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Comment by ivanstojic | Hacker News Reader

I am suspicious of free services/offers which require me to give up my credit card info :-(

Be suspicious, sure, check out the company in question... but don't let that disqualify them. Theplanet is, uh, rather large and old. Older than I am.

I've done a 'first month free' trial, and let me tell you, I certainly won't be doing that again without /somehow/ confirming identity first. When you offer something as abusable as a *NIX host for free, you /will/ attract abusive users, and I think asking for credit card info and/or charging a dollar or something sounds like a reasonable way to make sure that you are giving this away to someone you can at least threaten to come after if they do abuse the service.

If I was in their place, I would be suspicious of applicants who refuse to give credit card info while asking to consume a $200/month free service. ;-)

$200/month free service? Try more like $40. Those are servers who were fully amortized 2-3 years ago and otherwise would get sent to the $49-$99/month scrap bin where their margins are actually pretty incredible (the only real cost is the $12-$15/month they pay to power and host the server).

Hmmm:

Dual Xeon 2.4, 1GB RAM,

Ok the ram is a little under-generous but can you point me to where I can get a dual Xeon 2.4 (=8 core) server for $40/month?

>can you point me to where I can get a dual Xeon 2.4 (=8 core) server for $40/month?

http://www.joesdatacenter.com/Dedicated_Servers.html

It's a dual Xeon 3.0 with 2G of RAM and it's $60.

But does Joe have fanatical support?

Can you point me to the paragraph on this website where they claim to be providing 8 core cpus?

http://www.theplanet.com/sand-castle/

I'm fairly certain the first 2.4ghz Xeons came out in late 2001 .. These could easily be 8-9 year old servers.

There's more to the cost than just the power. Don't forget the manpower and hardware costs for disk/RAM/chassis swaps and so on when they break, bandwidth, the fact the space it is occupying in the rack could be filled with a much more expensive server (assuming rack space/power is limited.) Also, the small amount it contributes to the demands of overall resources such as admin staff, monitoring systems, systems administrators etc.

The hardware costs for disk/RAM/chassis swaps when they break are zero, they come from cannibalized servers probably from the same lot that are long-since amortized.

The labor? Negligible. Most dedicated server providers put their engineering dollars into services, automation, and network capacity. I know a dedicated server firm in San Francisco that pays it's button pushers and hard drive swappers $15/hour, or about 50% more than they would make at McDonalds .. In comparison, the nominal cost of labor for the average task is almost zero. Most dedicated server companies also have banks of systems administrators working in India for $5 per hour to further reduce their costs.

I've run two companies that provided dedicated servers as part of their overall offerings, worked at another two, and consulted for another two. The numbers say: Old Hardware Is Profitable But Expendable.

Since you have experience in hosting solutions, I would be interested in some recommendations on good dedicated solutions.

Why are you looking at cost and not the retail value? Just the unmetered 10Mbit line itself will cost you over $100-$150 for a co-located server. I think this offer is a pretty good deal.

Well then looking on webhostingtalk.com, the retail value for this is about $60-$75/month, not $200. There are quite a few tricks the dedicated server market plays to keep costs inline when over-selling. Small hard drives, slower processors, overloaded routers, limits on usage (like how dreamhost won't let you use your 500GB of storage as backup), multiple tiers of bandwidth (I wouldn't be surprised if these servers are put into a specific prefix where all outgoing bandwidth from that bandwidth is sent over a mixture of low-end providers like Cogent/HE/Bandcon, and creative prefix announcements send most of the incoming bandwidth over one of those three providers as well).

There are at least a dozen things an operator could do in order to make an offering like this cost them nothing on the books, and on the same note they would still sell these servers in their closeouts/specials section, or use them as freebies in larger deals.

The Planet is one of the biggest players in dedicated server market.

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