alt Hacker News15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die
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Old school internet. Internet done right.
Great work giis.
I haven't used it, I didn't know it existed until now, but I'm happy it exists and has been providing service to those who need it. There should be more of this.
That's wonderful and I know why it's an Indian founder. Was so hard to get a remote shell back then. Indian debit cards didn't work online reliably and so on. So what's the hardware underneath? Cloud server or on-prem?
These days the world is amazing. Oracle Cloud gives you a ton for free. But perhaps there's some niche where this is useful. I have to say that this shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, hahaha.
UML is a smart call, and reminds me when I built an inventory and shift scheduling system on wordpress in 2017.
somtimes the "wrong" / "old" tool for some job is exactly right for you if you really understand it. UML is old but fits here.
15 years is long enough to call memory about a lot of things.
To be fair. 8GB of ram is huge. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the early 00s but even 2 GB of ram still seems extravagant; I remember when that was an exotic amount of RAM for dedicated gamers to play extremely high fidelity games, so for a mere web server 8 GB of ram almost seems like absurd overkill. I still feel a tinge of shame whenever I see any software of my own using more than a few hundred megabytes. What a waste.
It's been a while since I've used it but Google cloud shell is a good free platform for learning Linux commands as well
Well... The best days were just putting hardware in a 2U box, racking it, and paying a bit for power and networking. This was such an easier time, and a handful of core 2 duos were fully capable of streaming 1080p video to around a million daus.
Of course, there's far more money in really fancy shared hosting that wastes resources, so that's the current model. Then you market to C-level folks that "real companies" host on AWS or Azure, and that all others options are "unserious." If your opex for compute isn't a million, you're wrong.
Feels like the real value here is zero setup.
Even spinning up a VM can be enough friction for beginners. A browser shell is kind of “good enough” for that.
Probably why tools like this keep sticking around. Wanna try.
All that on a single Github Sponsor[0].
It takes a lot of guts to run something like this for years on end, kudos to you for setting this up and running it for all these years. I am wondering if you'd ever come across pubnixes or tilde servers when you first started up webminal?
This is so fascinating, I've never heard of UML!
How many users can this support simultaneously? It says 256MB RAM per user, 8GB total on server? But it's probably more than 32 simultaneous users?
The way the stack is described reminded me of this masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W9Ghe4Jk
Well that server is worth 1M due to the 8GB RAM now!
You just might break that 10K visit from Spanish tech blog in 2017.
This is a very inspiring entrepreneurial story. The story of not giving up.
This is a good reminder that good enough + zero setup often beats more powerful solutions.
I've never tried Webminal (only used Linode for it's simplicity). But, it seems great. I'll probably try it out.
> User Mode Linux
Oh man, what a blast from the past. I have fond memories of learning linux networking with netkit (based on UML).
UML was a really really cool piece of technology.
If anybody is wondering, User Mode Linux lets you boot a Linux kernel as a normal linux process, and then run an userspace, still in a linux process. This is from 2001. Super cool.
Would UML be similar to Incus running unprivileged VMs?
blegh, the content is interesting but i've grown numb towards AI speak. It's so generic that I lose interest halfway through.
iximuiz also give you 1 hour per day free i think.
very easy to use. almost instant.
This is the post that should be required reading before anyone spins up a Kubernetes cluster for their side project.
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I didn't know about Webminal until today. Going to try it with some college students this afternoon!