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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

"Dedicated server" mentioned 4 times in that article. In hosting world, dedicated server means real physical server. I wonder if that's just marketing speak and in reality it's virtual server or they really install a separate server for every customer.

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My understanding of it was that it would be a dedicated instance of the matrix server software using your own domain and not the shared matrix server.

server as in the server daemon, not server as in the physical server.

I would phrase that as 'server instance.' Their language like "you’re sharing minimal infrastructure with anyone else" does reinforce the idea they mean physical server.

Maybe "dedicated" and "infrastructure" are being abstracted into meaninglessness as cloud computing matures.

“Fully managed, dedicated server” absolutely means that you get your own hardware. If they are using it to mean a virtual server, that seems incredibly dishonest to me.

Agree.

I think this bit of marketing speak was popularized by discourd - and inspired by team speak and ventrillio - all of which talk about chat "servers".

Its particularly odd with discord, as they clearly mean "instance" not "server".

Sure, it's a chat server daemon (like you could get a web server daemon) - but I think "dedicated private instance" would be better. Should probably drop the misleading bit about "not sharing resources" as I assume instances aren't that isolated?

Its $10 a month - unless they're using raspberry pi's, I think you can assume virtual servers.

A dedicated server seems like overkill. A shared VPS works fine for many realtime applications, even fast-paced games that host 50 players concurrently that send out updates every 32 milliseconds, like agar.io, diep.io, or vnav.io.

If I wanted lower latency, I would add WebRTC-based P2P chat for those who support it, to connect directly between servers.

I wanted to add: "Dedicated server" in the cloud business refers to a 1-to-1 mapping between server and physical computer. A "virtual server" is one that maps onto a physical computer when it actually needs the CPU. There are generally two types of virtual servers: A very low-end one running ARM or Intel ARM slower than your typical 1.3GhZ laptop, and a very high-end one typically used for CPU-bound applications.

The cheapest dedicated host on AWS costs $370/month: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

So Matrix is misusing cloud terminology when it says "dedicated server."

There are cheap dedicated servers, for example check out scaleway. I think they're around $10/month. They're slow Intel Atoms, though.

I agree, I just think that this particular wording introduces unfortunate confusion. Virtualized cloud solutions should work just fine for most uses.

they could have used "personal server" instead ?

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