thanks for the feedback! I'm looking at eucalyptus for provisioning. I want something standard. the optimal situation is one where you can easily move from me to another provider and back. the idea is that you'd run your backup images on ec2, but mostly run through prgmr (or whoever is cheapest at the time) for your day to day needs. You'd have the instant provisioning if you need to expand right away or if the guy running the cheap provider gets hit by a bus, but you'd be able to save money running with the cheap provider most of the time
Automatic provisioning would also allow me to drop the price on my smaller images. (right now I charge you $4 per account, plus $1 for every 64Mb ram you want every month.)
I give you console access, and access to PVGRUB, so you can change your kernel, or boot into a read-only rescue image I provide if you mess up your own image beyond recoverability. Any easier interfaces will be built using whatever provisioning API I end up with (like I said, right now I'm looking at Eucalyptus, but I haven't implemented anything yet)
the idea is that if you have managed servers before, the concept of a remote rebooter, a serial console, and a read only rescue image (a cdrom in the drive) will be familiar to you.
I don't think I want to get rid of the cheap plans. I meet lots of interesting people that way. I've hired a few of them, with good results. But on the other hand, I think my larger plans are a much better deal. Personally, I agree with you on the 64MiB plans, I'd rather pay the extra dollar to double my ram, but some other people disagree. I sell more 64Mb plans than 128Mb plans. (though, like I said, the 256Mb plan is the most popular.) I've got some people running NetBSD (which runs fine in 64M, if you aren't doing much) and others who upload custom linux distros, replacing sshd with dropbear. But then, I know at least one customer who lives (in China) on what amounts to about USD$200/month, so I imagine he cares a lot more about that one dollar than you or I do.
I like the sort of people you meet running these low-cost services (the big problem is making it unfriendly to spammers and other scum. I run snort on my outgoing traffic, proactively monitoring for abuse, which helps.) and I think the contacts you make on the low end (because even us wealthy bay area nerds can be pretty cheap sometimes.) often help with the high-end stuff, too. It certainly has allowed me to up my consulting rates, and it has gotten me a book deal. http://nostarch.com/xen.htm (Yes, I got someone who went to college to help. Also, most of it I wrote when I was not this tired.)
I compete on price because I don't have sales skills. I understand I need to make my website look better (and start buying hardware ahead of time) but I will always be at a disadvantage there. From my point of view, selling 10x as many images at 1/2 the cost (which seems to be about what happened last time I lowered my prices) seems like a damn good deal. I don't have to deal with salespeople or even focus on sales skills. I focus on building out new hardware and keeping my system reliable, and people keep coming.
with the price of dual-rank 4GB registered ecc ddr2 modules coming down, I will soon be able to move to 64MB ram per server rather than my current 32GB ram. (to give you an idea, right now each 32GB ram/ 8 core box sets me back around $2K, including disk.)
I've been doing this since '05... well, I was jerking around with FreeBSD jails before that, but I moved to Xen (Xen 2.0 on NetBSD) in December of '05. when ec2 came out, they were cheaper than I was. It looked like the end, and I even warned my customers and quit. (I kindof screwed myself there.) But it became clear that ec2 had no intention of lowering prices.
With my next server, I will experiment with providing more disk space (via NFS or ISCSI from an OpenSolaris storage unit.)
but yeah, this is all home built. Dell? why would i pay extra for a box with only 8 ram slots? There's almost always enough spare parts for another server in the garage. My new workstation (the parts are in the mail) will also use the same hardware, so that's something else I could pull from. But since I switched to new hardware (sometime in '07) the only hardware failure I've had was a disk (and that was half of a mirrored pair, so I was able to replace it at my leisure.)
It's all standard stuff, though, so if worst came to worst, I could always run down to fry's and get the parts I need. (not that I regularly buy anything but retail-packaged hard drives from Fry's, for quality and price reasons. But if someone was down, I could do it.)
Really, assembling computers is easier than jerking around with the salesguy long enough to get the 'real price' at least for me, and I'm something of a paranoid asshole when it comes to ESD (you see, for quite some time now I have been the guy who gets woken up in the middle of the night when a server mysteriously reboots. It doesn't take many of those before you are willing to perform any ritual that might make your server even slightly more reliable.)
Now, I do have a lot of good price competition in the below-512MiB size range... but it seems that few competitors discount the higher ram amounts. I wonder if it is because they are using Dell or other hardware that only has 8 ram slots, requiring the more expensive 4GB modules? or if it's just 'If you need eight gigabytes, you can afford to pay through the nose' ?
Wow, I didn't know that you could get a 32GB/8-core server for only $2,000. That makes the economics of it a lot less scary (and your prices a lot more understandable - I was a little worried that they you were significantly underselling your costs).
I do like that larger RAM servers are cheaper. I hope all your images don't sell too quickly once you get the new box provisioned! Oh, what do you charge for bandwidth overages? Not that I have a ton of traffic, but still.
Also, play up your history. Knowing that you've been around since 05 makes you a ton more credible - you aren't a me-too service and rather someone that's coming into their own.
right now it's $0.10/gb. (hopefully I'll lower that when I get to my new location later this month. My goal is to keep everything below half what ec2 charges.) - Nick finished up the new server and put ordering on last night, it's got 30GB still free. there are parts for two more 32GB servers in the UPS system as we speak, so hopefully there won't be a gap between when this one fills up and when I get the next one installed.
the key to cheap ram servers is twofold. 1. get motherboards with 16 ram slots. this is changing, but 4gb modules are still more expensive than 2gb modules. 2. get motherboards that support registered ecc ddr2 (not FBDIMM- they take a whole lot of power) I use the low-power quad-core opterons. then don't go crazy on the CPU. (most of mine are 1.9Ghz bartons. if you go that route, make sure you don't get a broken stepping. one of the new servers will be a 2.1Ghz low-power shanghai that just came out. they are cheap! Shanghais look really good.)
Automatic provisioning would also allow me to drop the price on my smaller images. (right now I charge you $4 per account, plus $1 for every 64Mb ram you want every month.)
I give you console access, and access to PVGRUB, so you can change your kernel, or boot into a read-only rescue image I provide if you mess up your own image beyond recoverability. Any easier interfaces will be built using whatever provisioning API I end up with (like I said, right now I'm looking at Eucalyptus, but I haven't implemented anything yet)
the idea is that if you have managed servers before, the concept of a remote rebooter, a serial console, and a read only rescue image (a cdrom in the drive) will be familiar to you.
I don't think I want to get rid of the cheap plans. I meet lots of interesting people that way. I've hired a few of them, with good results. But on the other hand, I think my larger plans are a much better deal. Personally, I agree with you on the 64MiB plans, I'd rather pay the extra dollar to double my ram, but some other people disagree. I sell more 64Mb plans than 128Mb plans. (though, like I said, the 256Mb plan is the most popular.) I've got some people running NetBSD (which runs fine in 64M, if you aren't doing much) and others who upload custom linux distros, replacing sshd with dropbear. But then, I know at least one customer who lives (in China) on what amounts to about USD$200/month, so I imagine he cares a lot more about that one dollar than you or I do.
I like the sort of people you meet running these low-cost services (the big problem is making it unfriendly to spammers and other scum. I run snort on my outgoing traffic, proactively monitoring for abuse, which helps.) and I think the contacts you make on the low end (because even us wealthy bay area nerds can be pretty cheap sometimes.) often help with the high-end stuff, too. It certainly has allowed me to up my consulting rates, and it has gotten me a book deal. http://nostarch.com/xen.htm (Yes, I got someone who went to college to help. Also, most of it I wrote when I was not this tired.)
I compete on price because I don't have sales skills. I understand I need to make my website look better (and start buying hardware ahead of time) but I will always be at a disadvantage there. From my point of view, selling 10x as many images at 1/2 the cost (which seems to be about what happened last time I lowered my prices) seems like a damn good deal. I don't have to deal with salespeople or even focus on sales skills. I focus on building out new hardware and keeping my system reliable, and people keep coming.
with the price of dual-rank 4GB registered ecc ddr2 modules coming down, I will soon be able to move to 64MB ram per server rather than my current 32GB ram. (to give you an idea, right now each 32GB ram/ 8 core box sets me back around $2K, including disk.)
I've been doing this since '05... well, I was jerking around with FreeBSD jails before that, but I moved to Xen (Xen 2.0 on NetBSD) in December of '05. when ec2 came out, they were cheaper than I was. It looked like the end, and I even warned my customers and quit. (I kindof screwed myself there.) But it became clear that ec2 had no intention of lowering prices.
With my next server, I will experiment with providing more disk space (via NFS or ISCSI from an OpenSolaris storage unit.)
but yeah, this is all home built. Dell? why would i pay extra for a box with only 8 ram slots? There's almost always enough spare parts for another server in the garage. My new workstation (the parts are in the mail) will also use the same hardware, so that's something else I could pull from. But since I switched to new hardware (sometime in '07) the only hardware failure I've had was a disk (and that was half of a mirrored pair, so I was able to replace it at my leisure.)
It's all standard stuff, though, so if worst came to worst, I could always run down to fry's and get the parts I need. (not that I regularly buy anything but retail-packaged hard drives from Fry's, for quality and price reasons. But if someone was down, I could do it.)
Really, assembling computers is easier than jerking around with the salesguy long enough to get the 'real price' at least for me, and I'm something of a paranoid asshole when it comes to ESD (you see, for quite some time now I have been the guy who gets woken up in the middle of the night when a server mysteriously reboots. It doesn't take many of those before you are willing to perform any ritual that might make your server even slightly more reliable.)
Now, I do have a lot of good price competition in the below-512MiB size range... but it seems that few competitors discount the higher ram amounts. I wonder if it is because they are using Dell or other hardware that only has 8 ram slots, requiring the more expensive 4GB modules? or if it's just 'If you need eight gigabytes, you can afford to pay through the nose' ?