

Ask HN:  What are your priorities in a VPS service? - lsc

As some of you noticed a while back[1] I provide virtual private servers using Xen[2].<p>Right now, the largest problem I see is the interface.   Now, I'm running pvgrub, which lets you boot into a read-only image that can mount your virtual disk, so you can upload and download new images, but it is something of a pain in the ass[3].<p>a bigger interface problem is that it usually takes about half a day for you to get provisioned, but this just requires me to sit down and work on it for a few hours.<p>Now, I do think I have a reasonably good interface to start, stop and to give the user a console.  But I think it is essential to allow users to easily upload and download the contents of their hard drive.  I was thinking a mechanism that would allow a user to download a .tar.gz of their file system through a webform or something.  (of course, this would require shutting down the guest for a consistent image)<p>what does hn think?   restoring such an image elsewhere would usually require little more than an untar (and fixing /etc/fstab)<p>the other option is to take a straight dd of the drive;  this is far more flexible, as it will preserve your filesystem labels, partitions, and will work with any filesystem you can dream up.  The problem is that a dd of a 90GiB disk partition will take a really long time.  (partimage-ng and related tools help some, at the cost of complexity.)<p>Another assumption I make is that most people leave most servers on for a while.  more than a week.  is that correct?<p>A further possibility is that my interface is fine, and I should throw all available resources into improving my support response times.<p>[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590993<p>[2]http://prgmr.com/xen/<p>[3]http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Untarring_a_fresh_OS_image
======
mahmud
#1

Ability to sign up. I have filled your online form; it says you're
picky/choosy about who you accept, and I haven't heard from you in 3+ weeks,
so I guess I'm not it. None of your features mean anything to me if I can't
get them.

#2

Knowing that my host is not doing a lot of maintenance work behind the scenes.
I don't like "scheduled" downtime.

#3

Good staff. Linode and VPSFarm have been exceptional in this; linode has
almost live support, dashboard and high-tech gizmos. VPS Farm has just one
cool guy :-)

[Edit:

#4

Slackware.]

~~~
lsc
hm. #1. did you get an email with instructions? right now, the procedure is
that after signup, you are sent an email with instructions on how to create an
OpenSSH format public key. You email the key back to us and we set you up
(hopefully... some people have fallen through the cracks)

as for #2, <http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/> \- the plan is to set up
new servers once, and leave them online for 3 years. Our SLA makes no
distinction between scheduled and unscheduled downtime.

#3, well, there are 3 of us, and we are all pretty good technically, but we
need to put some serious effort into response times. I need to put an alarm on
tickets that haven't been touched for 12 hours in RT or something.

#4, I'm trying to move towards using images from <http://stacklet.com/> or
similar (or rather, making it easy for you to upload those images) Chris is
actually really into slackware.

~~~
mahmud
Haven't got an email. Will try again soon. Don't worry about the other points,
mostly icing ;-)

cheers!

~~~
lsc
yeah, this could be solved by a better interface. Unfortunately, email has
become somewhat unreliable, thanks to spam (no spam filter is 100%; my
experience has been that most automated filters do better than I can with a
delete key, once you get worse than 10 spams for every good mail. still,
nothing is 100%)

I should set things up so you can set it all up in your one web session; it
shouldn't be that hard; the parts I'm missing are the ability to automatically
upload a ssh key, and to automatically process paypal payments. Neither of
which is particularly difficult.

~~~
mahmud
1) Use google apps' email accounts. five nine spam filtering, ime.

2) Web based sing up form, dashboard, and maintenance tools should be very
straightforward. I reckon you could get that done in a week or so; I would
love to license you the tech and get a commission out of every sign up :-)

also,

You should offer an affiliate service and let us marketing types do the
marketing. Offer a commission per sign up and sit back.

Mail me if you wanna talk shop.

P.S. I refuse to accept the freebie month bro, sorry, but I would rather pay
you for your services so you can pay me for mine :-)

~~~
lsc
Actually, I'm working on that now. But the part I really suck at is billing,
so I want to pass that off on the resellers. They'd be providing real value
for me then. I've been talking to a few people about this; what I want to do
is provide a interface so the resellers can provision new images themselves,
charge the resellers a discount on what I charge normally, then let resellers
sell and bill at whatever price the markets can bear.

This would help me immensely. If I didn't have to screw with billing, I could
focus more on the technical stuff, which is what I'm good at. I was going over
things the other night, and I'm collecting about half what I'm billing out. (I
imagine that many of those accounts are people who want to close the account
who didn't bother telling me, but some are probably interested in continuing
service.)

The question is how do I let resellers differentiate while I am still doing
support? I like the idea of letting them set the prices (because some people
really do want to pay more, and on the business end of things, I want to
provide a commodity. Getting some people to pay more for a commodity than
others do is a skill for other people. One that I'm not particularly
interested in developing.)

Resellers could differentiate on nicer interfaces, and hopefully some of them
would be able to have several providers on the backend... you know, kindof
like cloudkick; you could buy a vps from cloudkick and they could run it on
me, on slicehost, ec2, or linode; that is adding real value for the customer.

