

VPS Comparison between Slicehost and Prgmr: is an $8 instance as good as a $20 one? - uggedal
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-and-prgmr

======
asb
Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money
than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple
locations. A $20 Linode for instance gives you 360mb of of RAM, 16gb storage
and 200gb transfer. They also use more powerful CPUs than the Athlon's listed
for Slicehost/prgmr - my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon L5420 (2.5ghz, 6mb
cache).

Just guessing, but I'd expect disk access is a bigger bottleneck on highly
loaded VPS servers than the CPU, so the worst and average case disk
performance are probably what would concern me the most. I think prgmr is a
fantastic deal - I certainly haven't seen anybody else offering so much RAM at
that price point. I'd be a customer if they were located on the east coast.

Finally, for those who don't know, prgmr is owned and run by lsc who's a
member here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc>

~~~
m0shen
<http://www.fsckvps.com/> has similar pricing for OpenVZ based virtual
servers.

~~~
lsc
If you like OpenVZ, I would recommend

<http://www.johncompanies.com/>

Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention
than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I
tried them, were excellent.

~~~
thesethings
"Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention
than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly."

This is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit?

~~~
lsc
OpenVZ is a thinner virtualization layer. everyone shares the same kernel.
It's resource separation isn't nearly as strong. On the other hand, it is also
more efficient. you can reasonably expect to get more total performance out of
a OpenVZ system than the same system running xen, but the problem is with
OpenVZ, if one user is hogging resources, that user is much more likely to
effect other customers than they would be under Xen, with it's non-shared ram
and stronger CPU scheduling.

~~~
thesethings
Also, thanks in general for your HN participation and frank and open
discussion of your hosting business. I find it really interesting and also
helpful the way you classify different types of hosting needs and potential
good hosting fits, ( that are not always your own company ;D ). Very cool!

------
s3graham
I do feel like slicehost "must" be overpriced these days, just based on the
fact that their prices haven't decreased that I can remember. (At least ~2
years, maybe more?)

Not sure if prgmr is where I'd end up, but can't be all bad when "figlet
prgmr.com" was all the time they spent on logo design. ;)

~~~
asb
In that time, Linode have consistently increased their offerings at the same
price-point and they deploy newer hardware. It seems a little odd to me that
Slicehost seem to get so much more love in the hacker community and Linode
remains the underdog. Perhaps Slicehost tends to attract more passionate users
who market it more effectively to others? If Linode would get their backup
service out of beta and clone the Slicehost API I would see little reason to
prefer Slicehost.

~~~
FooBarWidget
I'm a long-time Linode customer, and I recently had to make the choice between
Linode and Slicehost. I was extremely unimpressed by Slicehost's offerings
compared to Linode - with Linode you get _so_ much more bang for the buck, and
they even upgraded harddisk space 3 weeks after I signed up for a new server.
I can absolutely not understand why Slicehost gets more buzz than Linode.

~~~
melvinram
Their beautiful copy/paste ready articles and fantastic support in their
Campfire chat room is what sold me when I started with them. Recently, I moved
over to Mosso.

------
davidw
This is worth noting:

> Much of what’s automated over at Slicehost (like provisioning a new
> instance) is handled manually at Prgmr.

(Which is also true for Linode). That might potentially be a big difference -
I found it very quick to bring up new Linodes or Slices, and it's nice to know
that that's a quick and easy possibility if you start generating more traffic.

Also... Calexico? Seems an odd place to be running a hosting business. It
appears their actual servers are in San Jose... so where did he get Calexico
from?

[http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.co...](http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.com)

(Which is what their 'about' link takes you to) Looks like a smaller operation
than Linode or Slicehost, too.

~~~
uggedal
I found the location by using a Geo IP lookup. It could therefore be
inaccurate.

~~~
falsestprophet
It is inaccurate. The servers are located at the svtix data center [1] in San
Jose, CA [2]. That seems like a perfectly sensible place to operate a business
to me.

[1] <http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html> [2]
<http://www.svtix.com/locationmap.html>

~~~
lsc
this is correct for all new customers. I have a really old location at
herculies data in sacramento, and another old location at he.net in Fremont.

~~~
falsestprophet
Just out of curiosity: are you planning to centralize your operation?

~~~
lsc
I am planning on spreading even more. I'd like a rack in the UK or eastern
europe. I do plan on getting rid of some of my current locations once I move
the customers, though. but it would be nice to offer some low-latency options
to our friends on the other side of the globe.

My next rack will probably be around here, though. Some place that I can get a
cheap dark-fiber connection to from svtix, or maybe even within svtix, but I'd
like to offer my customers the option of buying VPSs in different locations.

~~~
radu_floricica
> I'd like a rack in the UK or eastern europe.

And they will be welcome!

------
jordanlev
I am a slicehost customer, and a programmer without much sysadmin experience.
To me, the documentation and support community at slicehost is invaluable -
something this article touches on but doesn't put as much importance into as
raw performance. Of course, depending on your level of Linux admin experience,
saving $12/mo. may be worth it to you.

~~~
vaksel
Its always worth it to pay more for quality. Especially when the difference is
only $12.

~~~
uggedal
The difference is $12 for a 256MB slice. What if you start to grow and need 5
1GB slices? That is a $250/month difference.

~~~
vaksel
as your traffic grows, so should your revenue.

~~~
medianama
I've observed hosting costs to grow faster than revenue :-(

~~~
ryanwaggoner
You may be in the wrong business :)

~~~
lsc
really? i think with today's hardware/bandwidth prices, it's perfectly
reasonable to setup a fairly busy site and not worry about revenue at all. If
it only sets you back a few dollars a month, it might make sense for you to
build something popular for the experience and the social capital.

------
phoxix2
Two things to consider:

A) Slicehost isn't an overnite operation. Not saying I don't wish Prgmr all
the luck in the world, but still ...

B) vCPUs don't matter as much as the guest/host contention ratio does. If I
gave you 4 VCPU's and stuck you on a host with 128 other VMs .... you
performance is going to suck no matter what. The fewer the number of guests,
the better the performance of the guests.

Now only if Slicehost would stop sending me email I've got credit with them
even if I have used 'em for over a year ...

~~~
lsc
heh. I've been selling Xen VPSs since 2005, and I sold FreeBSD jail based VPSs
for a while before that. you can call me small, understaffed and cheap, but
I've been in the market for longer than many of my competitors.

~~~
phoxix2
I used Caker's Linode back when he was a startup with only 4 nodes circa: 2002
:)

Good luck to you!

~~~
lsc
Heh. Nice. I remember when ec2 came into public beta I thought it was going to
wipe the floor with us VPS providers. Their prices looked good at that point
in time.

------
callmeed
FTA: _"Community ... If you want to use Prgmr you are pretty much on your
own."_

That alone is reason enough for me to stay with Slicehost.

This article is weighted towards performance aspects. When judging any service
provider, I'd hope people here are wise enough to consider other factors as
well.

I've heard great things about Linode and may try them if I ever get a
chance–but between Slicehost and Prgmr, nothing I see would make me consider
switching (I have 9 slices with SH).

I may be off base, but even though Slicehost is more expensive, that doesn't
mean they aren't _a better value_.

1\. Slicehost's support is great. Quick responses to tickets and very helpful
people in the chatroom

2\. Slicehost's articles–while free to anyone–make me want to support them for
the willingness to contribute knowledge.

3\. Their DNS tool is very handy

4\. I'm sure the prgmr.com team is very competent and I hope they do well. But
their site does little to instill confidence in me.

~~~
lsc
I agree that for some people, linode and slicehost are a better value. (btw,
I've heard nothing but good things about either one, I mean, aside from the
pricing. Both, as far as I can tell, provide excellent service, and both are
easier to use for non-sysadmins than I am.)

My core audience is SysAdmins who need off-site servers and hobbyists, and I
think I serve those markets better than my competitors. I am trying to build
systems that will allow me to better serve people who are not as familiar with
Linux (or bsd)

The website still needs a lot of work. But that is consistent with my goal of
serving existing customers before new customers, if there is not enough time
to do both.

------
mahmud
VPSFarm, unlimited bandwidth and awesome staff. I called them from Cambodia
and told them I wasn't be able to pay this month since Paypal locked me out of
my account (I logged into paypal from 3 different countries in less than 48
hours, and they didn't like it.) I didn't get around to paying them for
another month and a half. My service was never interrupted.

I love a business with a human face :-)

[Currently on linode, for the easier resource upgrades since I'm getting
steady increase in users. Also amazing service.]

------
jpcx01
As a longtime slicehost customer, thank god for competition. Slice has been
slightly overcharging for memory (my current bottleneck). I also don't use any
of slicehost's (admittedly great) tools.

I'll probably think about reevaluating my server costs (about 300 mo) if
slicehost doesn't boost their memory offering in the next few months.
Especially using chef for scripted infrastructure, all I'd have to do is
change my ip list and rerun.

------
alex_c
Thanks, I was keeping an eye out for a way to cut costs for some non-mission-
critical stuff - this looks very interesting (that's a BIG price difference
for the larger plans). Will give it a try.

~~~
lsc
Yeah. Ram, disk and CPU are cheap. Now, dealing with abuse, etc... is
expensive, but most of the per-customer costs are the same no matter how much
ram they order, so I think it makes sense to drop the cost per gigabyte as you
order more ram.

the formula I use to calculate the 1 month pricing is this: $1 for every 64M
ram plus $4 per account. I think it works out reasonable; I was figuring
$512/month for each 32GB / 8 core hardware, which is maybe a little high, but
it is within reason.

------
aaronsw
<http://prgmr.com/status.html> doesn't inspire confidence. Sample quote:

> The cutover from Cogent to Rippleweb was messy, and resulted in nearly a
> full day's down time This was completely my fault, (That is, Luke
> Crawford's) as I set the cut off date for the old service to early.
> Rippleweb moved quickly to help me recover; the rest of the down time was
> due to a faulty cross-connect. All customers get one month of credit for
> this, as this has been a rough month (and we are not entirely out of the
> woods yet.) On the upside, we have avoided renumbering. Neal has survived
> the baptism by fire, and we can expect prgmr.com services to improve in
> reliability now that I have help again.

~~~
lsc
that page was last updated in 2007. granted, we still have problems, but we
are much better than we were.

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

is our current blog and the place we report mistakes and outages.

------
miracle
Why not compare slicehost with a real provider?

Take the servers at hetzner.de, they don't charge much more than a VPS but you
et much more power. The only real advantage of a VPS when you grow is when
they offer you tools to automatically deploy new instances (like amazon ec2).
Otherwise you should be switching to dedicated servers.

~~~
lsc
If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal
than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard
drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a
month.

~~~
leej
so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb
sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated
servers are very high.

lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by
user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and
one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be
true comparing to others. is there any drawback?

~~~
lsc
EC2 kicked my ass when they started their public beta. that's right, something
like $70 a month for 1.7GiB was cheaper than I was. I upgraded to new hardware
and lowered prices.

Under Xen if there is available CPU, any user can burst to it. I use the
credit scheduler, which means you spend scheduler credits to get that CPU. You
gain scheduler credits by not using as much CPU. Your weight determines how
fast your credits accumulate, so a domain with twice as much weight, assuming
contention, gets twice as much cpu as another domain. I weight my domains
based on the amount of ram they have, so a 64Mb domain has 1/4th the weight of
a 256MiB domain.

The ceiling on how much CPU you can use when nobody else wants it is set by
the number of vcpus you have. I give you one, and in this example, slicehost
gives you 4. this is in an effort to make the jokers who run mprime all day
(I'm looking at you) from dragging down the service for everyone else. And
they don't. I see some users who regularly use as much cpu as they are
allowed, and it doesn't cause problems for my more restraned users.

my standard system has 32GiB ram and 2 quad-core 1.9Ghz opterons. (I have one
with 64GiB and 2 2.1Ghz shanghais, but most of that ram is being used as cache
for my experimental ZFS domain, so it shouldn't have more contention than the
32GiB servers)

As for the number of domains, depends on how many users sign up for what plan.
62 domains are on the system that the user who ran this test is on.

------
datums
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Slicehost grew very quickly then got
acquired. Prgmr seems to be the smaller guy growing slowly, getting rack space
[http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation-
in-s...](http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation-in-san-jose-
my-plan.html) and trying to grow to a full rack. The automation is a huge plus
especially if you are in the hosting business. The pricing model and the added
features are what sets the competition apart from EC2. I think many of these
VPS providers have to catch up and come up with some of their own "Why choose
me" features, services if competing with EC2 is their focus.

~~~
lsc
I think comparing me to slicehost or linode is completely fair... they are my
direct competition. I think ec2 is in a different market. there is some
overlap, but really if you want to leave your instance on all the time, a vps
such as I sell (or linode or slicehost) is vastly superior to the instance
with unmirrored disk ec2 provides you.

the opposite is true as well; if you need instant provisioning... if you need
50 servers during the day and 20 at night, I simply can't do that for you. (I
hope to be able to at some point, but I can't yet.) Ec2 has been doing that
for some time, and I think slicehost and linode both have similar
functionality.

------
SingAlong
Do the prgmr.com guys support payment by Paypal?

~~~
deutronium
Yes, looks like thats the main payment option

~~~
SingAlong
Ya. Just checked that. They support Paypal.

It's very nice to see one nice VPS host that supports Paypal and appreciated
by HN. Slicehost and Linode don't support Paypal.

Coming from a geographical region where credit cards are rarely used, this
matters too me.

@Isc: you should probably have an FAQ page about the payment methods and other
common questions. People usually don't check the signup page to know the
payment methods.

~~~
lsc
yeah. I need to do that. The billing system badly needs work. We improved the
provisioning system a bit yesterday, but we still have a backlog from this
attention. Fortunately, I've got plenty of capacity, so the only problem is
the setup.

------
rms
I just wish that there was an easy way to switch... are there any tools to
help automate the process?

~~~
asb
This depends on the availability of a suitable API. Unfortunately, providers
haven't decided on a common one yet. Sun were working on one
(<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud>), although
perhaps other providers will end up just cloning Amazon or Slicehost's.

Check out Cloudkick (A YC company) for migration between Amazon and Slicehost.

~~~
lsc
I think something that is more simple than the ec2 api and the sun api will
win. Yeah, I think cloudkick has some good ideas.

------
barredo
Useful comparison

