I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to beat.
Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of jerks signing up with fake names and then running up my bandwidth bills with torrents, then at the end of the month, nobody, ah, "converted" so I am not going to respond with 'free'
One of my responses could be to push my larger domains (which are quite a bit cheaper than the competition) or continue focusing on the international market. (I haven't read the fine print of the amazon offer, but I'll eat my hat if they give free accounts to, say, Brazilians.)
So yeah; my current attitude is "wait and see" - as of today I'm still selling out servers as fast as I can put them up... if that changes, I'll change something.
As for slicehost/linode, my personal guess is that they will both tout their substantial customer support advantages over amazon.
You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax console with drop-down menus for shell commands.
I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
God! I love companies with IRC chans.
the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right?
Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me.
Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which
So, assuming the market is free (which is mostly is) and the barriers to entry are low (and they are very low.) assuming there are customers who care about price (and there are) you should see prices falling towards the cost to provide the service.
As far as I am concerned, I would just like to know you're living comfortably, that's all. If you're happy, so am I.
I'm quite new to VPS. I recently deployed a couple of project for customer in Linode. I am very happy with them, but at the same time, I have some hobby projects of my own that I dont want to host in a 20USD/month machine.
How are your VPSs compare to Linode?
I also give you fewer VCPU on the lower-end instances. they give you 4, I give you 1. the idea here is to optimize for the worst case (if there is contention, and you have 4 vcpus, that's more context switching and more cache flushes. on the other hand, cpu is usually mostly idle, and in that case more vcpu is more performance. My large instances have more vcpu.) I'm experimenting with my vcpu policy and may bring that more in line with linode. But really, I regard this as relatively unimportant because VPSs are rarely CPU bound.
Our disk quality is likely about the same (I use 7500rpm "enterprise" sata, which is about as good as sata gets without getting into the expensive 10K stuff, and if linode was using 10K disk, they'd be advertising the fact.) My ratio of disk to ram is 4 disks in raid 1+0 for every 32GiB ram/8 cores I'm not sure what Linode's ratio is. But Linode has better mechanisms for limiting heavy disk users than I do. (heavy in terms of performance rather than in terms of space... limiting by space is trivial.) My understanding is that they keep iop counters or similar, and first warn, then limit you if you use a lot more iops than most people. I don't do this, and sometimes overall disk performance suffers because of it. But I do plan to emulate Linode in that regard at some point.
And, of course, my most noticeable deficiency is that I do manual provisioning, and Linode has a nicely automated setup. but I'm (very slowly) catching up.
Now, I'm about half the price, too, but you already knew that.
My only complaint so far has been that I can't seem to figure out where I reset my key (I lost the original to a dead computer), while I still have root I don't dare reboot it because if it doesn't come up I can't fix it.
I'm a customer of yours because I know what I need, and with prgmr I pay for what I need and nothing more. It's great.
For me, the AWS free account is to more about letting developers play around with the unique features(/challenges) of AWS before needing to actually deploy a real product. There are a lot of unique things to consider with AWS that you don't have to deal with on regular VPSs.
This isn't about creating a free tier of hosting, and if Linode did offer something like this I'd be concerned about the potential impact on the hypervisor machine load and additional support impact.