[ajross]

You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean, I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were better choices, there always are.

But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.

[swozey]

I was just rhetorically reflecting on how strange it was that those specs is what they were using when they clearly aren't a 12 year old child or Russian warez slinger who can't get a VPS elsewhere and can afford something beyond a free or $10/mo VPS, WHILE they're arguing about how they're running out of memory on the VPS when compiling. And .. I assume that they're technically savvy since they created bitcoin, although I have absolutely no idea what that entailed.

Those specs for a VPS are absolutely pathetic even for 2009 era Xeon computing. I had quad xeons poweredges with 128gb+ ram under my desk as workstations when customers stopped paying their bills in 2009 when I worked at Hostway. VPS were leased with either dedicated cores or shared cores, shared probably around $20-40 then dedi core $60-250+. Datacenters either used Vmware g/esx or Virtuzzo.

I worked at all of the largest webhosts in the USA (not Hetzner etc in Europe) from I think 2005-2015 so I'm pretty familiar with that era of hosting. The guy who owns the webhost they're using can't even spell his competitor Linodes url/name. It's like they went to some random IRC channel and picked whatever free VPS host they could, which is a horrible idea. Whoever owned that VPS could absolutely figure out who these people were and interact with any file on their system he wanted to. I bet if someone tracked down whoever is the in that email talking about his webhost, they could track that email thread back and figure everyone out. But fraud at webhosts was absolutely rampant back then so there is the possibility the entire group faked their identities if they even HAD to identify at a fly-by-night webhost (narrator: they didn't).

When we took down Windows + Linux servers for CSAM, warez, fraud, etc we'd often log into them before wiping them and they'd have IRC, ICQ, etc open on the server and we'd be able to take down an entire group by going through their logs/etc that were still on the server.

$7.99 at HOSTGATOR who back then was the biggest (outside of godaddy) budget webhost barely got you a free shared cPanel account on a server with another 2000 customers to lag your site down. It was basically an sftp account with a cpanel login, that's it. The webhost in question here doesn't even give them a login, they have to communicate and have things done by their "customer support" (probably a call center India full of sysadmins, they were huge back then).

A $9.99 VPS in 2009? oof.

Even more to the point of this thread, it shows that the tech/operations/infra skills of that team are .. not very impressive. One guy didn't know linux at all and the "Linux guy" is the one picking a free VPS at a shady webhost that can't even compile his code. So that takes a lot of SRE/types off the "who made bitcoin" list. And this wasn't like, "Linux is super rare" world. It was 2009. I had been using Linux since the 90s when I wasn't even 10. We had hundreds of Linux sysengineers at each of these companies and we had no problem hiring them.

2009 hostgator SHARED (NOT! vps/dedi) pricing, $7.95, although they didn't have VPS back then so can't compare that. A dual xeon dedi is $219/mo, IIRC VPS started around $30-60 whenever that got added.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostga...

https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostga...

[alisonatwork]

I think you are overestimating the skills of a couple of math nerds working on a hobby project in their spare time. Even working at a tech company with professionals who are paid to write computer software, a lot of people don't know much about operations. Heck, I had been in the industry for 10 years by that point, including one as a sysadmin, and I wouldn't know where to get webhosting because I was never employed to do that kind of work. Most people in the tech industry (and even more so for people in tech-adjacent academia) only really have deep knowledge in one or two areas of specialization.

[swozey]

That is absolutely ridiculous. This was 2009. We had just started the recession and everyone who lost their jobs was opening up wordpress blogs and everything else. That's why Hostgator sold for $300 million 5 years later and made Oxley a fortune. 2008-2010 was the absolute largest webhosting boom that we've **ever** had. SO many webhosts started post-2008 to pull in that market. The webhosting market is absoultely dead nowadays.

Your grandma probably set up a blog to get some adwords revenue. The entire market was based around WYSYWIG website theme guis and wordpress. Nothing techinical required until you need a vps/dedi.

Once again, I worked in the industry. I am very familiar with the types of mom and pop customers who were buying $9.99 sharing hosting accounts. I spent a LOT of time on the phone supporting people.

Regardless, if they AREN'T skilled in infra/operations, like I said that they aren't - then whats your point? You just corroborated that they're not skilled in infra. So thanks for repeating me? We have a group of programmers who are so unskilled with operations/infrastructure I *know* they aren't SRE/infra types. That was my point. Satoshi or Hatoshi or whoever clearly wasn't an operations person.

If you consider someone technically skilled in linux when they don't know ANY webhosts or are willing to use a free webhost as ... technically skilled then we are absolutely not going to agree. That is absolutely pathetic, insecure, and stupid to do. Do not EVER use a free webhost. You shouldn't need a PHD in Debian to understand the implications of some random person/company who doesn't even charge you remotely normal fees having access to your super secret bitcoin code.

You were a linux sysadmin and didn't know any webhosts/dcs? Did you not work on apache/nginx? If you did you got your .htacess configurations from webhosts. You probably got your ~/.ssh/config from webhosts tutorials. You probably learned postgres/mysql through webhost tutorials. You probably learned systemd/etcd/etc from webhost tutorials. You absolutely learned iptables through a webhost tutorial.

Almost *EVERY* single linux tutorial from the 1990s to the 2015s was some sort of "Set up a LAMP/WAMP stack for a Bookstore company."

This sounds like a blatant lie. or you should've been nowhere near systems. You didn't know Geocities? Angelfire? Tripod? Godaddy? Linode? DigitalOcean? Rackspace? Hostway? The Planet? Liquidweb? 1&1?? Hetzner?? Or any of the tens of thousands of local datacenters we had to rack servers in? You were a linux admin who literally had never had their own server hosted somewhere? Where exactly did you get PRODUCTION experience to become a sysadmin? I learned linux over IRC but I absolutely had tens or hundreds of servers throughout my growth. A HUGE amount of us #linux people had eggdrops/shells even when we were little kids.

If you don't know any webhosts then what exactly were you hosting in the datacenter where you were a linux admin? What, 80-90% of servers in a datacenter are linux servers running a webserver probably. And if you're doing that you're doing exactly what webhosts are doing, except they put a nice little cPanel/Plesk portal in front. I think you're using "linux admin" a bit loosely here or our skills are astronomically far apart.

This is some strange weird whitewashing of an entire era of computing that some seem to know NOTHING about, WHILE arguing with someone who was in the trenches at that time talking about EXACTLY what they did for a living. But no, please have a random hackernews person who wasn't involved in webhosting whatsoever describe to me the industry in 2009.

Anything to play devils advocate. You people are making it sound like this was the wild west and webhosting was so hard and complex back then in the yesteryear of ... 2009.

cPanel was founded in *1996*!!

Rackspace was founded in *1998*!!

Hostgator was founded in *2005*!!

GoDaddy was founded in *1997*!!

[alisonatwork]

I don't really understand your hostility here. When I was a sysadmin, I was working on Windows NT and Digital UNIX systems, and we were taking the radical step of moving some of those systems to Debian. There was no hosted website, it was on-prem IT. In subsequent jobs I developed software that ran on various versions of UNIX/Linux, but they were on-prem installs too. By the time I worked in a company that had a SaaS offering, there was a whole team of people dedicated to setting up the operations side. I wrote back end application code, why would I ever need to set up a LAMP stack? At another company I did admittedly set up Apache and do a bit of PHP programming as glue to a Java back end, but once again... on-prem installs for enterprise clients.

I think you are seeing the world through your own lens of being an expert in web hosting. Sure, every software developer who used Linux before knows how to navigate a shell, and most software developers working in SaaS 15 years ago knew how to spin up a local web server. That doesn't mean they knew the names of every company offering web hosting services on the public internet, especially in America (assuming these Bitcoin devs were European), or that they knew about cPanel or Wordpress or whatever other PHP content management system. It's a completely different area of expertise.