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Comment by tych0 | Hacker News Reader

Why does every host offer a plan that scales at the same rate in every column (CPU, RAM, Disk space, bytes/month)?

I can think of almost no application which requires lots of all of these. Why isn't there a host which allows you to scale your own requirements? Is it a technical thing, or just another form of "oversell and underprovision because most people won't use their plan"?

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It makes things easier for the provider, build 1000 identical boxes then sell by the slice. It means they don't have to build odd boxes to deal with odd demand, or try to pair up high memory use low compute use with a low memory use high compute use client nodes.

We offer completely scalable hosting at UpCloud. You get to choose your CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth is billed by the actual traffic.

So I wouldn't call it a technical thing, but more of a strategic decision in how you want to position your company + offering.

> and bandwidth is billed by the actual traffic

Is that billed by usage, or billed by throughput? I'd love to get a cheap rate on something like "guaranteed 10Gbps port; 100GB monthly transfer cap."

I did not see it mentioned except in the copy for the free trial: Are your servers at UpCloud all equipped with SSDs?

Also check patio11's article on simplifying your pricing models: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/

http://steadfast.net offers customizable resources (CPU dedication, CPU cores, Memory, Storage, Network interfaces)

it's far easier to standardize (xsmall, small, medium, large, xlarge) than to allow for custom requirements for the purposes of communication. Most people don't necessarily know exactly how much they'll need, so its easy to just say "large".

Plus, in a virtual setup, optimizing allocations with custom requirements is a far trickier algorithmic problem.

Well there are many host that does this. Dediserve for example. But most of these Host are comparatively more expensive.

At www.gandi.net you can add processor core, ram, disk space and network interfaces separately.

Resulting at higher prices for almost all use cases than this and DigitalOcean ...

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