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Gauging interest for possible new service offering
Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT AN OFFER this is purely to gauge interest. If we receive enough interest we would be more than happy to offer this service. Once we can fully define the service offering with input from the community we will post our offer in the offers section of this forum and eventually add it to our site.
Some Background:
Our primary service is a premium offering to businesses and professionals though looking through this community has interested us in offering a service to fit your needs. I would like to gauge interest for a low end solution on top of our premium service offering. If you need more information about our services please check our website gridvirt.com
Our drives have been clocked at 135k 4kb random r/w IOPS and 1.4GB/s sequential write by an independent reviewer/benchmarker "vpseer.com/ssd-vps-performance-chart" (he says a full written review is in the works)
We certify that our drives are capable of up to 100,000k+ IOPS and 900MB/s sequential. This can be utilized by many things even on such a small node that we plan to offer. A game server, low disk usage high traffic site, remote MySQL database server, super fast DNS server, etc. One thing is for sure you won't be limited by disk I/O
Just to give you an idea of what our premium service is capable of. We have a client that wants to sell game server hosting on our service and we are building an optimized OS template for them. Lorne is doing testing on a 1 Node VM right now and has 3x32 slot Ace of Spades (minecraft mod) servers running all slots fully loaded with real players. He said that he could try a 4th server but he may run into a limit on the RAM though the 3 servers are running very smoothly with plenty of CPU/RAM resources to spare.
The Future Offering:
Our planned offering is quite simple, we can run the OpenVZ kernel within a KVM VM. We came up with this solution to keep this offering from affecting our premium service while still maintaining our automated fail-over, migration, and backup capabilities. Our offer would be as follows. . .
- We currently use Virtualizor though we will be migrating all clients to our own control panel solution within two months.
- The SecureNAS service is primarily meant to be used for backup and low usage file storage as an offset of the small SSD disk space. It is by no means fast. It is accessed through a shared gigibit port on our private network. In order to preserve speed for our premium service we will be limiting the VM's port to 200Mbps. This would be shared with all 10 OpenVZ VPS.
- This would be a completely unmanaged service. We can not provide support at this price point beyond the maintenance of the Node, the hardware node, and our network.
- We do not and will not oversell resources. You will get full use of the resources that you purchase.
3 Node VM:
4 CPU Cores
4.5GB RAM
75GB SSD (we will add more for the host OS)
75GB SecureNAS
3TB Data Transfer
200Mbps Port
/10 =
~800Mhz x 2 Cores
384MB RAM/Memory Dedicated
512MB RAM/Memory Burst
7.5GB SSD (plenty of space for a minimal OS install with room to spare)
7.5GB SecureNAS (Extra available @ $5 per 25GB)
1 IP Address (sorry we can not offer any additional, our Datacenter is very conservative with their IP space)
300GB Data Transfer
100Mbps port (We don't want 1 VM to hog the entire pipe but want the service to remain fast)
= $7/m or $60/yr
We have been a registered corporation in Michigan since 2010 and our domain has been active since 2008-2009 If you still don't like the yearly price since we have only actively been offering service since April of this year I will rescind the yearly price point.
This is just to open discussion. If you have any questions just ask I will respond ASAP.
Seann Gearhart | GridVirt Inc.
Owner | President & CEO
Comments
Seems interesting, but a bit expensive. Dont think you will gather many signups.
My 2c.
M
Not sure if I like the idea of a VM in a VM, reminds me of techieVPS :P
I assume a lot of the reason behind pricing is based upon the amount of SSD?
I think this could potentially be useful for single Minecraft servers, but RAM would most certainly need improving.
@Daniel @PytoHost @dmmcintyre3 all know a fair amount about Minecraft.. how much storage would be needed? And I assume 12 players could fit on 1GB RAM if that was possible?
Storage purely depends on what kind of plugins are being run, number of worlds etc. the biggest killer for storage is poorly configured backup plugins that balloon a disk. Server logs can also easily grow in size if a large number of plugins are throwing repeated errors.
12 players would easily fit 1gb of RAM. 20 is more likely possible and even beyond
Never run a minecraft server on a disk that is tight on space. Once you hit the storage capacity, worlds start to become corrupted and plugins configuration files wipe as they cannot write out.
I'd rather have 1 full-speed core than 2 800MHz ones.
If there is enough demand for it we may be able to work it out so you have a full KVM VM. It would have to be on completely separate hardware from our premium service but with the same hardware specs/configuration.
If this is the preferred configuration here we can definitely implement it. If we see any more suggestions for it we will move it to the top of our list
@birdie25 @ShardHost @liamwithers @Taylor @Maounique
Thank you! We are compiling a list of the suggestions please keep them coming.
We may not implement them all but we will try our best. I will have a complete list by Monday and that will become part of our LEB offer.
Have backup service, that would be helpful. Even for additional cost.
What kind of backup service exactly?
We include a 2 layer disaster recovery service (daily snapshots and weekly offsite replication) as standard with all virtual nodes. You can also purchase additional SecureNAS space @ $5/m per 25GB and use this for backups.
Seann
I would be quite interested in a budget offering from you. I love the numbers I've seen but quite frankly I consider your current prices to be a bad investment without a specific need for extremely high disk I/O. I know you talk about fast loading websites but I'm pretty sure I'd hit a bottleneck on the 200mbit line before I'd hit an I/O bottleneck on several of the vps providers that are common names here at LET. That isn't to insult your business, that's some honest insight into the mind of someone who has considered but passed on your services. Your prices aren't even that high for KVM, but it also isn't very competitive if you remove insane I/O from the picture (because most don't need that much).
With that said, a budget offering from you would certainly turn my head. Here's what I'd like to see, roughly:
1x 1.5GHz+ core
256mb ram (512 burst)
10gb SSD
10-20gb NAS
1TB bandwidth
100-200mbit
$5-7/m
Just a rough draft, something like that would interest me. I'm not afraid to spend good money, I always buy more performance than I need, but I do try to shop smart. Feel free to contact me or engage further here to correct any misunderstandings or pick my brain for some market research.
P.S. if this post is a little disorganized, I'm at a week long event doing audio/video and currently lacking sleep
If your running Minecraft on OpenVZ its best to set quota to off, although sometimes they hit the Inode limit.
@jarland Thank you for your insight. It does help.
I wanted to update everyone. This is were we currently stand:
Full KVM SSD 1/3 Node =
1/2 Core = 1.6GHz+
512MB RAM/Memory
10GB SSD
10GB SecureNAS
1IP Address (no extras available)
500GB Bandwidth
100mbit port speed
= $7/m
This is the absolute most we can offer at this price point you will need to upgrade to a full node service if you need more resources. I know we are not very flexible on this but we need to have hard resource limits in order to guarantee a level of service to our clients.
We are actually restructuring our setup to work with this. We will only allow 12 of these accounts per hardware node. They will take up approximately 4 Full Virtual Nodes of resources so our new per server limit is 12 1/4 Virtual Nodes + 6 full Virtual Nodes.
This will only be put on new server hardware so not to effect our existing clients who were guaranteed only 10 nodes per server.
Seann
I think that is actually a pretty good offer/price point for what you are getting. Maybe not applicable to 99% of the users here, but for the 1% that will see a benefit of this rock on
Definitely a good offer. Do you think you'd be willing to negotiate custom packages? If so I'll 100% be making an order
Very nice offer indeed, but I'm also of the opinion that a VPS in a VPS is a bad idea.
Once you guys start posting benchmarks I'm sure the other 99% will want to jump in as well
Yup, we've dropped that idea. The idea was to offer additional isolation for our premium service clients, but we are sure we can keep things under control and provide full KVM Virtualization for this offering.
We want to start transitioning to our new site by the end of this week so our time will be limited. By the end of next week we will have additional hardware setup and available to start offering this service.
Seann
I think the issue will be that the 99% of the other users will not need the disk IO and will look for greater resources at this price point.
At $7/m for the resources our profit margins are extremely low. We can't give any more at that price point.
You have to remember with GridVirt you really can't compare the provided resources.
We are not a budget host. We provide high performance and stability/availability 100% of the time. Not "ok" performance half of the time.
You would be hard pressed to find a host that can provide the same performance and stability with more provided resources at the same price point.
Seann
You've missed my point. What you are offering is great at that price point and I couldn't imagine you offering more.
This. Your prices are very reasonable for what you provide but most people here won't need that. (at least not for the types of services they usually run on low end boxes)
Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that point was clear.
I know a lot of bargain hunters are looking for the most resources at the lowest price. We are by no means a bargin host.
We just did a basic UB, DD, and FIO benchmark on a test VM with the mentioned specs. While these are preliminary numbers until we get the new hardware online, same hardware config just more users per hardware node, they are close to what should be expected.
UnixBench: 800+
DD: 580MB/s Average
FIO r/w IOPS: 80000+
wget from cachefly: 9.9MB/s
The DD and FIO are a bit lower than our 1 Node benches. That is to be expected as less SSD space has been addresses in the assigned logical volume. As most should know the larger the SSD the faster.
Seann
I like the offer you put down. Just be sure that it isn't a favor, don't be upset if it doesn't result in a single upsell. If its not beneficial to you, we've several options around here for quality providers at our cost point, simply because most of us do not need that kind of I/O. But I'd be likely to buy what you are talking about.
GridVirt,
Do not sell yourself short just to fit into other Low-end offers. You'll find that there are many sub-segments of Lowend VPS' and by offering a very high level of IO you'll attract people who need that.
Your pricing lots very very competitive!
@jarland @httpzoom
Thanks!
It isn't purely a favor. I hope it isn't coming off like that. We can provide the service and still be profitable, so it by no means is a favor. An upsell to full node service would be the ultimate goal, but isn't needed or expected at all.
As long as we can provide the service and make our customers happy while still being profitable; we are happy. That should be the ultimate goal of any business model.
When we first established our node plans we knew that the "1 Node" plan was larger than a lot of people would require but we went with it in order to keep our base pricing high so we don't appear to be a "cheap" host. I'm glad we can offer a smaller plan and the input of this community has helped a lot. I'm sure now we can offer a smaller plan and not have it be detrimental to our intended appearance and service/performance level.
Thanks Again,
Seann
@GridVirt just create an offer man... get things rollin.
We should have everything ready by the end of next week.
We don't "wing it" or "go in running" when it comes to stuff like this. We take our time and make sure that all systems and processes are in place. We also make sure that everything has been thoroughly tested before we offer a final service to our customers.
Seann
I'd definitely be interested.
@GridVirt what i mean is... make an offer based on your take on the community. Even with the suggestions, these are just sample opinion.
@GridVirt I like your style.
if things will be as advertised, i'll probably pick up one (or two :P).