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Apple isn't selling server hardware anymore

Sure they are:

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/...

Yeah, looks like a lot of registrars are price gouging - according to Nominet, the wholesale price is the same. And definitely don't ever use 123Reg because they'll even charge you to switch. Fuckers!

The only registrar I've found thus-far with the same price for .co.uk and .uk is Mythic Beasts although they're a bit pricey unless you're registering for 10 years.

Gandi.net don't appear to have .uk pricing yet unless I'm missing something!

Mythic beasts have been using Mac-Minis and even Apple TVs for web hosting for years.

I have never used them myself, but it looks interesting.

We have custom built rack shelves for Mac Minis that neatly hold the power supplies and minis.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/macminicolo.html

14 minis in 5U including the power supplies. You need to allow some rackspace for the masterswitches and switches too.

They definitely run linux, and you can install from a USB stick. We know, we've lots and lots of them running as dedicated servers.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/appletvdedicated.html

Pricewatch:
$180 for CORE2 1.86GHz mobo+CPU+RAM
$ 40 for a mid-tower case w/600w
$ 45 for a decent but very small HD
$ 25 for a DVD-combo drive
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$290 - This is from Pricewatch, four vendors involved.

Dell
$279 for a Inspirion 530, dumbed down with a Celeron 2GHz pre-infected with Vista, but with a bigger HD and double the RAM (2GB).

Apple
I'll get running OSX on a $230 AppleTV, or Linux for that matter, out of the way first. Only brought up because we're talking about doing it the geek way and breaking though the fear of doing so. This is almost a no-OS situation like with Pricewatch, but the box is at least useful as an AppleTV when you get it.

For the "normal" comparison, their bottom-end machine is the $600 Mac mini. Core2 1.83GHz, 1GB RAM, and a decent small HD. OS X comes with it. As does iLife*.

---
So, all that to point out that $290, $280 and $230 are not very far apart and all come with significant limitations or hassles, especially if something goes wrong later where vendor support is required. If that's your cup of tea it is all well and good.

$600 will get you a similar system in terms of hardware, but with a much better software load, higher quality components (Consumer Reports, nearly 70,000 in the sample size), and a verifiably better user experience all around. Assuming you're looking for something in this performance range, there are no limitations and maximum flexibility with this system, as well as access to the most software.

-Matt

*If you haven't used it, OS X and iLife are a stark contrast to the bloatware on any other OEM PC....akin to waking up from a bad dream. So is K|X|Ubuntu Desktop for that matter.

£35 = $70. The Americans have a massive competitive advantage, they have a cheap currency and they don't charge VAT. ex VAT annually it's £297.87 which works out at $49/month.

It's fair to say we charge a slight premium for our hosting, after all we figured out many of the issues in making Linux on the Mac Mini and AppleTV go,

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/macmini/

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/

We also install ncad by default - it's an ssh server that starts up before fsck in the boot process so you can recover from disk screwups / watch the lengthy fsck of your machine. We wrote that too (although before we started the company).

You might also be interested in the netboot recovery stuff we've got assuming you're a linux user. We could probably lower our monthly fees by making everything a chargeable extra, but we think that remote reboot, netboot recovery, secondary DNS, reverse dns, required IP addresses, basic SMS monitoring should all be included in the base price. We'd rather sell a decent service at a reasonable price, that sell the base service at or below cost and stick it to the customers with every extra thing they ask for.

£35 = $70. The Americans have a massive competitive advantage, they have a cheap currency and they don't charge VAT. ex VAT annually it's £297.87 which works out at $49/month.

It's fair to say we charge a slight premium for our hosting, after all we figured out many of the issues in making Linux on the Mac Mini and AppleTV go,

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/macmini/

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/

We also install ncad by default - it's an ssh server that starts up before fsck in the boot process so you can recover from disk screwups / watch the lengthy fsck of your machine. We wrote that too (although before we started the company).

You might also be interested in the netboot recovery stuff we've got assuming you're a linux user. We could probably lower our monthly fees by making everything a chargeable extra, but we think that remote reboot, netboot recovery, secondary DNS, reverse dns, required IP addresses, basic SMS monitoring should all be included in the base price. We'd rather sell a decent service at a reasonable price, that sell the base service at or below cost and stick it to the customers with every extra thing they ask for.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/

"The graphics works out of the box wiht Xorg-7.2, but it uses the panel size set in the EFI (which unless you have changed it with the Apple TV setup) is 720x400. Changing this shouldn't be a problem but the current driver doesn't seem to support it."

wiht/with

~ Kylu

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/appletvdedicated.html

15-20W, 1Ghz Core Solo, 256MB RAM, 40GB disk, already plugged in, masterswitched and ready to go.

disclaimer: I'm one of the company founders.

The best way to generate a groundswell against these systems is for websites to warn their uers if they are on an ISP that does this. For those in the UK worried about the 'phorm' spying system, Richard Clayton has extracted some technical information from them here: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2008/04/04/the-phorm-webwise-system/ and Gavin Jamie already has a prototype Phorm detector here: http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~gjamie/

We colocate and run dedicated servers on Mac Minis. Electricity prices in London data centres are crippling. In a standard 2kW rack we get 55 Mac Minis - 37W each. The guys in the rack next door have 6 Dell 1950s. They look at us enviously and mumble about the cost of Windows server licences. On the other side we've got people with a HP blade server (just one!) unhappy that they haven't enough power to fill it with blades, whereas we've got 3 times as many CPU cores and a massively lower hardware cost.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/

A page that got slashdotted

http://roughly.beasts.org/

Our account of being slashdotted

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20040911-more_introspective_nonsense.html

Another page that got slashdotted.

http://ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

That's all on our shared hosting server cluster. A Mac Mini will hold up fine too.

We're no stranger to being slashdotted :-)

We colo AppleTVs. Why? 1Ghz Core Solo, 18W. We also do Mac Minis. Why? 2x2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 40W. Let's put 125 Mac Minis, up against the IBM mainframe and see who's faster.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/appletvdedicated.html

I used these a couple of years back and it was fine until they got too many customers & not enough servers and the speed of my site slowed to a crawl. This lasted for about a month. Then it went down completely - no website, no email. I tried to contact the guy who runs it (James Innes) by email and fax but no response. It came back up a week or so later, but my website had been restored to a much earlier copy, and I found out later that I was missing a lot of emails. Still no response from support when I complained.

I wasn't the only one with these problems: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.internet.prov iders.uk/browse_thread/thread/2f0c27ac4d7e133d/c48 c25268d8e6192?hl=en

Eventually I gave up .. fortunately I had registered my domain elsewhere so it was easy to change to another. (I changed to mythic beasts (http://www.mythic-beasts.com/), who have been excellent.

You criticise the usual OSS model of supplying developed materials, but then offer something even more useless as an alternative.

Your 'icarusindie' project is doomed from the start. Who the hell is going to pay money to download off a website? And using Paypal, of all things! There are plenty of places that will host files either for free or for such a small fee that it is negligible.

To give a couple of examples, these are more appropriate for the task at hand (offering source code and compiled binaries for download) as you get a shell account as well as webspace:

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
http://www.freeshell.org/

In short: your idea sucks, and there are plenty more viable alternatives.