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New features from HostHatch in 2023 - feedback requested
Hello everyone,
I’m very happy to be sharing this with you as these features have been in the works for a while. All of these are in BETA access at the moment, so I am opening this thread to request you to share your feedback.
1) Snapshots:
This has been one of the most requested features.
Snapshots are now available in BETA access in the following locations:
APAC: Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong
EU: Amsterdam, Stockholm, London
US: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York
The remaining locations should be in the next 4-6 weeks.
If you have an active NVMe Compute VM in any of these locations, you can now take a manual snapshot of your VM. You can then use this to restore it to your VM, or deploy a new VM with it. Snapshots are currently limited to the location they are created in, and cannot be moved between locations. This is something we will offer in the future.
There is a global limit of 3 snapshots per account at the moment, and there is no charge for these. Once we are confident enough to move these out of BETA, we will also be offering higher number of snapshots, automated scheduled snapshots (backups) and introducing charges for these.
Floating IP addresses:
Floating IPs are now available across all of our locations. These are not yet available through the control panel, however you can request for any additional IP address to be turned into a floating IP address. It will then be usable on all of your servers in the same location. There is no additional charge for these (other than the standard cost of an additional IP address), and there are no plans to introduce any extra charges either.
Please open a ticket to request for these if needed.
BGP sessions:
We’ve finished the backend work required for automating BGP sessions. There is still going to be a bit of manual work for the next few months as we work out the kinks, and we’re having internal discussions on how to price this. I understand this is LET and the most common answer will be free, but we are not going to be able to do that.
The plan is to price it something along the lines of (your feedback is appreciated):
For our standard plans, the cost will be $10 USD setup fee + no MRC. This fee will eventually be removed completely in the next 3-6 months and BGP sessions will be completely free on these.
For promotional plans, the cost will be $10 USD setup fee + $2.5 per month.
BGP is be available in all of our locations.
API:
https://docs.hosthatch.com/api/
I think this one is self explanatory for the most part. If you would like to get access to the API, please open a ticket and we will enable it for your account.
Thank you 
Comments
Can I check if promo instances get access to the snapshots? Don't see it in the panel
EDIT:
NVMe Promo 16 in Singapore does not have the snapshot but NVMe Promo 8 in NL does.
It's great to have the snapshot feature available in the Hong Kong region. I typically use a cronjob to take snapshots. It would be even better if there were APIs for creating, listing, and deleting snapshots.
great job
The UI seems to have a bug. After clicking the "Take Snapshot" button, the loading indicator is displayed but disappears after the page refreshes. This makes me unsure if the snapshot task is still running or not.
I'd like to experiment with BGP and anycast IPv6 if I get an ASN this year, but this pricing on the promotional plans would probably mean I just wouldn't bother using my newly purchased SG Hosthatch VPS, even though it's in a location I'd definitely want in an anycast because the other places I can have the option to do BGP are in the EU and US so I don't have any coverage for SEA.
To me, the charge on the promotional plans seems like you're just trying to discourage people from doing it. Presumably, all the effort for you is in the actual set-up and $10 for that seems fair, but if there's no monthly on-going cost to you to provide BGP, why are you charging $2.50 per month? Just because you can? It's not going to push people from a promotional plan to a standard plan because they are so much more expensive, so it feels like it's just an opportunistic money grab when no other providers charge on-going fees for BGP and even you don't on your standard plans.
To put it into perspective, just to add BGP to the 3-core $75 per year offer from your current deal, this is 40% extra. There's just no way that advertising an additional route can cost you as much 40% of providing everything that's already in that package.
I guess the point is that I've chosen Hosthatch twice now at different points in time because your promotional offers represent insanely good value. A monthly fee to add BGP would represent insanely bad value, and that seems a bit incongruous.
Firstly, thank you for your detailed feedback.
They need to be maintained, so there is definitely a cost involved. You will see that most normal providers who provide a good amount of resources and value for the cost have a monthly charge for it (Melbicom, for example). Providers who do not charge anything extra for it have enough margins in their standard prices (Vultr), so you end up paying a lot more for your servers.
Perhaps you have some examples of providers who do not charge for BGP and have similar pricing for server resources as us?
In a way, yes. And there is a business logic behind this. We sell promotional plans at a near cost price to fill up excess capacity. The demand for these plans is already higher than the supply. We do not need to incentivize more for people to buy these. (FYI, I am not making this up to sound in any particular way, you will find that we are sold out a lot of times)
The cost of setting up BGP sessions and maintaining them exceeds the costs that we will bill to the customers. They definitely cost more than $10 USD to set up and more than $2.5 per month to maintain (when looking at the human time cost in total), but the reason we will provide it for free on our standard plans is because it is a value add, and if someone has a use case where they need BGP and they are going to choose a provider based on that, we do not want to be losing their business. In contrast, whether we provide free BGP or not on a promotional plan, we are still going to sell more than we need/want to.
(Because we now live in a PC world where people are easily offended and someone could take this comment to mean "you don't give a shit about customers who pay less", I must add this note to clarify that I am just being straightforward and honest in explaining our business reasons and this does not mean that we do not care for any certain type of customer, since we are a business at the end of a day and here to make money)
For E5 VMs, please check again in 24h, as they are not enabled for all of those yet.
The API endpoints for snapshots will likely be early next year, after we've moved these out of BETA.
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If there is no error, that means your snapshot process has been started, and the snapshot will appear there once it has been completed (the time depends on the size of course)
@hosthatch
How is the traffic routed when reaching the Floating IPs? Does it use a Round Robin strategy or something else?
Thanks
There's less margin on the promo plans, and the admin overhead of fixing someone's mistakes can be pretty high if you fuck up badly enough.
Plenty of providers charge monthly for BGP, check out bgp.services if you want to know more about that. $2.5/month is the lowest fee I've seen personally. There's actual work that goes into keeping everyone's sessions up and I think they're charging a fair amount here.
I can't think of any hosting companies currently offering a better deal, taking into account the bandwidth they're using + the amount of transfer they're providing.
oh @hosthatch responded while I was typing, my bad
Please correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't that fall under load balancers?
Floating IPs are simply IPs that can be used on multiple servers, useful for fail-over in case one of the servers is down.
Just went through your detailed explanation and I understand the business part, but still hoping that maybe in the future once you have reached enough automation, BGP for promo plans will also include just a setup charge.
Fair enough. I actually didn't realise there was an ongoing cost per route, but also understand @fluffernutter 's point that if someone messes up and it causes you work, then I guess it could easily require time to diagnose and sort out.
In my naivety, because I've never touched BGP before, I assumed that you'd have developed something that checks and/or sanitises all customer's announcements so that you don't have ongoing support work to run it.
I was specifically thinking of BuyVM who offer BGP for free even on their "unlimited data" (although I know it's not) $3.50 per month slices. Even if you just use them to proxy the data elsewhere, it'd be similar pricing to your extra BGP charge.
I'll agree that your promo plans are fantastic value, I'm not saying they're not, and that's why I have a storage plan from last BF and just picked up a SG one from your current deal because that's an incredible price with generous bandwidth for the region. My point was just that there's a LOT of value in the promo plan, but adding BGP doesn't seem like it'd add much cost to that from your end.
I also appreciate that if once a server is used for anycast, it's quite possible that its bandwidth usage will increase, so maybe it is justified if your promo prices are assuming that most people only use 50% of their actual bandwidth allowance. I guess a lot would depend on a customer's strategy for getting people to the right server in a unicast setup, where if you're doing geo-DNS you might easily send people to the wrong place.
Yeah, I also know they're often sold out. That's why I jumped on the SG one now even though I don't actually need it for a few months, because I wasn't even sure if you'd beat that offer during BF.
Yeah, that's a fair enough point that you'll sell out of them with or without BGP, I also didn't realise it'd cost that much to maintain, but I was assuming that you wouldn't have to troubleshoot people's issues if they mess up because I know what your policy is for support on promo plans.
TBH, I just kind of assumed you'd just drop any invalid or incorrect routes and auto-send an notification to that effect rather than putting in support time to fix it.
I actually wonder if this might backfire though... If BGP is a free value add, then people wouldn't get too upset if there was any downtime. But if you're charging extra for it (especially if it's free on the other product lines) then people will probably expect support whenever there's an issue. After all, if the BGP service is effectively an additional purchase on top that represents 1/3 of the total price, it's fair to assume it will work, but if it's an opt-in free with no promise of support, then people can expect low-priority support at best. Of course, I also appreciate that people are people and will raise hell regardless, and more so for low-enders.
No fair play, honesty is appreciated.
I'll also conclude that if you have a promo plan and need BGP then it's probably still a good value proposition given the savings on the promo plan originally. But if the promo plans are aimed at low-enders who probably only would like BGP, it's probably not.
I should also add that I still know approximately zero about BGP apart from reading a couple of how-tos, but not actually tried it out on a private network. It's just my interest was piqued last BF by @Cloudie 's cheap ASN deals, and it feels like something that'd be fun to try out, even though I don't strictly need it.
So I hadn't realised that BGP typically has a monthly fee, I've only seen it here were it seems to be a free option with some dedis and not available on some others, and free on BuyVM. Certainly, when reading the how-tos, the only costs they mentioned were with setting up an ASN and when using PI rather than PA ranges.
Does BGP session support AS-SET (downstream)?
Does BGP session receive full table?
I clicked on take snapshot and then left the page. There is no indicator on https://cloud.hosthatch.com/snapshots that a snapshot is pending.
One feedback could be the inclusion of a indicator bar / progress bar or even just something that says that the snapshot command is still pending.
One question, is the panel created by yourselves? I think it is an excellent platform. Could you tell me what cms/billing software it is under?
Custom
Any plan to add block storage?
It's just a wrapper of WHMCS if you look at the XHR response data
I wouldn't want to distort the friend's publication,
But is there anyone who can tell me how or what theme it is?
would be very interesting if you can provide load balancers with high-availability as an addon
Amaze! Keep it up
It's clearly not a "wrapper" or some sort of downloadable theme
It's a custom built panel using WHMCS for some backend tasks
Just look at the JSON..
Thanks @hosthatch! Snapshot is really a good and necessary feature, will all servers have this in future?
Are we able to restore ourselves with the snapshots?
Can we schedule a remote backup of these snapshots? So incase any issue, we can restore them?
Looking forward to the snapshot!
That seems amazing
BGP is nice and great, it used to be free for big spenders so good to see how it will be commercialized.
Today I'm using Vultr which is $5/month including BGP.
Here I could get the promo which is $25/year (yes more resources) and then on top of that pay $30/year for BGP.
Sure it's a bit cheaper but for those $5 I'd rather have the stability and "size/brand" of Vultr.
This is coming from a very happy Hosthatch customer since 2019.
One thing that could change this though - is the $2.5/month per account or per server?
If I could pay $2.5/month and use BGP across different locations that would tip in favor of Hosthatch.
And you can do the same thing with us, with a larger VM, for $4 per month...so you end up saving money compared to Vultr.
What exactly is the argument here?
(my point being you are paying for it one way or the other, with Vultr too)
True (although you are offering less disk and bandwidth).
Just associating Hosthatch to the promotional offers, this is LET after all
But maybe I could try it out with you when it's all ready to go, as a fall back in case Vultr goes down (it seldom does outside of maintenance windows).
@hosthatch First of all, I love that the snapshot is being rolled out.
Can you take a look at how the timestamp of snapshot is created? I have a server in Sweden but timezone is set to +X hour ahead. Right after a snap is created, it says snapshot is created X hours ago.