
Announcing Resource-Based Pricing for Google Compute Engine - manigandham
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/announcing-resource-based-pricing-for-google-compute-engine.html
======
devwastaken
I've been looking at costs for having a free service like Freenode, but doing
VoIP and images and such. The main problem has been affordable bandwidth with
a decent number of cores (8 or so) since nginx improves dramatically with 8 or
12. But at that pricing you end up paying for a dedicated 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s
unmetered, when there's not going to be that much bandwidth all the time. Or,
you get dumb small limits like 10TB a month egress. Bandwidth and hardware
prices today should make it possible to just be charged as you use it. Though
I'm not sure if the tech behind allowing live scaling through virtualization
has to be home made and therefore real expensive, defeating the savings.

~~~
aviv
Meaning offer free VoIP?

~~~
devwastaken
Yes.

~~~
aviv
Why not go with bare metal from say OVH for this type of service? Running a
free VoIP service on top of a cloud provider is kind of silly, not just from a
cost perspective, but also having shared resources for your voice/WebRTC media
servers. But then the question is, why offer free VoIP service to begin with?
You're going to invite a lot of abuse and fraud attempts very quickly. Sure
you can guard against that, but is it really worth it?

There's a massively booming VoIP industry right now (despite the perception of
"too many players" in the market). Go out there and make money while providing
good affordable service. Charge $10-$15 per line while the big guys ask for
$25-$50. VoIP seats add up fast, and it's very nice MRR with not a lot of
hassle if you run things right and give customers tools to get things done
without calling for support for every little thing.

Or go the route that Dialpad is taking with their limited Free product
(dialpad.com/free) which is kind of a bait-and-switch because surely a
business will need to convert to a paid subscription of some sort if they
don't end up going out of business in the first few months.

~~~
devwastaken
I'm talking about VoIP as in Mumble, Teamspeak, Discord, etc. And i am talking
about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of
virtualization, but if doable without needing to be the size of Google could
be a good business because you don't need to completely reserve hardware and a
bandwidth line.

~~~
mmt
> i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require
> some sort of virtualization

This is a bit confusing, as "bare metal" is usually used as a contrast to
virtualization, although it I suppose it could mean "not cloud" (but further
muddled by AWS offering "bare metal" instance types).

More importantly, though, if you're thinking of some kind of VPS provider,
where you'd dynamically allocate and de-allocate servers from their inventory,
there's no reason you couldn't run directly on the hardware with no
hypervisor.

Virtualization is only strictly necessary for multi-tenancy, such as if you
need to allocate only half of a server.

------
captain_perl
I've hosted high-bandwidth services before and here's what I recommend ...

Start with a dedicated hosting provider until you build up a user base.

Then when you need extreme bandwidth, Hurricane Electric is the affordable way
to go.

For $400/month, you can host your own servers up to 15 amps/rack and get 1
Gbps sustained (you can likely negotiate for more bw.) Their remote-hands is
free and expert enough.

------
ukoki
Nice. This means frequent VM repaving for security reasons / OS updates will
not reset the sustained use discount.

~~~
manigandham
That already was the case before if you weren't changing instance types. The
changes now are regional vs zonal and apply at the CPU/GB granularity rather
than instance shape.

