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

by teach • 14 years ago

217 92 14 years ago

koko775• 14 years ago

I use prgmr and they are fantastic for the geek who knows how to handle themselves. You also get a pretty decent /64 IPv6 allocation.

Their hardware console was enough for me to install Arch Linux despite no official support for it. It's pretty sweet.

nrkn• 14 years ago

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.

kapitalx• 14 years ago

Or you can just select it on the drop down list of any other page. The pkgpart seems to only preselect the item in the dropdown.

keithah• 14 years ago

They seem really expensive. I use buyvm.net and love them.

dchest• 14 years ago

I don't see any Xen options on this site.

IgorPartola• 14 years ago

I am a fan and a customer of ThrustVPS. They are similarly priced but with a lot more network transfer allocation. No native IPv6 though.

xiaomai• 14 years ago

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.

vasco2• 14 years ago

Everything is out of stock

minsight• 14 years ago

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

c16• 14 years ago

Buyvm client here too, great service though always sold out.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.)

slug• 14 years ago

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

venkyk2• 14 years ago

I rather wish they had worded it as 'We assume you are not stupid'. Or they are assuming wrong in my case?

jaysonelliot• 14 years ago

"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.

I wonder which is more appropriate?

hellerbarde• 14 years ago

spot on +1

venkyk2• 14 years ago

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

lsc18• 14 years ago

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."

WiseWeasel2• 14 years ago

As a stupid person, I was offended.

redslazer• 14 years ago

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

afhof• 14 years ago

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.

Here's validator output:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fprgmr.com%2Fx...

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

Spelling nazi, the HTML edition.

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

I doubt they care.

jwallaceparker• 14 years ago

That "view source" line make this the most incredible VPS service landing page I've ever seen.

mlntn• 14 years ago

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...

_delirium2• 14 years ago

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.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

Seems like a non-automated or a semi-automated provisioning on their side; I wonder what else isn't automated.

bricestacey• 14 years ago

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).

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.)

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

Can't recommend prgmr enough.

state• 14 years ago

Agree completely. The small size is part of what makes them great.

j79• 14 years ago

They also provide the option in the select list when you checkout. Of course, asking a user to "View Source" seems more geeky!

nicksergeant• 14 years ago

If you're thinking about it, do it. I've had the new Snipt on Prgmr for a month or so now and I've been 100% happy (and my wallet's happier, too).

Customer service is excellent, better value than Slicehost, Linode, etc.

dudus• 14 years ago

I really love the tone they use on the status blog http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.)

jtchang• 14 years ago

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.

frisco3• 14 years ago

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.

zred• 14 years ago

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.

mappu• 14 years ago

    the cheapest you can possibly get

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?

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

KaeseEs• 14 years ago

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.

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

View source is so 2006, cool kids use the Javascript console to modify web pages as they please.

    document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<!--|-->/g,'')

mouseroot2• 14 years ago

$(body).html().replace(//g,'');

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

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.

lell• 14 years ago

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!)

DuoSRX• 14 years ago

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

peterwwillis2• 14 years ago

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.

rweir• 14 years ago

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?

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

kragen• 14 years ago

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.

jerico2day• 14 years ago

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.

gergles• 14 years ago

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.

aangjie2• 14 years ago

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

I've got to manually tell the billing system to make you a bill. Sorry.

aangjie2• 14 years ago

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

moconnor• 14 years ago

"Please note; this means all plans come with $4/month worth of support."

I can't help wondering how much support that is.

_delirium2• 14 years ago

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

ghshephard2• 14 years ago

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.

lsc18• 14 years ago

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.

ghshephard2• 14 years ago

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.

tosbourn• 14 years ago

There are surely accessibility concerns over hiding links in comments.

kolkey• 14 years ago

This is a very clever piece of blatant advertising. I think I'll buy some.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

I'd be more excited if it was a 64GB instance rather than 64MB.

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

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