Kenneth from Virpus emailed me about the launch of their new Xen-based service — Virpus Cloud Hosting. The hosting packages start from $7/month which includes
- 384MB memory
- 20GB storage
- 1000GB/month data transfer
- Xen/onApp
Interestingly that it uses onApp to provide the architecture + control panel. Basically it has extra features such as automatic failover using shared storage, i.e. if the physical server dies, a hot spare (if there is one :) can come back with your VPS online. Not too sure about the type of storage Virpus Cloud uses — it could be SAN or cheaper roll-your-own storage server exposing as iSCSI. It would be interesting to test the throughput + latency on a low end instance.
Interestingly we were just talk about VPS vs. Cloud the other day on LowEndTalk, and I listed out my 3 criteria — instant activation, per-hour billing and API for automation. Obviously I based my criteria on EC2 and Rackspace Cloud, and Virpus Cloud has none of the 3 (instant activation is coming though). It does support HA feature that neither EC2 nor Rackspace Cloud has. At the end, there is still no one who can define what “cloud” really is :)
Servers would be in Kansas City MO like their other services.
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any test ip or download file?
I have to warn everyone here that Virpus is the worst host I have ever had out of the dozens of low cost VPS providers I’ve had in the past.
In 2 months of service, I’ve been on 4 different nodes. 2 of them suffered from extreme IO wait (less than 1 megabyte/second) which even caused SSH to slow to a crawl. When I was moved to the 3rd box, everything seemed ok for 2 weeks until they took it down for “scheduled maintenance”.
Scheduled maintenance, alright I can deal with that. The next morning I wake up to a dead box. I contact support, and I get a canned “your ticket will be escalated to someone who can address your problems” response after 2 hours of silence. Then I see this after nearly 24 hours of downtime.
http://virpus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=111
Oh nice, the box is completely fried and all data has been lost with no chance of recovery? Wonderful. They offer to restart from backup. Too bad their backups don’t work, and even now it is still broken.
http://virpus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=110
In the days following up to “Virpus Cloud”, their responses slowed to 1-2 days. Honestly they should have been working on getting their business fundamentals straight before setting up a Xen platform. I am sure this offering will be just as unprofessional as their OpenVZ platform.
Surely this is only short term then?
If OnApp is set to cost $10/core + $100/cloud after the first 12 months or 100 cores (whichever first) free – then this doesn’t seem viable after that time…
Virpus used to give out free DirectAdmin, which we have no idea how they afforded it. Maybe they don’t pay the full listed price?
Maybe the same can be said about OnApp?
Generally, Virpus uses Dual Dual Opterons (4 cores). Oo, once it gets to the point that they have to pay, they’re out $40/m for the management of that node. If most of their nodes are 8GB (lets say, since these configurations are a dime a dozen on ebay), they’ll make around $80/m per node, after licensing costs. It’s quite possible they’ve started using 16GB boxes (possible with these opterons), allowing them to make around $200/m per node.
It’s unlikely they got much of a deal with OnApp. I got a friend that is actually a sales rep for UKGroup, and he said unless you’re commiting to some serious CPU core counts, you aren’t going to get any sort of budge out of them.
I could be completely wrong on the hardawre spec, maybe they’re using much larger dual quads w/ 24 – 48GB RAM and a massive SAN?
Francisco
DA internally is cheap and either way – if they are in Kansas City and in a provider like Wholesale Internet – the free DA comes through Wholesale who have a nice agreement with DA directly.
OnApp is new and corporate, it’s not a ‘price’ budging thing, yet. If it’d have been on the market 12 months already, sure, they might. But even still – it’s possible, anything is these days.
This.
If a potential customer can promise large deployment, business should be able to work out appropriate license fees to establish themselves — if they are looking at competing against growing market of VM platforms. Especially when they are new to market.
Yes but there’s not too much to compete with. They are still the lowest in the pricing tiers out there and people know it exists – if they pitch too low then up with a tonne of crappy ‘companies’ who won’t be in it for the long run which is what they want. Corporations are looking to OnApp too. It’s not all about what we think in the budget market.
Either way, theres’ little room for budge on those prices, Ditlev has said himself. I can’t see Virpus making a massive core commitment at this point, that’d be rather stupid if they did.