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Looking for some feedback on a new project I'm working on (VPSs billed daily).
I want to preface this by saying this is a personal endeavor and NOT related to Secure Dragon at all.
I have an colocated server collecting dust at Dacentec and was thinking of what I could use it for then I decided to install OpenVZ on it to play with and then I got the idea of porting Wyvern over to my custom billing system and here we are today.
Is there any interest in VPSs that are billed daily instead of monthly/yearly? The way it would work is you purchase credits and then the credits are deducted each day the VPS is built.
I'm not looking to turn this isn't a company or expand Secure Dragon or anything, it's just an idea I had to put the server to good use and help offset the costs since I only use it for a VPN server and test bed these days.
I was trying to figure out the best pricing and specs and then I decided to just do a "build-your-own" solution instead, you can see the specs/pricing here: https://trexbyte.com (my daughter loves dinosaurs so she helped me pick the name of the site).
So what do you think? I'm looking for feedback on the pricing and if it's something you would be interested in even if not for year round use. It's cheaper than renting a dedicated server for a month if you just need the CPUs for a few days. I also tried keeping the pricing down for the base plan also.
Lastly, would this be more appealing if it were in a different location other than Dacentec (North Carolina)? I've got a few options that I can choose from in roughly the same price range (with setup fees).
Thanks!
Comments
Daily VPS is a good idea, I guess like the so called "cloud" thing DO and Vultr offer but for a day.
The pricing looks decent, you should stick with it. I don't think you should worry about location, as I don't think most people who want a VPS for a day will either - as long as it's good.
What about DDoS attacks on the NAT IP? Most nat services seem to be ddos protected now.
Could be something usefull that I might need in the future... Bookmarking it. (Some sort of fail over for my TeamSpeak/Mumble servers maybe...)
How to order?
Good point, I have a few different options for this so I'll have to see how popular it is and then I'll know how much I'm willing to spend on DDOS protection (ranging from free to not so free).
When it's ready you'll be able to order from the website. Right now it's still in development and I don't have everything ported over yet. This thread is mainly to get an idea on if I should continue with development, change direction, or work on something else completely.
Ok, one more thing:
If I put the sliders, to the lowest possible positions, it equals $1.46/year server. Is this a bug or really, a NAT vps with lowest specs, will cost that?
Nnnnope, hourly or GTFO.
@KuJoe
I'm not sure about the market segment you want to address. At the moment it might look somewhat like "wanted to do cloud (hourly) but didn't achieve it".
I think you might want to center it around "weekly" with "monthly" being slightly rebated and with "daily" being slightly higher priced. Maybe there should be a "store and be ready" service, too. Something like "Store your complete site for an insanely low price and, once you need it we push it quickly to the VPS and activate it". I think quite many people might be interested in that kind of backup or emergency thing. In fact, the prices for the VPS might be higher then as long as simple storage is dirt cheap, because most people would calculate sth. like "assume I have 10 bad days/year where I actually need the backup VPS at 80c/day makes 8$/yr + the (very cheap) yearly storage fee. That's pretty OK for an insurance policy".
At the same time you'd be less attractive for the cloud (next price wars commodity) market and wouldn't have to answer gazillions requests à la "But xyz is cheaper hourly!" and have lower costs (than cloud providers) too.
I myself would know small business clients right away who would like that kind of an "insurance package". To them (e.g.) 60€/year for the server plus 5 to 20 for a backup would sound quite attractive. OpenVZ though might be a problem with that clientele.
dont stop short of hourly ddos protected SSD KVM.
I get it, but equally I am not sure of the market. Securedragon users/followers may utilise it but I suppose but for what it is you are offering I personally can't see this being a "go to" instead of just firing up something on DO, Vultr or whoever else for an hour.
To be honest I don't see anything wrong with it at all, I just don't see the market.
Unless you're going to allow full utilization of CPU, then I'd auto-assign the number of cores based on price or memory. Otherwise I see no point to ordering 8 CPU to be limited to less than 20% usage or time based restrictions.
@Radi That is the correct price.
@bsdguy Good points, I haven't looked at any of the hourly VPS options out there but I assumed they were more expensive than $0.51/day for 8 cores and 4GB of RAM. I'll go ahead and take a look at those hourly VPS options and see how my plans compare and adjust accordingly. The ideal clientele would mainly be people who need a lot of resources for a few days to run a script for testing/development and then delete the VPS, I wouldn't market this for people looking to host a website or run anything mission critical because I'm going to be as hands off as possible and automate the hell out of it.
@JoeMerit You know how much I hate KVM.
@~Lee~ I was thinking the same thing about whether there was a market for it, hence the thread. I think I have my answer and will put some more planning into this project before I proceed.
It would be fair share of course, but no throttling or anything after XX% used for X hours. I should rethink the pricing or limit the number of cores they can order though so one VPS can't just eat at all 8 cores.
Now that I think about it, this kind of thing might attract a lot of abuse so maybe I should aim for something like LES. I'll see what locations they are missing.
This is exactly what I meant. "Daily" VPS is not in any way better than a hourly VPS, and there is no reason to invent "daily" other than your billing system fails to do hourly. Also your users get the lovely issue of having to track expiration times, e.g. "I ordered this at 2PM on Saturday for 2 days, so it expires at 2PM on Monday... or what. The billing panel invariably will be in the wrong timezone to them, making this much "easier". Etc.
@KuJoe
Then I think it won't fly.
Reason: Developers work on their own infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, they might need to test something on a "real VPS" for weird reasons but that will be the rare exception.(consider: what's the difference between your VPS and mine at my office? None except public reachability and bandwidth which both are not relevant for development).
Needing lots of resources for a short period? I disagree again. Then I'll just ask my current provider for another VPS for a month or I'll find one here at LETB. Sure, that'll cost me a full monthly fee; so what? We're talking 3 or 5$ here.
And I'm afraid it'll finally come down to evil guys thinking like "Yeah right, let's do a 3 days crime run and be gone".
Whatever, I wish you good luck with your little experiment
I guess I can set the cron job to run hourly but I figured daily was easier to do than taking fractions of a penny every hour and was easier for me to manage. As for the time tracking, the cron job runs at midnight MST (I made sure to include the server time in the footer) so if the VPS is available at midnight, they had the rest of the day to use it before the payment is deducted from their account.
I think I'm going to stick with the daily billing just because it's easier to do and I don't need to worry about missing a cron job here or there as long as I schedule my maintenance after 12AM.
@bsdguy I agree. I think I'll take the project in a different direction.
Feel free to contact me if you feel that my weirdly wired brain could be of use.
Pricing is too good!
Maybe you could only allow verified clients (and people where you are sure about that wont abuse) deploy any VM.
Maybe I'll just limit the resources and put some restrictions in place to prevent abuse.
I think I'm going to lower the pricing.
Nice idea.. would be usefull if somebody just need a server for an occasion such as demonstration or maybe on product lunch..
But I think if have another higher spec to choose might be better.
Pretty much every location that you offer with SecureDragon
Russia is coming soon (tm)
Billing a VPS daily, so pretty much what DO does? DO bills per hour, up to a whole month, but it's the same concept.
This thread can be closed now, It's no longer needed.
Thanks but this is the limitation of the hardware and I doubt anybody wants to pay $40/month for shared resources.
The billing itself was a small part of the idea, I guess I shouldn't have focused so much on that part.
Closed as requested.