Ravi, A Capitalist

I’m obsessed with power, and when it comes to computing power I’m more obsessed. For the past few years during my time at Indyahozting, I haven’t had much to do with super powerful desktop computers since I had all those servers to get the work done for me. Now that I’m free from those servers, I decided that it was time that I upgrade my computer at home after 2 years. When I was in college, I remember that I used to upgrade my computer every few months, but after college it has slowed down a bit, and my last computer upgrade was about 2 years ago.

It is still lying here on the floor, the antiquated AMD single core processor with about 1 GB RAM and 2 x 40 GB drives and a mercury motherboard with a pathetic display adapter and a 2 channel soundcard in which one of the channels stopped working ages ago. I have been listening to music in that 1 channel for such a long time now, and I don’t believe it that I could ever have been doing that if I were a few years younger when I was specifc abouttv stands and computer tables too.

Well, my new computer has got two Quad Core processors, thats 8 cores in total, each core running at a speed of 2.4 GHz. The FSB is 1.33 GHz. The Motherboard is Asus, specially ordered from Singapore. No one in India had that in stock, as it is quite special, and I don’t think many lunatics such as me would be buying that in India.

It supports 2 Quad core processors, and 32 GB of RAM, Has got 8 RAM slots, 4 PCI slots, 2 PCIEX16 slot (yes, 2), 4 SATA ports, 1 IDE Port and a big bunch of this and that.

It has also got an nVidia Gforce display adapter built into the chipset with about 256 of memory, and an 8 channel sound card built into it.

I put the whole thing together a few days ago, with 16 GB of RAM (yes, im a lunatic), 2 Quad Core processors ofcourse, 4 x 1 TB hard drives (confirming again, im a lunatic), and an old 40gb drive for the OS on the IDE port, and a DVD writer.

I was running gOS, a derivative of Ubuntu on my old computer, and I just moved the hard drive to this new computer, and as it was a 32 bit OS, it couldn’t address more than 3 GB of RAM, even when I upgraded to the server kernel of Ubuntu.

So I just went ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.10′s 64bit version, and copied all the settings from gOS and was working happily with it for a week.

I love commercials. I remember one ad made by Samsung some years back which says “Technology shouldn’t overwhelm you. It should open your mind”. I was overwhelmed on the first day that I put this together, but from the 2nd day, I saw my mind opening up. Till the day before I was using an antiquated computer and I wouldn’t do more than one operation in it at a time.

I had some photos that I had taken at Goa the last time I was there, and wanted them to be resized so that I can upload them into flikr. This is a big resource consuming process. All photos were in TIFF format, and they had to be converted into JPG first before they are resized. Each photo is about 5 or 6 MB in size and they had to be reduced to 50 to 60 kb each. Tough job. If I was using my old computer, I would have started the process at night, gone to bed and would have come back to check the next morning to find the process still running. But without thinking, I initiated this process on one desktop in ubuntu, and switched to another desktop to open VNWare (a popular visturalization software) and started installing vista on it. Then on the 3rd desktop I started to copy several bits of files lying in my removable 500 GB drive into the internal drives. With all these running, I had nothing to do and in the 4th desktop I opened Virtualbox and started Windows XP and started playing Age of Empires.

I finished a level in about 40 mins, and came back to see that the photo conversion was over, VMWare’s automated installation process of Vista was over, and the file copying is was 90% complete, and I didn’t have one bit of problem with the smoothness of the game that I was playing.

I just thought about it today, and was glad to find that I just opened my mind, and wasn’t really overwhelmed as I am now at the thought of it.

Right now I am parallely running 4 operating systems in virtual environments, XP, Solaris, Red Hat and Belenix, apart from the base operating system which is the Ubuntu 64 bit version running the computer.

I have my hosting with hostgator. Though I used to be the so called managing director of Indyahozting, I preferred my sites to be somewhere else when I moved out of the company, and so I chose hostgator apart from everyone else The name sounded cool, and I know that the site is in existence for the past 7 years. Well, the deal is I pay them $10 every month, and they give me a hosting account on which I can host unlimited domains and create unlimited databases and use upto 600 GB of space. Wow, what more do I need? I asked them whats the catch, and they told me that I cannot use more than 25% of the servers resources, and that they have a dual xeon server with 4 gb ram and stuff. They refuse to tell me how much hard disk they have got. They cant have more than 4×500 gb hard drives raided together. Thats only 2 TB. How are they sharing 600 gb to each client hosted on this server? Bullshit. I know that as I too have been selling hosting for some time now.

There is no such thing as Unlimited. If there was something called unlimited, I would take one of these $10 accounts and give hosting free for everyone with a limit of 10 or 20 mb per user to host their static html files only, and that way I would attract millions and billions of users and there would be no way that hostgator’s servers can tolerate the load of traffic though I would manage to keep the processor load within 25% as there would be no php or any other resource consuming sites. Everything would be plain html.

They would have a serious problem in their hands. What would they do? They would find a bullshit way to get me out of their servers, and I would challenge them that I am lying within the bounds of their TOS. The only thing that they can do to get me off their servers is to use the clause that states Host Gator reserves the right to fuck any client off their servers at their will and that I agree completely to that.

Dont get fooled by these offers. Think. Spend $1 per site a month and get hosting from the smaller providers, and you will get more resources per site.