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Show HN: Weekend project - Powerful Webserver on Tiny Hardware

blog.freshte.ch

15 pointsVierScar18 comments

I was expecting the 'tiny hardware' to be some microcontroller. A dual core Cortex A7 @ 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM is comparable in performance with lower spec VPSes that many people use to host personal websites/blogs. I guess the author was refering to the physical size.

[strike]I'm interested where to get a cubieboard2 for $50 since it is sold for $59 by the manufacturer.[/strike] No source of cheap cubieboards. :(

I have used micro-controllers, but hosting a webserver on one of them would be a mission! I'm not sure, but I would've thought majority of shared hosting providers have much higher CPU, RAM and ethernet speeds?

When I said "about $50" I did mean about $50 - I'm from Aus and my friend got it for me (+shipping) for over $70AUD - I don't keep track of money that exactly.

There's a whole community built around making the most out of restricted server resources over at http://www.lowendtalk.com/ . People very regularly utilize virtual servers with 64MB of RAM, 10mbit or less network, and very minimal disk space. Nginx will run with just about anything you throw at it.

> I would've thought majority of shared hosting providers have much higher CPU, RAM and ethernet speeds

They do, but when you rent a VPS you're essentially getting to use that hardware in timeslices (and you only get a part of the RAM). Depending on provider, the percentage of time your VM is active (and so it gets to use these resources) is either enforced by the hypervisor, is a result of fair scheduling between clients sharing the hardware, or a combination of both.

I don't have Cortex-A7 hardware to benchmark and compare the CPU speed with VPSes, but I think it should be close to lower end offerings. 1 GB of RAM is usually not even the lowest offering, e.g. DigitalOcean[0], prgmr[1].

[0] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing [1] http://prgmr.com/xen/

>but I would've thought majority of shared hosting providers have much higher CPU, RAM and ethernet speeds?

Not always - for example I have one VPS with 64mb of ram, on a shared 1gbit line, and one with 128mb of ram on a shared 100mbit line.

I use them for TT-RSS (nginx + php-apc + php-fpm + postgresql), a self-hosted image uploader (nginx + php-fpm), ZNC and an Irc Bot.

You'd be surprised by how few resources nginx (and similiar, like lighttpd) uses.

It's $49 at https://cubieboard.myshopify.com/

The author is describing a cubieboard2, which is $59: https://cubieboard.myshopify.com/collections/home-slide/prod...

No - Only cubieboard1 with the A20 - I believe the cubieboard2 has gigabit ethernet and wireless.

No, cubieboard and cubieboard2 are identical apart from the SoC. Both use RTL8201CP as an Ethernet PHY, which only supports 10/100 mbps. Neither has WiFI.

This is how the body font looks on Windows/Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/98RCkzv.png

I turned ClearType off and it looks like that too. All text looks better with ClearType on. I don't know why it's not the default setting.

That looks horrible! Sorry - I trusted it because it's from Google's Web Fonts... :/ I'll work on finding a few better fonts that work across platforms better. Thanks for letting me know.

Where are you hosting it? From your home connection?

For anyone interested, there are several[1] provider that provide free or cheap raspberry pi colocation. I'm almost sure that they wouldn't have a problem colocating a cubieboard (or similiar) if you shot them an email.

Regarding performance, I'm sure a raspberry (which is less powerful thana cubieboard) is more than enough to serve static pages, and even dynamic pages if your site doesn't get a lot of hits.

[1] http://raspberrycolocation.com/, http://www.micron21.com/raspberrypi-colocation.php, http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/, https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+colocating

Wow I had no idea about colocation - seems pretty cool!

Yeah I'm hosting it from a home connection, and it's hosting dynamic content - even though it could just be made static I wanted to test it - using php and hitting redis - looks like it works pretty well!

If you want Go without Perl, compile it from source. It's a 2 min story. You checkout the latest stable branch and :

   cd src/
   ./all.bash   # takes maybe 2 min on my laptop, dunno on a small board

Then set your $GOPATH and add `bin/` to your path. Then scrap PHP. Then scrap nginx. Then just use Go.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, but the Cubieboard platform caught my eye. I like that it has SATA, making it especially suited for server/NAS type applications.

run https://www.blitz.io/ on it

Cool - I need a tool like this. Is there one which doesn't require me to sign up though? It's annoying registering so many accounts :/

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