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Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

Something is wrong with their pricing, since a server with twice the RAM, bandwidth, and disk is $5/mo. It's too bad you can't combine two or more of these $1 servers in order to get just the right amount of VPS.

This low price makes me wish that RAM and CPU could be added to cloud servers on an as-needed basis, i.e. hot-swappable RAM. That would be much more useful than autoscaling since it could react to traffic very quickly. You'd need live-migration behind the scenes to make it work, of course.

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I would imagine that they are betting that most users will use this to host small static sites with negligible traffic, allowing them to benefit from payed for, but unused resources.

I can do that on GitHub pages for free...

What happens when github arbitrarily decides to take your site down?

Edit: nevermind, just saw their TOS

Can you expand on how the TOS solves this?

>Can you expand on how the TOS solves this

I meant the opposite. They have free reign to censor content.

Well something like S3 with $0.10/month seems like a good alternative.

If that's the case then people could just use Amazon's S3. You can get a LOT of static site for 10c/month.

More likely scenario is a tiny PHP site with the database hosted elsewhere?

S3's the storage - you still have to run an httpd daemon somewhere, and even the smallest, cheapest EC2 instance will run you no less than $14 a month. (Notwithstanding the one-year-only free tier)

(Wow, I didn't know you could just serve content straight off the storage. I need to re-examine AWS.. thanks :D)

Heroku? I'm unsure what could fit into one of these VPSes but not a free-tier Heroku instance. (Which you get as many of as you like, mind you.)

Looks like you can host a static web site just using S3: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

You can host static sites entirely on S3: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

Nice to know this. One major disadvantage is no https.

If you use Cloudfront you can: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...

Stick it behind the free cloudflare tier and you'll get ssl now for free.

S3 lets you essentially park a domain on a bucket and serve files from the URL, including .html. No additional httpd needed.

EC2's new t2.micro instance is actually $9.50/month https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/07/01/introd...

Yeah that is much more suited.. all the tiny php can be hosted on this without any SHELL/super user restrictions

Felt the same way. I'm wondering what the catch is.

Lock-in, that's what the catch is. It's supposed to act as a gateway to more expensive plans.

You often see plans like this on LEB, the catch is usually very oversold on CPU and memory resources, more so then more expensive plans. This might be less apparent with a bigger name provider who can swallow a bit more on there loss-leader plans so YMMV here. Of course to many light uses that overselling isn't going to matter particularly particularly when SSD backed as that reduces the effect of rampant I/O contention. In fact for things that need a small burst of CPU umpf every now and then, an oversold VM on a beefy host will outperform a cheap dedicated box (with an atom chip for instance) costing much more per month.

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