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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.

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Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.

Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it?

Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.

You can search for local linux/debian user groups.

yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for... but often it's hard to tell from the webpages which ones are popular, and which ones are just two guys.

Hm. But yeah, I should play more with LUGs in poor parts of the world; I've tried to give away stuff to local LUGs around here (in the SF bay area) but they usually have a setup they like already, and other providers falling over themselves to give them free crap.

Why not just buy google ads for technical keywords and target only the desired countries?

For my ad money, I like display ads rather than pay per click ads... I am just trying to say 'Hey, I exist' and pay per click is usually not a very cost-effective way of doing that.

(now, most of my advertising 'budget' was spent on, say, writing a book... but per-click ads are the opposite of what I want.)

Do you click ads?

I don't even /see/ them.

You could try their forums.

http://webgeekph.com/ http://www.philweavers.net/forums/

Or here:

http://webdesigners.org.ph/

Most of the time, the best way to access the best people is thru referrals. Drop me an email, I might be able to help you out.

Thanks. I've never used referrals, though. Usually I prefer cheap display ads, donating services, or community participation. I have used discounts for certain low-risk groups; I guess that's a little like a referral.

Try http://www.philweavers.net - I am not sure how it is now, but I have had a bunch of clients from their old site.

I think most people there are from Luzon - the biggest island in the Philippines - has the biggest city - so it is probably more expensive there than to get someone from Cebu. http://www.mynimo.com/ is local to Cebu. Or you could try JobsDB.com OR Jobstreet.com (almost all the big companies in my place advertise in JobsDB.com and Jobstreet.com)

What sort of skills are you looking for? I know some people who can run Linux boxes.

Edit: Just contact me through my email in my profile since I am a bit busy at the moment to check HN regularly.

hah. I'm trolling for customers, not employees. I serve the price sensitive, you see, but I do it in part by providing less support service, so I need people who know what they are doing as customers.

If you'd like really cheap web hosting, try http://nearlyfreespeech.net. Write something in PHP, and you can use a SQLite database for free (just put a high timeout on write locking) or a MySQL database for $0.01/day or something. They don't support FastCGI, so any other language would require starting up a new runtime for each web request, which is pretty much a non-starter if you can't afford $16/mo (which is the prepaid limit).

If you need money for a project to get kickstarted, try Kiva or Kickstarter.

On the plus site, if 5 of you can fit onto the EC2 small instance, it's only $6/mo, if you do a spot instance with a high maximum.

Thanks. NFSN looks really awesome - but the pricing is a bit too complicated. Right now, I am with Webhostingbuzz and I get a warning for using too much CPU from time to time.

Kiva / Kickstarter is very interesting. I wished I have heard of these sites right before my "busy season".

Right now, I am planning to save up so that I can get a Linode for one year.

ASO has $25/year web hosting that is solid.

eventually, maybe; but right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry.

Personally, I won't touch any hardware until I can get it from more than one vendor (usually, until you get to that point it's too expensive. Their may not be much price pressure in the industry as a whole, but in my niche, there certainly is.)

  right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry

Isn't that the point? Right now, there isn't much of a margin left to undercut competitors with unless you scale up to Amazon or Rackspace size. Developments like this could change that again.

look at my previous post; this is actually a good bit more expensive than 32gib ram/8 core opteron pizza boxes.

People keep telling me that margins are low in this industry. I mean, my prices are dramatically lower than others, and I imagine my my internal processes are rather a lot less efficient than the competition (we provision by hand, for example) also, we're not nearly at scale; I mean, we have 4 full racks and maybe 15Kw of power capacity total- I'm not making a lot of money, but I'm afloat on 1/2 the revenue and higher internal costs.

I mean, if you'll pay my bills, I'll pretty much do it for fun, so I'd expect my margins to be lower than most, but considering the price differences, some people must be making some serious coin.

Indeed. It's a rung on the ladder to times when what fills a rack or a server room today will fit into a 1U tomorrow. There will come a time in the not too distant future when the ability to host a site in which quite literally a majority of the world's population accesses multiple times per day is simply a matter of setting up a relatively run-of-the-mill inexpensive VPS. The implications such technology will have on business, society, culture, etc. are left as an exercise for the reader.

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