Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company?

#11

Post by castell » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 1:15 PM UTC

* free incoming traffic (like Linode)

* cheaper outgoing traffic or Slashdot effect 'protection' (and no weird combined quoate)

* no fixed plans: let me choose the memory, disk space (SSD and HDD), cores like AWS EC2 but as cheap as Digital Ocean.

* no vendor lock-in! use XEN/KVM but let me download the whole image, let me backup everything myself, let me upload my own images

* easy to use web interface like Digital Ocean, AWS

* easy REST-API to control start/stop/restart/launch new copy of servers

* offer additional services like: paid load balancer, free/paid "online" snapshot, server analytics

* build a great community and offer good documentation for common server issues.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company?

#12

Post by Beached » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 2:01 PM UTC

Make sure you offer Windows Server. While to many of the guy's on this bored windows is not a necessity, for many enterprises or in-experienced users, windows is a must. Get your hands on Windows server 2012 R2 at the least.

I know all of my customers are very cost conscious and AWS and Azure's variable cost system scares them (Forget to turn off VPS, surprising amount of traffic all of a sudden), possibly bringing VPS's back to a fixed monthly cost that can compete with the big guy's?

I know I would personally love the heck out of a simple yet powerful UI, AWS is powerful but the UI looks terrible and is intimidating to a new user. Azure's UI looks fantastic however is lacking many easily features such as scheduling servers to go up and down, creating backups of data disks and VM's, etc(Instead relying on runbooks and Azure automation which requires them to become scripters).

Offer a year long free tier like AWS, a small 1 core 1GB RAM vps running a linux OS. This feature will bring many curious eye's your way, and while it may seem like you are throwing away your product, truly free will attract the eyes of many potential clients already indentured in AWS, Azure, DO, etc, who would have never bothered to spend the time otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company?

#13

Post by jameshk » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 2:19 PM UTC

Beached wrote: post #12

Make sure you offer Windows Server. While to many of the guy's on this bored windows is not a necessity, for many enterprises or in-experienced users, windows is a must. Get your hands on Windows server 2012 R2 at the least. I know all of my customers are very cost conscious and AWS and Azure's variable cost system scares them (Forget to turn off VPS, surprising amount of traffic all of a sudden), possibly bringing V…

I'm actually working on a VPS startup that revolves around a simple yet powerful UI.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company?

#14

Post by matheweis » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 5:32 PM UTC

The ability to use all of the allocated resources.

Some of my sites run some fairly CPU intensive image processing on the backend, and after being booted off 3 or 4 VPS providers for "using too many resources", I finally just broke down and got myself a mid-range dedicated server.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company?

#15

Post by pjungwir » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 7:42 PM UTC

thenomad wrote: post #7

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with the current offerings on the market. If you could offer a lot more power for the same or less cost, I'd be interested. Other that that, I'm moderately unlikely to switch. Oh - specifically I'd be interested in a VPS with tons of data storage. Those are rather hard to find in the current market.

> specifically I'd be interested in a VPS with tons of data storage

Me too. With Linode etc you can't scale this independently of CPU, memory, etc. When I had a project last year that needed this, I finally just rented a dedicated instance, because that was the easiest/cheapest way to get a few terabytes of storage.