$4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup) • Hacker News Board

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#21

Post by gcb » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 2:50 AM UTC

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #6

What are the use cases for this device which are not covered by either (1) an EC2 "micro" instance ($82 up front + $0.007/hour * 3 years * 365 days * 24 hours/day == $7.38/month) or (2) a small form factor server in my home? If we ignore the toy/coolness factor of having such a small form factor device, are there any compelling use cases? I can't think of any.

you can check out as they will assign DNS "plugXXX.pluggr.info, where XXX is the plug's numerical ID."

couldn't find none so far.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#22

Post by mhd » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 3:12 AM UTC

mkramlich wrote: post #16

I pictured a data center full of nothing but wall outlets.

You're a better man than I. The first thing that popped into my mine was a room full of daisy-chained power strips.

I wonder what people are going to do with this. Reminds me a bit of the day when the Mac Mini was coming out, and immediately a lot of colocation offers were coming up.

Well, according to some RiscOS programmers I once knew, ARM assembly is quite pleasant, one of them even preferred it to 68k. So let's see what people can eke out of a system like this.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#23

Post by latch » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 5:39 AM UTC

Looks like Tonido (the maker of the hardware) is looking to get directly into the hosting business, at the somewhat ridiculous price of $20/month: http://www.tonido.com/tonidocloud_what.html

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#24

Post by aberkowitz » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 5:41 AM UTC

"Setup Fee" should be changed to "Purchase Fee" for clarity's sake. The setup fee of a typical webhost is for configuration (plugging in, making accessible to the world) exclusively.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#25

Post by lambda » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 5:48 AM UTC

I like the effort they go through in the comment thread to discuss the performance, power draw, etc. compared to a VPS. For instance, a VPS appears to draw 56 watts per user, while the SheevaPlug plus disk at high load draw only 20 watts; a pretty nice power savings.

From the site http://pluggr.info/#ps

"Please note that TonidoPlugs installed on our network have the torrent functionality disabled, as it is a violation of our AUP to download torrents via our network."

Sigh. I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes. I like to transfer free software and creative commons licenses work using Bittorrent; I should be able to do that on my own server, and if they want to charge me for the bandwidth usage, that's fine, but they shouldn't just ban it outright. Also odd that they don't actually mention this on their AUP http://pluggr.info/#tos but they do seem to forbid running IRC servers for some reason.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#26

Post by lhnn » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 6:10 AM UTC

sbierwagen wrote: post #10

pyre wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they monitor the network for IRC traffic in an effort to detect rooted boxes? (though that seems like a lame/hackety solution)

IRC servers tend to draw DDOSes like honey draws bears. That and if the admins aren't paying attention, someone will use it for botnet C^3.

Just get that node.js chat server running on your sheevaplug... nowadays there are many new architectural iterations of IRC.

Same with BitTorrent... I wonder how they filter that. What if I set up an Anomos server?

http://anomos.info/

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#27

Post by 8ren » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 7:02 AM UTC

I thought this was going to be a joke, and that actually you buy a Sheeva and plug it in at home. I don't think you can yet buy connectivity so cheaply, but if you consider it as a fraction of your existing connection... + electricity cost per month.

Of course, there are advantages for managed, off-site servers. And I applaud http://pluggr.info for kicking it off. It may not be the ideal deal, but it may (who knows?) exactly suit some niche, well enough, that's big enough - and that is all that matters at this stage.

I think businesses would go more for not owning the Sheeva, and instead paying less, and also getting automatic "free upgrades" when the next performance level comes out (in the next 3 minutes.) That's a different organization of costs and finances for pluggr.info, which probably doesn't suit them (yet), but which I think would be more profitable both for them and for (business) customers. But if you got a niche, you got a niche, and you've gotta start somewhere! I hope these goes well for them.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#28

Post by easp » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 7:26 AM UTC

Anyone remember the colo providers offering hosting for your cobalt qube?

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#29

Post by _b8r0 » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 9:17 AM UTC

mhd wrote: post #22

mkramlich wrote: post #16

I pictured a data center full of nothing but wall outlets.

You're a better man than I. The first thing that popped into my mine was a room full of daisy-chained power strips. I wonder what people are going to do with this. Reminds me a bit of the day when the Mac Mini was coming out, and immediately a lot of colocation offers were coming up. Well, according to some RiscOS programmers I once knew, ARM assembly is quite pleasant, one of them even preferred it to 68k. So let's…

ARM Assembly (with the exception of TDMI) is an absolute dream compared to 68k, Sparc, MIPS or x86. Instructions are fixed to 32 bits so everything (in theory) should line up nicely, the predication functions are way better than using flags and cmp-type instructions and the pipelining is much better.

Having said that, I wouldn't want to write a web app in ARM asm, I'd much rather use Python or Ruby.

Re: $4.50/Month SheevaPlug Dedicated Server ($140 Setup)

#30

Post by lsc » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 10:16 AM UTC

lambda wrote: post #25

I like the effort they go through in the comment thread to discuss the performance, power draw, etc. compared to a VPS. For instance, a VPS appears to draw 56 watts per user, while the SheevaPlug plus disk at high load draw only 20 watts; a pretty nice power savings. From the site http://pluggr.info/#ps "Please note that TonidoPlugs installed on our network have the torrent functionality disabled, as it is a violatio…

eh, a 32GiB ram 8 core G34 opteron with 4 disks is going to eat around 150 watts; that's a lot of 512MiB VPSs. The shevaplug/disk setup will definitely get you better I/O performance than the VPS (hard drives share... poorly.) but as far as power goes, the VPS, on modern hardware is going to win.