[lsc]

The comment about SMART errors would indicate they are a dedicated server customer. I don't have many of those, so it's funny I don't remember (and I probably owe them a price cut; I have new and dramatically cheaper dedicated servers now[1] and I try to give old customers first hack at price cuts.) - but the ram/money ratio is a bit more favourable to the customer on dedicated servers (of course, you have to buy a whole lot more.)

It's interesting that the amazon instances are that cheap, though; I hadn't done that math for a while; It does look like I need to improve my ram/dollar ratio; I need to stay cheaper than ec2 for the reasons you stated. (also, ec2 has an awesome reputation and can get corporate customers... so they are going to price themselves rather higher than the cost of production for that reason alone. I should be cheaper than they are.)

Oh yeah, I also do co-location[2] and if you want to talk about saving money? if you need north of 32GiB ram, you can save a huge amount of money over a year by buying hardware and co-locating it. Actually, the hardware cost of a dedicated server? as a rule of thumb, it's less than what you charge the customer for 4 months rent. (Of course, you have to pay for power out of that, so I don't pay off the server in four months, but you get the idea. It's not particularly low-margin.)

[1]http://prgmr.com/tin/

[2]http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html