> I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet.
The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.
If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines. However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?
I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't even notice if they need to be migrated.
Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.
> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!
There is https://www.serverhunter.com/ but really reviews like this are better because metrics like CPU-core and instantaneous disk speeds won't necessarily tell you about the consistency in network, disk, and CPU performance over a long period, and the supported features. It is not like AWS and Google Cloud where you can expect stable performance.
I'm replying to myself because I just managed to get a IONOS instance running in Kansas City (same distance from east/west-coasts) for low-and-behold 1€/month with unlimited data (18GB SSD and 512MB RAM). How is AWS/GCE going to compete with that?
One gotcha is that if you come from the EU you need to register via ionos.eu and there is a registration fee of 10€ for each instance!
Also looking at VPS in china now, Shanghai is pretty well placed in the Asia region: Edit: VPS is crazy expensive in China (10x-30x more expensive than IONOS and that is without data which also is 20x more expensive!), I suggest using AWS as backup to GCE over there, probably want to stay outside of the firewall in Asia if you use port 80, atleast if your other Asian customers are more important than your China customers to begin with.
Something is off with the prices globally right now, the US is like on a permanent firesale when it comes to non essential goods, but to live there is impossible!?
We need to introduce a common way of comparing these say: GHz CPU-core day, MB RAM day, MB SSD WRITE, GB SSD READ / NET?
Like this works now you're always comparing apples and oranges and maybe that is the way Amazon and Google (both on KVM now!) wants it?
Few small operators in Dallas, Kansas and Nuremberg are well placed for latency sensitive activity:
- vpsdime (7$)
- 1&1 IONOS (2$)
- Hetzner (3$) & Contabo (6$)
I'm going to try IONOS because they also have a center in Germany!
None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!
Only found yardvps.com (6$) in Taipei and they limit bandwidth to 100GB (2000GB for same price in Dallas).