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What makes a box "low end"
So was just looking at the various offers posted over time and on the dedicated side of things it seems that the definition of 'low end' has become more price oriented than actual box spec or performance oriented. Case and point the thread / deal on the CommercialMedia 5420 deal. A dual quad-core, even a slightly older one does not seem to be too low-end compared to the single-cpu dual-core offerings that are still in the market. I'm aware of the specific advertising restrictions in how the community limits the advertising. Just meant more in the ways of the views of the customer.
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Yes. And it's a sad thing IMO. We've had this discussion here before, and it seems few people are interested in low-end specs when you can buy VPSs at $1 per GB of RAM. Mind you, they might perform like shit, but that's the dollar-driven market.
@gsrdgrdghd well obviously a bare minimum VPS would be low end, I was looking specifically at dedicateds
Also see mine, it's no 64mb but it's still true to the cause
Mostly because I can't afford to offer 64mb at what the resources are worth.
Bare minimum servers.
But if you look at lowendbox recently, its more of a high end servers for low end prices.
@curtisg exactly what i was getting at
I see two ends of the market - those that want the best specs (RAM) for less regardless of anything else and those that want a lowendbox with better support / reliability / performance etc...
Next we want a 2gb ram vps, where we pay yearly and only pay $12 a year (we only pay IP costs).
It would seem like the original point of getting low end boxes would be to get servers for a low price and tweak the hell out of them until they can make do for whatever you need them to do. The thing is that as time goes on, hardware gets cheaper, and economies of scale take effect, that market goes away. What "low end" means has changed, because now for the money you'd have spent a few years ago for a very low spec server, you can get a gig of RAM, dual core, SSDs, and a Gbit uplink. The things we need to do with these servers have mostly stayed the same.
This almost seems like people complaining that they can get too good a value for their money now.
Well, low end had been small tiny accounts. Very limited RAM being the most notable lacking feature. Probably spun out of folks originally running shell accounts that then became VPS market.
Now low end seems to mean anything that can shoe horn itself into the low end price bracket defined on here and LEB.
There's nothing low end about a dedicated server offer, unless it's an ARM server with < 512MB of RAM and 700Mhz CPU and USB drive. But then again, that's no real low end box either. Dedicated shouldn't ever have been on here.
Sadly most of what we end up seeing in this market is indeed low end. No support, no server monitoring, overloaded nodes, no disk IO, high wait times, etc. etc. etc. That applies to outfits like Commercial Media selling vapor servers and 2GB+ VPS packages.
I remember the times when low end was 64 MB with 10 GB traffic over shared 10 mbps ports. Or "unlimited" 10 mbps ports where you could do something like an analogical modem speeds.
The whole nodes were P3s with 1 GB ram or so bought second hand from the dumpster of some corporation and even basement "datacenters".
Things evolved a lot since then, now 64 MB is done only by the nostalgic people it makes no sense as paypal eats most of the payment and the IPs are no longer free.
I had a server with 4 MB ram (real machine, not VM) ffs...
Novell was the standard in networks sharing a huge 386 server with an 120 MB scsi disk with 20+ XTs as terminals and 640 K as ram.
Windows ? Was a silly kinda game before 3.0 didnt even look at it, ashton-tate was the god-o-db, microsoft basic the language to learn and turbo pascal the future.
haha M before win 3.0 that was real low end.. In the 1.2MB floppy u can fit all those god-of-db, gwbasic/turbo basic, turbo pascal/turbo C, wordstar/wordperfect.
(it was sad to know that the creator of Turbo Basic died 2-3 months back)
On topic i still have two 32mbs, one 50mb leb
Though like everyone i also look for any offer of 1GB/2GB at leb pricings
But if you look at lowendbox recently, its more of a high end servers for low end prices.
Sorry!
Proposed resolution:
1 CPU Core @ 33Mhz
8MB RAM
300MB Storage
1GB Bandwidth
No internet
Accessible through host node via telnet
Who wants to order a real LEB?
With reliability and support in between.
@Dalcomp from my lurking for months it's obvious that the majority are 'low end' on the support and reliability aspects.
@Nick_A yeah we're about to run a special that will be another mess maker... > 64gb ram for < $100/mo why not? Sorry
lol
This. I started into VPSs because for a long time I ran my own shell hosting business, then shells became obsolete by people being able to purchase their own servers and colo them for reasonable prices. At that point, shells became outdated and VPS became the new shell account. I still look at it this way for OpenVZ. Only difference is your buying a shell with root access and your own dedicated ip. Before VPS you still could have your own ip, but you only had user level access and usually the ip was for your site on the shared server or for use with your irc client for vanity names.
More recently. VPS has gone far above a shell with KVM/XEN/VMware full virtualization. This was the start of vps taking the place of dedicated servers for smaller tasks, especially with people now providing SSD disks and enough resources to basically host your server for a fraction of the cost of an actual dedicated server.
I for one like to collect VPS servers around the world to explore the different network connectivity that exists and to have geo-redundancy where I need it, for a cheap price. I feel that LEB/LET has allowed this to happen. Especially in the ever changing professional markets that still think they can charge $10-$20 a month for basically the same resources, just 'better' support. If you are a newbie to Linux/Unix it makes sense to pay for the support, and its worth spending the money for. If you are a weathered Linux/Unix admin like my self, who only needs the most basic of support help (i.e. I have no connectivity, the server is down, I need /dev/tun enabled) LEB/LET is just, well.... awesome.
Just like shell accounts went by the wayside and we changed to VPS, the VPS market and similar ideas will also continue to change. The technology will get better over time and as that happens you will have more density in less space with more stable virtualization. This will make virtualization make more and more sense and you will be able to get more for less as things evolve, as we are already seeing here.
It is the nature of the market, and as much as us "Old Timers" wish it could stay like it was in the 1990's, it isn't going to. So, ever changing will the idea of "VPS" , "VDS" and "Cloud" be.
My 2 cents.
Cheers!
But if you look at lowendbox recently, its more of a high end servers for low end prices.
We've entered some sort of race for the lowest price/GB. ChicagoVPS is one of the worst at that (glad Chris is banned, saves us drama) with they o-so-regular offers, but there are more. I've bought some of these boxes but I have now given up. I just don't trust it when it's sold that cheap. I mean, do the calculations: a company does have to make profit or at least break even.
Like @Pubcrawler said in the thread about ColoChicagoCrossingVPS, it also damages many other companies that do offer VPS with normal prices. It also supercedes the purpose of this site.
@mpkossen It doesn't damage anyone who has an angle. If you don't have an angle you're just Generic Provider #47. If this trend puts people out of business it's because they didn't have anything to offer besides competitive price. If that's the case, they had to know it was going to happen sooner or later. Now we have 3GB offers at LEB price and I haven't been having any issues selling my 2GB plan for $10/m. Why? Because I deliver and I perform daily security audits and I monitor my nodes. Everyone needs to offer something besides just a cheaper price.
This is a self correcting market. The worst thing you could do is interfere with rules. Let it play out.
@pubcrawler
@TheLinuxBug
That's true. It started with shell accounts. All about running Mystic BBS, eggbot or psyBNC. 10 Mbit was something unbelievable. And something you cannot afford alone.
It was trust to a person that is able to keep the server running.
As TheLinuxBug said, OpenVZ is the successor of shell accounts. Only differences to a shell account:
For the money I spent for all my vps systems I could afford a single dedicated box. But that would have drawbacks:
So basically we are complaining on quite a high level. And it is still about trust at someone able to keep the servers running.
PS: Trust I have e.g. in @ipxcore ( @Damian ), @VPSCheap_net or @Francisco.
I do know what resources I need and I now how much I do have to spend for it. And I take offers which have the best package - even if I have to pass additional RAM if I can get good service for it in return.
I am against dedi too, most of the time is a waste of resources, while VPS give you a better deal for the money, has someone to manage it and you can easily jump locations.
Besides a VPS will give you access at better hardware and will feel snappier.
Only drawback, waste of IPv4. Hopefully IPv6 will solve that.
i agree lowend box is highend server with lowest price as possible. :-;
too good to be true high spec but very cheap plans - for playing and learning with linux
reasonable spec and price from reputable host - for production purposes.
LEB Used to be a place about actual low end boxes not low end prices, that is why the word box was used instead of price.
Now it is about how much you can oversell openvz by and get away with it.
I don't really care what anyone else says on this subject, lowendbox.com was never set up on a quest to find the most resources for the lowest price. fact.
Oh not another thread of these... "Wah wah LEB is no longer true LEB, we don't have to stuff ourselves into 64 MB of RAM anymore".
LEB was always about the price: $7/mo or less for a VPS. That you now get more for $7 than you were getting in 2005, is called progress. Relax and enjoy it.
^^ I don't agree: "Hosting Websites on Bare Minimum VPS/Dedicated Servers"
Nothing in that mission statement has anything to do with price, the $7 was an arbitrary figure.
Look at the specs on xen/kvm offers, not much different then what they have been.
The difference is openvz, i guess providers learn their system and knows that they can offer greater soecs because the general user wont actually use them.
Anyone know if auctions are allowed on here?
Auction for ?