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Comment by RowanH | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I was just about to sign up to their Managed service offering (basically they monitor the VPS's and if a monitored URL goes down they do initial trouble shooting for the basics to bring things back online before they contact you). I've rarely seen this offered elsewhere. Any other hosting co's HN knows about that does this (and had good experiences with?) ? Vultr doesn't from what I can see. I prefer my servers a little less than crispy so OVH isn't on the menu.

[ I had my first network interruption on my VPS in years this weekend... so just a touch nervous and looking at other options ]

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Rack space (used?) to offer something like this and it was somewhat worthwhile if what you were doing was bog-standard.

I found that if you were even a bit off the beaten path they didn’t do much more than reboot and check if the disks had filled up.

Yeah I remember from back in the day. The Linode offering (assuming it works) gives some degree of confidence if a key person or two are out of action, you still can get back online if it's something not app related. And it's almost always the stupid stuff or an Apache reboot to get back online. For the money is worth that initial peace of mind.

In that awkward in-between phase of starting to grow and not quite there yet for another set of back-end hands :)

I was actually thinking of how this story reminded me that Rackspace's cloud product started off as the acquisition of Slicehost.

At MNX, we manage your infrastructure at your existing provider or ours (mnx.io) and provide 24x7 monitoring and response. Our customers usually have 10+ servers, and pricing starts at ~$2500/month.

Thanks for the response. A bit too spendy for an early stage (bootstrapped!) product. For comparison Linode charges $100USD/month per VPS.

It does look to be a good price/value.. though I wonder if they continue with that under Akamai. We're at the $250/server price point -- and we include a number of items:

  - Realtime kernel/lib patching.
  - Patch management.
  - 24x7 monitoring and response.
  - Metric collections, alerting, and health reviews. 
  - Tuning and infrastructure best practices wherever you are (AWS/GCP/Azure/mnx/colo).
  - Ad-hoc support - example this week -- one customer who runs large ecommerce valentine day related -- needed eyes on all infrastructure.  We sat in slack with them, and huddled realtime to work through any issues.

Thanks - appreciate the reply ! Will keep you guys in mind in the future. Translating it into real terms, at an early (early) stage bootstrapped, $2500USD/month = $48'000NZD per annum which is about 1/3 of a good full stack salary in New Zealand.

I can certainly see in future when we're a bit bigger it might be interesting and having a lot more infrastructure to manage - but right now when we've barely (infact only once in past year had an issue) then not quite justifiable.

Like I say, it's that awful middle ground of "can't really justify it, but also would like to be able to switch off!" I'll reach out to stay in touch for future.

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