
"If you want to order it, use 'view source' to find the commented-out link." - teach
http://prgmr.com/xen/?viewsource=1
======
jtchang
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.

~~~
frisco
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
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.

~~~
frisco
I have a couple of the xen instances, but the vast majority of my capacity is
on colo'd machines and a managed dedicated box. My total hosting bill is in
the $300-$400 range. Admittedly I haven't looked closely at EC2 reserved
pricing (I used the on-demand prices to get to the back of the envelope 3%
number), but I still don't think it would be close. And this is month-to-
month.

~~~
jamespo
Not really comparing like with like, colo vs cloud

~~~
lsc
they accomplish the same goal; If you are taking the flexibility out of IAAS
(please don't say "cloud") through reserved instances, the biggest difference
is that you need someone on call to physically handle hardware if you co-lo.

I mean, I agree that they are very different products, but IAAS and a vps are
different products, too. (with a VPS, the customer expects me to preserve the
data on disk. With IAAS, the customer expects to be able to spin up new nodes
on demand.) If anything, co-lo is much more like VPS or dedicated servers, in
that you generally use raid and expect the RAID to be fairly reliable.

But if you are running a webapp, just like most webapps that could run on a
VPS can run on IAAS and vis-a-vis, most webapps that can run on a dedicated
server or IAAS can also run on co-located hardware you run.

The cost difference is, well, dramatic. Of course, the stress difference, if
you are notified that you made the front page of hacker news Thursday evening
and have to come up with more servers same day on a friday, and your
application can't run on IAAS? The stress difference can also be considerable.
so I'm not saying colo is always the answer; I'm just saying that if you are
looking at hosting options for your webapp, colo deserves a look.

Of course, if you do co-lo, don't forget redundancy. Good hardware you own
with RAID is going to be significantly more reliable than a single IAAS
instance, all things being equal, but you don't run something on IAAS without
redundancy, and if downtime is expensive, you won't run it on hardware without
redundancy. For some applications, it's enough to just have spares and carry a
pager (of course, that's also a pain in the ass. I better be saving a lot of
money to carry a pager) and for other applications? It's okay to just wait
until Monday and get the people you bought the computer from to fix it. In
those cases, I'd practice spinning up your app on IAAS so you have something,
just in case.

------
KaeseEs
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.

------
koko775
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.

------
mlntn
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...

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

~~~
bricestacey
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).

~~~
whimsy
Actually, billing _is_ pretty automated, but shutting down your account is
not.

------
afhof
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...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fprgmr.com%2Fxen%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

~~~
ricardobeat
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

~~~
nknight
Speaking of bandwidth... Are you really not losing money on $1.15/mbps
overage? How many 10gbps ports did it take before you got Cogent down that
low?

~~~
lsc
5 gigs on a 10G port. $5000 one time setup for the 10G port. $0.65/mbps on the
commit, $1.15/mbps on overage. That's my cost, so i guess I'm losing a tiny
bit on my time, setup fees and equipment, but right now, I just want someone
to split some of the monthlies with me. I really, really want that 10G port,
though, as at those overages, I can oversubscribe my own commit, and if I
oversubscribe too aggressively or one of my customers grows unexpectedly, just
paying the overages won't be that big of a deal.

Bandwidth gets cheaper all the time, and I've been pestering them forever. I
actually haven't inked that deal, and probably won't if nobody takes me up on
it; I really only need about a gigabit, and I can get $1/Mbps bandwidth all
day long. I have to decide by Tuesday or so. So far? nobody else seems
interested, which tells me this isn't all that unusual of a deal. One guy I
asked went off and is now getting his own line from Cogent.

Oh, also note, Cogent just wants the 5g commit from me. If I'm willing to pay
the setup fees $2500 for a 1g port, $5000 for a 10G port) they will let me
have 1G ports at that price; I just need a lot of 'em.

Turns out, though, selling bandwidth is harder than I thought.

~~~
peterwwillis
So if I understand that correctly, the reason other providers seem to provide
a lot more bandwidth per subscriber dollar (ex. my Linode has 200G
transfer/month at $19.95) is most of their customers probably don't push the
pipe into an overage so they're basically overselling the bandwidth?

p.s. I just noticed your $20 plan provides double the RAM and 4gb more disk
than my Linode... i'll do a little more research but I might just switch since
I don't get anywhere near that bandwidth cap.

~~~
lsc
if you notice, my current xen setups have a pathetic bandwidth cap right
now... which will change shortly, (after some network upgrades on my part. I
don't want to say you can use a lot more bandwidth until you can do so without
causing problems.) but I certainly have no room to criticise anyone else for
having low bandwidth allocations.

but in a very real sense? for customers doing non-pornographic and legal
things? bandwidth is in a real sense close to free, and most customers don't
need much. Look for 'penny a gigabyte' overage charges from more competitive
hosts soon, and, well, 'unlimited' these days often closer to the real thing
than it used to be.

------
nicksergeant
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
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.

~~~
lsc
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.)

------
MatthewPhillips
Can't recommend prgmr enough.

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

------
nrkn
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
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.

------
peterwwillis
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.

~~~
lsc
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
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

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

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

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

~~~
Maxious
Agreed. I am constantly playing package management musical chairs.

~~~
dpritchett
Same here. I have found myself using Rackspace Cloud for my newer projects
because I get more disk for my $11 and their Ubuntu provisioning is very low
effort on my part. KVM offers a bit more control than I need.

I still have a soft spot for my first prgmr box though.

------
ghshephard
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

~~~
ghshephard
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.

------
gergles
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.

------
aangjie
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.

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

~~~
aangjie
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

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

------
j79
They also provide the option in the select list when you checkout. Of course,
asking a user to "View Source" seems more geeky!

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

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

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

------
tosbourn
There are surely accessibility concerns over hiding links in comments.

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

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

~~~
jaysonelliot
"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?

~~~
lsc
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."

~~~
K2h
That was exactly how I interpreted it when I read it originally.

I love the minimalist page by the way.

~~~
zorked
It's great design I think. It attracts exactly the kind of people they want as
customers.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
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,'')

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

