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Ask HN: Any Hosting with tiny dedicated machines instead of VPS?

4 points by lzw ↗ HN
The SheevaPlug post yesterday reminded me of what I really want from a hosting provider, and since we've been thru the age of the blade, and VPS is all the rage right now, I wonder if some innovative host has come up with it:

A tiny dedicated machine. EG: A blade or a rack system with a bunch of independent very small machines. Say and ARM CPU, and 512-1GB of RAM and an onboard, dedicated SSD of 10-40G. Since this is an all silicon solution it should be smaller than anything using hard drives.

I'm picturing something like the gumstix. (Maybe someones done this with gumstixes in fact.) You could probably fit hundreds of them in a 4U Rack enclosure. Power supply would be separate, off the shelf, and stick a network switch in there as well and provide a separate NAS for bulk hard drive storage.

This would be pretty ideal for a lot of hosting situations. Fast local storage (the downside of the shivaplug is the USB hard drive interface) and dedicated resources at low power and low capital costs.

I know VPS is more efficient in theory because most people are idle most of the time. But there are thousands of VPS providers and this would be an interesting differentiation.

Anyone doing anything like this?

4 comments

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tlack
you'd have to be priced really aggressively since those machines are super low power. add an SSD as an additional differentiator - i can't think of a VPS service doing that, and it would really boost performance.
lzw
I don't have a sense for the compute power difference between a 1GHZ ARM and 1/64th of a Quad Core Xeon or whatever a VPS represents.

But I also am continually surprised that SSDs are still independent devices. I'd expect at least Apple to have integrated one on the mother board by now.

This idea is predicated also, in part, on the assumption that there's some software that will allow part of the SSD to work as a cache for the networked hard drive.

RobGR
Linux and other modern operating systems automatically cache network drives or can be configured to do so. Probably the best way to address that would be to increase the amount of RAM in each device, so more (or the entire disk) could be cached.
RobGR
I think there is a market for this. Here is something similar: http://www.macminicolo.net/

I know someone who used them and was satistfied, he was able to take the macmini he had his server on and just mail it to them.

Some credit card processing requirements specify that certain servers not be on shared hardware, I have overheard discussions about this with regards to hosting some kinds of transactions on Amazon. Perhaps that could be a target market.