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I don't think you understand, LowEnd is 64mb to the occasional 8gb with a price of UNDER $7. You have one "okay" plan, but even the L1 isn't that great honestly. Just saying.
zRAM is not actual RAM, it is basically compressed swap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
@Deltik, idealism is a wonderful thing. But rarely does it have a place in business, especially business on the Internet with anonymous clients.
You're a high school kid with grand visions. Nothing wrong with that
But in business you need to have both feet planted firmly on the ground and your head out of the clouds.
Remove all those outlandish plans from your website and offer a $5/month Xen VPS with realistic resources. Work on building a clientèle and a reputation. Then, in 6 months time, re-evaluate your services.
Sure, it's production-ready! Android 4.4 KitKat enables zram by default. So do some distributions like Lubuntu. Mac OS X Mavericks is built to compress RAM.
Furthermore, I've tested zram and its performance, how it affects a variety of configurations, etc. Practically, in the past, I've saved some servers from going down due to normal disk swapping. zram has proven to me to be great.
I think there are some benchmarks out there for you to see if you're skeptical. They're probably under the name "compcache", which was what zram used to be called.
@FiberVM Thank you for your remark, however first post is edited and there was screen shoot with 4GB ram 4GB zRAM
It was actually a $5/mo plan with 1GB of RAM. At the moment that the site was leaked, I was preparing to do a brutal test of the “Fiver” plan by filling up almost 5x its available RAM. The plan wasn't intended for production, but if you ordered it (the billing system had been fully functional, since I've already done payment testing), I'll give you what you ordered.
“Fiver” was especially poorly received by the public, as those who have done their research know for sure that it isn't possible to earn a profit with those specs. I've delisted “Fiver” while I go through these comments to evaluate how people would feel about such a plan being advertised.
(I have yet to explain how I have the resources to offer prices as low as some screencaps are showing. That'll be coming in another post in this thread.)
@Deltik I wish you best luck with your new project.
Ah, yeah, you're right. I see the price ranges established in the culture here at LowEndBox and LowEndTalk.
Keep in mind that even though my naming has the term "low-end" in common, at the time of writing the plan categories, I was barely aware of the existence of this forum.
Would you like to suggest a new name for the category (currently consists of plans called "L1", "L2", and "L3")? What do you recommend for "power users who don't want to pay a lot"?
Oh, note that I'll be recalculating inventory for what you guys have contributed, so the plans are likely to change again. Thanks again! I now feel glad that @spraker made the mistake of starting this thread, since I probably wouldn't have met y'all if he hadn't.
@marcm
I appreciate you for your attention to this thread. For going out of your way from your own business. You've got Phoenix VPS—epic design, by the way! (By the way, would've gone to Phoenix last summer if I hadn't gotten a job! I've got a friend who lives in Mesa.)
You know what you're doing, and I see perfectly well how @spraker is laughable. And epic fail, indeed. If this thread didn't revolve around Xenfinity Hosting, I would also have been entertained by the apparent scam and the discussion about it.
In fact, I look up to VPS hosts like yours when making considerations for what I want to do; you're well established, and I'm not.
I just hope you don't see me as a lowly phishing scammer!
@Deltik Nick, I know you are young, but in terms of your presence on line, "you are as old as your gun" like many other buddies I know in this forum.
A little advice from me, when I host my website/webapps with someone, I don't usually go with how big the company is but rather how much I trust to people behind it.
Sometimes I move my sites because the tech support that I used to deal with move to other company.
To wrap it up, money is important, but a good relationship is more important, so watch your steps carefully.
Keep up the good work, young gun.
"Our culture" Yes, we're a fascinating species.
As for the names, quite honestly.. the name is only as good as the product itself. You can have a great name and have a bad service. Plan wise, i'd kill for a 512mb Xen at $5. From my consumer perspective i'd tier it: 512 for $5 768 for $6 and 1024 for $7 or something in that neck of the woods.
Nah, my posts were directed at the OP. I don't really get what the entire spiel is here, but my perception is that someone is just seeking attention.
So I will! I'll be reevaluating what I have in stock and rebuild my plans, this time factoring in what all of y'all have told me.
But I do affirm that the plans I originally had were not as outlandish as you think.
Oh, which reminds me... I still have yet to explain how Xenfinity would be sustainable (given that I have sufficient clients). That information is finally further down in this post.
Thank you. I'll talk a lot more about relationships in my finale post soon, when I sign off for the night.
Sorry to say, but I didn't intend for Xenfinity to have plans this far into the low end. Financially, the biggest flat rate hog is actually the IPv4 address. The global shortage of IPv4 addresses has made them more expensive over the years (yes, I've been around enough years to see the leasing cost of IPv4 addresses increase). Since my server provider is in France, they are shorter on IP addresses than larger American companies, who have claimed huge blocks.
Nevertheless, I will take into consideration 512MB, 768MB, and 1024MB RAM plans for the LowEndBox definition of "low-end".
How can I possibly provide plans like the ones screencapped before?
I don't like putting names out into the open, but I think it'd be appropriate for this discussion for me to provide at least some examples.
When I buy from dedicated hosting providers, I shun the mainstream hosts, who greatly overcharge. You might have seen on Web hosting forums that HostGator was migrating its servers from SoftLayer "to save money". The procedure didn't go very well, so that's why many people know about this migration.
Yes, it was to save money, and at the same time, to provide much better hardware. SoftLayer overcharges that much. (Please don't smite me, IBM!)
My provider of choice is Online SAS. They offer a dedicated server with dual Intel Xeon E5-2620 processors, 128GB of DDR3 SDRAM with ECC, 3 x 2TB Serial Attached SCSI hard drives in RAID 5, and a flash-backed hardware RAID controller with 1GB cache. The price? 180€/mo ($250/mo).
I configured the specs with SoftLayer as close as I could to Online SAS's offer. How much did that cost? $2500/mo. I haven't even factored in the extra components, but I do know that the Threat Management System is not included.
$250/mo or $2500/mo? Same specs. Which one would you rather buy?
The clear winner is Online SAS.
This is how I can offer a lot of RAM and disk space for such a low price.
How do I know this server can hold multiple VPS? I do tests. Self-designed practical tests to see how a VPS and its host node would hold up in the event of some heavy activity. (I don't have numbers to give you because my tests were pass/fail.) The practical tests exceeded my expectations. My favorite result is that Xen handles memory much better than OpenVZ does. (With OpenVZ, I kept getting "Killed" printed on my terminal. Now I mumble something about bean counters...) Another highlight is that the flash-cached RAID controller greatly improved the performance of three 7200RPM SAS drives. I was wary of the poor IOPS of slow hard drives, but the RAID 5 and flash cache combination brought pretty good results. (Again, no numbers, but it passed.)
I get test failures, too, mostly depending on how I set up CPU scheduling for unusually high loads for the host node, so it's not like I'm writing "pass" for everything. My conclusion was that 1GB should be the minimum amount of RAM that I offer. I'm not great at optimization, but I did not know that you could run a blog on 96MB of RAM. Are you a wizard? O_O
My server doesn't cost $240/mo for a stick of 16GB RAM. No reason to put that extra cost onto a Xenfinity VPS plan.
@DomainBop
I am almost speechlessly impressed by your research skills! You don't miss a single thing, do you?
In fact, you might be contemplating about why I'm responding to you last, even though you weren't the last to post. You're also probably aware that I already started a paragraph with "In fact" in my previous post to this thread.
Amid all this, you probably have one burning question: Why is he acting like this to everyone?
Can't someone be nice and candid without his motives being questioned?
I could have done one of two things on this forum:
- blow up in anger and shout at everyone who's criticized Xenfinity for being so stupid and inconsiderate, or
- be civil and nice and value each comment for what it tells.
Getting mad is easy. Be finished with all of you in one go. Dismiss y'all as a cult or something. I dunno. It just doesn't feel right, you know?
On the other hand, being nice is much more rewarding than getting angry. I don't live a superior or perfect life—far from it—but I love the feeling of being interested in people... listening to what they have to say... looking into what they're interested in... and smiling! You can't see my smile from this text, but people have glanced at me curiously, thinking to themselves, Why is Nick smiling?
Expanding on that, I love knowing that I made someone's day. It doesn't matter who. I can't think of anything more rewarding than that.
And that is part of the reason I want to join the Web hosting industry. I look forward to working with satisfied customers, and everything every one of you who has commented in this thread has truly helped point me in the right direction. It might be a bit of a stretch to say that I am eternally grateful to have all of you, but your sincere feedback has been so important and invaluable that I can't help but thank y'all.
Good night (Western Hemisphere)!
-- Nick
@Deltik as much as didn't like Chief (correction, I hated his guts), right about now I miss him. I think that you would have gotten his attention and special treatment by now for sure. Now go ahead and ask who Chief is.
From my consumer perspective i'd tier it:
256 for $4,
512 for $5,
768 for $6 ,
1024 for $7,
1280 for $8,
1536 for $9,
1792 for $10,
2048 for $12,
2304 for $13,
2560 for $14,
2816 for $16,
3072 for $18,
3328 for $20,
3584 for $25,
3840 for $75,
and 4096 for $330 or something in that neck of the wood
(wait, something is not right)
The prices are risen?
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
lolz dont think
Can we please have a sticky on this topic? Can we can we, please please, pretty please :-)
Trial SSL, domain registered few days ago with GD and website hosted on a NetworkSolutions shared hosting plan...
The webpage is pretty nice though, I'll give him that, and at least he is not hiding his Whois info, or use fake ones...
All right... who's Chief?
So you LEBers actually want low-end services, eh?
I had written this on Xenfinity's homepage: "
You deserve more than 256MB. Much more."Perhaps I've just been working with the massive stuff, like Apache HTTP server and MySQL server.
But you betcha, I did testing with a 256MB RAM machine. In my pass/fail benchmark, it failed.
Well! You're clearly much better at optimization than I am. Still, I can't offer specs too low because it'd be unfair to you. Unfortunately, every VPS I provision must be at least $3 because of the IPv4 address cost. That's why the higher-up plans had been my main focus.
Still, I am giving the low end some extra consideration now that I've gotten to meet you guys. And @painfreepc gave me numbers to consider. We'll see where it goes.
For now, until I can get the final plans established. To make up for this transition, I'm running a preorder promotion called "What you see is what you get.", meaning that when you preorder a plan and then it changes or gets delisted, you have the option to accept the plan you originally preordered with the exact same specs as listed the moment you preordered.
Some of you may have noticed that the L1, L2, and L3 plans got cut down over the past 24 hours, but those of you who ordered one of those before the changes get what was originally advertised.
Why should this discussion be stickied? Surely it's not that special!
90-day trial SSL certificate. The intention was to use the Stripe API for billing. Stripe recommends that requests be sent from HTTPS, so I put in a short-term SSL certificate to use as part of my billing tests.
Yeah, the domain was purchased on GoDaddy on 16 November 2013, but I assure you that the idea has been around for much longer.
The website is actually hosted on a HostGator reseller hosting plan. You can check with this: http://hostcabi.net/domain/xenfinity.com
And yes, here I am: the real Nicholas ("Nick") Liu.
All right, so this post should have reached all the corners of the new comments since my previous one. @marcm, I'll be waiting for you to talk about Chief. @painfreepc, thanks for providing a detailed opinion of how you would like plans and pricing to be set up. @Zen, well, I tried 32MB of RAM, but it seems like I only had the patience to see Damn Small Linux in action. @JerryHou, the plans and pricing are volatile right now, but there's not going to be a maintenance mode so that you can snatch a plan that you'd want if it appears.
I look forward to talking to y'all some more!
-- Nick
Yeah, you're new here... n00b
Nick, for your own good, please find an actual business mentor in this industry.
Chief
I would assume it is those 99 cents for the first year promotion as well?
Just saying... you forgot that Online.net charges 60euros for a block of /27 which equates to around 32 ips -3 and you get 29 usable ips.
@zhuanyi - how's it going brother? Haven't spoken to you in ages.
I took a moment to read Deltik's explanations and justifications (and have a good laugh). Oh boy, if this guy only had a clue how idiotic and ridiculous some of his explanations and statements sound. @Deltik can we have some more please?
@marcm more drama? I'll get some popcorn and beer then. lol
U2
$300 / month
12 CPU threads
2TB disk space
60GB RAM w/ECC + 120GB zRam
1 IPv4 address included
Priority 1200% CPU allotment
The Ultimate VPS.
Priority 1200% CPU allotment? --
$300 / month 12 CPU threads -- WHAT!
for $200 mo? - can't i just rent a great server -
and how are offering all this hardware, are you rich?
@vRozenSch00n well he had an explanation for everything. My favorite bit was about the SSL trial certificate. If he had any common sense he would have either spent $2.99 on a SSL certificate, or traded in his trial certificate for a one year AlphaSSL for free (if he has to be this cheep). I don't want to see more drama (I don't see anything dramatic in this case anyway), but a good laugh...