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Whats next.. 5GB RAM for 7 dollars?
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Whats next.. 5GB RAM for 7 dollars?

Ash_HawkridgeAsh_Hawkridge Member
edited October 2011 in General

What is with this sudden rush of 1GB/2GB VPS for 5 and 7 dollars. Providers need to stop competing on price and start concentrating on competing for performance. Waits for the 5GB/7USD plan

I don't care what hardware they use or what deals they think they have got, those prices are not sustainable without serious overselling as i and other providers should know.

Look what happened to shared hosting when the terms unlimited came about, at this rate VPS is going to go the same way. A few years ago if somebody told me i could get a VPS for less than shared hosting i would have laughed at them, now sadly enough its true.

/end-rant

Thanked by 1stack
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Comments

  • fanfan Veteran

    That's why I choose to avoid OpenVZ VPS's if I can, though ram is getting cheaper and cheaper, this kind of marketing strategy isn't wise enough IMO.

  • leave them to it lets see which companies are still standing 6 months from now :)

  • drmikedrmike Member
    edited October 2011

    @VMPort

    Providers need to stop competing on price and start concentrating on competing for performance.

    Won't happen. People vote with their pocketbooks.

    I know that my big selling point is (edit: managed support) but it took quite a bit for people to accept that. Most of my pre sales emails are from folks complaining either about price or pointing out that other providers offer up unlimited space and bandwidth and how I should too.

    edit: I can see overselling bandwidth. Heck, even I do that. Never really gets used up 100% and, if it ever does, you can always get extra from the datacenter.

    Overselling memory and hard drive space is another concern though. You can run out of those as they're both hard numbers.

  • iKockaiKocka Member
    edited October 2011

    To get ~$200 per node Brandon needs to oversell resources twice. But as it was said in the past:

    miTgiB said: OpenVZ can be oversold far more then that on gear of that quality before it is even noticed, more like a magnitude of 500% is very easy to get away with on those small accounts. Keeping IO over 50MB/sec you can oversell that box quite a bit.

  • What's next?

    Unlimited VPS, of course!

  • @vendran: What's next?

    How about $5 dedicated servers with 256MB RAM/10 GB storage using the Model B Raspberry Pi and SD cards?

    http://www.silicon.com/technology/hardware/2011/10/03/raspberry-pi-cheat-sheet-39748024/

  • I reckon I could offer 4GB Ram openVZ for $7 quite easily with decent performance and still make money however I'm happy with software development at the moment.

  • XeoncrossXeoncross Member
    edited October 2011

    Since we have all these people like me that buy VPS which we don't use. Why don't we all just purchase from the same person so we can have a 5GB RAM VPS for $1 month. Overselling is fine since we only do an initial speedtest and then leave the VPS idle for months. :)

    Thanked by 2kylix sidahmed
  • LongShot said: How about $5 dedicated servers with 256MB RAM/10 GB storage using the Model B Raspberry Pi and SD cards?

    http://www.silicon.com/technology/hardware/2011/10/03/raspberry-pi-cheat-sheet-39748024/

    lol, funny little thing.

  • I want one for my house!!!! =(

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    drmike said: Providers need to stop competing on price and start concentrating on competing for performance.

    drmike said: Won't happen. People vote with their pocketbooks.

    Not really. People only vote with their wallets when your brand isn't well known enough to justify higher costs. Using us as an example we haven't lowered the price on our 1G/2G RAM plans and we still sell out of them. Yes, it might take a little longer than our other plans but we're not in a rush to the bottom.

    Brandon has done nothing wrong by us so I don't want to go crapping on the guys parade, but it's obvious he's using 16GB RAM dedicated boxes at max. 8GB sticks simply aren't on the market and while he can claim he might have some special way of making it work without swapping to hell and back, softlayer isn't going to special order $2000 in RAM for you unless you put $2000+ down in setup fee's. If he was willing to put $2000 down in setup fee's then he needs to re-consider his business model all together.

    Everyone else can race to the bottom but all that does is makes for a much bigger deadpool explosion when that goes up in smoke. Maybe Brandon is OK making $10 - $20/m of clear profit on a box (maybe none at all and just doing it to boost a brand), I sure as hell know I wouldn't be. From $15/y deals to $7/m 1GB plans, it just comes off as odd since I usually figured enetsouth to be a higher end brand when they were doing vmware.

    Francisco

  • SpiritSpirit Member
    edited October 2011

    Xeoncross said: Overselling is fine since we only do an initial speedtest and then leave the VPS idle for months.

    You're right here. We are here too long to be so naive that we would move serious projects to those hosts so many our vpses are (apart from some small jobs like IRC or VPN) most of the time idle. And even those with some blog or so... here and there usually don't use even 20% it's capacity.

    Thanked by 1sidahmed
  • @Francisco both you and I are well known in our fields but we're not well known to the general public. If you get average Joe Blow from Somewhere in the Hicks, USA, if he sees Company A for $5 a month and Company B for $2.50 a month, both with the same stats, he's going to go with Company B, even though Company A has better service.

    I dealt with a lady a couple of days ago who wanted me to price match another company's $1.99 a month offering for "managed" service. Even though I pointed out all the places on their marketing copy that "managed" to them meant server management and not the script management that we do she still wanted it at that price. Needless to say, she went with the other company. A quick check of her domains shows that she's moved her sites or had them moved but the scripts are broken.

    And I'm very happy that I have 4 slots on each of my motherboards so I don't have to justify those costs you were throwing around on the main site. :)

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    drmike said: And I'm very happy that I have 4 slots on each of my motherboards so I don't have to justify those costs you were throwing around on the main site. :)

    When the RAM goes into public it'll drop in price to about $150 per 8GB or so, but the thing is that there is no such sticks on the market yet.

    Francisco

  • fanfan Veteran

    Francisco said: When the RAM goes into public it'll drop in price to about $150 per 8GB or so, but the thing is that there is no such sticks on the market yet.

    I'm also waiting for that for my desktop pc.$150 for 8gb is really cheap. :)

  • I can see where its possible, to jam 2GB in a VPS, slap a price of $7, and sell it and have the I/O of about no better then 50MB/s.

    But you still have to deal with the CPU, ipap had this issue. Hard Drive space doesn't seem to be as oversold as RAM/Bandwidth, and I hope the new providers can handle putting so many on a box.

    Degrading will likely happen soon, with ipap, people had good VPSs until about a month, (they did the same thing as all the other 1/2GB companies are doing now) so I am just going to watch this one for about a month.

    I am sure a company can do this. If BuyVM know how to handle a 1.25/month (15/year) setup, a 1/2GB company can probably work on handling a 7/month, but we have yet to see it reach to that point yet.

    Generally, either the CPU, RAM or HDD is entirely Oversold. Some of those with bandwidth up to 2TB/month seem to overdo that as well.
    Then there's the 'abusers' of a VPS. If given a 2GB VPS with Equally Shared CPU/HDD/BW, and they stay within their allocation, where's the general cutoff point? If I were to run something that used all my equal share CPU, 90% of the HDD/RAM, and every month I hit 95% of my BW, does that qualify for suspension? To some companies, I know it does.

  • I doubt it's hard to not oversell on the diskspace, drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and smaller and smaller

  • Disk space is usually not oversold, as @Daniel stated it is too cheap to be worth overselling. The problem is that when a user gets too much disk space he may decide to actively use it which means higher I/O (seeking) which becomes the bottleneck. So offering too much disk space usually means worse I/O speeds.

  • rds100 said: So offering too much disk space usually means worse I/O speeds.

    I can't find any relation between disk space and performance, it depends of the VPS usage. A backup box will not be seeking and seeking, and the same for a box running some gameservers (some of them uses a lot of space), etc.

  • Blackstorm72 said: Degrading will likely happen soon, with ipap, people had good VPSs until about a month, (they did the same thing as all the other 1/2GB companies are doing now) so I am just going to watch this one for about a month.

    Ipap's VPS was never good, IO was always poor (from day one), they were massive oversellers, no question about it.

    Anyway, here is a little comparison:

    BuyVM ($15/y plan, recalculated for $7/m price)

    RAM: 716.8MB
    RAM+Burst/VSwap: 1433.6MB
    Disk Space: 84GB
    Bandwidth: 2800GB

    ENetSouth ($7/m plan)

    RAM: 2000MB
    RAM+Burst/VSwap: 2000MB
    Disk Space: 50GB
    Bandwidth: 1500GB

    Who's overselling more there? No, seriously, what's easier to oversell, RAM or everything else?

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2011

    @Vedran Space is cheap considering we use 8 x 1.5TB drives in our nodes. BW is also pretty cheap when you get BW priced at < $1/mbit like we do :)

    I should add, we're not arguing them offering it in nodes that CAN hold 96GB RAM (read: nehalem based CPU's), the major point is that the platform they're using has a physical limit of 16GB for the time being.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 1Vad
  • @Francisco, I see what you're trying to say. I guess we can only wait and see if they can get away with it :P

    Or they really got those 8GB stick somewhere and somehow. We'll know how it works in a few weeks.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    vedran said: Or they really got those 8GB stick somewhere and somehow. We'll know how it works in a few weeks.

    Softlayer isn't offering them either way, nor is 100TB.

    Francisco

  • vedran said: Or they really got those 8GB stick somewhere and somehow. We'll know how it works in a few weeks.

    Dell is offering E3-1200's in the R210's with 32GB for an addon fee of $1700, so a quick config of an E3-1270 w/32GB ram and PERC H200 is a mere $2900 without drives, and sorry, from experience, the E3's do not handle OpenVZ as well as my Opterons, but shine like stars for KVM. And I've yet to hear the CPU lockup bug has been fixed for the E3's with the ovzkernel in CentOS 6

    I've always found people that are jumping up and down yelling about how much they don't oversell are some of the biggest oversellers out there.

    I think the gear used is not quite as important to your long term customer base, it's the flighty customer that is always provider hopping and never really uses the VPS for anything but to run dd and ioping in cron and email themselves the results that care about gear, but are gone after 1-2 months.

  • sleddogsleddog Member
    edited October 2011

    miTgiB said: I think the gear used is not quite as important to your long term customer base, it's the flighty customer that is always provider hopping and never really uses the VPS for anything but to run dd and ioping in cron and email themselves the results that care about gear, but are gone after 1-2 months.

    Perfectly true. This kind of "VPS Tasting" is what I think fuels many of the too-good-to-be-true startups.

    But it's not just the customer that's flighty. Providers are too. Some lowend providers will offer a budget plan which is initially good but then degrades into uselessness. It's as if they lose interest in providing any kind of QOS to their budget customers. "Server up? That's good enough."

    This whole "lowend" craze went belly-up I think when "lowend" started to be equated with "cheap". Those terms means entirely different things. A 64MB VPS at $7/month is lowend but not cheap. A 2GB VPS at $7/month is cheap but certainly not lowend.

    Nowadays we have lots of "cheap" offers, which will, eventually, follow the trend and go belly-up or simply become unusable.

    Sadly, their are very few good lowend offers -- with some notable exceptions, including Hostigation :)

    Thanked by 1sidahmed
  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    sleddog said: Perfectly true. This kind of "VPS Tasting" is what I think fuels many of the too-good-to-be-true startups.

    It's already happening in the 2GB market. From the looks of it there is a bunch of people that moved from ChicagoVPS to enetsouth's deal. All that needs to happen is another such deal gets released and you'll likely see another migration.

    Francisco

  • I have not moved nor do I plan to do so. I figure if they can keep the server up and it not crash every five mins it is worth keeping if even for back ups alone. I am not sure if I would put a main site on it but time will tell.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    AuroraZ said: I have not moved nor do I plan to do so. I figure if they can keep the server up and it not crash every five mins it is worth keeping if even for back ups alone. I am not sure if I would put a main site on it but time will tell.

    I'm not saying everyone will move but I do expect many to. Be it they're simply 'testing the waters', but it may very well be people are trying to see if they can get an even better bang/buck ratio.

    Francisco

  • I agree with that but if the services I have are adequate, I see no reason to move. I know a lot of people like to move around a lot. I got enough of that in my life already lol. I am not saying I will stay forever but if the service works for what I need it for then I do not plan to move.

    I expect people will think that the nodes will be clearer and will make a move. The thing they do not realize is if the provider does not keep those nodes clean and abuse free they will more then likely suffer the same exact problems and want to move yet again.

    Money is great motivator but if you suffer lack of performance and/or service for it I am of the opinion the extra is worth every cent spent. If you can't provide the service or support everyone loses not just the customers.

  • edited October 2011

    Francisco,

    First and last warning. If you call me a liar again -- We are going to have problems..

    I asked you publicly to hit me up in email and I would have gladly explained how we got this. I will side with fact you know most of what you are talking about but you do not know everything about everywhere and what they have.

    Hardware

    Motherboard SuperMicro X9SCI-LN4F Intel Xeon SingleProc SATA

    Processor Intel Xeon-SandyBridge E3-1270-Quadcore [3.4GHz] Hardware upgrade

    RAM slot 1 Samsung DDR3 8GB DDR3 [8GB] Hardware upgrade

    RAM slot 2 Samsung DDR3 8GB DDR3 [8GB] Hardware upgrade

    RAM slot 3 Samsung DDR3 8GB DDR3 [8GB] Hardware upgrade

    RAM slot 4 Samsung DDR3 8GB DDR3 [8GB] Hardware upgrade

    Please note the following with regard to the installed X9SCI-LN4F Motherboard:

    I will gladly prove this further to anyone else who is interested.

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