Do you all think there is a market for a high-storage-space / high-storage-speed VPS offering? It’s easy enough to set aside an entire SATA disk for one VPS customer, or use SSD’s to boost performance in some areas, but do you think customers are willing to pay for this? I see a lot of threads on here regarding $20 / mo and lower VPS plans, and I don’t see this kind of high performance option being possible at that pricing, even with 512mb ram.
Is this something you think people will see value in, and be willing to pay (a little bit) more for?
There is definitely a HUGE market for that niche. A lot of web sites especially multimedia sites look for high storage while needing the fast blazing speeds to allow streaming of the content.
Reselling this type of hosting will make anyone lots of money in this emerging market for sure in my honest opinion.
With the financial pressures today, I have to disagree as servers are pretty fast, ADSL is very fast and the microseconds (at most) saved by SSD drives are unlikely to be worth the $$$.
Since there is disagreement on this, it might be worth your while to do a cost-benefit analysis of this to (1) convince yourself that it’s worth your while as a hosting provider to spend the $$$ on SSDs to save what amount of time and (2) how that time saving can be worth the extra cost to your clients (advertising). If that comes out positive, PLEASE post the non-proprietary portions of your analysis here.
Hi, the main portion where the speed comes in, is not in milliseconds saved per transaction, but rather, how many transactions can you fit on a server.
I.E. the SSD’s I would want to use, commonly benchmark at least 8000 i/o operations per second in a database benchmark. Standard hard drives benchmark closer to 100-150 (sata) or 300-400 (15k sas). The benefit here, is that on a VPS, where you have 10-100 customers per server, that you can still get decent performance, without having dozens and dozens of drives. 2 SSD’s can outperform a dozen SAS drives, or even more SATA drives.
The obvious downside is the amount of space you get on an SSD. For databases, this might not be a huge issue, you really need speed more than space.
If I have an application that needs high i/o speed, my first thought is to not use a VPS at all, but go dedicated. If cost constraints mean it has to be a lower end provision then I’d look at getting a high memory VPS/dedicated and using memcached where possible.
Having said that, I’d be interested to see benchmarks of real world applications running on a system as you suggest - if you had amazing magento/drupal/‘other slow database bound app’ performance benchmarks then this would be probably be a good sales pitch for the service.
hi, that’s a good idea. i would be glad to run benchmarks of this, but right now there aren’t a ton of users on the server so it wouldn’t be a very ‘fair’ benchmark, at least on the SSD one. for the dedicated drive per customer option, that should perform similarly from an i/o perspective regardless how many users are on the system simply because each user has a dedicated drive. of course, with more users, the cpu would be split between them.
exactly that’s the idea as well, that this would appeal to people who might go with a vps except that the i/o is too low on most vps’s, and therefore, they do with dedicated.
I disagree. Dedicated servers are on the way out now. If you need more power than a VPS then cloud is the only way to go in this emerging market. It doesn’t make sense to pay the same price for a dedicated server while a much faster cloud option costs around the same ball park.
‘cloud’ hosting is essentially a fashion term for a cluster of VPS resources. Your contention that cloud is ‘much faster’ than dedicated is rarely true unfortunately - you generally get what you pay for pretty much in terms of raw cpu, disk i/o and bandwidth. The entry cost for cloud/VPS hosting is undoubtably low, but can either hit limits of performance or have costs ramp quickly once it starts getting a load applied - If you look at cloud/grid providers such as mt grid/rackspace cloud etc there are extra charges incurred for resource use, and it’s not hard to end up paying a lot more than you would have done for an entirely uncontended dedicated server. Many people have found that these services performance in areas like databases, have been extremely inconsistent and often very slow.
I believe if the configuration will be the same as for dedicated server as for VPS user will chose the one which has low price or better managment (reviews). IMO
“Cloud” only works really if you application is designed for it, it’s nothing more than self provisioned VPS usually billed on a more granular basis - which from the off means because of the overheads of virtualisation two systems of the same specification, one cloud, one dedicated will differ in performance - with the advantage going to the dedicated system.
The advantage of cloud computing comes along if your application is designed to scale horizontally and you can scale up/down the compute resources you need as your load varies.
That’s kind of like saying, if need something more convenient than taking the city bus, instead of getting your own car, you could take the metro. It’s a difference without a distinction.
“cloud” is just a name that is popular. virtual dedicated server didn’t catch on with the non-tech crowd. virtual private server didn’t catch on. “grid computing” didn’t catch on. utility computing didn’t catch on. software as a service didn’t catch on as a buzz word. platform as a service didn’t catch on.
so instead, whereas all of those other terms are less ambiguous than cloud computing, instead of using terms that mean a little bit more, we just wrapped them all up, and anything using any of those concepts, we just call it cloud. Is gmail a cloud? sure, no reason to call it software as a service. Is a vps a cloud? sure why not. Is amazon web services a cloud? yup. Is shared hosting a cloud? sure! Everything is a cloud.
now, my understanding of cloud, when the word is used properly (if that is even possible):
it’s a vps server
that has some kind of resiliant storage
that is usually (but not always) separated from the host node and
is usually scalable with little notice and
is usually (but not always) able to be turned on and off with little or no notice (possibly billing in periods as short as 1 hour)
and usually (but not always) this can be done with little or no human intervention (on demand)
It doesn’t do anything to engineer for you the ability to spread your website onto multiple servers. Your software has to support running on multiple servers for the scalability (points 4, 5 and 6) of “cloud” to be useful. Mind you, if your software is designed to scale to multiple servers, you could just as easily get multiple VPS servers, or multiple regular servers, instead of multiple “cloud instances”. Oh, the price would be lower, for basically exactly the same thing.
Resiliant storage? You can get a VPS with a san (points 2 and 3). That’s nothing special.
VPS is great mind you, but calling a VPS a cloud doesn’t make it anything special.
“cloud” is just a name that is popular. virtual dedicated server didn’t catch on with the non-tech crowd. virtual private server didn’t catch on. “grid computing” didn’t catch on. utility computing didn’t catch on. software as a service didn’t catch on as a buzz word. platform as a service didn’t catch on.
I suppose that is not so popular so far and that is not what you are looking for. I suppose you need to get in touch with several web hosting providers now, which provide VPS solutions for your budget and explain (show) them everything you would like to host. That is good opportunity for you should drive something relevant and very close to your request. And then I supose you will not pay attention at all on what how that is called.