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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

What are the use cases for this device which are not covered by either (1) an EC2 "micro" instance ($82 up front + $0.007/hour * 3 years * 365 days * 24 hours/day == $7.38/month) or (2) a small form factor server in my home? If we ignore the toy/coolness factor of having such a small form factor device, are there any compelling use cases? I can't think of any.

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Well, the advantage being that your home connection probably isn't the same, plus you don't have support people whose job it is to keep your home server up and running.

e.g. Say you're away from home, need something off the server, and it goes down. With this, you can call support and probably have it up and running again.

I get the need for a local server if you need low latency/high bandwidth and/or lots of storage. However, for what percentage of those use cases would the user not be happier spending a bit more for something beefier? Why is the form factor so appealing? Even those in a NYC studio could find somewhere to stash a larger server. If the device is being used to serve media, it will have a bunch of external drives dangling from it anyway.

The managed vs. unmanaged question seems important but mostly orthogonal to locality and form factor. And, Dropbox has proven that the local/remote Hybrid is valuable (along with management). Although the form factor is novel, I don't think it's significant for those who only care about the benefits of a piece of technology.

Maybe the world needs more managed services for the individual/household? I posted a "Tell HN" a few months ago about my desire for a managed router, so I guess I've already made this claim:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585

The EC2 option doesn't include bandwidth or storage. Depending on how you use it, this thing might have faster I/O.

A point well taken that EC2 could be much more expensive for transfer/storage-intensive use cases.

Possible use case: If I can put a bigger hard drive inside this, it would be a nice personal mini "mozy" backup service for me. No, it wouldn't be terabytes of stuff, but the dedicated connection would be worth it.

You can get up to a TB RAID1'd

500GB bandwidth included.

a sheevaplug with it's own sata disk is probably going to have less CPU than the amazon 'micro' (at least if their setup is anything like mine, which it likely is.) but disk shares very poorly. If the sheevaplug comes with it's own sata disk, it will kill any shared disk solution as far as disk performance goes. (on the other hand, it's not RAID, which can be pretty bad.)

you can check out as they will assign DNS "plugXXX.pluggr.info, where XXX is the plug's numerical ID."

couldn't find none so far.

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