Hi, Do you all think there is a market for a high-storage-space / high-storage-speed VPS offering? It's easy enough to set aside an entire SATA disk for one VPS customer, or use SSD's to boost performance in some areas, but do you think customers are willing to pay for this? I see a lot of threads on here regarding $20 / mo and lower VPS plans, and I don't see this kind of high performance option being possible at that pricing, even with 512mb ram. Is this something you think people will see value in, and be willing to pay (a little bit) more for?
Yes, there is a market for high-performance VPSs, but setting aside a single SATA drive isn't the answer. Providing RAID10 storage with high-end RAID controllers, SAS drives (there goes your disk space!), tons of ram i.e. 64GB ECC-R DDR3 or more, high-end (6-core hyperthreaded) Westmere CPUs, and very few VPSs per web server. Separating the host OS spindles from the VPS spindles - you now need 6 drives min on the server - or providing high-speed SANs for VPS storage. It's going to cost you several thousand dollars per server just to purchase and kit out so don't expect much change from $10,000. We plan on replacing the our front-line servers after a max of 3 years use. Then you need to co-locate it, manage it, provide additional hardware if anything goes wrong (it will....eventually), and supply bandwidth. At these costs, you can imagine what you would need to charge to make it worthwhile if you really wanted to provide high-performance VPS hosting with very limited numbers of VPSs per server. Back to your original question. Is there a market for it? Yes, but it's not easy to get into, it requires large cash investements, and you'll need some experience to secure that type of business. If you have the experience and knowledge go for it, but don't lose sight of customers whose requirements are less dramatic or onerous because it is these guys that will grow into needing that type of service eventually. If you serve them well they will stay with you, grow with you, and bring you new custom.
thanks for your feedback. I'm finding what you've said to be true. Have invested quite a lot already, looking to see what everyone's opinion is of this market.