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Offering Free Shared Hosting Instead of Free VPS?
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
in Providers
Hello all.
New to LowEndTalk but have got a few hundred registrations for free VPS since someone posted a thread about us a couple weeks back.
The interest in the free VPS came much more sudden and faster than anticipated and I am starting to think it may not have been the best idea.
Would free shared hosting be as popular? It would certainly be easier for us to offer shared hosting over VPS.
Considering the following system and package:
CPanel Control Panel
LiteSpeed Web Server
CloudLinux OS
Installatron/Fantastico Auto Installer
10GB Disk Space
100GB Bandwidth
1 Domain
10 MySQL DBs
PHP
Same limitations as our free VPS would apply.
- 1 free account per person
- Use with E-Mail is strictly forbidden
- Nothing illegal of any kind (if you have to ask, it's not okay)
- No backups included
Any thoughts?
Comments
Most people use VPSs to play around with, not to simply host websites, so I don't think a shared account would be as popular.
Of course they are completely different kinds of service, but with VPS, there are obviously higher costs and the demand we get outstrips our current supply. One the first day our free VPS was advertised here, we had over 100 registrations, which we originally anticipated would take 1 - 2 months to get given it was our launch day.
The free hosting we can offer to more people and for longer. Different purpose and probably less demand, but probably more sustainable long term. At least this is is our thinking.
It's popular enough, I used to offer free kloxo hosting a while back from a GVH VPS.
The only problem I see with free hosting is that the niche is extremely saturated. And there are not so many free VPS providers.
It'd be much more difficult to achieve the same level of success you achieved with VPSs.
Probably true.
We don't plan to stop offering the free VPS, but we just can't keep up with the demand.
If you offer NAT and lower resources, you will be able to get more out of your boxes. Although that's probably something you've already considered.
Who really want's a NATed free VPS?
Most people will require an OS that demands at least 512MB RAM. Lowering to 256MB RAM restricts the service to very few OS.
If NATed VPS is still in demand, then perhaps an IPv6 with tunneled or indeed NATed IPv4 will help.
Regardless, a single node can only support so many VMs. You can host thousands of sites on a single shared hosting box, but not so many with VMs. I suppose we can always consider OpenVZ or other container based VPS?
Do you plan on selling "First" World traffic to CPA companies from your free shared hosting plan? Under first world are usually meant USA, UK, Western European countries, etc. Fucking stupid labelling if you ask me, but it's widely used.
Do you plan on upselling later on?
Do you plan on ransoming data on shared hosting plans?
That way you would lower the node overhead, yes. Also, since OpenVZ only allows Linux, I'm sure that a bit less of RAM per CT won't make such a difference.
... what? Only CentOS requires more than 512MB to install, and that only on KVM as well.
Free low resource (256MB RAM is fine) NAT VPS's are fine to learn things and test some stuff out. (Because you may never use free stuff in production)
To be honest and in my opinion, there are many people that would be happy with a 128/256 MB RAM VPS, and believe me, you can do many things with that amount of RAM. If someone is new to the VPS world and already uses 512 MB these are the only reasons I can think of:
1 - Is running a Minecraft server
2 - Installed a graphical interface, so they can access the VPS via VNC
3 - Has a busy website
4 - Installed a control panel that uses much RAM
There's no point in giving 512MB RAM when with 128/256MB RAM you can get a pretty good performance with just the command line interface. With 128 MB RAM you can run a TeamSpeak server, SA-MP server, a small website and you can still play around with the machine.
Providing free VPSes with dedicated IPv4 will be a thing of the past very soon (if not now). IPv6 is the way to go. Look at LowEndSpirit, for 3 EUR per month you can get a NATed VPS. People pay for a NATed VPS, and it's not hard to imagine that at least a few people wouldn't mind to get a free NATed VPS.
P.S: I wrote this text assuming you use OpenVZ.
They're XEN currently. But yes, the best thing for him is to move to OVZ.
Heck, I'd be happy with a 64MB nat vps. Free is free and I will always be happy about it.
Indeed our free platform is all XEN. We have some HyperV, Proxmox/KVM, and Parallels Cloud nodes setup in Hong Kong but they are all for a fee.
Erm... what makes CentOS shitty? And not just KVM, but Xen, HyperV or any HVM based virtualization.
256MB RAM will work fine with CentOS 5 but not 6, and I'm not so keen on CT if I'm honest.
I have no idea what this is...
The free hosting is a form of marketing. Get the word out and hopefully some people will buy a paid hosting plan or indeed upgrade, or buy an add-on service like an extra IP, backup, or custom ISO installation. etc.
You mean like, shut down the server, and then tell everyone to pay up or the data get's it? And by "it", I mean deleted into oblivion? Sure, why the hell not?
In all seriousness, no, but either way, as it's a free service, people really should have their own backups since we won't offer any sort of backups with it.
CentOS 6 works fine here with 256 MB
The installer for whatever reason needs more RAM though. But with OpenVZ you don't have that problem. With Xen you can create CentOS 6 templates I guess, then you don't need to have the RAM requirement for the installer.
Our system provisions VMs in a similar way to provisioning dedicated servers over PXE. Not using templates. Too much trouble to change our system to use templates.
Then say that the Free VPS is
out of stockon your website and keep your existing Free VPS clients HappyAn hackish solution would be to create the VM with 512MB RAM and then downgrade it after CentOS install. Not sure if that's viable though, but I did it once with a provider :P
It's a terribly manual process. We need this to be automated otherwise running costs will be too high.
Easier to just ask people to choose an OS that can install on 256MB RAM or less!