

Rate My Startup: Xen VPS Hosting - tres

Our VPS hosting project (www.onvps.com) is up and running. We'd like some final help flexing the system before we take the 'beta' label off.<p>The deal: Get 99 days on a full VPS with 256MB RAM, 8gig disk and 2 VCPUs and one of the few remaining IPV4 addresses :) for $0.99.<p>99 days for 99 cents (after is $5.50 monthly).<p>We'd like to give away accounts for this, but since we're in a market that sees frequent fraud and abuse, we really need a credit card number we can validate. So, we're trying to make it as low cost as possible.<p>Use the following URL to get the coupon:<p>https://management.onvps.com/signup?product_id=8&#38;coupon_code=My99CentServer<p>Thanks for your help!
[edit: add URL to company website]
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dmc
What are you doing that is different to other VPS providers?

[edit] that popup on your homepage... It just wants to make me jump ship. You
have a nice uncluttered design, no need to have a pseudo-popup that makes your
website seem it's hosted on geocities :)

~~~
tres
> What are you doing that is different to other VPS providers?

We're trying to be the VPS provider we always wish we had.

One example is the kernel. Pretty much every other VPS provider gives you no
access to the kernel. You either get the choice of running a shared kernel
(OpenVZ providers) or having a 'blessed' kernel loaded by the provider on Xen.
Ultimately, you are stuck with what they give you. So if you want to run a
specific kernel, you're out of luck. And if your provider is running OpenVZ,
good luck even loading a module.

Giving full access to the system, including the kernel is the kind of thing we
thing a VPS provider should do.

> that popup on your homepage...

Thank you. I really appreciate this feedback. To be honest, I had the same
reaction the first time I saw it... I've been working on everything from the
order process to the hardware node, but the onvps.com home page has been taken
care of by a web designer.

~~~
roxstar
It wasn't just the popup for me it was the stock photos that turned me off
(you have a bunch of suited guys and gals on the about page but scroll down to
what looks like comments of all guys names and descriptions.

Linode and prgmr give you pretty much full access unless you are somehow
offering something else?

Some tips for your homepage, get rid of that popup it is the bane of many
internet users. Maybe show some pictures of your admin if it looks alright,
and stay away from stock photos. State where the hell your servers are
located.

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tres
> Linode and prgmr give you pretty much full access unless you are somehow
> offering something else?

Linode is a good example of how we're different. As per my knowledge, you can
have your own kernel, that's true, but you need to make a special request to
support & then wait for them to modify your server. It's not included out of
the box.

We include this out of the box on every server. I know that prgmr does the
same; however, they're the exception in the industry.

prgmr is the exception in many ways. Our hope is to provide the same kind of
service for grown-ups while also providing a robust set of features that help
make management easy and doing it for a good price. They have a very focused
target market, but they don't appeal to all VPS customers (otherwise, everyone
would already be a prgrmr customer).

Thanks for your feedback about the website! Very much appreciated.

~~~
roxstar
> Linode is a good example of how we're different. As per my knowledge, you
> can have your own kernel, that's true, but you need to make a special
> request to support & then wait for them to modify your server. It's not
> included out of the box.

Nope you just compile it yourself set up grub right and choose 64bit or 32bit
pv-grub for your kernel

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nwmcsween
This market is highly saturated and in reality I doubt this business will go
far without a unique feature or technology. Business is brutally honest.

~~~
tres
Thanks very much for your honesty. I fully understand and agree.

I think that in the US, there are some parallels in the hosting industry to
what happened to ISPs a decade ago; the small guys are giving way to big
players in the market. The biggest slices of the pie are just getting bigger
while the remaining crumbs are few and far between.

For the small guys, there's a race to the bottom in pricing and most times
this is at the expense of quality... There's really no other way to easily
differentiate yourself from the other guys.

But there are important differences between the hosting industry and the mom &
pop ISPs of yore, the big one being the target market. Having name recognition
works to get the undiscerning, but the average VPS user is more knowledgable
about the product they are getting. And the product itself is much more
complex; the needs of any two businesses are quite different.

This presents opportunities. And the popularity and ultimate acquisition of
the ISP Speakeasy by Best Buy shows that building a loyal base of knowledgable
customers can pay big dividends.

Things have been pretty well saturated for a long, long time and there's still
a niche market in the US for good quality hosting companies that care about
the individuals they serve. (Although that niche becomes smaller as the big
guys' quality, cost and ease-of-use improves year after year.)

Ultimately, hosting just isn't a business that can go viral. There's just too
many physical limitations. It is lucrative and I think it can be a good long-
play, but it's dependent on getting and keeping a relatively small critical
mass and keeping those customers happy.

I really appreciate your feedback and honesty. Solving the difference problem
itself is really the innovation in this business; there's not really many ways
to distinguish yourself as a hosting provider, so how do you do it?

~~~
nwmcsween
I wouldn't, I would offer services or products to the companies doing the
hosting. As for an advantage - there are none within a technological scope
that haven't been used and without incurring large R&D costs, maybe seamless
failover using conntrack would be new.

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colanderman
I'm on RapidXen right now. I've had a very good experience with them but
you're cheaper ($5.50/mo to get twice what I'm getting at RapidXen for
$7.50/mo). How do you do it?

(Edit: RapidXen provides swap as well... would it be viable to run swap on
your disks?)

Also, what are your network policies? e.g. is there a bandwidth limit?

~~~
tres
> How do you do it?

The pricing is based on our need to get the word out. It's our loss leader so
we can start getting customers in the door. We plan on keeping the prices as
low as possible, but we won't be keeping them this low indefinitely.

We're working in coordination with Wowrack (<http://www.wowrack.com>) for our
datacenter and systems. They give us a great price on our overhead, so we're
passing it on.

> would it be viable to run swap on your disks?

We do provide a dedicated swap disk included with each server (2x RAM). In
addition, if you wanted to add a swap file in your VPS, you certainly could.

> what are your network policies?

Customers have free access to do anything over the network as long as it's not
an outbound attack against another server. We don't limit the network unless
we get multiple reports of outbound attacks. And finally, before we limit
anything, we make sure the customer knows about the reports & try to see if
there's any mitigating circumstances that we may help in resolving.

> is there a bandwidth limit?

The bandwidth limit is based upon the package. For the Vps256, it's 110GB
monthly & $1.00 for every 10GB over.

~~~
colanderman
Thanks for the info. I'll be keeping you guys bookmarked. Good luck!

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tres
I should clarify that the prices listed are for life. Sign up now & that's
your price for life. As we start gaining traction, our signup price will be
going up, but already existing customers will never see their prices go up as
we grow.

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roxstar
Why don't you offer 32bit OSs especially considering that all your servers are
under 4gb ram

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tres
Thank you for your feedback!

We went with only 64 bit OSs to:

1) limit the number of choices available to the customer (simplify choices --
make it easier to decide)

2) lower the overhead of managing OS templates.

We've included a kernel in every domU in hopes that most 64 bit issues we've
seen with VPSs won't be problematic for our customers.

~~~
btmorex
64bit only is a significant disadvantage for lower memory VPS's. I'm not sure
what problem you're trying to solve wrt including a kernel or whatever, but
running 32bit gives you substantially more memory for applications.

~~~
tres
Thanks for the excellent feedback.

We've tried to do everything we could to get those old VPS memory problems out
of the system. In our experience, most performance problems with VPS systems
are due to overselling of resources on the node level, or plans that simply
are unrealistic (i.e. 64MB of RAM) not actual client limits. We're ensuring
that each server has dedicated resources allotted to it. We don't oversell our
systems.

We've tried to offer the best possible price for the resources, so although
memory usage is not optimal for smaller systems, we have tried to offset this
by offering realistic server resources for a good price.

The 32 bit issue is something we'll definitely revisit; however, there's a
technical limitation with pygrub that will only run a 64 bit kernel when
loaded from a 64 bit dom0.

There's two different ways we can overcome this: the same way that everyone
else does -- by loading a 32 bit kernel & managing that, or by having
dedicated 32 bit hardware nodes for our low memory VPSs.

Internally, either option has its own drawbacks & problems.

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beatpanda
Thanks for this. What's the cancellation policy?

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tres
Cancel at any time -- it's all automated in the control panel; however, there
are no refunds for the unused balance. :(

