New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Yeah, it costs them to download an ISO and sync it within the nodes.... Takes them 2 minutes.
We charge a nominal fee of $5 to set up a custom ISO for clients simply to cover the tech time required to download, checksum, test, and distribute the ISO file across our nodes. If handled properly, it's more like a 15-20 minute task, not 2 minutes. Since most common ISO's are already available by default on our plans (and a lot of less common ones, as well) we don't feel that it's unreasonable, especially considering that some of our customers pay under $1.50 per month for their VPS.
Would we charge a fee if we were providing $15 or $20 per month managed VM's? Probably not. But when your monthly margin on a hosting plan is measured in cents rather than dollars, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask customers to cover costs on requests like providing a custom ISO. The other option is simply not to do it.
Will you install a LAMP stack on my VPS and then secure it for me before migrating my website? It'll cost you nothing.
If you're running a company, every minute is worthy. Like I've mentioned in my previous reply, some shady customers will try to make fun with free offers. Mostly what they're trying is to abuse the system.
If you can do it for free all the time, I'm willing to offer you a job with no salary. Because it's Free as you've said.
Visit a lawyer just for five minutes. Then you'll understand. If the service cost already calculated into monthly billing, it's nothing. But when it comes to cheap packages. This always happens.
I'm not trying to be a douche here, but when running a company (I'm running hosting business for 2 years and development firm for about 7 years now) everything should be managed. Even like clicking downloading button.
It's easy to tell on here who's the folks getting burned by unreasonable offers and who works within the industry.
i sure will, just PM me
Here is a related question:
When a customer asks you to setup a custom .iso, do you make it private, or does it become available for all customers?
I can tell you it is not right at all to basically charge for what doing wget to download a iso? that is what I use is just wget it to virtualizor's directory and done.
that is why is just wrong to charge for doing something so simple.
and I refuse their "labor intensive" excuse as that isn't one.
I mean seriously what panel is he running that he has to charge to do something that should be so simple but yet takes 15-20mins to do?
Of course he is right to charge whatever he wants for whatever he likes. Just like the customer is right not to pick him
The right question is "is it a good business decision"? Well, it is, only if it works for him. If he's losing customers, it probably isn't, but that kind of data, he only has (if he has).
Is the cost zero? It can be, but it depends on the number of requests. You are already paying for staff, bw, power etc. If your staff is not stressed out during the day and they have those 5 minutes free, it does cost you nothing. On the other hand, if the staff is overworked and/or there are 20 such requests per day that you'd have to get an extra hand, no, it's not free at all.
i think solusvm will make it available to every customers
Indeed. It doesn't even get levied most of the time.
Still takes up disk space.
Yeah, like all your disks are full and waiting for that extra ISO to burst...
please take a look at ramnode's iso list:
CentOS 5.11 Netinstall (x86_64/x86)
CentOS 6.6 Netinstall (x86_64/x86)
CentOS 7.0 Netinstall (x86_64)
CentOS 6.4 with cPanel (x86_64/x86)
CloudLinux 6.6 Netinstall (x86_64)
CoreOS (x86_64)
Debian 7.7.0 Netinstall (x86_64/x86)
Debian 8.0.0 Netinstall (x86_64/x86)
FreeBSD 10.1 (x86_64^/x86)
OpenBSD 5.7 (x86_64/x86)
Fedora 21 Netinstall (x86_64/x86)
openSUSE 13.1 Netinstall (x86_64)
Gentoo 20150312 Minimal (x86_64/x86)
Ubuntu 10.04 Server (x86_64/x86)
Ubuntu 12.04 Server (x86_64/x86)#
Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop (x86_64)+#
Ubuntu 14.04.2 Server (x86_64/x86)
Ubuntu 14.04.2 Desktop (x86_64)
Ubuntu 14.10 Server (x86_64)
Ubuntu 15.04 Server (x86_64)
Arch Linux 2014.09.03 (x86_64)
Alpine Mini 3.1.3 (x86_64/x86)
NetBSD 6.1 (x86_64/x86)
GParted (x86)
System Rescue (x86)
Grml (x86_64)
Scientific Linux 6.3 (x86_64)
Slackware 14.1 (x86_64/x86)
TurnKey Linux - ejabberd (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - node.js (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - OSQA (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Revision Control (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Redmine (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - LAMP Stack (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Drupal 7 (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - WordPress (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Magento (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Ruby on Rails (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Nginx (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - File Server (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - GitLab (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - ownCloud (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - OpenVPN (x86_64)
TurnKey Linux - Core (x86_64)
Elastix 3.0.0 (x86_64)
Oracle Linux R6 U5 Server (x86_64/x86)
PBX in a Flash CentOS 6.4 (x86_64/x86)
iPXE
NixOS 14.12 Minimal (x86_64)
FreePBX 6.12.65 (x86_64)
AsteriskNOW 3.0.0 (x86_64/x86)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (x86_64)*+#
Zentyal 4.0 (x86_64)
ZeroShell (x86)
and yours
CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal
CentOS-6.6-i386-minima
CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Minimal
debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst
FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1
FreePBX-64bit-6.12.65
turnkey-lamp-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-lighttpd-php-fastcgi-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-mongodb-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-mysql-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-nginx-php-fastcgi-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-openvpn-13.0-wheezy-amd64
turnkey-wordpress-13.0-wheezy-amd64
ubuntu-12.04.4-server-i386
ubuntu-14.04-server-amd64
I guess that depends on how your infrastructure is setup. Whether you keep the images stored or not ( customers will expect their images to be stored ). Its not about that one extra disk image. If you had 40 customers and each had 3 images uploaded, assuming you have raid 10 on the node, it can amount to 1TB total disk space used.
If you used a centralized service to host these images, then 200 customers who upload 3 images then you are looking at 5TB?
The above examples are small deployments, hosting companies with thousands of customers who can upload images then the disk space required to store those images quickly adds up.
Does it cost significantly to store those images? probably not, but it still costs.
We allow customers to upload and install from their custom ISOs without staff intervention, but we charge for storage space used per GB when the images/snapshot sizes total more than 20GB because these images are stored in DFS with at least 3 times replication; So, I can see how this can be problematic for some providers.
If you use data deduplication (which would be really effective for these kind of data) the actual usage per customer can be much lower, and they would still be happy
Yes, but then it would cost much more, because staff would need to be paid for time to add deduplication to Ceph or GlusterFS or whatever.
Edit: well, I suppose you can just hash the file contents and see if an image with the hash exists already. But that still is not trivial to implement, lots of details you have to deal with (e.g. someone adds a new image while someone else deletes old one, need to synchronize those operations so that we either delete the old one and then store the new one, or never delete the old one). Also raises question of how to bill clients for that storage space (if a client wants 1000 unique ISO's and each is 500 MB, that's fine, but not going to do it for free).
We do not do that !!! its a stupid fee !!!
I think on Iwstack you get charged for the storage of the Iso, but it gets charged as secondary storage which is 0.036 euro per month or 0.00005 euro per hour and of course you can delete it once you've used it if you're worried about the storage costs.
Seems reasonable given it costs them to store it.
i just wonder how can ramnode provide so many isos without charging their customers
because they are cool, and thats why they are always on top of leb's providers