

Ask HN: How about this idea, a 'friends of HN server' ? - jacquesm

I've been kicking this around for a while and I think it is time to ask you all for input on it.<p>I would like to make available a single, 500G storage, 100MBit connected (flat rate) server that I can get at a local hosting company.<p>Then I would like to make that server available to the HN community, for people that can't afford the commitment to a long term hosting contract, to see if their ideas have 'legs'.<p>There would have to be some house rules, and there would have to be a system administrator (I will not be doing anything over and beyond providing the server).<p>Is this idea viable ?<p>Would people be interested ?<p>Is someone prepared to step up as sysadmin of this box ?<p>How to determine who goes on and who doesn't if the demand is larger than the supply ?<p>What other conditions should there be made on the 'tenants' ?<p>Pitfalls, snags that you can foresee ?<p>Let me know your thoughts please, if there is enough interest and someone with enough competence that wants to commit to babysitting the box then I am willing to go and sign a years lease on this thing.<p>I figure if all it brings is one successful launch then it's well worth it.
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aichcon
I think it's a nice thought, but I don't think a lack of hosting is what's
stopping people here from getting their ideas out.

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vaksel
yeah a shared server is all you really need to test an idea out, and that can
be had for as little as 2-3 bucks a month.

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ankeshk
I used to give free hosting to Indian bloggers and startups. (More bloggers
took me up on the offer than startups though.) Tips from my experience:

* I kept it as a first-come-first-serve thing. I didn't want to become the judge out there.

* But I kept a rule from the beginning: people had to move once they became ramen profitable.

* There was no other rule except the obvious: don't abuse the resource. It worked well.

* The only problem I faced is: quite a lot of people who took me up on the free hosting offer didn't do anything with it for months. Didn't put up a single web page online. And only used email. It was free. So they procrastinated. And weren't as aggressive as they would be if they had to pay for hosting.

* So if I were to repeat my offer, I would add Rule # 2: their website or beta has to be up within 2 weeks.

(Also to weed out people who wouldn't use the free hosting after getting it -
I started relying on how good they were with follow up. I usually asked a
question on their first request. Once they answered that, I asked another
question. And only then did I gave the hosting. Its amazing how many non-
serious people drop out by that stage. These questions were basic ones: who is
going to be your target audience? How many people in your team? Anything to
just see their response reaction.)

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jacquesm
Thank you, that's very constructive criticism, I like your 'ruleset' quite a
bit.

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jacquesm
Wow, I'm really quite surprised at the negative sentiment, that's not what I
expected.

1) the world is a lot bigger than just the 'affluent' portions of it, in some
countries 3 to 5 bucks per month is a big deal, this server will cost a fairly
large multiple of that. If you can get a server with these specs for 3 to 5
bucks I'd like to know where.

2) this is a fairly serious server, not some rinkydink slicehost, you could
use it to get to a reasonable amount of traffic before you'd have to scale up
(if you took some care at making things efficient)

3) most of the 'free' alternatives are just as 'free' as gmail, they require
some amount of lock-in, this idea is a fully functional 'you've got root' (or
at least the sysadmin will) server.

4) Nobody gets to be locked in to any hosting contracts but me, the bill is
mine, the people that use this server host there for exactly $0 plus a promise
to try and make a go of it.

5) hcoop gives you _1_ GB of disk space and _a few_ GB of data transfer per
month for $5. This box has _500_ G of disk space (so, let's say it's 5
'tenants' that's 100G per project), and 30T worth of traffic for $0.

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NathanKP
I think that is sounds like an awe-inspiring idea if only because it would
give a lot of people a chance to try out ideas. It would be nice to see if it
spawned community projects that HN members collaborated on.

However, in practice it will probably be a nightmare to try to maintain.

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bumblebird
You can get a VPS for $19.95 a month now, with pro-rata billing. Set one up
for a couple of days, see what happens, if it fails, cancel it and get most of
the $19.95 back.

I don't think server cost is an issue to most people these days. Not until you
start to scale, and then it's all good news.

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mahmud
$5 for a VPS

<http://prgmr.com/xen/>

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bumblebird
True true, $20 or $5, it's probably less than most people spend on coffee.

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adatta02
would probably be a lot of work for you.

I mean the cheapest slices over at Slicehost are $20/mon and that should be
pretty decent for experimentation puporses. Granted 256mb of RAM isn't a lot
but hell I managed to get Firefox to start...

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patio11
Experimentation nothing -- I ran my business on 256mb of RAM for _years_.

Apropos the discussion we had earlier today: do you want to be the guy who
cleans up after the guys who are either insufficiently invested in the idea of
owning a startup to pony up $20 a month, or alternatively are so unskilled
that they cannot find $20 a month of gainful employment?

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jacquesm
Those that can afford it should probably not apply for this, I'm thinking
about people that _can't_ afford it.

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easp
How many people who are capable of writing a viable app but can't afford
$20/month or less also lack friends who would give them some server space?

I'm serious about this. If someone is so painfully shy or otherwise socially
incompetent that they know no one who would give them an account then how are
are they going to deal with cultivating customers or buyers?

If their issue is that they just don't have the right friends, then I'd think
the right answer is to start cultivating geeky & entrepreneurial friends for
the sake of just connecting with some like minded people. Helping facilitate
that sort of thing sounds like a fine thing to experiment with, being able to
offer them some free server space would just be gravy.

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jacquesm
Good points. I think that the answer to the first question is probably almost
everybody in the third world for starters, and probably a fair number of
people in the former eastblock countries, especially students.

In the 'developed' world probably fewer but it would not surprise me if there
are thousands of people in a situation where a free server would _just_ give
them the leg up they need to get to 'ramen profitable'.

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_pius
I love the idea, but agree with others who say it seems like it'd be a
tremendous amount of work to manage.

One approach, given the extant free options like Heroku and GAE, would be to
focus on what is actually difficult to get for free: various daemons, queues,
fast key-value stores, etc. Maybe provide a RESTful interface to provision
common cases on demand. That'd be helpful to a lot of people without
overlapping too much with existing options or allowing people to execute
arbitrary code.

Of course, implementing this is probably a business idea all in itself and may
take way more time than you'd want.

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jefffoster
Sounds very similar to <http://hcoop.net/>. It's $5 a month and you get
superuser access to almost everything according to the FAQ.

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abyssknight
You better virtualize it and pray no one breaches the hypervisor. ;)

In all seriousness, you would definitely want to prevent one user from taking
out the whole box. As much as we all trust one another, there is always room
for an 'oops, I rm -rf'd /usr/bin...' to happen.

Great idea though, I'd definitely be interested!

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jacquesm
That's a good suggestion, but I don't have much experience with hypervisors,
how much overhead do you think that would give ?

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easp
The overhead of a hypervisor is pretty low. VPS hosts will divide a 16GB 4-8
core machine into 40 pieces with Xen and each slice performs pretty well
(provided that not all of them are running CPU intensive jobs at once.

The main overhead is that each virtual machine has its own kernel memory, file
cache, etc. There are other virtualization approaches that use a shared
kernel, and which may be able to use a single copy of common shared libraries
across partitions (not sure about this last part though). FreeBSD jails or
OpenVZ on Linux fall into this category.

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stevoo
I can help being the sysadmin and anything else related to this.

It will be a great hands on experience for me.

As for the idea, i believe that it is great. Many students cant really afford
buying hosting as it doest come cheap for them ( i couldnt, wish i had ) . And
there are other people that most probably would like to hang on to there hard
earned cash, but still want to try out something. This will be a cool
experience for them.

As for the 256 RAM .... that wont fly with this. Put 10 users on this and it
will crawl till it dies ! 2gb is the absolute minimum for this baby !

Conditions can easily change, but it should be a free box to do what you
please, but no illegal stuff on it or you will be screwed ( I am sort of safe
here in the middle of nowhere ) :D

email at my profile, i hope ! NO SPAMMING !

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josephruscio
Not trying to troll or anything, but in the age of services like EC2, App
Engine, and Heroku, why would anyone get locked into a long term hosting
contract without prior proof of "legs"?

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jacquesm
Nobody is getting locked in to anything but me.

EC2, App Engine are lock-in platforms with a price to switch that force your
application in to a certain structure.

Heroku is free if you can make your stuff work with 5MB of storage.

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easp
How is EC2 a "lock-in" platform, particularly when compared to space on a
shared server?

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jacquesm
You're right about that, EC2 has it's own 'instance storage', which would take
the place of the shared hard disk here.

I was thinking about integrating S3 when you use EC2, but of course you don't
_have_ to use S3.

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jasonlbaptiste
Talk to rackspace's cloud division about doing something. They seem big on
working with developers and they offer really small slices. You can spawn via
an API, so letting people on/registering and being on their own vps is fairly
easy. Maybe do it where it's invite only or there's some advisory board? I
don't know how you control who has access,etc.

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lhorie
How's this better than just finding a free PHP host in a free subdomain?
(honest question)

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jacquesm
Hey Lhorie, do you have an example ?

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lhorie
Lots of PHP hosting providers have free account options. Here's a random one I
just googled up:

<http://www.000space.com/>

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jacquesm
Ok, here is the major difference I think:

You'd be sharing the same kind of box as with this hosting provider, but
instead of sharing it with several thousand others you'd be sharing it with
maybe 5 to 10 others.

You wouldn't be limited to PHP.

You'd have a lot more storage space and bandwidth.

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lhorie
I see. I don't suppose the free CPU cycles would be too critical for someone
doing a prototype, but the language freedom is definitely compelling.

With that being said, I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough.
FWIW, I hear that many private mmorpg servers die because they overlook the
amount of time and money needed to keep a server running.

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jacquesm
> I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough.

Someone has already volunteered for that post.

I'm a bit upset at all the negativity though.

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lhorie
Well, if you have a volunteer sys admin, you're all set then :)

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Tichy
There are some free hosting options, though, for example Heroku or Google App
Engine.

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colinplamondon
I don't get what the point is, when you can just push to Heroku and go off one
dyno until people pay money.

