Hacker News Reader

djchenon A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted

They mention one person's cost for a PV system with batteries in the article, it was $14,800. (Look for "Hayashi bought a system with batteries"). It also states the buyer will be able to recoup his upfront cost in 2 years thanks to tax credits.

That doesn't seem too bad.

djchenon How AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are working together to screw you

People also need to vote with their dollars. I understand thats only part of it but its a necessary part. Look at what T-Mobile has done for wireless plans, if more people switched to them for example, I'm sure AT&T/VZW/Sprint will wake up and start offering better pricing/plans. It won't fix the issue, that boils down the law makers need to make the landscape more competitive and easier to compete in. But at least it helps in the short term.

djchenon AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history

Linode, DigitalOcean, etc

djchenon What are Linux containers and how did they come about?

I was thinking more like FreeBSD jails. Containers can't change the system clock.

djchenon AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history

Yeah, thats doubtful but you can run your own on a VPS (OpenVPN and DD-WRT router) and can push several hundred mbps no problem and probably closer to 500mbps; assuming the VPS is connected via gigabit.

djchenon DigitalOcean growing faster than AWS

I highly doubt DO oversells RAM or HDD, though yeah overselling is so easy these days. You can oversell RAM and HDD even with KVM. RAM is the easiest with the virtio_balloon driver.

djchenon DigitalOcean growing faster than AWS

DigitalOcean (DO) is VC funded so its very different from some "hoster" started by some guy with rented server(s). DO can grow really quickly due to that funding which you need to achieve economies of scale. The biz has thin margins and you need volume to achieve profitability.

Ben Uretsky, the CEO of DO is also the CEO of ServerStack. I think I've heard that DO is a sister company of ServerStack, but I could be wrong. The two use the same datacenters: https://www.serverstack.com/infrastructure So very likely one is piggybacking off the other and they're able to get much better prices that way through higher volume.

DO also developed their own control panel so they don't have to pay a licensing cost. Most "hosters" use WHMCS and SolusVM. Granted those aren't hugely expensive but it adds cost if your talking about a $5 VPS. Also the custom panel allows them to further automate most everything.

It can't hurt that DO is also giving away tons of free credit to new sign ups. They must be getting tons of new customers from that alone.