BOOTTALE Indie & Solo Hacker Archive
ENGINEERING 32 upvotes 2010

NewServers: Bare Metal Cloud

Shared by @z8000 · Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013) · 28 discussions · ⏱ 2 min read (301 words)
32 pts
Hacker News Signal
2010 · Shared by @z8000
NewServers: Bare Metal Cloud by @z8000
Original Source HN Thread (28)
ORIGINAL RETROSPECTIVE

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @z8000 on Hacker News:

"The only server cloud that delivers dedicated servers instead of virtual instances on shared servers."

What the founder wrote

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled reflections, business mechanics, and tactical takeaways:

In this technical retrospective (2010), @z8000 shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
2
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
3
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:

HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.

Author Replies

Founder's Discussion Replies (@z8000)

Direct clarifications and follow-up comments shared by the author during the live discussion:

OP @z8000 Original Author
2010 Thread ↗

FWIW

``` We do not keep any servers unused, all servers are recycled and added to queue so the customers have equal rights to get them... and we cannot keep them reserved because of the costs... instead you should consider leasing them for longer periods so you have them available. ```

What HN said

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

Key perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (28 total discussions):

DN @dnsworks Peer Contributor
2010 Thread ↗

I interviewed these guys at Structure 2008 for my blog. They were pretty nice and rather reasonable people. They seemed to have an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. To be fair, they're not targeted at the Web 2.0 market that EC2 has targeted. They're more suited as an alternative to dedicated servers, and seemed to be targeting traditional businesses who are bad at capacity planning.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29307 ↗ was the interview if anyone's interested.

MR @mrkurt Peer Contributor
2010 Thread ↗

That's a pretty cool setup, really. I almost made an ass of myself by saying "they should be using blade servers" when they are, in fact, using blade servers.

I would really, really like to know how the power density of blades like this compares to the potential power density of hefty machines running virtual instances. If you can get close with dedicated blades, something like this would make a really desirable (and sustainable) premium "cloud" offering.

PI @pierrefar Peer Contributor
2010 Thread ↗

I don't understand it because their content is very Buzzword Compliant, but this is what I can gather: they sell you dedicated servers billed hourly and provisioned quickly, much like a cloud provider.

Read All 28 Hacker News Comments ↗
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 32 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 28 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK:
#architecture#bare-metal #bare-metal