Paying for free service?

erkin

The bandwidth is currently capped at 10Mbps.

upfreak

The company offers some x number of free vps and since there is demand for more like it, asks if there is interest to buy the same spec for $1 so the company can release them in larger quantity. I dont see anything wrong in it. Just that the title makes it a bit confusing..

Many providers have tried this here before in many variants.. Just saying....

randvegeta

To be clear.

The $1 VPS will not be on the same nodes as the FREE VPS. In terms of hardware, they may use very similar spec. Not all free nodes are the same. The nodes have a simple setup, and it will be the same for the $1 VPS nodes.

If we have a bunch of i7s, some 3rd gen and some 4th gen, we would probably use 4th gen on the $1 nodes and 3rd gen on the free nodes, but they are not significantly different. We would not advertise the $1 VPS as being any better in terms of hardware, than the free ones.

Network wise, we would offer 100M ports, and slightly more data transfer.

We would run twice as many $1 nodes as we would free nodes, and actually use the $1 nodes to dictate the number of free nodes we would set up.

Ole_Juul said: I don't know how they make any money though

Anyone offering this kind of plan, particularly if you take payments monthly, would not make any money at all. It basically covers running costs. But if it can cover running costs, then it is a sustainable long term offer!

Hidden_Refuge said: I don't know how much the server costs them + power usage and Internet but I kinda bet that with $1*50 (lets say he puts 50 clients on one node) - fees/tax = he won't be able to cover whatever he has to pay for "the server + power usage + Internet + possible hardware replacements" and et cetera. Not to mention the money they have lost with the totally free nodes already.

We own the hardware, so the costs on that are one-time (excluding maintenance of course). You are correct in that we do put roughly 50 VMs on a single node. This brings the total revenue from the server to about $50.

You take the 50+ IPs required, power consumption, network connection and physical space and you end up with costs that are around or above $50.

This is not a money maker. If we use IPv6 and do OpenVZ then we might actually make some money.