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I am perfectly aware big companies are doing this, however, they can also send NSA after you if you are abusing or trying to support democracy and free speech so their customers are much less likely to abuse. There are few that offer free tiers without credit cards on file and they do "manage" to charge it for a thing or the other.
IWStack is not a competitor for Amazon, DO, Microsoft and the like, we are not delusional so we do not intend to use the same advertizing they do, if we have one customer for every 1000 of theirs, that is just fine.
If we are to go that way and say: "hey, x and y does a free service, why should I pay for a LEB when AWS offers free instances and Microsoft too not to mention DO where you can practically run for free almost a year and then just make another account ?" then we have to wonder why there is a LEB market in the first place. The answer is that many people are not happy with one aspect or the other of the free/trial offers out there or simply need more resources. Another answer would be that not everyone is so poor so cant spare 30 Eur for a serious setup like 2 webservers with load balancing, 1 database server for them, one workstation to control everything, all on a private network, your own VLAN, complete with HA, fail-safe, automated snapshots almost 5 TB of outgoing traffic (incoming is unlimited and free !), etc for a full month and you still have some change left (it is the example I used to illustrate billing here: http://www.iwstack.com/billing). And at the current offer, the credits cost even less.
Also, we did offer the beta testing and participants, apart from the free service, received 30 credits to continue to use the service, completely free. But, they were trusted long time customers, very unlikely to abuse it.
After almost 2 years in this market there are a few aspects we thought can be solved by a real cloud deployment:
1. Redundancy and load balancing will mean there are less service interruptions due to hardware failure and abuse (not to mention KVM already isolates much better than OVZ);
2. The infamous Solus panel will no longer control everything, we plan to offer our regular local storage VPSes under CS too, so, for example, we can have SSD setups, but those will lack fail-over;
3. One account will control all VPSes and you can re-arrange resources as your needs change. No more tickets for mergers, downgrades or even upgrades (many services could not be upgraded automatically before);
4. Finally, there is a simple solution for automated back-ups that everyone can use and you can also control exactly how much space you allocate for it, how many checkpoints you do and at what time of the day;
5. Completely isolated VLANs with external firewall where you can open pinholes if you need, but also can merge with your local LAN or connect as a road-warrior using IPSec VPNs, with the often-requested internal traffic for free and internal IPs inaccessible from outside are finally possible and very easy to setup;
6. You can use whatever OS you wish with your own ISO, can even upload a qcow2 disk and run it with minimal changes, we run plain KVM so it will also be compatible with other KVM setups you may have at home or at your workplace, no more tickets on imports, loading custom ISOs, etc;
7. We worked hard to be able to offer all these things at a price compatible to LE* requirements while offering a lot of scalability if your needs are to explode over night.
I do not wish to bragg, but this solution is almost the holy grail we were seeking for almost a year to solve almost all the requests we had. So far, nothing else than KVM can be offered, but Xen-PV and HVM will be added soon if there is enough demand for it and we sell-out our KVM zone fast enough. There is also technically possible to offer SSD storage at the cost of fail-over.
Question:
How do you get billed if your VM is "off"? Same as if it's "on"?
No. You only get billed for the storage and reserved IPs if any. Also, if you are using the isolated network, the virtual vm used as router does not go down, so you will be billed for that too.
To minimize the cost, take a snapshot of the VM and destroy it, you will then pay only for the secondary storage which is 3 times cheaper than the live one. But you will get another IP when you restore the VM.
Still no benchmarks around? Like ioping, network speed...
Which country is this in?
Italy.
That's not how you keep abusers away. You're only keeping potential customers away.
Compare IWStack's pricing to cloud providers like GoGrid that offer similar features. IWStack: a 1GB RAM/50GB storage/1TB outgoing bw instance is about $13 monthly. The same specs at GoGrid are $177. I don't think the average customer will have a problem with making a 30 euros deposit when IWStack's prices are so much lower than other cloud providers.
I'm not aware of any other cloud providers that require an upfront payment/credit deposit (there are some that only need a reasonable $5 or so, not 30EUR). Lowering the barrier and dropping the "serious customers only" thingy would be good of them.
inb4 biased fanboys telling me to shut up
I think you're looking from the wrong point of view. We never had free trials, most of time we had good deals for long term commitment and still we sold our planned capacity.
Now, remove the "cloud" word from our service and get the small instance Basic 384M + 10GB of disk.
Name it VPS 384 (KVM, 384MB RAM, 10GB of SAN disk, free incoming traffic, 1TB outgoing). Now we decide to price it €30.66 / year.
Are you going to buy it? Maybe the price isn't stellar but it look decent and you may decide to buy.
What you get? The same 384MB and 10GB of disk for 365 days.
Now let's go back to iwStack. You have bought your account with 30 eur worth of credit.
Fire up a Basic 384M with 10GB of disk. From that moment (not from when you paid), so maybe days or a week later, you're charged 0.0035 per hour. If you run the same for one year then you spent 0.0035 x 24 x 365 = 30.66. Same than with a VPS offer.
But you're getting more. In fact if your project doesn't need this server for some months because there are delays or you changed your mind, you just delete it and you're charged ZERO, your credit will be available for later use.
Or maybe you understimated your need and at some point you need 512M or 1G of ram, more disk space, maybe only for one month or two. You're free to add disk volumes and change computing offer on your own for how much time you want.
Add the fact that you can load your iso and create your own templates, get a private isolated vlan with a virtual router and all the other features iwStack offer and I think that this is a good offer even with €30 of minimum credit to buy.
:-)
Aren't the good standing customer already get these :
I have followed prometeus since last year. they tend to reward people who are into long term commitments. this is evident if you check their prices.
@prometeus if iwstack becomes a success, will regular vps still continue?
Yes, at least for OVZ will continue with Solus since CS does not support OVZ. The others (KVM and Xen) we plan to slowly migrate to the cloud, after we are done with the panel. It adds some options such as snapshots (ending up in something similar with what DO can offer) and we will be able to offer SSD too.
The pricing will be different.
CloudSigma, if you are interested.
I wonder, how many serious customers there can't afford deposit of 21 EUR?
just a small suggestion, offer a little bonus to larger orders, ie. buy 50iwstack and get 55 or buy 100iwstack and get 120.
I'm used to buy annual VPS and i know the quality of prometeus, so if/when i move a few of my services to iwstack i'd love to be given the option to prepay for more and get better pricing.
No hurry, but did this happen (email to IperWeb-customers)?
Yes, I'm receiving the email now
It's went out a couple of hours ago - there's a discount code, and existing customers only have to prepay 15 euro. Jolly nice. I chose to pay the whole 30 to make better use of the discount code.
Note that the offering seems to being sold over via the Prometeus site, not iperweb.com, so I needed to create a fresh account over on the main Prometeus.net, since I've only used iperweb services (an Overzold VPS, inevitably) in the past.
I'm a very long way outside my home EU country at the moment, but customer services were kind enough to authorise the order for IWStack I placed via my Overzold node. Thank you, John and Salvatore!
Just got my iwstack logon details. Wish me luck! o7
Yeah, received email in 25 mins after posting
@prometeus excellent work, iwstack is really promising platform!
I'm beginning to move to the iwStack now. Had a problem with the Ipv6 configuration, due to the wrong netmask, /56. But Uncle Sal helped me to solve it.
Thanks Uncle
today i buy iwstack, i'm happy.
2$ for 1 month? This is the best value!
how about DDOS is there such an instance to buy for mitigation or handling? DDOS protected IP perhaps and if there is a DDOS attack on a neighbor will this not interfere with our service?
We have monitoring systems in place and almost all the time someone is watching. It may happen for a few minutes to have packet loss in case of big attacks that go over 1 gbps (the port speed of the node you are on), but that is not overflowing to the neighbours most of the time, we tanked 20 gbps due to non-commit stand-by lines, but the network does degrade visibly during those very big attacks. They last little, however, because, even tho we are watching and nulling, the DC is watching too, so, even in extraordinary circumstances, the attacks do not last much more than 10 minutes, usually less.
If you are receiving attacks, though, iwstack is not for you, we nullroute mercilessly because we do not advertise nor offer DDoS protection. If you launch an attack, then it is the end of the road for the cooperation between us. Even if we will offer DDoS protection (so far unlikely but not impossible), we will not mix IWStack in this, it is mostly for professional services and people playing nice, long term customers and the like.
Exactly! I can really attest to this. I've gotten my first Prometeus server about a year ago and have only added more servers since (7 servers right now). I've gotten so many "rewards" for being a customer in good standing/long-term customer and have had the privilege to test some servers before they were released to the public.
Prometeus is a family business and that's evident in everything they do.
Guys, who thought it was a good idea to use Comic Sans MS in here: http://www.iwstack.com/iwstack-infrastructure/
Please no...
First impression is important for first time visitors, image for enterprise customers but long term customers just don't care.
I know, our sites were never a strong selling point for us :-)
and please don't redo that image using papyrus. Those 2 fonts should be banned
You should be able to use paypal guest to pay with cc.