All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
VPS provider with an API
I am working on a new project. I have signed up for a half-dozen VPS providers trying to find somebody to use in addition to Amazon Web Services. We have been benchmarking performance as well as administration. There must be hundreds of VPN providers listed here and a lot of them are similar - specs around the same, same ordering pages, similar admin panels, same signup emails, etc.
For some reason nobody is offering an API where new instances can be started programmatically. I noticed some providers have an API where you can reboot servers and query CPU usage etc. but nothing that lets you add more resources without going through the standard ordering pages.
So, is there somebody who is now offering an API, or is there anybody interested in offering an API? I think this is an area that is being grossly under-provided for.
Comments
It's indeed an area which is currently under-provided. So to speak, we're building something like this and should be out within a reasonable time period.
I'm not sure many of the providers realize. There was an entire thread on this board about which services are not readily available in the industry and auto deploying and API's etc. were not mentioned once:
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/6323/what-service-is-not-readily-available-in-this-industry
Not really one of the focuses here from a provider or customer standpoint. I don't think too many of LET users can say that they have projects that need such things.
There is some 'VPS reseller' service that allows you to purchase pre-allocated resources and allows you to split them. Maybe that's what you are looking for.
(duplicate post)
The OP isn't. What it sounds like is, e.g. I have this application cluster that can have x-amount of nodes depending on scale. I can add/remove them automatically from my application based on load/users at the time.
Still highly considering writing a VPS Panel with such features and a lot more. Wonder if there would be enough interest. Stopped after someone else announced a panel wink wink.
Amazon
DigitalOcean
Linode
VPS.net
Zerigo
Neosurge (just management not booting/ordering)
Gandi
Worth checking out: http://scalr.net/
My first project on Prometeus includes such thing with cloudmin.
However, being IPv6 only probably not interesting yet.
We are working on a cloud setup with openstack/cloudstack (we are evaluating options there) that will certainly include this.
DigitalOcean
Linode
VPS.net
Zerigo
Neosurge (just management not booting/ordering)
Gandi
That is a great list - we haven't tried DigitalOcean, VPS.net, Zerigo or Neosurge yet - so we will get onto that.
I'd also add GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud and Azure to that list.
And thanks for ServerBear - we have made up a large number of your pageviews in the past couple of days. Have you considered listing the IaaS providers and categorizing them?
It would be great to have a benchmark across all the providers and to be able to compare based on some cost per computation or memory unit. For eg. comparing AWS against ChicagoVPS, et al.
This is where the market is heading. It isn't just for people who need to auto scale, it is about being able to automatically install apps, better portability etc. For eg. what portion of VPS buyers do simple things like just install Wordpress, Joomla or phpBB etc. A lot of that can be automated and open the market up to the large number of people who want to host a simple website but don't know Linux commands.
I would be very interested in a provider that offers this if it's easy to use.
I use my US VPSses maybe 2-3 times a week for 1 hour each as a proxy to bypass geo restrictions. Neither do they need a static IP nor stay online 24/7. However going to a providers control panel, logging in, starting the server and waiting for it to boot takes much too long.
The same goes for gameservers that i play on maybe 2-3 hours every other day.
It would be about building apps on top of the API that are easy to use. For eg. a developer builds an app that deploys a proxy. You signup for it, select your provider from a drop-down and in the background it goes out, creates the server, configures it and then simply sends the user back the login credentials.
With a standard API across hosts, the possibilities are endless. We are already starting to see a lot of what is possible with tools built on AWS. To get a similar or same API across the low end providers would make it more affordable for users.
Paying $17-20 per months for a single EC2 server to only use it as a proxy or Wordpress host is prohibitive. This is why I would like to see other providers implement API's, because at the moment there is no way to roll out $2 per month servers or anything less than the $20-40 per month at AWS, Linode, etc.
This is the alternate we are evaluating - running our own hardware, which we would prefer not to do, and our own openstack environment, which we would also prefer not to have to do - hence the question asking if anybody else wants to do that
@nikcub @gsrdgrdghd are you looking at hourly or monthly payment but? Amazon's hourly payment model will cause price rises in the low end market. It creates too many variables and other problems.
Having said that, just spinning off VPS etc should be easy to do.
DigitalOcean has fair pricing, hourly billing and api
Monthly is fine. AWS do hourly because their instances are ephemeral
DigitalOcean