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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much a free advertisement for non-competitive pricing.

You have no idea how many neighbors you have on that vps.

And that "vcpu" is likely a hyperthreaded core, not physical, so it's a "half core" in reality.

    Monthly	vCPU	Memory	SSD	Transfer
    $6		1	1GB	10GB	1TB
    $12		1	2GB	20GB	1TB
    $18		1	3GB	30GB	2TB
    $24		2	4GB	40GB	3TB
    $48		2	8GB	60GB	4TB
    $96		4	16GB	100GB	5TB
    $192	8	32GB	200GB	6TB

At that "4 core" (virtual) pricing I'd take dedicated from OVH instead [1]

The $6 pricepoint is likely to just get you in the door for an upsell.

Why would you subject yourself to unknown neighbors with unknown abusive habits on the server resources when you can just get a dedicated with SSD for less money and co-host your own projects with known behaviors (and without the overhead of a vps hypervisor).

[1] http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp_32g_ssd.xml

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As long as you're realistic it's not a bad deal, it'd act as a lovely irssi/ssh machine that I don't need to worry about for me.

You can also get 2 free servers a month from Amazon.com (1 Linux one windows). It's actually 750 hours each so could use more than one at a time if you turned them off afterword. http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Note: These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date

Please don't present this as equivalent. AWS's free tier, amortized over the life of a five-year web service, isn't free, or even cheap.

Now, I did make pretty good use of AWS myself for that first year... and then it ran out, and suddenly AWS was much more expensive than Linode (and more recently, DigitalOcean.)

When all you want is "a thing to keep your Rails app running for its measly 10K hits a day" AWS loses hands-down. It's just not their use-case.

At 2c an hour * 365.2425 days * 24 hours a day /12 months * 4/5 = 11.70$ a month. But, if you want an always on connection for 1+ years you can get discounts dropping down to 8$ a month and if you link it to a high volume account you can get another 20% discount.

Which sounds cheap to me.

Where does the first 20% discount come from? (And I would completely disregard the second one; if you know someone who has a high volume account, you can probably get some spare slices just with a polite word.)

More importantly, though: you're assuming Micro instances. Micro instances are tolerable, but not really comparable to anything offered to paying customers at even the most downmarket VPS. The moment you want to burst the CPU of a Micro for any extended period (say, starting up Unicorn workers), your instance will become a chugging morass.

When I was on AWS, I had to go in and reboot my instance every other time I deployed an update to it, because the update process ran just long enough to prompt a 99%-CPU-throttle. At that point my server was basically wedged, since new HTTP requests were still trickling into the old app servers and queuing up (with the throttling, it now was too slow to handle them before more arrived), leaving the CPU unable to "relax" enough to get out of the throttled state even after the deploy was over.

> if you want an always on connection for 1+ years you can get discounts

With a down payment. You have to calculate the NPV of the cashflow, not just the aggregate sum; $10/mo is a lot easier to manage than $100 + $8/mo.

But disregaring that: even with a three-year term--costing $257 up-front, and committing you to payments in a similar way to a cell-phone contract--it looks like an Small will still cost $15.80/mo. Why put yourself in such a bind just for a not-that-good slice? (Network throughput is one of the few acceptable answers to that.)

This does all assume that your app that will live comfortably on any consumer workstation machine for the foreseeable future (its growth has already plateaued, in other words.) If there's any possibility of hockey-stick growth in your app's future, AWS becomes a lot more attractive.

You said "amortized over the life of a five-year web service" that's 4 years of cost + 1 year free.

As to Cost it's $100 for 3 years at .5cents an hour or 63$ for 1 year at .5cents an hour. I used the 63$ for 4 years vs 3 for 100 plus one at 63. If you really care about the time value of money your first year is free so it's better than than paying up front for that first year any way you do the numbers.

PS: I don't actually use AWS I was just defending them from the old 'there vary expensive' which I found to generally be false. Most of the time your time is worth far more than hosting costs especially when dealing with such small servers.

I did. I got charged, I'm still trying to sort that out with Amazon.

Why not buy your own server and get it collocated?

Co-lo for a single server is not practical if you are relying on the datacenter techs for repair/replacement. When it's their own hardware and the have hundreds (or thousands) of identical systems, much easier/cheaper.

Hetzner.de is also cheap for dedicated servers.

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