Actually wondering about this as well, currently considering making my own SaaS, though it's not like there's that many approaches to do billing.
In my eyes, a pretty good option would be to automate VPS provisioning and allow each client to order a particular amount of resources, with the software installed on top of them. That way, multi tenancy can be limited to services that handle provisioning, billing and setup, while the individual instances can allow avoiding a single point of failure as far as the day to day operations are concerned.
Basing pricing on the underlying VPS costs with a profit margin in mind just seems like one of the few ways to do it, why would there be anything wrong with it, if the SaaS provides value?
There is not and if Hetzner would have been mentioned on the website I wouldn't have done detective work to find out it is hosted and I wouldn't have written any messages. Maybe there is something with branding that they can't tell they run on Hetzner but then they should work that out with Hetzner orbtgey are trying to hide. Anyway I saved people a registration and possibly renting an instance to figure out where they are.
If you are mostly reselling compute and storage be transparent where you get it from.
> If you are mostly reselling compute and storage be transparent where you get it from.
Genuine question: why or why not?
If someone is reselling compute with very few changes and wants to hide where it's sourced from, then i guess it's understandable from a business perspective but at the same time could indeed be considered dishonest. Is that your reasoning?
But at the same time, if someone is reselling compute with custom software or non-trivial automation around it, then i guess the software/automation itself is the product, in which case the compute is just a means to an end? At least in my eyes, if i'd be buying services from something like Mailgun, or something like Heroku, i might not necessarily care that much about where it's running from (except for maybe caring about latency). Would you agree with a statement like that?
Doesn't it all seem a bit blurred, where to draw that line of what's okay and what isn't? Is reselling compute without references to the underlying host/company not somewhat common?
The reason why I make any judgement about this is because I am an utilitarian. I see 3 Booleans that influence the outcome
- Is it product that adds value?
- Is the person inspecting the website a customer or a potential competitor?
- Is the platform of which the computation is resold listed?
I am only interested in cases where the product actually adds value. So I we can discard that other part of the possibility tree and demand that every company acts as if it adds value.
This leaves us with a 2x2 grid.
- potential customer & transparent: The user can make an educated decision before having to register, for additional hardware questions people can look at the original hoster, website focused on value add, using trusted hoster gives legitimacy
- potential competitor & transparent: competitor can clone your service without creating an account
- potential consumer and no transparent: greater uncertainty for consumer, "Why does he hide it", maybe negative experiences because it wasn't obvious that might not be suitable for tasks due to particular issues with underlying hoster (such as ping time), positive features (such as Hetzner running on green energy) are lost, with unclear hoster reliability of the infrastructure in question, lack of access to historic data that does exist.
- potential competitor & not transparent: competitor has to create to learn in what data centers the servers are as creating an account and renting a few instances would allow him infer any information he needs to know
We can suspect there are more customers than potential competitors and competitors are ore willing to learn about your service then people visiting the website by having this information available you make the life competitors are single digit $ harder, at the cost of having a harder time getting the trust of many more customers and potentially losing business.
So either the product should 't exist xor it is irrational to not make this information available easily as it hurts reseller and potential customers more than it hurts a slightly motivated cloner of the service.
Thank you for the writeup! That is solid reasoning, even if many of the companies out there would prefer not to publish too much information about the underlying infrastructure, or their expense structure.
My only nitpick would be this:
> ...using trusted hoster gives legitimacy
This can also simply lead to all of the smaller/regional hosts out there to be viewed as not trustworthy, just because they're not known to a wider audience and therefore haven't got the positive reputation that the likes of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, Hetzner and many others could have!
> This can simple lead to all of the smaller/regional hosts out there to be viewed as not trustworthy, just because they're not known to a wider audience and therefore haven't got the positive reputation that the likes of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, Hetzner and many others could have!
While I agree that this is a concern it is my opinion orthogonal to (I mean it literally becomes an irrelevant when you project along) the question "transparency good or bad?"
A hosters name gives you something you can Google. If there a post from someone 4 years ago asking whether it is any good the answers gives you helpful information independent from marketing claims. You might also be able to look at IP ranges and their trust scores or reverse DNS IPs to find out in what neighborhood you end up.
In my eyes, a pretty good option would be to automate VPS provisioning and allow each client to order a particular amount of resources, with the software installed on top of them. That way, multi tenancy can be limited to services that handle provisioning, billing and setup, while the individual instances can allow avoiding a single point of failure as far as the day to day operations are concerned.
Basing pricing on the underlying VPS costs with a profit margin in mind just seems like one of the few ways to do it, why would there be anything wrong with it, if the SaaS provides value?