Isohost founder Edwin Peer on SA VPS environment
Isoho.st is a new player in the South African Virtual Private Server arena, offering well thought out packages at reasonable prices, large data bundles, and an innovative interface.
We’ve already reviewed the Isohost service and found it to be up to scratch.
We asked Edwin Peer from Isoho.st a few questions, and he was happy to oblige. If the name is familiar, he has been featured on MyBroadband before, being part of the team that launched NeutrINX, South Africa’s first open and neutral Internet Exchange.
MyBB: There are many VPS providers in South Africa, what made you decide to join the fray?
Edwin Peer: My business partner and I have been discussing doing something in the local VPS space for years. We’ve been unhappy with the state of affairs in South Africa and have a vision for how it can be done right in a local context, but the execution plan scope grew into something unwieldy that we did not privately have the capital resources to pursue. Then I read the “Lean Startup” written by Eric Ries and it changed my thinking completely. Instead of trying to deliver on the grand vision all at once (and never get there), we’ve carved out something a little less ambitious that we can go to market with right away. Once we had a minimal viable product to work with the decision became simple and so here we are.
MyBB: Your bandwidth offerings with your packages are rather aggressive; will that trend continue as bandwidth pricing improves in South Africa?
Edwin Peer: Yes, we expect so. Our business model does not revolve around making money on bandwidth at all and so we simply pass it on to our customers at cost. The present pricing is the best we’ve been able to achieve at our current scale, but as we grow we’ll be in a better position to negotiate with upstream providers and we’ll pass on all those savings to customers too.
Edwin Peer
MyBB: Windows Server 2008 is now offered. How is pricing handled? Is that included in VPS rental?
Edwin Peer: That’s very sneaky of you. We have not announced our Windows offerings yet. I guess you saw the Windows Server ISO in the list of CDROMs you can insert into your isoho.st? But yes, we’re very close now. All the necessary contracts have been signed with Microsoft and we’ve been testing Windows virtual machines on our infrastructure for the last week or so. Pricing will be announced soon and as is the case for bandwidth, our business model does not rely on making money out of Windows licensing either. The problem with Microsoft though, is that all their pricing is US dollar based. So either we have to build in some safety margin to cater for R/$ fluctuations, or we need to simply price it dollars and our customers will see monthly fluctuations as the exchange rate varies. We haven’t decided on which approach we’ll be taking yet, but as it stands right now you can expect to pay around R120 extra per month for a Windows Server license.
MyBB: How long before a MacOS isoho.st application will be available?
Edwin Peer: The SPICE client is open source software, so it’s really just a matter of getting it to build on MacOS. If you poke around on-line, you’ll see that some folk have got it to build successfully, but for some reason that build doesn’t run on Mountain Lion and works only for earlier releases. I’ve tried to build it myself, but I’m still a Mac newbie and haven’t managed to get it right just yet. So, in true Lean spirit and depending on actual validated customer demand, MacOS client support will play out in one of two ways. If we get a massive number of MacOS customers banging down our doors faster than we can resolve the MacOS SPICE client issue, then we’ll simply enable VNC support on our VMs in parallel with SPICE support. There are plenty good VNC clients available for MacOS, but that’s a path we’d rather avoid if we can. SPICE is technically superior to VNC and if we’re afforded the time to do it right, then we will.
MyBB: Can users negotiate for custom packages, or are the offerings set in stone at this point?
Edwin Peer: We’ve tried to provide a broad cross section of specifications that we hope will suit most customer needs. At our current scale, it’s best if we can sell chunks of physical hardware in multiples that divide up a physical machine evenly (without remainder). Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know about customers with special requirements. We’ll obviously try to accommodate those needs wherever we can. While we’re small though, our flexibility to bend is necessarily less than it will be once we have attained larger scale.
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