IPad Colocation
ipadcolo.net
ipadcolo.net
I'm wondering if there are places looking at hosting little boxes like:
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12678
Power-wise, they must be on-par with the Mac Mini/AppleTV but seem to be a fair bit cheaper.
I'm not saying it's impossible, it just is going to take some work to build a proper rack, and even then, you are probably going to want to take the 'if it fails, cut power and leave it' approach which doesn't do as well with the 'send me your server, I host it' model.
or, maybe they are just really careful stacking it? I don't know. There is a whole lot of demand for cheap co-lo on dedicated boxes.
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11485
Shame they don't take more ram.
Seem to be some other cheaper ones on http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=160&pp=160
problem is that this is a company that sells to large corporations, so the markup is, ah, out of my price range.
Honestly, I don't know enough about the costs involved with making chassis to know if there is much margin in the conventional server chassis business.
The problem is, there are no good standards on VPS provision of CPU time. Memory and disk space are easy to count, but guarantees of CPU are harder to come by and pin down.
(Disk space, as opposed to disk performance, sure, that's easy. But space, without performance, is so cheap as to hardly matter at all.)
Amazon attempt to define things with their "Compute Units" as being equivalent to a single core 1.0GHz 2007 Opteron (or whatever it is), but most VPS providers don't give good demonstrations or examples of the sort of power you're guaranteed to get. Pure megahertz don't help, but even something like "roughly equivalent to a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo" would be a massive help to buyers.
(Even Amazon's compute units can be hard to figure out. How does a 1 GHz Opteron from 2007 compare to, say, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo? These are things buyers are thinking about and looking up endless Tom's Hardware charts for :-))
Hm. But what If I mentioned the minimum and maximum? I can do that... so, for example, on a 256MiB VPS, you are probably on a server with 8 cores and 32GiB ram. (now, personally, I steal 1 core and 1GiB ram for the dom0, but you could squeeze that some, though I wouldn't recommend giving the dom0 less than one core.)
so, uh, you have a total of 124 domains, right? and 7 cores, so each domain gets, what, 5% or so of a core at minimum, and then 100% of the number of vcpus given at maximum.
now, if the provider was simply up front about how much ram they put on a box, the user can figure this all out for themselves (in a xen system /proc/cpuinfo will give you information about the real cpu)
But yes, this could be made much more clear. But even so, it'd probably not result in anything that is usefully comparable to a dedicated server, and really, the performance bottleneck we usually see is disk; if you use 2 or 4 spindles for those 124 accounts, well, disk sucks pretty badly for everyone. But this is the nature of small VPSs.
(so really, giving you specs about my disks might be better; or just making public graphs of CPU and Disk usage on servers. But I have a hell of a time convincing people that anything but the CPU matters, so that might be a waste of time.)
https://interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated-servers.htm...
In that sense, bravo.
I can kind of imagine a system where you setup a "service" per pad. You might configure a database on an individual pad which is dedicated to that task only, or a mail account, or whatever you need. Then plug the pad into the rack slot for safe keeping and powering - actual communications are all wireless. I imagine this not unlike how "crystals" and other such things are used on a lot of scifi shows where they have to pull the crystal/pad thing and tap on them a bit to reprogram them...
Granted, it's probably easier to just have a remote tool (ssh, web interface, etc) to reconfigure services like we do now all in one place (and from any physical location), but there's something very compelling about being able to just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI, and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
but there's something very compelling about being able to
just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI,
and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
There's a whole big chunk of your customers that will fall into a middle range: they'll be smart enough to know that this is a terrible idea, but gullible enough to believe that you would try it. They certainly won't click on the "sign up" link, and therefore may not be let in on the joke. And you really don't want your smarter customers thinking that you're actually selling this service.
I know how we love our nerdy humor, but all I'm saying is that companies have to be a little bit careful not to inadvertently let inside jokes hurt business.
In this case though, they are offering to serve an OS X desktop environment, not just web sites, so there's one thing that can't be done (well) on Linux.
Oh and it is forbidden to send sexy emails on you iPad mail server, it could be used to remove the software from the app store. That means you will have to unregister from that viagra mailing list that keeps sending you offers.
It's weird they did not put in a more visible link to their real service. http://www.macminicolo.net
[1] http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-cloud-to-atomic-c...
Although ... you _could_ do this with a custom app. Wouldn't be too hard, really.