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waitwhaton The Five Stages of Hosting

Careful of the small-print: "The traffic is unlimited. If you exceed 5TB/month for the Kimsufi 2G, 10TB/month for the Kimsufi 16G or 15TB/month for the 24G Kimsufi the connection will be limited to 10 Mbps." My understanding is that if you do get restricted, the restriction isn't automatically lifted the next month. You might want to check with pre-sales to find out exactly what the process is.

I have had a box with them on and off (more on than off) for the last couple of years. I'm not doing anything critical there, but have also had no issues. Everything seems rock solid (which it should be -- Wikipedia says that "The company has six datacentres housing more than 100,000 machines.") You can reinstall from the web control panel, they rent KVMs, not sure what else to add.

The major things people tend to bring up in forum postings are:

Kimsufi is the "non-professional" brand, and hardware support is slower than the OVH parent. Nothing ridiculous, but you aren't going to get a bad drive replaced within a couple of hours either.

OVH has "low quality bandwidth". Of course, people making this complaint never quantify exactly what they mean by this. I just tested on my "24G" box, and see 30-40MB/s to cachefly, 90MB/s to Leaseweb in Amsterdam, 75MB/s to Linode in London, 3-4MB/s to Linode in Newark and Atlanta, 12MB/s to SoftLayer in Dallas, 10MB/s to SingleHop in Chicago, 11MB/s to Joe's Data Centre. (Of course these are large test files.)

If you're interested, there's no setup fee and no minimum contract length (check this for yourself, obviously), so I'd say go for it.

waitwhaton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

Deleting an email really isn't that onerous a task, but you are of course free to use whatever criteria you wish to judge a host.

And as you point out with the "forgotten password dance", access to your email account gives an attacker access to your hosting account anyway (although not stealthily).

waitwhaton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

If your threat model includes hostile mail relays, you probably shouldn't be using bargain basement VPS providers.

Password-reset emails are also easy for an attacker to generate, and no harder for them to intercept than the welcome email.

waitwhaton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

Their servers are in the US, UK, and Germany. http://quickweb.co.nz/supa-vps-plans.html

waitwhaton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

I've used Gandi for a few years on one project. https://www.gandi.net/hosting/vps

The price was right at the time, and they have a few basic cloud-style features (so not just a barebones VPS provider.)

waitwhaton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

Just because the welcome email contains the password in clear doesn't mean that they permanently store the password in their database unhashed.

waitwhaton US bars friends over Twitter joke

Sister paper to the News of the World (home of the "phone hacking") and home of Page 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Three (photos of topless glamour models).

waitwhaton The Five Stages of Hosting

Also have a look at OVH's Kimsufi brand: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/

i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50

(they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)

waitwhaton Sorry, this blog post is not available in your country.

It's just too fine on Chrome/Firefox on Windows. Looks okay on IE, though.

waitwhaton $270 Spark Linux tablet is powered by KDE Active Plasma

That. tablet. has. really. jerky. performance.

waitwhaton YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

You should be aware that the iStockPhoto (and BigStockPhoto) license specifically excludes using their content in logos.

waitwhaton YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

"No matter how many corners you cut and no matter how small your team is, you still have to spend time and money on development and design."

The implication is that a slightly less lean startup would have had more design resources and wouldn't have done something so stupid.

waitwhaton Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

/usr was originally only for home directories [...] /usr/bin popped up

I wonder if this is the origin of the 'bin' user as well, because that's a design decision that never seemed to make any sense.

waitwhaton Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

While they're at it, they should move /usr/src somewhere else (/var/src?)

waitwhaton Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

Presumably if FreeBSD went down the same path as Fedora, they could also change the default partition layout.

waitwhaton Bill Gates on his last visit with Steve Jobs

And post 2007, smartphones have shown that the the OS really does still matter.

waitwhaton Bill Gates on his last visit with Steve Jobs

To imply that Bill Gates' goals were "simply making 'all the money'" is at best intentionally misleading. Microsoft's unofficial mission statement from 1977 was "a computer on every desk and in every home". They aimed ridiculously high, succeeded past anyone's expectations, and fundamentally changed the world all on their own.

To dismiss the tens of billions of dollars that he is ploughing into his foundation (and the tens of billions of dollars he convinced Warren Buffet to also donate) as just "play[ing] the nice guy and work[ing] on [his] place in history" is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

This is a foundation working hard on some of the most fundamental problems of humanity: crippling poverty and devastating diseases. Sure, this gets them a few headlines, but what do you expect when their budget is as much as the International Red Cross and Oxfam International combined?

Bill Gates: Changed the world once. Will probably do it again.

Steve Jobs: "This changes everything. Again."

waitwhaton Why crimes on Skype leave witnesses but no evidence

This seems to be the heart of the article: But in most cases if you witness something on Skype [...] there will be no video evidence to back you up.

What is not at all clear to me is why adding the words "on Skype" to the middle of that sentence transforms an existing problem that society has lived with forever into an urgent issue that must be solved.

waitwhaton The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.

Except that isn't Moore's Law.

waitwhaton FileSonic disables all filesharing

thepiratebay is Swedish, not Swiss.

waitwhaton How $99 and four hours every 2 weeks can provide rocket fuel to an Entrepreneur

The labour-saving is huge (just think how much washing up this process saves alone), and there is nothing wrong with eating frozen food.

waitwhaton Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

DMCA takedowns must be "expeditious", which I don't believe has yet been clearly defined by the courts.

waitwhaton Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy

Of course, someone [https://twitter.com/AnonOpsSweden/status/160107848121061376] has now taken down the justice.gov website.

Google cache of the press release: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...

waitwhaton How not to do URL redirects (… the way Quora does)

Quora don't "need" to do anything. You just want them to.

waitwhaton "It might be useful" - gmail virus?

Have you uploaded the PDF to http://www.virustotal.com/ ?

waitwhaton Ask HN: Did Google protest by crawling (a lot less) yesterday?

Not a protest, no.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/iUN5...

waitwhaton Google contractors sacked after vandalizing OpenStreetMap

They were contractors. Google isn't their employer and can't sack them. All they can do is ensure that they no longer work on Google projects.

waitwhaton Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux

Is this the symbols-embedded-in-the-binary thing? Disc space is cheap, and they don't use extra RAM.

waitwhaton Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily (with former Techcrunch writers)

Have you looked at the bond markets recently? Total return doesn't need to be 1,000-10,000% to make a good investment.

waitwhaton Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

There is also the hipster version of this: http://theburninghouse.com/

"If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It's a conflict between what's practical, valuable and sentimental."