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

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

#91

Post by kragen » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 1:34 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #61

peterwwillis wrote: post #53

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.

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 gettin…

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.

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

#92

Post by ghshephard » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 6:43 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #88

ghshephard wrote: post #70

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.

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…

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.

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

#93

Post by ghshephard » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 6:43 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #88

ghshephard wrote: post #70

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.

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…

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 - that would cover 95%+ of the desktop environments.

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

#94

Post by lsc » Tue, Apr 24, 2012, 4:16 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #91

lsc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gettin…

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.

yup, that's one of the big per-account costs; paying attention to the abuse box and shutting down spammers. But, the problem is probably better addressed by just requiring a long pre-pay which you don't get back if I think you are spamming.

The real problem is compromised accounts. How draconian should I be about that? I mean, personally, I'm not sure. Policy is to shut them down, give them a fresh VPS and let them mount the compromised one read-only; But, about 5-10% of people re-infect themselves immediately, presumably by copying the infected webapp off the backup.