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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

Linode is my top choice for hosting, but lately I've been tinkering on a project that needs a lot of disk, and it's hard to find good options there. On AWS every dimension scales independently, but with Linode I can't buy disk without buying CPU and RAM too. When I had a similar need a few years ago, I wound up renting a dedicated server, where even the cheapest came with 2TB or so. I'd love to just stick with Linode, but I need an option to add disk!

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Delimiter has a clever solution for $10 a month. They call it Slot Hosting. You ship them a disk and they'll host it and attach it as additional storage on a VPS. https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/

I use it to host an 8tb drive that I then attach to a dedicated server I rent for $20 a month.

$30 a month and I have a server that I use for Plex (16 cores, 3.2ghz, 32 gigs of memory, and 10tb of total storage).

Thanks for sharing - this is really cool.

Which hosting plan are you using for Plex?

[Disclosure - I work at Delimiter]

Thanks for the recommendation, slot hosting is a good solution if you need to get a disk online with a VPS attached to it.

We've had a lot of people asking how you did this so just to explain:

Slot hosting $120/year ($10/month) - that gives you one 3.5" or 2.5" slot to send your disk in. You can aggregate up multiple slots and aggregate the VPS resources into one large VM. This is great for things like ZFS and software RAID. The VM is KVM based. https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/

The server is this: Dual E5420, 16GB RAM, 1TB or 2x500GB HDD $200/year ($16.66/month). https://cc.delimiter.com/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=1718

Slot hosting uses dedicated (non-contended) CPU/RAM/Disk resources so you can run Plex directly on it if you have enough slots aggregated to give you the RAM.

Why annual pricing? I'd do it if you had monthly pricing.....Since the payment is annual what happens if 2 or 3 months in I decide to change and need something else?

Slot hosting moved to annual only as administering a customer-owned equipment adds an additional layer of headache.

Its not cost effective to have customers who want to load up on 'warez' cancelling their service, shipping back their disk to get it back the next week empty for another round.

We're positioning this as a long-term storage product where customers don't want to be paying the hosting company each month for disks.

Can I buy slots and use them from your Cloud Resource Pools, (e.g. for $10/mo on top of the $6/mo for the Pool)? That's an interesting configuration...

The slots are just a VM + Disk. You can setup the VM to serve the disk contents by NFS or CIFS etc and mount it on any of our products.

Holy, why do you need that computing power for streaming shows/movies?

Transcoding... x265 CPU encodes on even a 2hr video can take several hours on a very fast intel CPU. I've been playing around with nvenc vbr 2-pass which has been giving me good results, not too much larger than the cpu encode in minutes.

But if you want something hosted/online, then it gets harder.

No way to offload it to the GPU? I remember reading about ffmpeg extensions for doing that...

I mentioned using nvenc (nvidia encoder), but didn't mention that is was using gpu... cpu encoding is much slower.

Depends on how many concurrent streams he's doing and if he's running anything else.

$30 a month and I have a server that I use for Plex (16 cores, 3.2ghz, 32 gigs of memory, and 10tb of total storage).

That sounds amazing. Where can I find this?

It works out at $26.66/month but its based on two annual products:

Dual E5420, 16GB, 1TB HDD (or 2 x 500GB): https://cc.delimiter.com/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=1718

Slot hosting: https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/slot-hosting/

Thanks for the response, but the spec is half of what you listed. you linked me to a 2.5ghz, 8core, 16GB machine. No obvious private network options, so pricing is pretty much middle of the road. Although the slot option is cool.

There is no private option with Slot hosting. I think the OP is confusing 8 cores + 8 threads as 16 cores.

If you want disk, as in spinning rust, I think it's going to remain that way for a long time. For some reason cloud providers don't like to offer disk at a reasonable price. I suspect it might be because it's not actually a single disk but space on something like a RAID10 SAN, where costs are higher since it inherently requires more hardware.

Personally, I settled with colocation. I pay $60/mo + $2k one-off for the initial hardware + say $150/5y/4TB HDD, which, for 80TB of storage over 5y comes out to a total of ~$88/mo, or $0.001/GBmo. Even if I was to store 3 copies of everything instead of doing erasure coding, my costs are roughly half of what Backblaze B2 charges. And my disks are fully online block storage, not necessarily object storage.

Speaking as someone who hasn't tried colocation, would you care to recommend your provider or explain who the Linode and the DO are in that space?

I'm sharing a cabinet with a few other people in one of Hurricane Electric's datacenters. A full cabinet is $400/mo and we split it 7 ways based on space and power consumption.

If you can't get together the people for a full cabinet (which I think is definitely worth it, the more you buy at once, the cheaper it gets), there are a number of providers that offer single server colocation. The only one I've really heard much about though is Joe's Datacenter, which is in Kansas City, Missouri.

Unfortunately there isn't really a "Linode" or "DO" in the colocation space anymore. There used to be https://prgmr.com, which offered transparent pricing based on power and bandwidth usage but they've stopped that I believe. The few global providers are generally geared towards multinational corporations or at least businesses more than small groups or hobbyists. You're really best off with the smaller regional providers near wherever you are.

There is no de-facto colocation provider. Peer1 is an example of one that has a lot of locations, but it's not by any means dominant.

Every major urban hub has a multitude of providers. Some offer expensive, but reliable service, others cheap but you get what you pay for, and there's a mix in between. Talk to people and ask for tours. Every town is completely different in terms of scene.

Assuming that your are not in the middle of nowhere, it is typically best to stick with a somewhat local or regional co-lo facility. Discovering who else has space there is typically a good indicator or quality. Find out where your local hospital or university has their boxes. Keep in mind this is your hardware and it will occasionally need a new HD or fan. You do not want to fly across the country for that. Also their are a wide range of security options for co-los, so weigh those options.

"In the coming months we’ll be releasing into beta our new Linode Manager, RESTful API, and block storage service."

From the blog post you just commented on ;-)

Good catch. Thanks!

DigitalOcean has their new block storage https://www.digitalocean.com/products/storage/

Cool. Is "block storage" anything other than a fancy new word for "network drive"?

Slightly off-topic, but EC2 doesn't really scale independently if you compare it to GCE. We let you combine 24 vcpus with 39 GB of RAM, 3 partitions of Local SSD and a few GPUs, all independently (though the ratio of RAM to vcpu is currently bounded between .9 and 6.5).

One of our easiest pricing wins is against say the i2.* series ("Were you trying to buy more flash or more cores?") and now against their p2.* GPU series. It's pretty liberating to actually mix and match.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I am in the same boat. Need additional storage for less random-access demanding data, like photos/videos. If you check the Linode forums, they have begun to work on block storage option, like Vulr/DO. But it is still early in the design phase and they don't have an estimate launch date yet.

I was in the same situation a year ago. Eventually found Vultr that allows attaching additional "disk instances". But despite that I would choose Linode for any resource-balanced project.

IwStack (by Prometeus) can be customized quite a bit storage-wise:

http://iwstack.com/price-calculator.php

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