Ask HN: What would you want in a new VPS company? | Hacker News Reader

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

4 pointsjameshk14 comments

What sort of things would you want or expect from a new VPS provider, like Digital Ocean or Linode?

* 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.

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.

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

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.

From the perspective of a user who isn't really experienced in running servers:

* I think they're called snapshots. Let me setup my VPS the way I want it, upload my stuff, etc, then let me backup/save my entire VPS on your servers. Two weeks later, when I'll try to setup a mail server for the first time in my life, I will probably break a lot of stuff. With a few clicks, I should be able to restore everything in a matter of minutes.

* Slashdot 'protection'. If I bought some starter package, and at some point I start getting 100%-1000% my usual traffic, then instead of killing my VPS for abuse or letting it suffocate on its own, make minimum effort, like boosting my resources, etc. Reach out, help me decide if I want to upgrade, or give me enough time to move out.

* Wiki/guides/tutorials. Maybe try creating a community where users can request guides, and (heavy) contributors could get some free server time :)

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.

Customized images. For instance, I want a simple debian based email and web server. All I need to do is enter the domain name and it handles the rest, as well as maybe giving me instructions on adding SSL certs and so on. A freeswitch PBX - again, all I have to enter is a few things and it is setup for me. There are lots of ways to do this, but it would be a big attraction to some folks if it just worked on setup.

The biggest thing I always look for in a VPS host is customisation. Let me choose the memory, disk space and prepaid transfer allowance. Being able to choose the number of cores would be a nice bonus.

I realise this makes billing more complicated but it must be possible, my current host offers this (and the option to rent a dedicated physical machine(s) to get full resources to myself)

Actually something else that would be nice (I haven't looked into the reality of it with an OSS hypervisor like xen) is something I saw a few years ago with ESX: the images are stored on a SAN instead of local disks, and can be migrated (even while running) between physical hosts when required (scheduled downtime, fault, etc) without a reboot.

The "live migration" part is less important but a traditional (ie not volatile like with AWS/"cloud") VPS that can survive a host failure without a complex restore from a week old backup - (auto) nominate the new host and bring up the vm exactly as it was pre-failure

One-click Rails setup. Ideally, I would sign up for the service, select a VPS size, "create" a new app (using your built-in web panel) and deploy from my terminal. When creating a new app I could select the Ruby and Rails size, DB etc. Basically, a very convenient Rails VPS host.

How does this differ from Heroku? Pricing, hopefully.

Although it's a new technology, I'd eventually like to see VPS hosting built around Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), if at all possible. As it stands now, we have to completely trust that the VPS host isn't going to do something nefarious with our data; this should go some way towards mitigating that.

Lot more memory at lower cost - e.g something like the 64GB linode for $100 a month. Would not mind sacrificing storage space and bandwidth (or even CPU power) for it.

Would love some more comments!

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