The Hosting Provider Time Machine: Paying 2006 prices in 2009
statsheet.com
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ChunkHost has 2GB instances for $66/mo. You can get a 512MB instance to try for free during their beta.
Prgmr (which is very, very basic and much harder to use) offers 2GB instances for $36. However, their service isn't so automated.
The issue is that Slicehost now operates on a premium level - they're a big name. And you're paying for that name. Linode offers slightly more competitive pricing, but again name.
People are willing to pay up a little in order to get something they think will have better uptime. But this is one of the reasons that I left Slicehost. When they started, you could get a 512MB dedicated server for around $70-100 with no RAID and crappy reliability. The cost thing is starting to swing back toward dedicated hardware as for $160 a place like Softlayer will give you a 4GB dedicated box or an 8GB server for $210 (both coming with 2,000GB of bandwidth). It's still hard to match on the low-end because when you're dealing with dedicated hardware you have electricity and rackspace which, well, a server has to take up physical space. But Slicehost and other VPS providers haven't cut prices and adjusted as things changed which has made dedicated boxes a lot more attractive.
If you have 7 2GB slices, you might want to look at a dedicated box. Buy a box with 16GB of RAM, 4 processing cores, and get your VMs running on it all for around $460. That compares favorably to the $910 Slicehost would charge. Gets even better at 32GB for $660 vs. $1820.
Just remember that VPSs aren't the be all and end all. They're a tool. If the pricing of other options is working out better for you, look into that.
Something to like about this situation: most startups price too low out of the gate, and should be raising prices regularly. Here Slicehost gets a (small) shadow price increase over time, as its costs for storage and compute decrease.
Also, I don't think this is a "small" shadow price increase. Hardware gets cheaper by 50% year-over-year. Even if you cut that in half, a 25% yearly decrease in hardware costs is pretty good for them.
Other people value their time and effort differently. Slicehost might not get them. I think they've factored that in. =)
Any positive/negative experience with them?
While they have precanned "instance types" as well, they also offer a separate Elastic Block Storage service where you can ask for as much storage as you want, and it acts like a virtual hard disk on your partition.
Now, if you want to treat hard drive space as a commodity, there are many service providers out there who are happy to meet your needs. You'll have to put up with some of the pain associated with dealing with a commodity service. Slicehost (sensibly) has no particular desire to commoditize their offering or price like they have done so.
I'm also curious how you know that their numbers would actually let them drop the price yet. You really think they pay for all their hardware and software with a few month's worth of fees? That after paying personnel/electricity/marketing/rent each month they're going to wipe out the long-term investment numbers each month? I'm willing to bet they have some kind of spreadsheet somewhere and understand where they stand on their pricing requirements much better than you do.
You are right; the hardware cost is only a small part of the total outgoings for this type of business.
In that regard, the pricing model tends towards how big a slice of the 'pie' each customer gets to buy. The 'pie' is the total amount of hardware available for customer use.
So if you want to buy more disk space only, that would reduce the size of the pie for everyone else who wants disk space, so you'd need to reduce the allowed disk space on all plans to leave some 'spare' in case someone wants to expand their disk.
Slicehost instead have maximized the amount of disk space per customer and that hasn't left any spare, so you are (in theory) already getting a good deal.
Perhaps there's room for a small startup company to arbitrate buying and selling of extra disk space amongst Slicehost customers :-)
Or maybe Slicehost could use some of the money to buy some more disk space and hook it up.
What you're suggesting means buying a new "pie", because they've sliced up the existing pie and allocated all of it, completely. This would mean buying more datacenter space, more servers, more networking equipment. When you want to offer disk space to customers as a product, it has to scale, you can't just plug in a USB HDD every time someone emails to ask for more space.
Aren't they already using a SAN? Aren't they continuously expanding their "pie" as they get more customers and replace superannuated servers? So not USB but SATA: populating the new servers with 500GB disks instead of 250GB, or three disks instead of two. Maybe you know more about how Slicehost operates than I do, and I'm wrong about the above? If so, I'd love to have details.
Not necessarily. What about inflation? It's remarkable that technology continues to become cheaper while our currency is decreasing in value. It just makes me wonder what we'd be paying if we used hard money instead.
2) What do you need on your Slicehost VPS that you couldn't just dump onto your home storage device?
2) I can dump it on my home drive just like i could dump it on S3, but I do a lot of parsing on the files and copying them back and forth when needed is a headache I'd rather avoid. And then there is my front-end server that caches large portions of the website dynamically which I can't move to my home drive