or you can just spend those two beers on prgrmr, or 3 beers at linode? for tech people in the West, the amount of money is so small, why would you bother going with the absolute bottom of the market?
But on IRC, I meet kids from Alabama or Minnesota... or China or Myanmar. They're making less than ten bucks an hour, if they are lucky, working at wal-mart or best buy or what have you, and trying to learn about computers. I know a couple of these people starting hosting companies. Some of them are pretty good, others, well, they are interested in learning, and that's good too... but for them? that difference between three bucks and five every month is worth spending some time on.
So yeah, it's a market that I owned once, but that market has... passed me by. (and really, a lot of the people in that market seem kinda angry that I'm not keeping up with the times... which I guess I could take as a complement?) I will put some effort into it again, at some point, but it's not my current highest priority. The comment that gave this hn post it's title was actually me trying to get those people to quit buying my five dollar account, because while in '05, I had images that worked okay on it, today, out of box it just does not work very well. I didn't disable ordering on it completely mostly for irrational reasons. I am pleased and surprised that other people found it this amusing.