Yeah. I'm considering repricing or getting rid of (or repricing and only taking yearly orders) or something for the under 512M images. I've been getting a lot of flack from people in IRC about how expensive I am even though once you move up into the 1gb range, I'm reasonably competitive with most new VPS companies (and way cheaper than the companies that have been around as long as I have.)

I mean, ram is also getting cheaper, and I need to increase ram per dollar across the board just for that, but when I set those prices? $5 was a very low 'smallest thing you can order' price. It's not any more.

I have to wonder how many of the people ordering the 64MiB image are doing it just to have a place to spam Twitter from.

yup, that's one of the big per-account costs; paying attention to the abuse box and shutting down spammers. But, the problem is probably better addressed by just requiring a long pre-pay which you don't get back if I think you are spamming.

The real problem is compromised accounts. How draconian should I be about that? I mean, personally, I'm not sure. Policy is to shut them down, give them a fresh VPS and let them mount the compromised one read-only; But, about 5-10% of people re-infect themselves immediately, presumably by copying the infected webapp off the backup.

That's true. I bought a 128 meg box for 2.25 from another provider. I run my primary postfix server on it, and prgmr runs a backup postfix server among other stuff.

Anyway, 6 months in my cheaper box is mysteriously reset, postfix config gone, but it's still accepting (and rejecting all) email because the default instance runs sendmail out of the box. Emailed support, they apologized and gave me a month. Still REALLY ANNOYING. PRGMR doesn't pull that kind of crap, so I'm happy to pay the extra for it.

or you can just spend those two beers on prgrmr, or 3 beers at linode? for tech people in the West, the amount of money is so small, why would you bother going with the absolute bottom of the market?

There are... different markets. I have a whole lot of customers in the area; probably the majority. I do often meet customers at social events, and yeah, they usually don't have the tiny guests, and they usually think I'm super cheap. I mean, here in silicon valley? even mediocre Engineers pull six figures. (well, mediocre Engineers that can find employment in silicon valley; generally, but not always, that means significantly above average by the standards of most places.) so the difference between five bucks and three bucks is not a beer, it's what goes in the tip jar after you get your latte. Nobody is going to notice, and none of those people are going to buy my five dollar plan when I give you twice the ram/disk for six dollars, and really, most of those people are going for the $12 or $20 plan. I mean, having extra ram is kinda nice.

But on IRC, I meet kids from Alabama or Minnesota... or China or Myanmar. They're making less than ten bucks an hour, if they are lucky, working at wal-mart or best buy or what have you, and trying to learn about computers. I know a couple of these people starting hosting companies. Some of them are pretty good, others, well, they are interested in learning, and that's good too... but for them? that difference between three bucks and five every month is worth spending some time on.

So yeah, it's a market that I owned once, but that market has... passed me by. (and really, a lot of the people in that market seem kinda angry that I'm not keeping up with the times... which I guess I could take as a complement?) I will put some effort into it again, at some point, but it's not my current highest priority. The comment that gave this hn post it's title was actually me trying to get those people to quit buying my five dollar account, because while in '05, I had images that worked okay on it, today, out of box it just does not work very well. I didn't disable ordering on it completely mostly for irrational reasons. I am pleased and surprised that other people found it this amusing.