Virtkick alternatives now that they turned their backs on everyone

mikenike182

Does anybody know of an alternative to Virtkick? I don't know if they ended up getting bought by onapp or what happened, but I need an alternative because their pricing is just ridiculous, as is their support.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

MikeA

Why not just use a common panel like Virtualizor? Virtkick was more expensive anyways I'm pretty sure.

DETio

Hey Mike,

We've been working on VirtEngine for the past few years,

VirtEngine integrates with OpenNebula for the creation & management of Virtual Machines, as well as Docker (Containers) & Ceph (Object Storage).

Regarding our pricing, you can find it here: http://docs.virtengine.com/pricing - but we can provide discounts to early users.

The majority of VirtEngine is Open Source https://github.com/virtengine/

If you are interested in demoing version or deploying it on your hardware, feel free to contact [email protected]

For a quick video demo, you can check this:

Awmusic12635

DETio said: If you are interested in demoing version or deploying it on your hardware, feel free to contact [email protected]

Is this actually production ready now or simply talking more about the future?

DETio

@Awmusic12635 said:

DETio said: If you are interested in demoing version or deploying it on your hardware, feel free to contact [email protected]

Is this actually production ready now or simply talking more about the future?

It's production ready.

6ixth

Any plans for file based storage? @DETio

AnthonySmith

Ouch $128 per mode per month... I think onapp would be a better option

DETio

@6ixth said:
Any plans for file based storage? @DETio

We already have integrations with Ceph FS for Object Storage (file based storage) & Minio as well.

@AnthonySmith, where did you find '$128/mo/node'?

randvegeta

Virtkick had a reasonably nice interface and what worked, worked quite well. But functionality was limited. I gave them a try because the guys working there (initially) were very friendly and seemed very knowledgeable.

It wasn't long after signing up that they basically stopped development and basically stopped with support. It's a real shame cuz I quite liked the team behind it.

We've since tried Virtualizor, and actually I've been pleasantly surprised with how well it works. At least for basic functionality on a simple setup, it's been very easy to install, deploy and maintain.

Would love it to have better support for HA clustering though.

Licensing prices are also very reasonable. $1 /VM or $9 /node (unlimited VMs) is very reasonable indeed. Especially if you have a very dense server, packed with RAM and lots of CPU cores. I honestly wonder why CPanel can command the prices they do. $30 /month for a dedicated server and $15 /month for VPS? The $9 /node license seems like a bargain by comparison.

Of course shared hosting servers can be far denser, with MANY MANY users, and VPS nodes can only handle so many VMs. Still..

MikeA

@randvegeta cPanel employs a lot of people in the U.S. I think, doubt they would ever lower their prices even if there was a competitor pushing against them.

AnthonySmith

DETio said: @AnthonySmith, where did you find '$128/mo/node'?

Your website?

https://virtengine.com/products/minified.html

FoxelVox

@AnthonySmith said:

DETio said: @AnthonySmith, where did you find '$128/mo/node'?

Your website?

https://virtengine.com/products/minified.html

It’s 0.25$/GB ram, but once you reach 16$ it would be capped at 16$/mo but you can still create more vm’s

AnthonySmith

FoxelVox said: It’s 0.25$/GB ram, but once you reach 16$ it would be capped at 16$/mo but you can still create more vm’s

I was looking at the complete edition not the cut down version, but either way, is it just not loading properly on my side then?

hostdare

https://prnt.sc/ijguca

DETio

@AnthonySmith said:

FoxelVox said: It’s 0.25$/GB ram, but once you reach 16$ it would be capped at 16$/mo but you can still create more vm’s

I was looking at the complete edition not the cut down version, but either way, is it just not loading properly on my side then?

Yes, sorry about that - seems like the pricing on our product page isn't being displayed completely.

But the full text is: $0.5 per GB of RAM (Up-to $32/month/node)

Example:

16GB ram node: $8.00/mo

32GB ram node: $16.00/mo

64GB+ ram node: $32.00/mo

randvegeta

MikeA said: @randvegeta cPanel employs a lot of people in the U.S. I think, doubt they would ever lower their prices even if there was a competitor pushing against them.

Not complaining about the price of CPanel. We use CPanel, and there is good reason it's the industry leading panel. Just saying that Virtualizor is very reasonably priced.

But if you're talking about Cpanel competition, I have long been a fan of DirectAdmin. I certainly prefer it, but most customers do not.

lurch

I've used DA for years and much prefer it to cpanel

doghouch

@DETIo ... why should a provider choose you over SolusVM? For two nodes with 64 GB of RAM each, SolusVM is only $15/mo (incl. master and both slaves). What makes your panel so much better than a panel that’s standard for most providers here?

DETio

@doghouch said:
@DETIo ... why should a provider choose you over SolusVM? For two nodes with 64 GB of RAM each, SolusVM is only $15/mo (incl. master and both slaves). What makes your panel so much better than a panel that’s standard for most providers here?

Most of the benefits are for the end-user,

• Users can scale infrastructure on-demand, only being billed for resources by the hour.
• Users can take backup's of VM's, and redeploy them in a couple clicks.
• Users can deploy popular applications in their VM's in a few clicks.
• Users have more control on their VM's, for example they can reset VM passwords via the panel. Users can also view real-time feeds of the VM's usage, such as Bandwidth / CPU / Ram.
• Users have access to Object & Block Storage. Block Storage can be used to expand the VM's Storage - and object storage can be used for static file hosting.

Soon to be added

• users can add a Cloud-Init script that can be used to automate deployment of Software within a VM - making it much easier to scale out large deployments.
• much more sophisticated management of Docker Containers, most of the functionality found in cloud.docker.com will be ported to VirtEngine .

Benefits for the provider:

• Larger scale of technology integrated, OpenNebula alone is a much more sophisticated platform than OnApp can ever be.

For example, the provider can deploy an HA Region in OpenNebula using redundant storage technology such as Ceph, DRBD.

• You can add pre-packaged applications to your marketplace, very easily - any Bitnami Image is supported by simply adding a DB Record. You can also add any other application setup you'd like to automate - for example cPanel by creating a script that installs it.

The reason our panel is priced higher than SolusVM, is purely because we are a much smaller company and need to cover our development costs.

doghouch

@DETIo You’ve built on an existing platform (OpenNebula) that is free.

Surely $32/mo justifies something that is complety custom...?

Edit: You said “OpenNebula alone is a much more sophisticated platform than OnApp can ever be.” Why not just use OpenNebula since it is now ‘“more sophisticated’ than OnApp? It’s free compared to your panel.

raindog308

doghouch said: @DETIo ... why should a provider choose you over SolusVM? For two nodes with 64 GB of RAM each, SolusVM is only $15/mo (incl. master and both slaves). What makes your panel so much better than a panel that’s standard for most providers here?

If I was an ass, I could read that as "even though Solus sucks and hardly a day goes by on LET where someone doesn't complain about it or bait @OnApp_Terry that 2.0 is the Duke Nukem Forever of hosting, it's a dollar cheaper so that's what I'm going with!" :-)

Harzem

@doghouch said:
@DETIo ... why should a provider choose you over SolusVM? For two nodes with 64 GB of RAM each, SolusVM is only $15/mo (incl. master and both slaves). What makes your panel so much better than a panel that’s standard for most providers here?

Why is it standard? It sucks, nobody really likes it, development has practically stopped for years. It's standard because there is no competition. If you are willing to pay for a sucky product instead of an upcoming and actively developed alternative, how will the alternatives ever be developed?

why should a provider choose you over SolusVM?

So that finally we can have something better than solusvm.

doghouch said: Surely $32/mo justifies something that is complety custom...?

Who decides the price cut-off? And why something completely custom is better? MacOS is built on Unix kernel, I guess MacOS should be free too. After all, why use MacOS when you can simply install the Unix kernel, right?

If you want a web developer to create a blog website for you, do you want a back-end like wordpress or drupal, or do you want everything coded from scratch? Will you be willing to pay the developer, if he uses an existing CMS to build your website?

I'd much rather use / pay for some product that's built on something good, instead of something completely new and untested.

If you are never willing to pay for a product that tries to replace a bad product, the bad one will never be replaced. Development costs time and money, old product has stalled development so they don't even need your money anymore. Instead of complaining about paying for the new product, you should complain about paying for the old product when you don't even get support or new development. You are just purchasing Porsche's for the owner of the old product, while not allowing any new one to replace it.

doghouch

@Harzem What @DETio has done is built off an open source platform, charge a ridiculous price for it and attempt to sell his product to a market that focuses on servers that cost less than $7/mo. I’m not saying that he won’t be able to replace OnApp, I’m just saying that he’s targeting the wrong market.

As for SolusVM, I agree that it’s dead. It hasn’t received any major updates in years yet most LE* companies use it. Like I said, @DETio is charging too much for this market. He needs to drop his prices if he expects any low-end providers to switch over. Otherwise, he’s advertising in the wrong place.

risharde

I see related topics like this popup and I am always tempted to comment. All I can say is please don't run out of patience yet, I am working on something but it's taking very long to build.

DETio

@doghouch said:
@Harzem What @DETio has done is built off an open source platform, charge a ridiculous price for it and attempt to sell his product to a market that focuses on servers that cost less than $7/mo. I’m not saying that he won’t be able to replace OnApp, I’m just saying that he’s targeting the wrong market.

As for SolusVM, I agree that it’s dead. It hasn’t received any major updates in years yet most LE* companies use it. Like I said, @DETio is charging too much for this market. He needs to drop his prices if he expects any low-end providers to switch over. Otherwise, he’s advertising in the wrong place.

At what price point would you find VirtEngine more suitable to use than something like SolusVM in your opinion?

Regarding using Open Source, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using OpenNebula - Why would we reinvent the wheel? We plan to integrate with other platforms such as OpenStack, and possibly ProxMox in the future so that the hosting provider can choose the platform he is most comfortable in managing/deploying.

DETio

Zen said: Edit2: The last issue that I don't see mentioned that much whenever these discussions come up: SolusVM architecture is old/archaic, but simple, and works. Every competitor I've seen come along tries to develop with the more modern cloud computing business in mind, uses cloud frameworks, and the result is that deploying that product costs more, the infrastructure required is more complicated, the extra features provided aren't required, and the setup in general becomes more complex. There's plenty of hosts out there that can handle this, but plenty that can't. Imagine if cPanel required a minimum three node cluster, in depth Apache configuration, PHP built from source, firewall manually configured. Not viable. You need to keep the lowest common denominator in mind.

The setup is not complex, OpenNebula is fairly simple to setup (We can set it up for you as well) and we can handle the VirtEngine installation for customers (Or share instructions for those who prefer to set it up themselves).

All you need is one node to get started with opennebula.

For HA, of-course - the setup becomes more complex and requires Private Networking, multiple nodes, etc.

fleio

@mikenike182 how mancy CPU cores do you have on your compute nodes and how many compute nodes?

404error

@Harzem said:

@doghouch said:
@DETIo ... why should a provider choose you over SolusVM? For two nodes with 64 GB of RAM each, SolusVM is only $15/mo (incl. master and both slaves). What makes your panel so much better than a panel that’s standard for most providers here?

Why is it standard? It sucks, nobody really likes it, development has practically stopped for years. It's standard because there is no competition. If you are willing to pay for a sucky product instead of an upcoming and actively developed alternative, how will the alternatives ever be developed?

why should a provider choose you over SolusVM?

So that finally we can have something better than solusvm.

doghouch said: Surely $32/mo justifies something that is complety custom...?

Who decides the price cut-off? And why something completely custom is better? MacOS is built on Unix kernel, I guess MacOS should be free too. After all, why use MacOS when you can simply install the Unix kernel, right?

If you want a web developer to create a blog website for you, do you want a back-end like wordpress or drupal, or do you want everything coded from scratch? Will you be willing to pay the developer, if he uses an existing CMS to build your website?

I'd much rather use / pay for some product that's built on something good, instead of something completely new and untested.

If you are never willing to pay for a product that tries to replace a bad product, the bad one will never be replaced. Development costs time and money, old product has stalled development so they don't even need your money anymore. Instead of complaining about paying for the new product, you should complain about paying for the old product when you don't even get support or new development. You are just purchasing Porsche's for the owner of the old product, while not allowing any new one to replace it.

Since when its the responsability of the target demographics to justify a company products worth?
Since when is the client expect to be a friend helping out instead of someone we need to account and prove out product worth to?

I think it works the other way around.

nitramoneito

DETio said: Most of the benefits are for the end-user,

Users can scale infrastructure on-demand, only being billed for resources by the hour.
Users can take backup's of VM's, and redeploy them in a couple clicks.
Users can deploy popular applications in their VM's in a few clicks.
Users have more control on their VM's, for example they can reset VM passwords via the panel. Users can also view real-time feeds of the VM's usage, such as Bandwidth / CPU / Ram.
Users have access to Object & Block Storage. Block Storage can be used to expand the VM's Storage - and object storage can be used for static file hosting.

Soon to be added

users can add a Cloud-Init script that can be used to automate deployment of Software within a VM - making it much easier to scale out large deployments.
much more sophisticated management of Docker Containers, most of the functionality found in cloud.docker.com will be ported to VirtEngine .

Benefits for the provider:

Larger scale of technology integrated, OpenNebula alone is a much more sophisticated platform than OnApp can ever be.

For example, the provider can deploy an HA Region in OpenNebula using redundant storage technology such as Ceph, DRBD.

You can add pre-packaged applications to your marketplace, very easily - any Bitnami Image is supported by simply adding a DB Record. You can also add any other application setup you'd like to automate - for example cPanel by creating a script that installs it.

The reason our panel is priced higher than SolusVM, is purely because we are a much smaller company and need to cover our development costs

I think What @Detio is doing is incredibe, and i would not scrutinize hime for cost, i think the cost if better and much fair. Lets have a talk.

i have looked at some other providers whose costs are very hig, like stratoscale

deank

Weak necro. Do better.

raindog308

nitramoneito said: The reason our panel is priced higher than SolusVM, is purely because we are a much smaller company and need to cover our development costs

...which is completely irrelevant to your customers, who are the ones who'll making the purchasing decision.

No one has is going to pay more because your company is small. In fact, you likely need to charge less for your products to induce people to switch, because switching is disruptive and costs a significant sum of money in terms of time, effort, and risk. More features has been shown to not be attractive to the target audience - only price.

nitramoneito said: i have looked at some other providers whose costs are very hig, like stratoscale

You're competing against Solus, who competes on price.