Krydos Posted November 17, 2022 Posted November 17, 2022 We began offering VPS hosting in April 2018. As more and more VPS customers signed up we noticed that our hard drive speeds kept dipping lower and lower. By April 2020 things had gotten bad enough that we decided to start giving away 1 GB free memory on every VPS to help improve speeds, and started a fundraiser to buy some faster hard drives. In August 2021 we finally got the new hard drives installed, and things improved considerably. By December 2021 we were certain that the hard drive speed issue was solved and our VPS service had gotten so popular that we had run out of space to create new servers. Since we had zero spare memory we decided it was time to end the 1 GB free memory sale which had been running for 20 months at that point. The VPS customers who already had the free 1 GB of memory were allowed to keep it, but the time has come for that to end now too. Once again our VPS service has gotten so popular that we don't have any space left to create new VPS so it wouldn't be fair to turn people away, while at the same time giving away free memory to other people. As long as the memory wasn't being used anyways it was fine to give it away for free, but it's been a year since the sale ended so we're going to end the sale for the VPS that were grandfathered in to the old sale price as well. If your VPS has the old sale price still you'll have 2 options: Continue paying the same amount you've always paid on the same subscription you've always used, but you'll have 1 GB less memory. Or begin paying the same fair price that everyone else pays for the memory that you've been enjoying for free for so long. We will be emailing all of the affected customers to give them this choice as well. The default option will be #1 to continue on the existing payment subscription with 1 GB less memory unless we hear back from you wishing to continue with the same memory that you have now. When we started looking at the numbers we were quite surprised that there were so many customers still using the old sale price. It's proof of how loyal our users are, and proof of how great of service we provide that so many people have stuck around for so long. If you have any questions please let us know. Thanks for your understanding, and thanks for being part of the HelioHost community.
badrihippo Posted November 26, 2022 Posted November 26, 2022 Thanks for the heads-up! I'll run an analysis and see how much RAM my server is using; my guess is my team will choose to keep it for the upgraded amount since we can afford it at least for now.
badrihippo Posted November 26, 2022 Posted November 26, 2022 By the way, I've noticed the price jump is significantly more when upgrading RAM than it is for storage or even CPU upgrades. Is this because CPUs scale better but RAM has to be added linearly each time, or something? (Just trying to understand how this works; it's a pattern I've noticed in other hosting providers too)
Krydos Posted November 26, 2022 Author Posted November 26, 2022 Memory is what we have the least of and therefore run out of first.
badrihippo Posted November 27, 2022 Posted November 27, 2022 Oh, so it's more of a "we have less of it so use it sparingly" thing than a "that's just how much it costs" thing?
Krydos Posted November 27, 2022 Author Posted November 27, 2022 Well to give you an idea of what the various stats cost up front, configuring the next server we can purchase: Memory is a one-time cost $3.81 per 1 GB. Example: 32 GB server is $504.87 and 1024 GB server is $4280.87. We charge $3 per month per 1 GB. Storage is a one-time cost $2.95 per 1 GB. Example: 600 GB server is $523.87 and 3072 GB server is $7840. We charge $0.01 per month per 1 GB. CPU is a one-time cost $56.29 per 1 core. Example 8 core server is $504.87 and 22 core server is $1292.87. We charge $0.25 per month per 1 core. CPUs are expensive up front, but all of the VPS on a server can share the CPU time. Most VPS only use 1% - 5% CPU at any given time. Plus we don't allow mining and other activity that would use 100% CPU so there is usually plenty of idle time. Storage is pretty expensive up front, but the speed of the storage is similar to the CPU usage where most VPS only have a very small amount of disk activity at any point so the read and write speed for all of the VPS stays decently high. Memory cannot be shared however. Some VPS providers oversell memory, but that means that if all of the VPS on the server simultaneously try to use more memory than the whole server physically has the host has to start swapping to provide that much virtual memory. The speed between real memory and hard drive is like night and day. The VPS would all grind to a halt basically, the load would spike super high, and they would all be extremely slow. 2
badrihippo Posted November 27, 2022 Posted November 27, 2022 Thanks for the detailed breakdown! This makes a lot of sense; I didn't consider the "sharing/using it at the same time" aspect of it before. I just went back and re-read your original post too; there's quite an interplay between memory and storage here! First the storage was slow, so it was being offloaded to the memory to keep things running; now the memory is running out which means it may have to be swapped to the storage. Must be quite a balancing act to decide how much of which resources to upgrade. About the usage of CPU vs. memory, I can see that play out for myself too: most of the processes I have running there don't consume much CPU except for short periods while working, but the memory usage is constant.
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