(Please don't cc me on mails to the list; I am subscribed.)
On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 06:31:54PM +0000, mick wrote:
On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:45:21 +0000 Jonathan McDowell noodles@earth.li allegedly wrote:
I've got a single VM with DO that handles my parents' email (so running exim/dovecot/roundcube and little else). Not had any issues with them (and in terms of the traffic stuff you mentioned and I snipped I suspect that people like me hardly using their allowance are averaging out with people like you using a lot. Bandwidth in well connected datacentres has got scarily cheap). Like you my personal stuff (such as the machine which hosts this list) is with Bytemark.
I don't think that would work. Consider, I alone am using the total network allowance of about 10 other $5.00 VM users. And there are a lot of users like me who have signed up to DO simply because of the high bandwidth available. And if bandwidth is /really/ that cheap a commodity, why don't other VM providers offer it? Bytemark for example give me 1TB of transfer on my VM. They would charge me £20 for each additional 1TB of transfer. That means that the service I get at DO for $15 (about the same as the 12 quid I pay bytemark) would cost me £192 pcm (9 * £20 plus the original £12) with bytemark. Other VM suppliers are the same. I have used a lot of different suppliers over the past 8-10 years and all have used a model of charging for additional bandwidth over and above the base level. Sure, the base allowance has crept up over the years, but no-one other than DO has this weird model where they don't seem to care if you chew up a lot of bandwidth.
A $5 DO VM comes with 1TB/month of traffic allowance. That's about 3.2Mb/s assuming continuous usage, which is about £1.60 at current global transit rates. I note they're also at LINX and various other peering points so there's a good chance their actual cost is lower than this. Yes, your particular usage will potentially end up costing more than you pay but I'm assuming DO have calculated that there are few enough people who have been grandfathered in that it's worth doing (and I'm sure if it was causing them a problem they would terminate your contract).
DO are concentrating on VMs AFAICT, whereas Bytemark are a much more full featured ISP and as such have found it worthwhile to build their own data centre in York and arrange for transit to there. I've also found the quality of their support and offering to be superior to DO for the things I use them for (for example, DO do not appear to offer phone support by default). Additionally I suspect DO are a much bigger organisation, which will give them potential advantages when negotiating things like transit pricing and peering arrangements.
J.