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High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

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Re: High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use OVH. Their support is horrendous though. For example, I put in a support request at mid-day this Saturday to ask if their geo-ip feature where you can select which country you want an additional IP to appear to be from, meant that the IP address actually terminated in that country. They didn't get back to me until this morning (3 days later), and the response was a bit vague. I bought some new IPs 4 hours ago f…

Meh, doesn't sound too bad to me. Its not like your machine has failed and they are not responding. You use OVH/Hetzner with the understanding that the great prices come from minimal support and the hardware will be used or desktop class. Hetzner support is strictly standard office hours. If you want instant responses, you can pay 10x at another provider but you chose not to.

The thing is, it wouldn't have cost them anything for them to have sent me an automated email to tell me that my order needed to be manually checked, and I would get it within X hours/days. In fact, because they didn't give me this information up front, I ended up logging a support ticket to find out what was going on.

It wouldn't have cost them anything to tell me up front that IPs aren't automatically provisioned and required manual intervention and it would take ~24 hours before I get them either. Luckily for them, this time I didn't log a support ticket, because I just assumed that they would have crap processes and that's why it was taking so long. I mean, why did it take so long? Where they manually checking my order again, even though I used the same payment details? Does somebody need to manually pick some IP addresses from a spreadsheet? Why is this process not entirely automatic?

This is the sort of thing that should be automated for low cost hosting systems, precisely to prevent having to provide unnecessary support.

Re: High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure guess, but I'd imagine that payment processor fees don't make it particularly profitable to offer price levels much lower than $5.

It's more about support costs if I were to guess. How many support tickets does it take for their profit on $25 a year to disappear? (if $2.50 a month is discounted to $25 a year).

I always like prgmr.com's stance on that. "Please note that these plans include $2.50 worth of support"

Re: High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transcoding... x265 CPU encodes on even a 2hr video can take several hours on a very fast intel CPU. I've been playing around with nvenc vbr 2-pass which has been giving me good results, not too much larger than the cpu encode in minutes. But if you want something hosted/online, then it gets harder.

No way to offload it to the GPU? I remember reading about ffmpeg extensions for doing that...

I mentioned using nvenc (nvidia encoder), but didn't mention that is was using gpu... cpu encoding is much slower.

Re: High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

#174
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Linode's FAQ: "If My Linode is Powered Off, Will I Be Billed? If your Linode is powered off, but is still added as a service on your account, you will still be billed for it. This is because Linode maintains your saved data and reserves your ability to use other resources like RAM, transfer, etc. even when your Linode is powered off. You will be billed for any other active Linode service, such as Longview Pro or…

"If I'm not in my hotel room will I still be charged? I was at a ball game for three hours! Also I wasn't in my apartment all weekend, can I get a partial refund?" Seriously, people do not understand leasing and renting.

Question here is about they using the new model as a smoke curtain for the price hike.

All their marketing during the change was how it was cheaper. When it clearly was over double the price. And your argument is "it is cheaper if you are not using". So good luck going to a hotel and not booking any room so it can be cheaper.

Re: High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes

#175
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I'm not in my hotel room will I still be charged? I was at a ball game for three hours! Also I wasn't in my apartment all weekend, can I get a partial refund?" Seriously, people do not understand leasing and renting.

Question here is about they using the new model as a smoke curtain for the price hike. All their marketing during the change was how it was cheaper. When it clearly was over double the price. And your argument is "it is cheaper if you are not using". So good luck going to a hotel and not booking any room so it can be cheaper.

It would never be cheaper for you because you want a single low-utilization server that's available 24/7.

It's only cheaper for companies that have lots and lots of servers, but most of them aren't provisioned most of the time.

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