Isoho.st cuts virtual server prices

Pricing isn't bad but the storage is where you get nailed.

A 3TB SATA drive costs around R1700 which works out to R28 per 50GB.
Paying R95 per month for an extra 50GB is crazy even when you factor in RAID controllers and redundancy, etc.
 
Paul_S said:
A 3TB SATA drive costs around R1700 which works out to R28 per 50GB.
Paying R95 per month for an extra 50GB is crazy even when you factor in RAID controllers and redundancy, etc.
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Is it though? Our redundancy is 2x on data, so by your reasoning that's R56 worth of disk platters, but that only takes into account cap-ex on the disk itself. The physical disks are by far an insignificant part of the cap-ex, let alone the monthly running cost of the solution. There is far more significant cap-ex than the disk cost that goes into the storage nodes (servers) the disks are attached to. Then, there's rack space rental, power costs, support staff, etc. which really makes up the bulk of the cost structure.
 
Let's assume 2x redundancy + a R5000 raid controller + 10W power consumption per drive.
Capex = 2 * R1700 + R5000 = R8400
Electricity = 20W = 175.2kWh per annum = R21 per month (at a generous R1.50/kWh)

Assuming the hardware is written off over a three year period we can work out the cost per annum.
(R8400 + (R21 * 12 * 3)) / 3 = R3052 per annum.
Billing R95 per month per 50GB = (3000/50) * R95 * 12 = R68400 per annum

So that's a R65384 per annum margin.
That's why I host my own server at home - works out much cheaper even if I don't have the network redundancy in place.
If it wasn't for the storage costs I'd have gone the VPS route long ago.
 
Paul_S said:
So that's a R65384 per annum margin.
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I wish we made those kinds of margins on each disk, but we don't.

You're still vastly underestimating the capital costs of the solution we provide. I'm not going to get into the details of our cost structure here, but suffice to say, it's not simply a raid controller and a couple of disks. There are also high end servers (we are redundant in terms of storage nodes, not just disks) and a high speed redundant 20Gbps network connecting them together that you haven't accounted for (the network cards are several thousand rand each alone, not to mention the switch gear). Then, because we're using Ceph in our storage layer, there are additional high speed write journal disks installed for each storage disk (4 disks, not 2). Building highly available redundant storage solutions comes at a capital cost that far exceeds merely slapping a raid controller and a couple disks into your (already existing and not accounted for in your costing) home server.

Capital costs aside (which are significantly more than your estimation), a significant portion of our storage costs are actually running costs. Renting 2U of rack space per storage node comes at a monthly cost too and we can only pack so many disks into that space. Then, there's the cost of supporting all that infrastructure.
 
I understand, I just wish it was cheaper. :cry:
It maybe makes sense for business hosting but I wish there was a cheap VPS solution for personal hosting.
 
Paul_S said:
I understand, I just wish it was cheaper. :cry:
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Heh, so do we. ;)

We're certainly not getting rich off fat margins, that I can promise you. We are a low margin business that will rely on massive volumes to make us rich and we have a long road in front of us to get to that point.
 
Paul_S said:
I understand, I just wish it was cheaper. :cry:
It maybe makes sense for business hosting but I wish there was a cheap VPS solution for personal hosting.
Click to expand...

I, for the same reason, have the server at home... gone back to it after a few years, too many of these guys trying to coin it now.
 
Paul_S said:
I understand, I just wish it was cheaper. :cry:
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isoho.st's pricing is very competitive when compared to other VPS providers. They are also the only one that actively quotes their contention ratios and one of only two that could quote it to me when asked. Without knowing the contention ratios you have no idea how many VM's are being crammed onto the hardware.


Paul_S said:
It maybe makes sense for business hosting but I wish there was a cheap VPS solution for personal hosting.
Click to expand...
Sonic2k said:
I, for the same reason, have the server at home... gone back to it after a few years, too many of these guys trying to coin it now.
Click to expand...

I used to host my servers at home, but moved them at the beginning of last year to isoho.st for the reliability and redundancy that I just couldn't get on any reasonable home-hosted setup.

Granted, all of my servers are business related. Perspective matters here I guess. I'm also not that interested in large amounts of storage as opposed to high IO throughput and redundancy.

I do, however, host a single virtual server not hosted with isoho.st for offsite backups amd redundancy of a single service, but that will fall away pretty soon with isoho.st upcoming offsite backups. This offsite server has very similar specs to all of my lower-end isoho.st servers and regularly performs worse than them.

The only physical server I have left is a stratum-1 ntp server that simply cannot be virtualised for obvious reasons.
 
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Paul_S said:
Let's assume 2x redundancy + a R5000 raid controller + 10W power consumption per drive.
Capex = 2 * R1700 + R5000 = R8400
Electricity = 20W = 175.2kWh per annum = R21 per month (at a generous R1.50/kWh)

Assuming the hardware is written off over a three year period we can work out the cost per annum.
(R8400 + (R21 * 12 * 3)) / 3 = R3052 per annum.
Billing R95 per month per 50GB = (3000/50) * R95 * 12 = R68400 per annum

So that's a R65384 per annum margin.
That's why I host my own server at home - works out much cheaper even if I don't have the network redundancy in place.
If it wasn't for the storage costs I'd have gone the VPS route long ago.
Click to expand...

Hi Paul and Sonic2k, I am using Paul's quote and Sonic2k's comment about "coining it" to illustrate something here.

You are quoting SATA drives, but you are not quoted enterprise spec drives. Allow me to break it down based on some recent quotes I have received.

4TB Drive (7200RPM SATA) R4,500 per drive
3TB (7200rpm SAS) R4200 per drive
600GB (15000rpm SAS) R3200 per drive

You generally fit 36 in a server, and then get storage out of them depending on how you want your on device redundancy to go. A safe bet would be 10-18 per array for the larger disks, and then 20 = 36 for the faster smaller disks.

Then there is the server chassis that includes the RAID array and you are looking at anything from R80 000 to R250 000 at the low end of the market for the chassis, and then you can pay R25000 per CPU or more, depending on your desired spec level. The article quotes 36 core servers, so 36 x R15000 (let's be kind here) = R540 000.

Then you get RAM, and I have paid R4000 per 8GB RAM chip. This is registerred ECC and this was about three years ago that I can remember off the top of my head. Depending on your chassis and brand you can pay double or triple that, and they will be charged in pairs. Generally a server will have 4-8 of them, some can have 24 or more in various chip sizes.

So let me just round up where we are at the moment with our back of the napkin calculation:

Disks

Low end:
10x 4TB disks x R4500
1x chassis R80 000
4x 8GB RAM x R4000 (2012 pricing)
4x CPU x R25 000

That is a low end thumbsuck for you, and even that works out at R241 000.00 for one server.

Now you want redundancy, so that means at least twice that, so we get to R482 000.00 for a very basic hosted VM platform with very bad CPU performance.

Now you want to host these babies. These are not 1U servers, so you will have 2U at least x2, and that can go anything from R10 000 each per month upwards. I am certain on volume you can get less than that. If you buy your own rack which has 42 U in it you could get down to R6000 per U or maybe less, but this is a monthly expense. Often this only includes a token amount of bandwidth, so that will be extra as well.

So that is R40 000 per month for rackspace to host your servers in a proper datacentre.

Other old salts will definitely poke holes in my calculations and pricing, so a YMMV disclaimer is applied. Isoho.st also got a fantastic deal on bandwidth as well if their pricing is anything to go by. When I hosted we saw about 6c per gig for included bandwidth, and then overage was charged at 25c per gig. That they can sell it at roughly 10c per gig is impressive.

I suspect that volume players like Terraco can give better pricing than what I quoted for the hosting, but there is not a lot of wiggle room on the hardware level. I have personally commissioned servers that started at R300 000 per chassis alone, and upgrades added another R100 000 to that and those servers only had four disks each.

This is not home hosting or an Mweb rented server that gives you unlimited bandwidth but gets throttled up the wazoo. These are servers that give you 1GBPS network connectivity without throttling and with an uptime guarantee from one of the better Datacenters. I have worked in the IS dc for clients and they work hard to make it a proper environment.

[edited because apparently I can't engrish or math.]
 
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macarbiter said:
Your engrish wasn't too fony, but your math was inexcusable. ;)
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I tried my best :P

I did not go for absolute accuracy, but wanted to get the idea across that when you look at your home PC and think "Eh I'll fling a RAID controller and a few cheapy 4TB hard drives in there and do what they are doing AND PROFIT!" you are missing the point entirely.

Enterprise spec hardware is insanely expensive, and when you look at a R95 vm with 50GB storage and think "I can put 200 on my PC at home, these guys are ripping people off!" you are really not taking the true costs into account.
 
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