Author Archives: Matt

Digital Ocean

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I came across Digital Ocean today, and am fairly interested. (Though I’m not really planning on jumping from my current host.)

The premise is that they offer SSD-based virtual machines cloud servers. They’re not the only ones doing that, but their pricing is beyond competitive. The front page advertises a VM with 20GB of SSD storage and 512 MB RAM for $5/month. (And unmetered transfer.) Prices climb a bit as you go, but are pretty proportional — $20/month for a 2GB instance with 2 cores and 40GB of SSD-backed storage. That’s a very good deal — but almost frighteningly low, along the lines of “Would you like this 40-cent bottle of champagne?” in that it leaves me a bit worried about what’s “wrong”. (Though I’m yet to find anything.)

In not-very-scientific (nor real-world) tests, hdparm -t showed 310.29 MB/sec throughput (932MB in 3.00 seconds). Various speed tests give scattered results, from 2-6 MB/sec. (16-48 Mbps), though it’s entirely possible that the bottleneck was the remote server. I must say, though, that yum is faster than I have ever seen it before.

They do seem to block outbound ICMP, probably due to abuse problems. They also appear to block NTP, which is odd and makes me wonder what else is blocked.

I don’t plan on switching over any time soon, but at the same time, it’s tempting to think of $10/month as a reasonable expenditure if I find myself needing something to host the occasional app or whatnot.

Another Link Roundup

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A haphazard assortment of interesting (to me) links:

  • Someone on the ntp-pool list shared a blog post about building a stratum 1 NTP server with a Raspberry Pi and a GPS. I should see about trying this with my existing OnCore UT+ receiver…
  • Adobe posted a series of downloads with license keys for Creative Suite 2 (CS2). The Internet collectively freaked out that they were “giving away” the products for free. On their forums, though, Adobe’s stance was decidedly less generous, pointing out that the products are 7 years old and intended only for existing customers.
  • Another story about John McAfee: The bizarre tale of John McAfee, spymaster. I’ve come to take his statements with a grain of salt (but not bath salts) after he himself has referred to existing comments he’s made as pranks, or “the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world.”
  • California’s Jonathan Frieman was pulled over for driving alone in an HOV lane and issued a citation. But as this article explains, he wasn’t really alone — he had the articles of incorporation for a corporation he had filed in his passenger seat. The case was meant to challenge corporate personhood, though it didn’t quite strike down that ruling.
  • Suds for Drugs is a long but fascinating article exploring a rash of laundry detergent thefts in Maryland, uncovering an underground economy in which Tide is a currency.
  • Ruby 2.0.0-rc1. Oh my gosh.
  • Shocking no one — except perhaps record executives — a recent study has found that censoring pirate sites doesn’t work. It concludes by recommending that content creators “follow a complementary strategy of reducing the demand for pirated content, e.g., by providing legitimate offers that are more attractive to consumers than pirating content.”