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Comment by deftnerd | Hacker News Reader

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).

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[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.

$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.

Thanks for sharing - this is really cool.

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.

Which hosting plan are you using for Plex?

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