Hacker News Reader

Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free

1: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/

View on HN

> KVM access is expensive

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that KVM access on KimSufi or SoYouStart requires somebody to walk over to your machine and plug a USB key into your machine. That would explain why it costs $30.

Not really in a data center. They have embedded firmware for KVM e.g. Dell's DRAC, HP's ILO, Oracle's ILOM, Intel's RMM2, and IPMI. Plugging and unplugging things into a server can be operationally hazardous and is definitely tedious.

OVH's more expensive servers do use IPMI and include free KVM. Their cheaper kimsufi and soyoustart offerings use a USB KVM to ethernet device, and charge for its usage.

In my experience online.net/scaleway support is better than ovh/kimsufi. Also, the scaleway offers have some sort of API at https://developer.scaleway.com in addition to web ui.

Why would you need KVM access, you can activate their rescue image to boot from, which allows you to mount your hard drive and inspect the system?

If you install a custom kernel and it crashes or hangs before it gets far enough to write the logs to the disk, the rescue image doesn't help figure out why the custom kernel isn't booting up.

"only in Canada and EU". Some regard that as a feature :)

Charging for KVM access.... Sounds extremely unpleasant. Why would you want a provider like the that, who is going to kick you in the genitals when you're down?

Just to put it into perspective, both Azure and AWS don't allow KVM access at all, at any price, period. If your VM doesn't boot then only THEIR support can restore it (and both of their support is expensive).

Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.

> Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM?

Yes? It isn't called a KVM, but most hypervisors have a management tool which allows you to act as if you're sitting in front of a physical machine. This is how most allow you to install operating systems (aside from images).

> Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.

It is more a logistical problem. The hypervisor viewer isn't security aware yet, so in order to provide "KVM"-like access to a single VPS they'd need to alter how the viewer and interface works.

You can attach to a KVM or Xen instance with vnc, generally speaking, which allows access to the BIOS, grub, and other stages of the boot. It's generally how I would troubleshoot a non-booting VM.

Yes, a number of VPS providers offer it. Well not precisely KVM, since that's for bare-metal machines, but a similar kind of console access. For example https://prgmr.com/ does.

Ah, yes, you're right. I even used this once when I was on Linode with Lish. I think I was a bit too focused on the KVM naming and it didn't click.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com