The fact that https://www.stormondemand.com/ is down right now certainly helps your point.

To be fair, Storm is charging $300/mth for the 12GB SSD that they benchmark in their advertising, not $20, and their cheapest SSD-based VPS (with 3GB of disk space) is $75.

A linode with 12GB of RAM bought for a 2-year term costs ~$408/mth, so you're not saving that much money.

SSD's make terrific sense for typical VPS users and I would be willing to pay more. I might move if I can't get an SSD timeline. Here's why:

Database is typically the limiter for most web applications. The primary reason for using a VPS compared to a more managed host is to run web applications that need databases. Although I can optimize MY disks to write mostly sequentially and buffer MY logging to happen in chunks and optimize MY daemons to not log excessively, the OS has to access disks randomly to serve all neighbors and they might be consuming lots of IO that I can do nothing about.

VPS's, because of the presence of many applications on one machine, are by their very nature random-access I/O. SSD's make excellent sense for improving the performance of the rest of the machine. I can burn IO in incredible amounts by utilizing tons of async server optimization and limiting database fsyncs, and I'm sure there is some concern that SSD clients will all be better at being bad neighbors, but I'm willing to bet there are just as many clients that want the SSD performance boost instead of investing in the skill to totally preoccupy the disk I/O as much as possible.



The limiting factor on all dynamic websites is eventually the database. Async, optimized fsync,
and caching can only go so far. I would much rather have an SSD with 10x the random IOPS than pay 8x more for 8x the memory, 8x the CPU, and 8x the IO tokens. On the face of it, it makes cost sense to customers to upgrade the bottleneck instead of paying for a bunch of heat.

Bwahahahahahaha - nice shill there knappador.

You "might move" after posting a whopping ONE TIME to shill your SSD company?

How moving. Why don't you show REAL WORLD stat's instead of a bunch of hypothetical BS?

If you think paying a zillion times more per month will pay off for your site, feel free to move, but most people have a real budget and would NEVER see the ROI at today's SSD prices.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Bcache is another option I'd be interested in as a customer if its single server performance translates to a hosted environment. I'll compare an Amazon instances and see where things are at.
http://www.accelcloud.com/2012/04/18/li ... e-testing/

Being able to upgrade nodes to scale vertically and put off scale-out is hard to overrate. As soon as there are multiple machines a lot of security overhead gets introduced and it should only make sense for a round 1 funding startup etc that's realistically going to scale-out long term and not just to deal with single-machine limitations.

The bottom line is that I use SSD's to do more at work. I want SSD's so I can be less anal about caching and get more headroom on single machine setups. I'm not interested in bargain costs nor are most educated Linode users.

http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=IOPS ... enchmark=-

Yeah, in 2010 I had one of those "slow death" failures. It was just a HTPC / DLNA / WAN media server I built some time around 3rd / 4th quarter 2006, but I was rather annoyed that all my DVR archived recordings were lost. I made the mistake of going a year from the start of the problems before attempting a backup & migration to a new disk, and ultimately, most of the drive was unrecoverable.

... I would imagine that a good datacenter operator would notice such glitchy behavior and address the issue much quicker than I did... though there's no way to know if the symptoms of such a "slow death" failure would be consistent or flag any monitoring alarms, etc.

just my $0.02

@HoopyCat ...another post you made:

Wait, really? linode offers 512MB worth of SSD swap and they throw in another 20 gigs worth of regular storage? I can't find that on the site anywhere.

That's not how it works. We don't offer any SSD right now, and the swap is deducted from your plan's allocation.

-Tim

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'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.' //Edsger Dijkstra
'Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.' | 'Do things that have never been done.' //Russell Kirsch

@kuzetsa Look at the Linode 512 plan ...

@theckman --- I figure you know what you're talking about. The word "staff" on forum title I'm assuming isn't a falsehood.

@HoopyCat --- Please explain. Ram isn't swap space if that's what you meant.

RAM and swap are not mutually exclusive things. RAM is a storage medium, swap space is a use of a storage medium. There is nothing preventing you from using RAM for swap. It doesn't make any sense, but you can do it.

HoopyCat's point was that you could get high-speed solid state storage for $20 per 512MB. It just happens to be volatile storage, but it's very fast, and there are various ways it can be used in a semi-non-volatile manner by coupling it with a backing store.

That said, there's rarely any point in it, because the RAM is often more suitably used for regular disk caching. SSDs are more useful when you need fast random access to large data sets, or fast safe writes (since a write cache is inherently unsafe).

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Strangely, they do not accept BitCoin as a payment method - that seems very odd for a company of their stature.

Their staff did appear to be totally lost and confused, as if in a maze, so they were definitely honest about that.

James

How do we know we can trust your "friends" judgement - he might be a psycho nut spammer just like you are.

@Hoopycat - I'm interested but only if the numerous rust spots match the rest of the car's trim/color scheme - please let me know asap (perhaps a hand drawn sketch would clarify things and relieve my concerns).

//come on Linode - get on the ball with Forum Spam management - you just look sloppy/pathetic/lazy/stupid allowing spam to hang around this long - if it's a COMMUNITY forum, then setup some COMMUNITY MODERATORS to take care of crap like this//

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Here's the best I could do while the car is at the mechanic getting a blown foot gasket replaced. Note well the Adirondack front seats and the excellent condition of the duct tape.

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