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You're correct but most providers also use cloud images, meaning when you reboot the VM after increasing the raw disk space, VM will notice it and automatically resize its fs according to the available space.
https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/modules.html#resizefs
It can be sustainable business model.
We've been offering bonus storage for many years, and keep on growing it larger and larger, and can be much greater than this. Then again we do not offer it was guaranteed, but considering we've been not hitting global max limit for few weeks now it's pretty likely you get yours, depending on if that particular server has any to give.
Our current max is +300% bonus, meaning you get quadruple storage. Some bonus points are shared across all accounts, those which are billing profile based, ie. months customers total and euros paid. Part of it is on per service basis: https://wiki.pulsedmedia.com/index.php/Pulsed_Media_Free_Bonus_Disk_Policy
Sorry not meaning to hijack the thread or turn anyone away from Servarica. Quite to the contrary, just saying it's not as impossible as people think when done in this kind of fashion
Hi Everyone,
Didnt expect this to be caught this fast and so many questions
Note: we still didnt have the offer up in appsumo but they require the plans to be up before they put them thats why we made them public
We are trying to target different user sector and this idea and the plans are done in a way that attract those users
Those plans are made mainly for appsumo , and from my observation of their offers and the ones that sell well there I noticed that most users care about that their plan appreciate with time.
Think about the users who bought owned whmcs license int he early days and now they can sell them for much more than they paid for it plus they get to use it all this time for free
So these plans target this mind set by reversing how usually VPS plans work, usually VPS plan lose its value with time , if anyone check his plans from 5 years ago they will find the plans are really bad compared to today plans
So here the whole idea and the process is to create VPS plan that is actually much more valuable 5 years from now than it is at this moment while maintaining that it is still profitable to us
the plans you see here are the result of this thought process
here will try to answer the questions one by one
Current implementation require a restart to do disk expansion (we tried to do it while VPS is up but it had issues)
the idea is that you will collect storage credits daily
and one you reboot the VPS the storage of your VPS will expand (if you use the templates we provide the OS will see the expended disk after reboot )
We have another implementation that do grow the disk while the disk is online daily and we keep it up to the user to make their OS see the disk expiation but we decided not to release it as it makes it hard for the vast majority of customers
this is not typical unlimited storage that you see in some big shared hosting providers, the storage you can have in the vps is limited at any point of time but that limit is increasing toward infinity by time
So yes in 1000 years maybe we will run out of storage
on the third year onward the unlimited storage plan will be better value , and this will increase with time
this is not made for users who need storage for few months (some of our users have been with us for more than 10 years) So this is marketed toward long term customers
Also another fact is that this plan appreciate over time , so if you use the plan for 4 years and decided to transfer it , you may get high price for the transfer
The increase here is calculated that the product price can support it
for example if you pay 20$ there is like 4$ of it set aside to buy the new disks that will be added to handle the disk expansion
Thats why this product will never be same $/TB initially as our black friday offers as they dont have that little extra that is absolutely needed here
The process goes like this (all numbers here are just for example and not actual numbers)
in one year lets say we get extra 40$ from the customer more that the running cost and the ROI of the initial plan specs (ex .we got 200$ and the plan really costed us 160$ to get our ROI)
this 35$ is enough to get the the extra disk the user have in the plan (full purchase price)
and the extra 5$ should be more than enough to cover the extra power cost of the new storage added per year
the calculation is more complicated than this but this is the general idea
in another word the user pay once for the extra storage they accumulate each year
the idea is excellent and will check how feasible it is
For the risk as I explained to @yoursunny it should be good although yes if storage price go significantly up for extended period of time we will be in trouble ( prices going up for few months is not an issue as we dont add much per month and we can handle a price increase for few months the issue if the prices due to some disaster goes up and stay up for years which I think and hope is very slim chance )
you are correct thats why we do it in reboot , the file system expand at that time using the scripts we have in the template (complex process , I didnt work on it personally, our team did it and i can check the details with them if you have questions)
it is actually automated as long as the user use our templates , but i like the thought process
it is an infinite function that increase toward infinity
So when t is infinity the storage is infinity
Maybe a better name to call it infinite storage VPS ?
@servarica_hani you think we can get a deal for LET? It doesnt have to be a BF level deal but anything is appreciated!
honestly I didnt think there will be this interest in the idea here ,
So will check if we can do one within LET limit and if yes will post it after appsumo offer have some time
I'm interested but say I buy it, will I be able to upgrade the package later assuming I need a flat increase in storage while maintaining existing bonuses?
yes I assume you mean add 3TB or extra ram , cpu at some point of time
yes upgrades work as any plan and you keep the existing gains in the storage that you accumulated over time
Don't bother with LET users. You will regret it.
I have managed to miss appsumo before. Doesn't bring up in my mind first a place to sell VPS at all, gets some sort of fiverr feel actually when you lookup VPS there. Interesting.
Actually one of our users suggested doing offers there (didnt know it before) , then started looking around to understand their users
after that I asked the appsumo team if my idea makes sense and they were excited so we started working on it
When do you plan to launch in AppSumo?
those unlimited plans mentioned here in this thread
I tried searching AppSumo - guess its not available there yet.
IMO the issue (as a provider) is that someone can resell it for a high price, and you don't actually get any of that money, unless you charge a transfer fee.
not yet published
That is 100% fine by us , because the product itself is profitable so if someone managed to make profit out of it good for them
The larger the storage, the more likely it's for long term storage.
That's not how this works. There's absolutely nowhere in your available or maximum storage capacity formula (that includes physical area, storage servers, available power, etc) that includes infinity.
This is specifically growing/expanding and absolutely nothing to do with unlimited. You're asking for trouble using "unlimited". You can still easily market this as an expanding server, but absolutely not "unlimited" in any sense of the word. Even the 100Mbps bandwidth is better to say "unmetered" since its inherently limited by speed and capacity per time period.
@TimboJones
if the term unlimited is used to describe the physical resources then nothing on the universe is unlimited or infinite.
but usually the term is used to say there is no limit within limiting context ,
e.g. if someone living by a river you could say they have unlimited water supply although in reality they are bounded by the bigger limit of how much water flow in the river
same idea can be said about unlimited 100mbps the idea you are not limited within the bigger limiting context of 100mbps
the situation for storage here is that the total storage in the VPS follow a mathematical function that does not converge to a finite number and instead Diverge to infinity
the equation that describe the storage capacity over time for the first plan looks like this
storage equation
and this is a Divergent series which is explained as "the infinite sequence of the partial sums of the series does not have a finite limit. " (from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_series )
the term above " does not have a finite limit." is equivalent to unlimited
I honestly dont feel the naming is misleading at all specially that we describe the process and how much increase in details and this look much better than some shared hosting providers just throwing the the word unlimited for the amount of storage they offer with their plans without describing the limiting function or limiting context
You're going to find it pretty common that infinite/infinity wouldn't be involved in resource and capacity for physical resources and infinity is used for theoretical resources. You're providing physical resources, even if "virtually".
No, they really wouldn't. Mostly because, again, real world and environmental changes. Now, if they lived next to an Ocean, I would agree to "unlimited water supply".
This isn't the same. The "within the bigger limiting context of 100Mbps" is the bandwidth of 100Mbps 24/7 for a month or billing period. The maximum possible is achievable, doesn't grow or change (ignoring calendar day difference per month). Your unlimited storage has limited storage and grows, meaning limits are changing.
Oh boy.
I'm arguing you don't have "infinite sequence" so that's irrelevant.
I don't agree with it either, but you're no different that the details are in the small print, not headline. And they don't agree, IMO. It's also not different in that you get so much space until the provider allocates more over time or as needed. Shared Hosting also generally limits the usage and types of files that can be hosted, so they're not going to have nearly as high as storage use cases, unlike something specifically being sold as unlimited storage on your own VPS.
I thought about the naming yesterday and although I still feel the wording unlimited storage vps is fair I missed 1 important point
In this case my position does not matter because at the end I don't want to mislead potential customer and if the naming did mislead other potential (majority) customers then the naming must be changed
Based on this I decided to change it to Unlimited Expanding Storage VPS, this way users will understand that the vps is not just unlimited but it is unlimited expanding vps
I think this way the naming is much more clear and avoid confusion
Grorage VPS or Growrage VPS!
GAAP-1
GAAP-2
GAAP-3
@servarica_hani What's the RAID level on these plans?
raidz2 (similar to raid 6 )
Was initially kinda interested but ran into a few problems trying to justify it to myself.
1. The plan only ever makes sense on long term agreements but the plans existence isn't guranteed by a contract and can be killed off once it would be beneficial or if company dies
2. What a good price per terabyte today is, might be expensive af in 5 years therbye nullifying any potential benefit this plan may have offered
Suggestion:
Variable increasing storage plans are a great idea and as a person with an ever expanding Linux iso collection I'm interested . That being said i think the plan needs to be reworked/a new offering so the average price per terabyte over the yearly /tri yearly offering is equilivant or better than purchasing an equilivant amount of flat storage today. Then at renewals just take whatever the best current flat rate per tb is + fee for continued increases
That is hard to implement as we will be selling just promises , since we will tell the users that the increase is dependant on the market price of the disks this year , users will not know what they are getting before getting in this long relationship
Also that means the amount of storage given could be less as it could be more than what it is now (since it fluctuate based on the market price) and no one will be happy to get less storage than what they thought they will get
Also who can decide the price , I feel we as provider have vested interest in saying the disk price is higher so we give less for the same amount of money (we will never do that but for anyone who didnt have years of relation with us will think this way)
Thanks for listening, the new name is way better, IMHO.
If you really meant "when" (as opposed to "what", which I think you got answered instead), I see them up now.
AppSumo now has the small plan for $150/year. The base cost and specs seem to be identical to what you can from ServaRICA directly, so there's not much reason to go for the AppSumo deal specifically.
It might be a little cheaper if you have Plus or credits, or if you expect to need to use the refund policy. But if you buy straight from ServaRICA, you can choose from more plans and you know that the chunk that would go to the AppSumo cut will instead go towards sustainability and future expansions.