Do you like paying extra so other people can ask amateur questions? That's how it is at other hosting companies where beginners and experts pay the same price. Beginners drive up the cost by asking a lot of novice support questions while the experts don't contact support. That is great for amateurs, and unfair to the experts like you.
No Support Linux Hosting has a completely different business model. We ignore the support questions, and pass the savings on to you! If you are an expert who does not want to pay extra for help with amateur support issues, then you can host with us and save big money.
Experts like you can sign up now for free. We charge $1/month per website, and there is no limit to the number of websites you can host in your account. This is the best deal in the web hosting industry, as long as you are the type of person who can find his or her own answers.
For those interested in this kind of thing, there are two fun resources I would recommend. First, LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/) which documents where you can get VPS hosting for as little as $1/month or even cheaper in some instances. Second, Super Dimensional Fortress (http://sdf.org/) where for a $1 you can get lifetime low level hosting and for $25 you can get access to a much beefier server. A community of old school *nix nerds comes as a bonus.
Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it.
I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.
Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider?
No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night?
There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts...
It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse.
My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience.
Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!
Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything.
And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.
This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client).
For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.
lowendbox.com was great to start, but they got popular, and then profitable, and finally were bought by a low end hosting aggregator/rollup, and now almost all the different offers on lowendbox.com are coming from essentially the same company. The sister site, lowendtalk.com, seems to have picked up the mantle of open discussions, and they have offers, too. For example, recently I bought a 1GB KVM VPS for $14.83/yr. With KVM, I can use netboot.xyz and play to my hearts content with any Linux distro I want. I have NixOS running on it at the moment. On another, I'm playing with dokku, which takes over the whole VPS as a heroku clone.
These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0].
I'm so glad Super Dimensional Fortress is still around. I learned how to use Unix thanks to them back in the 1990s. They're in a different league than the goofballs selling unlimited web hosting cheaper than arizona iced tea.
Definitely be careful with hosts off Lowendbox, as other commenters have mentioned providers go offline without warning all the time. Never pay more than a year in advance etc...
Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight.
I think the claim is that anything clearly legal is allowed. The problem is how iffy 'clearly' legal is. First, which country's law are we using? Second, which court rulings are we applying? Anything controversial ceases to be clearly legal because the police can go after it. Even if a well funded defense will eventually win the case, it may be on appeals meaning that punishment for the content has already begun. Thus it becomes easy to justify anything controversial as not being fully legal.
And that's assuming they'll actually try to stick to their claim. I find that isn't the case when it is really put to the test.
I get it, I was reading "police" too literally; police enforce the law, so how can you have only legal content and describe that as "not policing"? And if you have only legal content, of course you don't police it because that's redundant. "We don't filter the filtered water" you must because that's how you get filtered water, but you don't because you already have done so and it doesn't need doing again.
Un-moderated, or "we have no content policy or acceptable use policy separate from the law".
Saying "whatever reason Amazon gave" is a pretty good reason to downvote it. Amazon gave reasons. If you can cite them, then you can disagree with them. But to simply wave those reasons away as "whatever" is intended to convey "that was obviously legal content being shut down for purely ideological reasons", and that is simply not the case.
The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens
the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in:
So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available.
That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.
“whatever reason Amazon gave” was dismissive, but also accurate. They gave a reason. The poster dismissed it and the comment was downvoted for the dismissal.
You don't know why it was downvoted; the comment just wasn't very helpful at explaining or clear (I didn't downvote). If the reason was "unpaid bill" that would come under "whatever reason" but would that be relevant to policing anything?
Without knowing what reason Amazon gave that leaves me to go look it up; I do, and see various news site quotes including "District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not take down posts threatening public safety." quote on npr.org, and "Amazon told Parler it would boot the company from its web-hosting service [...] because of repeated violations of Amazon's rules" on NYTimes.com, I try to find an official looking source of exactly what reasons Amazon gave and get to the filing for the lawsuit/legal case between Parler and Amazon[1] which includes on page 3 "17. During this same time period, AWS claims that it received reports that Parler was failing to moderate posts that encouraged and incited violence, in violation of the terms of the CSA and AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”). Exec. 2 Decl., ¶ 4; Ex. C (AUP). The AUP proscribes, among other things, “illegal, harmful, or offensive”". It's not clear here whether Amazon is claiming it was illegal or not, or whether it actually was illegal or not.
I google "inciting violence illegal usa" and get to a Cornell Law School[2] page on 18 U.S. Code § 2101 - Riots - saying, abridged, "whoever uses a facility of interstate commerce including but not limited to telegraph, telephone, radio, to incite a riot or promote or organize a riot, or aid or abet any person rioting or commiting any act of violence furthering a riot, shall be fined or imprisoned". Still not clear whether Parler was actually breaking the law or whether Amazon was alledging that they were, or whether this has been decided, or what exact reason Amazon gave.
I know there are arguments about whether hosts are or aren't responsible for content on them, or are just blind transmission systems, but I don't know which way it falls in which scenarios.
It reads more like a complaint about Parler being taken down than a helpful explanation, and could be more clearly and directly said "(policing legal content) means a company removing things against their content policies, even if the things are legal" in as much space and effort.
Assuming the best from the GP, I think they might have meant "whatever" in the sense that AWS enforced their terms of service by enforcing something that they don't hold their other customers to. As you said, this could be for ideological or PR reasons.
The "whatever" being any cause they could justify their actions with.
Thank you; you have done a good job of steel-manning the OP. I appreciate that.
The way it was written, it doesn't surprise me that people didn't read it that way, and downvoted. It comes against a background of people loudly claiming to be oppressed for ideological reasons and failing to support that claim or acknowledging that a serious act of violence has just occurred by people professing the same ideological reasons. At the very least, I felt it was worth pointing out how it reads, so that they might consider it without requiring others to specifically seek an assumption-of-the-best.
NearlyFreeSpeech, where I have been hosting my static personal site for 9 years has a similar model. You pay for exactly the resources you use. I pay less than $20/year.
“Why did it take you so long to answer my question” , “I just wanted a quick answer why are you charging me for 20 minutes of support”. Human time spent on support is not as cut and dry as hosting resources used, so I imagine it’s easier to not have that discussion. Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.
>Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.
Be less minutes than that I dare say. $20 an hour tech costs, then you have overheads and that's without a profit margin. I'd say 5 mins be more closer to the mark. Really gets down to how many support calls you have as if you have a couple admins who have to dip into a support queue, then their hourly rate would be higher. However if you have a nice frontline 1st line support pool with 2nd and 3rd for escalation model/scale then it will get cheaper.
That all said you have to factor in how much support they use and maybe your average user will need one or two tickets a year and then at the other end you the types who fail to read FAQ's and end up needing more support to use their computer, let alone the service and blur the lines contacting you for an issue that after some back and forth turns out to be the user's end. Those will be costly. So you balance things out - and go with the average and yet at the same time, dread some types of customers.
from experience, i can tell you high end support far exceeds $20/h (think 3rd level network and systems support).
$20/h is more in the 1st line territory.
Not just SV, but almost anywhere in the US at this point I would imagine. I was working support in the Phoenix area back in the mid-90s' and it paid roughly 2-3x minimum wage at that time. While the ratio wouldn't be the same, a lot of places now have a minimum wage in the $9-12 range. Given that, $20/hr+ wouldn't be improbable for first line email/phone support.
A couple of years ago I took a break from IT to work first-line support at a local (midwestern) software company. Hourly rate was just a little over that minimum wage range, nothing near $20hr though. I was glad to get it, glad for the experience, and glad to go back to IT when my time was up.
In all fairness, support costs also include all of the techs' phones, computers, networking, software licenses for Teamviewer et al, and office overhead. So a $20/hr bill is pretty cheap for a minimum wage technician.
> "Paid support must be opt-in. Whatever we do with paid support should have no effect on the 80-95% of people who don’t use it."
I assume that includes "when the tech has no tickets, they /do not/ work on anything that would improve the service for everyone"?
> "Essentially, if you want support, you’re not really paying for the answer to a question. You’re paying for somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing to be there when you have a question"
Often no, what I need from support is something I could technically do or am willing to work out, but cannot because it needs to be done on your side of the customer/business security boundary, or needs information from your side of it. e.g. the difference between support resets passwords vs self-service password resets.
This is covered down at the end of the comments in a list of recent support examples, many of them can be potentially fixed by the customers who are using the support as a consultancy service, but a couple cannot. Take password resets, you can design your company to have a self-service one or not at your choice and a good self-service one will mean fewer support requests. Thus, if you charge for support, it would incentivise you to have no self-service reset so that you can get support money for salaries. But you need to pay salaries either way because you need some techs available to run the service, and to provide support-as-consultancy.
> "Although there is a distinct response time benefit to subscribing before you need support, we do expect that a nontrivial number of people will wait until the first time they need support to subscribe. Leaving the first month at $5.00 helps protect us in that scenario."
1. There are parts of the system customers cannot get to, cannot find out about, which can go wrong, so there is the risk of every customer needing support at some point. 2) People who willingly pay a support subscription also go times when they aren't using that support. 3. The people paying for the support and not using it are subsidising the retainer fee of the technical employees being still available when the other peolpe waiting until they need support to subscribe have something still around to subscribe to. 4. Technical people employed and not doing support can do things to benefit all customers.
It only makes sense to include the cost in the fees charged to everyone. It can still be prioritised by inverse usage, or etc.
There are three main problems with pay-as-you-go support based on time. All three come down to support being provided by people:
1) Unlike software objects, it is not yet possible to instantiate qualified support personnel as needed.
2) Unlike virtual machines, people get very cranky if you attempt to suspend them to disk or delete them to save resources when not in use.
3) Unlike physical hardware, uploading large volumes of data to people so they can produce useful output is extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Here's a more serious answer:
When you seek (qualified) support, you're not paying for the time it takes the person to type the right answer; you're paying for them to know the right answer. (See also: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/)
It took us quite a while to figure that out, and we tried pay-as-you-go support along the way, as someone linked below. l-lousy correctly guessed the outcome of that: more time spent arguing with people about how much we charged them for support than providing support.
Worse, that's how the person providing support makes their (minimal) income: by nickels and dimes and on other people's schedules. So, if you're doing that job, you're making very little money and frequently dealing with angry people due to a system you have no control over.
It's the tech support version of being an Amazon delivery driver. Amazon may be cool with treating people like that, but I'm not.
One detail l-lousy did get wrong (as others observe) is the 15 minutes. $5 is 5 minutes or less of a qualified person's time.
That does assume people want qualified support and not first-tier "I can't be bothered to search the FAQ, read me the right one!" interactions.
Usually, but by no means always, that's a reasonable assumption for us. People looking for that level of hand-holding tend to be much more successful with other hosting services with multiple tiers of support and (usually) phone support.
I guess for small shops, a steady stream of income to pay a support person's salary is more important than the benefits of hourly billing like fairness and possible higher income.
> Each website in your account can use up to 1GB of disk space and 30GB of monthly bandwidth. These resource limits are enough for most normal websites. Each website can set up 3 databases and 25 email accounts.
Yes, but how often does that really happen? I've known of this possibility since I was a teen, and sometimes it happened on fairly popular sites back when unlimited bandwidth was very expensive, but it was rare back then and I haven't heard of this actually happening to any site in the last decade. I'm sure you can find examples online, but it's way more common to get a proper DDoS than to get this kind of attack.
You'd think it'd be more common given how many sites are on EC2 and how expensive Amazon's egress is, but nonetheless, I never hear billing horror stories from that vector.
At my last job, we would get casually DDoSeD from time to time. One of the ones I remember was a wordpress pingback reflection to a large file. Not too hard to handle (pingback is dumb and needs to die in a fire, but at least wordpress sets user-agent), but used a ton of bandwidth until sorted it out.
This was a common prank on mobile browsers using 30+GB favicon.ico files. I am not even sure that was ever truly fixed in all the browsers, might be a good thing to test. The browsers would continue to download the favicon in the background even if you left the page. People that were roaming would get their cellphone accounts suspended. Providers reacted by putting roaming limits in place, but it still caused grief for people.
CDNs are the only sites that have ever saturated my broadband or fiber connections. Accessing 'mere mortal' web sites is way slower. Block out the whole day on your calendar.
An easy to understand price schedule: $4/month per account, and $1/month for every 64MiB ram. Please note; this means all plans come with $4/month worth of support.
While that copy is old, and our pricing reflects the hardware we run on today, the quip has now been updated to: "You get $5/month of support," which is the price of the smallest package we offer.
That wisecrack aside, the reality of the support we provide is more in-line with our byline: "We do not assume you are stupid." In practice, and with a hat tip to pera replying to you here, that means we provide what you might call peer support--we explain what's going on, what steps are necessary to correct it, and take responsibility when we caused the issue. And expect similar candor.
As you might expect, most of the technical support we provide is routine--with sufficient information communicated to both parties the problem is typically straightforward to resolve. But we treat tickets on their merit and customer reports do come in that admit more substantive investigation and resolution:
I know but I believe they should rephrase that: I have been using their VPSs for ten years and they have the best customers support I have ever dealt with :)
Also, no one noticed how funny is that they actually used Microsoft servers/tech for their own website (At least I presume by seeing urls ending in .aspx[0]) while offering "Linux Hosting"?
A lot of people, myself included, would throw in fake extensions to throw off the script kiddies. It seemed like everybody wanted to be one at some point and throwing up an ASPX extension on a php powered site made the scans stand out that much more. Plus it funny :)
If that kind of thing is appealing to anyone, check out uberspace.de. It’s the best possible version of shared hosting and it can even cost 1€ too (you should pay more though).
Unlike this thing they are both super friendly to all manner of linux nerd stuff yet provide excellent, gracious support where they teach you the stuff you don’t know.
I love that model when done well. Others have mentioned NearlyFreeSpeech.net web hosting.
What they provide to me: a place to upload my static web pages to, period.
What I ask from them: serve these web pages I've uploaded, period.
I don't want or need support for any of that. If something breaks on my part, I can and will diagnose and fix it. If something breaks on their end and they need to fix it, then that's a bug report and not a support request.
In exchange for that, their prices are dirt cheap and perfect for the things I need it for. I couldn't possibly host it myself for the prices they charge me. I think that's a good example of there the business model makes a huge amount of sense for all involved.
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Experts Host Sites Here for $1/month
Do you like paying extra so other people can ask amateur questions? That's how it is at other hosting companies where beginners and experts pay the same price. Beginners drive up the cost by asking a lot of novice support questions while the experts don't contact support. That is great for amateurs, and unfair to the experts like you.
No Support Linux Hosting has a completely different business model. We ignore the support questions, and pass the savings on to you! If you are an expert who does not want to pay extra for help with amateur support issues, then you can host with us and save big money.
Experts like you can sign up now for free. We charge $1/month per website, and there is no limit to the number of websites you can host in your account. This is the best deal in the web hosting industry, as long as you are the type of person who can find his or her own answers.
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From https://web.archive.org/web/20201109042643/https://www.nosup...
I guess they took savings from security too.