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Domain: serverbeach.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to serverbeach.com.
Comments · 11
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Re:I like their commercials
Try out pair.com for basic stuff. If you're trying to do anything resembling real work, however (such as hosting commercial websites) you're going to want the physical hardware all to yourself and $10-15 simply isn't a reasonable price anymore. At that range ($75 and up) I'd recommend serverbeach.com but only if you know what you're doing.
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Re:The Real Reasons Howard Wants Broadband = SpamWhich is to say: quit yer complainin'. Are you charged AU$0.15 per megabyte (AU$150 per gigabyte) after you go over your 10GB monthly quota?
Even at the data centers in Australia, an average rented server costs about AU$300/month and the most bandwidth you'll get for that price is about 200GB/month (counted in both directions). The port is 100mbps but you'd be lucky to pull more than 200kb/sec from other countries and 1MB/sec within Australia (single thread).
Compare this to the US where you can rent servers for US$100/month with 3 terabytes of bandwidth quota each month.
Now you can hopefully see why Australia's international links are struggling. We can't host anything here in Australia (which would make sense) because it costs far too much. Companies like YouTube, Google, etc aren't going to build a data center mirror in Australia because bandwidth is (if you're lucky) AU$2/gigabyte. That equates to AU$2000 per terabyte. In the US you can get a 1:1 contention 100mbps link with no limits for US$1300/month (example) - which lets you transfer 30 terabytes of GUARANTEED data center grade bandwidth each month. -
Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers
Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel? That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.
First, it remains to be seen whether the files will be multiple gigabytes. A one-hour show downloaded from bittorrent (actually 40 mins after removing commercials) is only 300 megs or so, and that's better quality and higher resolution than the iPod video downloads. I think 1.5 GB is a reasonable estimate, since that's about double VCD bitrate. A quick check of serverbeach (just because they happen to advertise on slashdot) shows they advertise 2000GB of transfer for $139. That's 7 cents per gigabyte. (And that's just for joe schmoe off the street). So about a dime for a movie. OK, that's twice what I claimed, but assuming $10 per movie download, it's still only 1% of the sale price! Not enough to justify any degredation in service. -
Re:Incentive for the user?
Presumably for lower prices. Bandwidth is cheaper than ever, but is still expensive.
It's not expensive, it's very cheap. Without even shopping around, at serverbeach, 2000 GB of hosted bandwidth starts at $119. Figure 2GB per movie, that's 12 cents per movie. Inconsequential compared to what they will charge.I think, rather, this is simply an attempt by the studios to "get into" P2P - in other words, to use the buzzword even if it doesn't make a lot of sense from a technical standpoint.
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Re:Too expensive by an order of magnitudeI was going to say you need to factor in transfer costs, but actually they're very low.
At serverbeach you can get 2TB down the wire for $119. That's only $0.03 for each 500MB program. And I didn't even shop around.
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The Big Reason
Fedora is the basic RedHat-without-the-cost installation, and has very little going for it in the server space, other than being free and easy. The one thing it does have, however, is support from other applications.
Other than providing an RPM installation mechanism (and thus supporting software distributed via RPM) and being based off of RedHat (and thus working well with e.g. Oracle), it has one major benefit in the hosting market: control panels.
Popular webhosting services (I use Serverbeach as an example because I've dealt with them and know their URL offhand) offer, generally speaking, Redhat, and as such, the administration control panels available have generally targeted RedHat. ServerBeach now offers Debian servers, but as of yet, does not offer Plesk, Ensim, or CPanel on these servers, because they are not supported.
As such, when a user goes to a company like ServerBeach and wants a control panel, they have to choose Fedora as their option in order to get it. That being said, things in that realm are changing.
Firstly, I noticed that Plesk has Debian 3.1 support coming out in March. At that point, Plesk will be available on servers running Debian (such as those ServerBeach provides). Additionally, cPanel is working on support for Debian 3.0 (which will be easily ported to 3.1, likely with no changes) which is currently in beta. Ensim, from what I can tell, has no plans to support Debian, though for all I know it could be announced tomorrow.
Once the popular control panels are available with Debian, then it will be easier for all-Debian companies like my own to use and promote Debian in our hosting environments. The ease-of-management provided by e.g. Plesk, along with the ease-of-maintenance and upgrading (not to mention longevity) provided by Debian. How could it go wrong?
And since Ubuntu is so similar to Debian, it wouldn't be hard for these manufacturers to support that as well, giving it a boost too.
Things are looking good for Debian. -
Re:Easy answer
Or, if you actually want to control the cache, get a box from ServerBeach or EV1 Servers, and install Squid as an accelerator.
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Re:Ob. Slashdotting comment
They're more than used to this kind of traffic. Not only have they been linked from Slashdot many times in the past, but they've scaled up to handle the bandwidth as it grew. From their FAQ:
"The videos are 320x240 to save bandwidth. Our first series, Red vs Blue regularly chewed up 170 Terrabytes of downloads in a month."
For those without any reference, bandwidth can run from "unlimited" (see Serverbeach) to paying $x/GB. When you're talking 170TB/month at approx $6/GB, you're over $28,000 in that month. Of course, if you're doing that much traffic and working with a host that charges you like that you need to switch fast. -
Not a good idea?
While people planning on a purchase might like talking to a live person, I went to RackShack's site one day to see what their prices were like, not really planning on spending $500/month any time soon. Up popped the window. I was somewhat freaked out.
Of course, the very next day I was checking out pricing at ServerBeach, owned by the same people, and had a repeat. I left immediately.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not massively afraid of socialization or whatnot. It's just eerie to have someone pop up out of the blue offering to help, when I'm not at all ready for it. 'Live help' type stuff where I have to initiate the conversation has proven to be pretty great, as I can get questions answered quickly, and get a feel for how professional / friendly the people there are. But when they pop up out of the blue, it's always creepy.
I'm the same way in brick-and-mortar stores. I'm always "just looking" when the salesman comes; if I have a question, I find someone and ask them. IMHO, businesses should focus on making it really easy to get help if you need it, but not bugging people if they don't. -
Re:Ask Slashdot: Secure, Shared Hosting?
I have been searching high and low for a way to advertise my hosting service. I'd like somewhere that is visited by many people in the tech community, but is still free to post my adverts.
Too bad the moderators will help reveal the fact that his prices fall down miserably (read:suck) compared to ServerBeach and DreamHost and traceroute says he's running on SCO's own favorite *EV1.NET* machines.
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Run it yourself, save a buck or $100.If you want to run a box yourself, you can always go with a dedicated server or a virtual dedicated server. Then you can install all you like. You can use a self- signed certificate, or get one from a free public registry. You'll have to manually accept it the first time in each browser you use, or you can carry a copy on a USB fob and add it in for extra security.
For a dedicated server, look at Server Beach for a cheap (about $100/mo) server. The only support you get is rebooting and reinstalling, the ToS are no-nonsense strict, but the box is yours, the price is wonderful, and the bandwidth is mind-blowing.
For a cheap virtual dedicated server, I absolutely cannot speak highly enough of JVDS.com. They use User Mode Linux to host whichever Linux distribution you like. Uptime is excellent, Rus (the guy running it) is very attentive to security, and you can choose from several locations if you have a geographic preference for the server. Most of the machines are hosted with Jipes or Cogent-class bandwidth providers which has sometimes meant brief outages in the past. I haven't had recent problems, but it's been a few minutes every couple of weeks in the past. For $20.00/mo for root, that's easily forgiven.
The down side to both is that neither are paying me for their goddamned licenses, so I'm going to sue all the customers blind as soon as I figure out how to go after JVDS' FreeBSD users too.
~Darl