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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I don't really see the suspension as something worth paying more for; the only potential "feature" I can imagine is it being significantly cheaper, which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

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> which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.

If the pricing for a product like this reflected that, it would certainly be more appealing to me. $5 a month is already so low though that unless I got way better performance for the same price or paid like, $0.50 a month or less for the same performance, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Yeah, same. If you’re competing on price, you have to have a competitive price. Unless you can come up with some solid real-numbers benefit to the environment or some other really compelling marketing angle, nobody cares if it’s theoretically the lower-cost way of doing things if that doesn’t translate into either a lower bill, or more service for a comparable bill.

The service seems neat, but the pricing seems more to be a novelty than a real service. Maybe I’m missing something.

it has to cost some amount in reserved capacity too. for every n suspended machines there is some small fraction of a machine's cpu/ram capacity that must be kept in reserve, like in a fractional lending system.

You can 'suspend' to SSD/aka hibernate.

Can be pretty fast.

I think gp means that when a customer wants to connect to the VM there needs to be hardware (CPU and RAM) available to run it. While this can be less than the total number of (suspended) VMs it has to have some buffer of "unused" hardware to account for usage spikes that still needs to be paid for.

I think gp's argument was that you must have enough capacity to run peak load, which will be way above average load.

Makes sense for dev boxes you spin up weekly but don't actually use 24/7. Like staging environments.

Those can just be VMs on a computer you already have. What's the advantage on putting them into a not publicly accessible cloud VM?

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