Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase • Hacker News Board

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#161

Post by cdr » Thu, Jun 17, 2010, 11:42 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #159

jules wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of the customers stop paying? Probably not many. How much disk space are these customers using? Probably not much. How much disk space do they have sitting on their servers unused? Probably a whole lot.

Credit Cards expire every 2 years. I would guess that a very large percentage of them don't preemptively re-verify their credit card until a billing fails.

There's no reason a merchant has to stop billing a customer after an otherwise perfectly good card expires. Having your billing process fail on that is pretty dumb.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#162

Post by carbocation » Thu, Jun 17, 2010, 12:59 PM UTC

mr_luc wrote: post #100

JshWright wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr; Didn't back up data/config files, expected hosting company to store data for free

I know, I´m an idiot. :P There´s an easy backup option now. A year ago, when I first signed up, the only things I could see were the options to use some of my storage space to make a backup image -- which you have to think of at the get-go, and make your image half or less the size of your storage. I think all my monit and nginx stuff -- the per-project stuff -- is fine, as I keep in in the project repo. It´s just ..…

In addition to what wwortiz said, you do not have to create an image using less than half your allotted storage from the get go. So long as you can ultimately get it down to under half the size by deleting files, etc, later, you can downsize the image. In other words, get an 8gb image down to 4gb of actual data and you can resize the thing down to 4gb from the linode CP.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#163

Post by xinsight » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 12:43 PM UTC

Greenisus wrote: post #88

xinsight wrote: post #67

In terms of iPhone apps, linode easily beats slicehost. Nice graphs for CPU, network, etc. And last i looked, slicehost required you to make a URL with you API key and mail it to yourself, which is a huge PITA.

I wrote the Slicehost app. Would love to add graphs, but that data's not available yet in the API. As for the email link, that's because the app came out before the iPhone had a copy/paste feature. You don't need that anymore with copy/paste.

Cut/paste that string is still quite fiddly.

Do you know why slicehost doesn't just make their private API key a link in the slice manager? I'm also curious what extra level of security the API key buys. If I lose my phone people can still mess with my slices.

I thought the iphone app was a slicehost product - but are you saying you just developed the app as a customer? That's mighty generous...

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#164

Post by lsc » Sun, Jun 20, 2010, 1:24 AM UTC

spicyj wrote: post #143

lsc wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unless their costs are radically different from mine, (and if anything, their automation is better, so their costs should be lower) the small instances are quite profitable.

(None of this takes into account semiyearly/yearly pricing discounts.) The difference is that they sell their boxes with prices proportional to memory so that doubling resources costs double (25.6MB RAM per dollar), whereas at prgmr, you charge a flat $4-per-guest fee and then charge linearly for space on top of that (64 MB per dollar). Bonus fact: If you both were to offer a 173 MB size, the costs would be almost th…

It's funny, because my choice of pricing with my current support costs, and the fact that nearly all my advertising is fixed-cost 'brand building' vs. per-customer cost referrals or click ads, actually makes the smaller domains /much/ more profitable than the larger domains, which yes, probably means I've mispriced something. But the smaller domains do have a much larger 'margin for error' - if I sell a block of them to spammers, or to people expecting a full-time sysadmin, they can get expensive fast.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#165

Post by mr_luc » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 6:17 PM UTC

johnswamps wrote: post #97

mr_luc wrote: post #92

This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today! I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago. "Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all." So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for…

For comparison, my experience with slicehost: I lost my credit card and got a new one, so the charges from slicehost were bouncing because they had my old number. They sent me several e-mails about it but I wasn't checking the e-mail account they were sending it to, so this went on for about 2-3 months past due. Eventually I logged onto the e-mail account and found out about it -- I hadn't even noticed anything was w…

Heh, I stopped looking at this thread almost immediately after "getting over" the initial sting.

But I have to say, I still feel that this kind of behavior would be a sane policy.

No one´s saying you should hold onto data forever. But having a dedicated pool of dead storage that´s capable of storing the data for a few months of non-payment, or even longer -- that seems like a very good idea.

The running VMs are so many, many times more expensive than a block of dead storage of equivalent size. Probably orders of magnitude more expensive.

Then when you consider the business benefit to having the softer-and-fuzzier policy ... well, there´s always the "avoid 'high maintenance' customers" theory.