Hosting/Webhosting MEGATHREAD

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adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I'm considering starting a hosting company myself. If I decide to pull the trigger, I intend to start small and keep the personal touch. Since I'm not really advertising here I don't think i need to show off my credentials, though I will say I am a storage and VMware admin by day. I wanted to ask about pricing here. If/when I start I don't plan to have HA anything, and I will make that clear in any marketing. I think I can turn a profit on a plan like this:

1 vCPU
512MB RAM
25GB storage
250GB transfer
1 IP

for $15/mo, with the following options available

Extra RAM $3/256MB
Extra disk $2/5GB
Extra IP $1 per
Transfer $1 per 25GB

I can do this without terribly overselling, based on my experience with virtual workloads. If I can turn any profit whatsoever with this, I have a plan to expand and provide much better reliability options, including offsite data backups and HA for both storage and servers.

The real question here is, will I look like too much of a fly by night rear end in a top hat to even get started?

# ¿ Aug 25, 2010 01:33

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 14:04

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Maneki Neko posted:

Are you counting the costs of paying Vmware for ESX licenses? You can't use free ESXi in a hosting environment, if that was your plan.

Even if I was planning on paying for esxi, it's pretty cheap. Luckily I am not, and I have spent a lot of time playing with KVM, so that is my intended platform.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2010 03:00

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Bob Morales posted:

What kind of disk subsystems would you plan on running?

If the longmode patch is in RHEL 6 I am going to use two nexentastor guests, on seperate hosts, clustered with raid6 volumes mapped directly to them and sandforce or intel SSDs for ZILs. After my first few hosts I'll buy a few disk shelves, use IOMMU to pass a SAS controller straight into the nexentastor guests and have true HA storage, but that piece takes some actual cash so I want to wait until I know my business can support that.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2010 00:00

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

eightysixed posted:

Are you going to run a closed beta like Bob said? This might be a good idea so you can test time needed/customer wants/feasibility et al.

When I actually start, I will almost certainly advertise it to goons with an "as is" disclaimer.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2010 02:47

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