB RAM for literally 3% of the cost of EC2" calculation at all. Even without reserved instances, Amazon has their 3.75GB instance available for $115/mo (or $30.67/GB). At $17/GB, prgmr is more than half the price (~55%). That is a savings, but certainly nowhere near 3% of the cost.
IIRC, prgmr charges $4 plus $1 per 64MB of RAM. Assuming that they'd sell you a 500GB instance, that would be $8,004/mo. Since you'd probably have to spread it over more machines, it would likely be a bit higher. Anyway, even without dipping into reserve pricing (using the quad XL high-mem instances), you can get 500GB of RAM for $9,000-$10,000. Again, prgmr is a bit of a savings, but in the 10-20% range.
And here's the big point. If you're using AWS for on-demand instances in that range, you're likely to want the hourly billing and rely on the fact that Amazon has much greater scale. Prgmr can have a queue for more capacity so clearly they're not accommodating someone like Netflix who needs 1,000+ boxes to do encoding for a week when a new platform comes out and then shuts them down until a new platform comes out. If you're running a more predictable infrastructure (which it has to be to an extent to go with a smaller player), then you can use Amazon's reserved instances. Amazon's reserved instances beat prgmr on price.
Now, I didn't calculate in storage or bandwidth into Amazon's costs, but even with those additional charges, I don't see how you came upon prgmr being 3% of the cost of EC2.
For my own personal server, I have an EC2 Micro instance with 1-year heavy utilization. That means that I pay $8.77/mo for 613MB RAM - a discount against prgmr's $12. Now, I have to add storage to that - the 12GB that prgmr offers would cost an additional $1.20 - and bandwidth, but I don't break $12 for my usage. If I wanted to commit to three years, the cost would be even less - $6.38/mo.
None of this is to take anything away from Luke - he's literally written "The Book of Xen". That said, Amazon's pricing isn't much more expensive. Their reserved instances can be a good bit cheaper. Amazon also has the scale to accommodate you more easily. Prgmr can't keep thousands of spare boxes on hand and they (as you noted) have had queues for instances. Amazon is by no means the be-all and end-all of Xen instances, but it's pricing isn't that bad (and in fact can be better) and there are advantages to using a company with Amazon's scale.
The comment about SMART errors would indicate they are a dedicated server customer. I don't have many of those, so it's funny I don't remember (and I probably owe them a price cut; I have new and dramatically cheaper dedicated servers now[1] and I try to give old customers first hack at price cuts.) - but the ram/money ratio is a bit more favourable to the customer on dedicated servers (of course, you have to buy a whole lot more.)
It's interesting that the amazon instances are that cheap, though; I hadn't done that math for a while; It does look like I need to improve my ram/dollar ratio; I need to stay cheaper than ec2 for the reasons you stated. (also, ec2 has an awesome reputation and can get corporate customers... so they are going to price themselves rather higher than the cost of production for that reason alone. I should be cheaper than they are.)
Oh yeah, I also do co-location[2] and if you want to talk about saving money? if you need north of 32GiB ram, you can save a huge amount of money over a year by buying hardware and co-locating it. Actually, the hardware cost of a dedicated server? as a rule of thumb, it's less than what you charge the customer for 4 months rent. (Of course, you have to pay for power out of that, so I don't pay off the server in four months, but you get the idea. It's not particularly low-margin.)
I have a couple of the xen instances, but the vast majority of my capacity is on colo'd machines and a managed dedicated box. My total hosting bill is in the $300-$400 range. Admittedly I haven't looked closely at EC2 reserved pricing (I used the on-demand prices to get to the back of the envelope 3% number), but I still don't think it would be close. And this is month-to-month.
they accomplish the same goal; If you are taking the flexibility out of IAAS (please don't say "cloud") through reserved instances, the biggest difference is that you need someone on call to physically handle hardware if you co-lo.
I mean, I agree that they are very different products, but IAAS and a vps are different products, too. (with a VPS, the customer expects me to preserve the data on disk. With IAAS, the customer expects to be able to spin up new nodes on demand.) If anything, co-lo is much more like VPS or dedicated servers, in that you generally use raid and expect the RAID to be fairly reliable.
But if you are running a webapp, just like most webapps that could run on a VPS can run on IAAS and vis-a-vis, most webapps that can run on a dedicated server or IAAS can also run on co-located hardware you run.
The cost difference is, well, dramatic. Of course, the stress difference, if you are notified that you made the front page of hacker news Thursday evening and have to come up with more servers same day on a friday, and your application can't run on IAAS? The stress difference can also be considerable. so I'm not saying colo is always the answer; I'm just saying that if you are looking at hosting options for your webapp, colo deserves a look.
Of course, if you do co-lo, don't forget redundancy. Good hardware you own with RAID is going to be significantly more reliable than a single IAAS instance, all things being equal, but you don't run something on IAAS without redundancy, and if downtime is expensive, you won't run it on hardware without redundancy. For some applications, it's enough to just have spares and carry a pager (of course, that's also a pain in the ass. I better be saving a lot of money to carry a pager) and for other applications? It's okay to just wait until Monday and get the people you bought the computer from to fix it. In those cases, I'd practice spinning up your app on IAAS so you have something, just in case.
It's cheap for Xen, but in the much more common case of not needing to swap out your own kernel, there are a huge variety of cheap FreeBSD and Linux OpenVZ VPSes available for around 15USD/year with decent enough storage and IPv6 (see lowendstock.com, no affiliation).. or did you mean, cheap at the high end?
I hadn't heard of lowendstock.com. At first, I thought you had misspelt lowendbox.com (I've been listed once or twice, but other than that, no affiliation, and they didn't charge me for the listing, which is a good sign. Some sites require a cut to refer customers to providers; others require a flat fee; Me, I think this introduces a unhappy bias.)
Personally, I feel that a megabyte of ram in OpenVZ and a megabyte of ram in Xen are not directly comparable. (a megabyte in KVM and a megabyte in Xen are, I believe.) but yes, for some uses, OpenVZ works quite well, and it can be had for very little money.
I must say that for no-frills hosting, prgmr has really done right by me. I was broke and didn't pay for a few months and they were able to set my vps right back up once i had cash, despite the fact i was no longer using the same credit card or email address; they really went the extra mile in terms of taking time to check who i was and once my identity was established, helping me out.
I had a strange experience with these guys. I signed up and didn't get anything back. When I sent an e-mail two days later telling them to just forget it and cancel my account, they told me they were busy and didn't get around to setting up my VPS. Just weird...
Iirc, it's basically two people, the owner and an employee, and the owner does most things himself, from assembling servers to setting up accounts. Provisioning in particular he admits is currently rather suboptimal. I've had a good experience overall, though.
Yup. big problems in that department. Most things are semi-automated. I do have it setup so that once a user is setup, they can boot into a rescue image, change the kernel, access the serial console, etc... without my help, though.
But, it is a pretty big problem if someone needs a new instance right away, or if someone needs an upgrade right away, and for system problems that don't hit my pager (though we're working on improving that one.)
Billing is not automated. I'm months overdue and I just got a personal email asking if I still wanted my account. It doesn't matter. Prgmr is hands down the best hobby VPS provider (I can't comment for other scenarios).
Hmm, there seem to be a number of syntax errors highlighted when viewing the source code. If I was inviting people to view the source, I would probably want it to be clean.
The only actual error in there is the 'anchor' attribute (should be 'name'), the rest is just warnings for self-closing <br/> tags and unencoded ampersands. Not that bad, considering it's still using an HTML 4 doctype.
5 gigs on a 10G port. $5000 one time setup for the 10G port. $0.65/mbps on the commit, $1.15/mbps on overage. That's my cost, so i guess I'm losing a tiny bit on my time, setup fees and equipment, but right now, I just want someone to split some of the monthlies with me. I really, really want that 10G port, though, as at those overages, I can oversubscribe my own commit, and if I oversubscribe too aggressively or one of my customers grows unexpectedly, just paying the overages won't be that big of a deal.
Bandwidth gets cheaper all the time, and I've been pestering them forever. I actually haven't inked that deal, and probably won't if nobody takes me up on it; I really only need about a gigabit, and I can get $1/Mbps bandwidth all day long. I have to decide by Tuesday or so. So far? nobody else seems interested, which tells me this isn't all that unusual of a deal. One guy I asked went off and is now getting his own line from Cogent.
Oh, also note, Cogent just wants the 5g commit from me. If I'm willing to pay the setup fees $2500 for a 1g port, $5000 for a 10G port) they will let me have 1G ports at that price; I just need a lot of 'em.
Turns out, though, selling bandwidth is harder than I thought.
So if I understand that correctly, the reason other providers seem to provide a lot more bandwidth per subscriber dollar (ex. my Linode has 200G transfer/month at $19.95) is most of their customers probably don't push the pipe into an overage so they're basically overselling the bandwidth?
p.s. I just noticed your $20 plan provides double the RAM and 4gb more disk than my Linode... i'll do a little more research but I might just switch since I don't get anywhere near that bandwidth cap.
if you notice, my current xen setups have a pathetic bandwidth cap right now... which will change shortly, (after some network upgrades on my part. I don't want to say you can use a lot more bandwidth until you can do so without causing problems.) but I certainly have no room to criticise anyone else for having low bandwidth allocations.
but in a very real sense? for customers doing non-pornographic and legal things? bandwidth is in a real sense close to free, and most customers don't need much. Look for 'penny a gigabyte' overage charges from more competitive hosts soon, and, well, 'unlimited' these days often closer to the real thing than it used to be.
eg:
= update on rehnquist
well, it's down again, so I don't know what the heck is going on. I'm going to swap to new hardware this evening (will involve a graceful shutdown)
Note, until then, all new provisioning is on hold.
hah. I keep getting told I need to dilute that with more positive entries or something. I'm actually embarrassed that I never gave a final update on Rehnquist; I usually do. I set it to 'bank sparing' mode, and it's been stable ever since. (The spare is standing by, but I have at least as many questions about that hardware as this. Expect some serious entries about burn-in and hardware testing from me in the next weeks; I have a whole lot of used hardware that I'm renting out for unixsurplus as dedicated servers.)
Or looking at the other links, noting that the number in pkgpart=x increments by 2 for each package in the list, open the 2nd link and decrement by 2 to get the 64m package.
I don't care how reliable the hoster is, $5 for those specs is excessive in this market. Go to http://www.lowendbox.com/ and look at all the deals. Almost all of them are $5 or less a month at twice the specs. Concerned about reliability? The cost of one beer at a restaurant will buy you a second box at a different hoster.
Yeah. I'm considering repricing or getting rid of (or repricing and only taking yearly orders) or something for the under 512M images. I've been getting a lot of flack from people in IRC about how expensive I am even though once you move up into the 1gb range, I'm reasonably competitive with most new VPS companies (and way cheaper than the companies that have been around as long as I have.)
I mean, ram is also getting cheaper, and I need to increase ram per dollar across the board just for that, but when I set those prices? $5 was a very low 'smallest thing you can order' price. It's not any more.
yup, that's one of the big per-account costs; paying attention to the abuse box and shutting down spammers. But, the problem is probably better addressed by just requiring a long pre-pay which you don't get back if I think you are spamming.
The real problem is compromised accounts. How draconian should I be about that? I mean, personally, I'm not sure. Policy is to shut them down, give them a fresh VPS and let them mount the compromised one read-only; But, about 5-10% of people re-infect themselves immediately, presumably by copying the infected webapp off the backup.
That's true. I bought a 128 meg box for 2.25 from another provider. I run my primary postfix server on it, and prgmr runs a backup postfix server among other stuff.
Anyway, 6 months in my cheaper box is mysteriously reset, postfix config gone, but it's still accepting (and rejecting all) email because the default instance runs sendmail out of the box. Emailed support, they apologized and gave me a month. Still REALLY ANNOYING. PRGMR doesn't pull that kind of crap, so I'm happy to pay the extra for it.
or you can just spend those two beers on prgrmr, or 3 beers at linode? for tech people in the West, the amount of money is so small, why would you bother going with the absolute bottom of the market?
There are... different markets. I have a whole lot of customers in the area; probably the majority. I do often meet customers at social events, and yeah, they usually don't have the tiny guests, and they usually think I'm super cheap. I mean, here in silicon valley? even mediocre Engineers pull six figures. (well, mediocre Engineers that can find employment in silicon valley; generally, but not always, that means significantly above average by the standards of most places.) so the difference between five bucks and three bucks is not a beer, it's what goes in the tip jar after you get your latte. Nobody is going to notice, and none of those people are going to buy my five dollar plan when I give you twice the ram/disk for six dollars, and really, most of those people are going for the $12 or $20 plan. I mean, having extra ram is kinda nice.
But on IRC, I meet kids from Alabama or Minnesota... or China or Myanmar. They're making less than ten bucks an hour, if they are lucky, working at wal-mart or best buy or what have you, and trying to learn about computers. I know a couple of these people starting hosting companies. Some of them are pretty good, others, well, they are interested in learning, and that's good too... but for them? that difference between three bucks and five every month is worth spending some time on.
So yeah, it's a market that I owned once, but that market has... passed me by. (and really, a lot of the people in that market seem kinda angry that I'm not keeping up with the times... which I guess I could take as a complement?) I will put some effort into it again, at some point, but it's not my current highest priority. The comment that gave this hn post it's title was actually me trying to get those people to quit buying my five dollar account, because while in '05, I had images that worked okay on it, today, out of box it just does not work very well. I didn't disable ordering on it completely mostly for irrational reasons. I am pleased and surprised that other people found it this amusing.
make sure you are comparing to the KVM prices; OpenVZ is cheaper because allocated ram is... not comparable to allocated ram in xen or kvm.
It is a fair criticism, though; the KVM prices are comparable to Xen prices, and in that department, they have me beat for guests smaller than 1024M.[1] And you are right that it is time for me to increase my ram per dollar (and my transit per dollar) to remain in the niche where I live. I'm working on it, and you can be sure that existing customers will get that upgrade before I offer it to new users.
[1]I price things at a flat fee per customer ($4) then a cost per unit of ram ($1 for every 64M ram) - I find that there are many providers that beat me on the low end but that I beat on the high end. This is in part an artefact of my manual processes, (or rather, an artefact of how manual per-user processes altered my pricing choices.)
My plan in the upgrade was to offer people a choice between significantly more disk and significantly faster disk, but the way things have been shaping up (we're very slowly upgrading the customers that I re-ip'd) we've only had one or the other available at a time.
Same here. I have found myself using Rackspace Cloud for my newer projects because I get more disk for my $11 and their Ubuntu provisioning is very low effort on my part. KVM offers a bit more control than I need.
I still have a soft spot for my first prgmr box though.
I was a satisfied customer of thrust too but their support staff has become really terrible. They broke my reverse DNS and it took a week to get it fixed (they kept closing my ticket saying it was fixed without verifying that it was. Turns out they had missed a period somewhere further up in the bind file.
There may be some confusion in this thread. I own prgmr.com, but not buyvm.net Also, I am not (quite? it looks like I might be by the end of tonight) out of stock.
Other than their "We've got stock" events that happen probably 3-4 times a year, the best option to get a hold of a buyvm vps is to hit up the irc channel. Often they have some available when other people cancel their accounts.
If you don't want to try this route, follow @FrantechCA on twitter and watch for announcements. Stock sells out in a matter of days, especially their smaller instances.
You can also check out www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com .
Not shilling, I just went through this to get on a $15/year OVZ and thought it may help whomever is interested.
It's kind of hard to find stock on buyvm since everytime they got something new, it's selled soooo fast. Sometimes you can find some stock on their irc channel and their mailing list.
've been a customer since about a year ago and can't be happier.
Something is confusing - nobody measures bandwidth in GiB, and _almost_ nobody measures disk space in GiB. It's useful that they emphasized the unit, otherwise 99% of their (educated) customers would have assumed 10 (network/disk) Gigabytes was 1.0 * 10^9 bytes.
The only use of GiB that I seen commonly is in Memory. Every other use of "Giga" is the SI reference.
nobody measures bandwidth in GiB, sure, and next time I boost the bandwidth allocations, I might move those to GB, as that's what all the tools report. (I'd wait until I boost bandwidth allocations enough that it wasn't reducing the allocation)
However, there is much confusion with disk space in GiB vs GB. Hard drives are sold in GB, but most of the time, within an OS, space is most often reported in GiB like ram, so a 1tb drive is rather less than one TiB. I really do allocate disk space in GiB, not in GB, so I think it's appropriate to market it as such.
It would be interesting to do an audit of modern operating systems to see if this is true. OS X has reported in GB for a while now. I wonder what windows 7 does.
Regardless - I very much appreciate the use of GiB when that's what is meant. Classy.
I am also a happy prgmr customer, and love that the machines are hosted in a top-tier datacenter and that support is responsive and knows what they are doing.
The provisioning isn't automated and there's no usage monitor (for transfer), but I assume that Luke would be reasonable in the event that someone ever went over.
Hmm.. Am a little confused with the payment page options. Do i have use the purchase additional package option to pay ? I just registered and was asked to the billing/payment page to pay. But there doesn't seem to be a simple pay button/link/tab.
I take that to be a coy way of saying "not very much at all". If the person responding is making even $20/hr, then $4/mo of support is 12 minutes/month of support. :)
That said I've had no complaints with support from them when needed. It just has to clearly be about things on their end; they aren't going to help with sysadmin issues on your box.
coy? I was going for blunt and self-depricating. The thing was that I didn't want people buying the bigger instances thinking they'd get big product support. Without putting you on my pager (which is going to cost you more than $68 a month) we simply don't have that capability. But yeah. responding in a reasonable period of time is something I am working very hard on, but to be completely honest? it's something we fail at... a lot.
Person for person, I think we stack up very well against any other front line support... but there's essentially two of us, and yeah, the wait times quite often render the knowledge moot.
Nick and I fight about this; Nick thinks it's better to not say anything until you can say something definite. I think it's best to say 'I'm working on it, doing X, Y and Z' - but compared to 'real companies' both nick and I are on the side of "it doesn't really count until you fix it" whereas most big companies have SLAs that reset the clock when they respond and get a level 1 person working on it.
"We assume you are not stupid" means they are making an assumption of intelligence, whereas "we don't assume you are stupid" means they make no assumption one way or the other.
My intent was to say, in a positive way, "If you are unwilling to learn how a serial console works, or how OpenSSH public key authentication works, I'll refund your money and send you to Linode."
What's the js to make a site editable with your cursor (you can click on text in a <p> and then you get a cursor in it where you can insert more text, also changes your mouse cursor to indicate that you can edit, over text)? I saw it here on hn once in the comments, but then I couldn't find it again later when I needed it. (I had also saved it in a vim window but forgotten to save it, ugh!)
