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Comment by param | Hacker News Reader

This is a fluff piece, probably written for SEO juice. At least the submitter of the story is open in his profile that he works for the company in question (anchor) and is the author of the piece

A better article would have quantified all the measurable metrics like "virtual machines are 'fast'" and talked about some of the negatives - like privacy/security concerns etc.

What I want to know is - why are they so much more expensive than linode(for example). These guys are offering a 512Mb VPS @80$/m compared to 19.95@linode. They also charge 100$ for setup - (doing everything manually?)

(Disclaimer - I am a happy linode customer)

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What I want to know is - why are they so much more expensive than linode(for example).

Hosting prices in Australia are all super-expensive.

Hosting is a lot more expensive in Australia.. To give you some idea, for wholesale bandwidth alone we pay in the order of 20times what it costs in the US or Europe.

The reality is we're a long way from everywhere. When we connect into the US we need to run the cables 15,000kms and we get to pick up the vast majority of the costs to do so. Then when you try split that cost over 22 million people versus the 300million++ in the US, you end up with economies of scale which are way out of whack with what your familiar with. :)

To give you some idea, the vast majority of residential DSL connections cost in the order of $100/month .. and only come with 150GB data allowance. :)

Depends at what level. Dedicated isn't too bad and there are some VPS providers who have reasonable prices e.g. http://www.mammothvps.com.au/home/index

If Amazon EC2 does come to Sydney as expected then I would expect a bit of a shakeup of the industry.

According to my bosses who have done the research when setting up their web hosting, the Australian hosts are 1) uniformly VERY expensive and 2) not as reliable as hosting providers elsewhere.

As someone else said, bandwidth is expensive and travels great distances. But that's not the only reason either imho. Things are simply more expensive here. :(

Your first point is relatively correct. Prices in Australia are hugely more expensive because of a combination of high wages and sheer distance from everything else.

The second point however is a stereotypical blanket statement. It's important to note that Anchor as a company designed and maintained the infrastructure of Github.com and now does the same thing for testflightapp.com; Both of which are high profile startups each of whom have traffic numbers orders of magnitude higher than most Australian hosting providers see across their entire network.

In the end, quality hosting isn't just about the hardware (linode, rackspace), but highly skilled engineers who can architect and provide solutions that don't 'just work' now, but scale into the future.

I read with great interest the write up on Anchor's work for the new Github architecture, so I meant no disparagement to the employee's skill.

The problems I was referring to were simply the ability to keep from falling over at random times for varied reasons. Many providers they tried couldn't even handle this basic task. Sure, we could have paid for the expertise with a company like Anchor but it was more cost effective to look outside Australia.

Different markets for different people. Anchor isn't going after the commodity/volume end of the market like Linnode. Horses for courses.

You shouldn't be a happy Linode customer. They still haven't owned up to what happened during that Bitcoin incident and what they've done to stop it happening again. Major security incidents DEMAND transparency e.g. look how professional Cloudflare was.

So for all you know your VPS could still be hacked in seconds despite whatever security measures you have in place.

What was "that Bitcoin incident"?

Second hit on the Google results for "linode bitcoin incident" is this: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/cloud-service-linode-hacke...

The bitcoin incident was a xen exploit that they couldn't talk about until Xen provided a fix and disclosed themselves. They talk about it, without referencing the bitcoin incident specifically, here http://blog.linode.com/2012/06/13/xen-security-advisories-an...

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