"If you want to order it, use 'view source' to find the commented-out link."

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.

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.

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).

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.)

to be fair, I fixed a few real errors after I was pointed at this link; I was distracted by a meeting about more bandwidth before I could comment.

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.

I have to wonder how many of the people ordering the 64MiB image are doing it just to have a place to spam Twitter from.

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.

The prices were great though.

I've been a customer for years. They're a great operation. Their owner is on hacker news with username lsc.

I would prefer more disk per dollar though. Besides that I'm a happy customer.

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.

Ah.. assume the paypal link will be on the bill. ok no problems. had dropped a mail too. Will pay once i get the bill. :-P

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.

spot on +1

I see your point. However, I keep reading it as "We don't (have to) assume you are stupid. (We know so)".

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."

The fact you understand what the page is even about, means that you are not in anyway a stupid person.

Multiple errors, it should be:

    $("body").html(function(i,h){return h.replace(/<!--|-->/g,'')})

jQuery is awesome (is even my nickname!) but sometimes plain Javascript does the trick pretty well.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';document.designMode='on';void 0