feedback request, Sdx Pro proposal

[JPC-Greg]

We are considering a new product that further expands the sdx line and approaches full dedicated resources. This would be a full size/scale sdx server but even more undersold than anything before. Not certain on specifics yet but we are thinking of limits around 4-5 users for a full 4gb ram type of machine.

My question is how many would be interested in this product?

What costs would you expect to pay for such a service?

If we have enough interest we can start with a machine to try this new line on and decide from there whether or not to make it a part of our offering.

[Doug Nelson]

Count me in. As far as I know, no one else is offering anything else like this. I'm paying $50+ for a VPS that isn't hacking it for me, and the next step up is $70+ (and probably still wouldn't hack it for me), so anything in that price range would be acceptable to me. The least expensive dedicated plan is $140+ (counting cpanel, which is a necessity for me), and would have less power than this, even though I'd be the only one on it.

Even better would be further power tweaks like dual CPU, quadcore, PHP caching, etc. Maybe even limiting it to one domain per user. I'd pay even more for that. And it would certainly draw some attention over at WHT.

[JPC-Greg]

You wouldnt find single domain very limiting? I was thinking maybe 5 domains or so.

Also what about a plan like this tailored for resellers?

[Doug Nelson]

I'm motivated by selfishness, I want the lowest possible competition for resources on my server

[Ron]

Also what about a plan like this tailored for resellers?

I am not allowed to use the terms together.

[JPC-Greg]

lol Yes Ron I know youve been asking for it. Lets talk it about in detail. What kinds of things are you wanting to get out of it, limits, etc etc.

[Ron]

lol Yes Ron I know youve been asking for it. Lets talk it about in detail. What kinds of things are you wanting to get out of it, limits, etc etc.

I just don't want to get kicked out of JAG if/when my site becomes a burden on a "normal" reseller plan. As it stands now, my upgrade path (for resources) is :

Bulk Reseller ($30) -> Dedicated. (maybe $200 with WHM, and backups? lots more with some management help) A plan somewhere in the middle, $50-$100 would be nice. From my perspective $50 would be best, from your perspective... maybe more.

The limits thing is the complicated part. I wouldn't be opposed to limiting the number of CPanels resold because that's not the business I'm in. I am more interested in the horsepower. I know that other resellers might be looking to resell a ton of accounts, and might not be too worried about having a single heavy hitting account.

If you're talking about disk space and bandwidth, and if you're going to have only a single offering, I'd suggest a 100GB HDD and some obscene amount of xfer, like 1TB, although I don't know what price point you want to hit.

Can you imagine the buzz??!?? Honest, unthrottled 1TB in transfer?

[JPC-Greg]

Rather than edit that last post to correct the figures and discuss that part I just moved it . we'll start that one over.

Our ideal goal of an uber sdx plan would land it in the 4-5 user per node limit. I think anything above that like 10 or so and you lose what we are trying to achieve. sdx nodes now have 4gb ram and that puts each user at nearly 1gb ram but of course theres no limits so all 4 is available.

We could drop in 8gb ram and double up the user count to drive down costs but Im not sure thats the best direction to take.

At 4-5 users each could easily have 100gb space on nodes with raided 500 gb drives. If the same laws of averages, use, and under/over selling apply each could be allowed even more. $50 is probably on the low side and $100 too high. A $70-80 plan with 100gb/1TB none oversold space and resources would be an ideal product if theres enough of you guys wanting it.

Do we have 4-5 people to try one node?

[Gwaihir]

Hmm.. wondering out loud: shared vs. dedicated:

Shared:
- You share the resources with others on the server
- JagPC picks the hardware as it sees fit and upgrades ocassionally as it sees fit
- JagPC does the setup and management, in its standardized way
- JagPC does the backups

Dedicated:
- You have the whole server to yourself
- You pick the hardware, you figure out what you need and when to upgrade it
- You set the server up the way you like it, you can then have JagPC manage it or help manage it
- Backups are an add-on

Up here you're talking $280-$400 (4-5x $70-80) for a fully managed, fully backed-up up bad ass machine and supporting 4-5 clients on it. Yet, taking an Odyssey class server (looks like same drives and mem, less cpu), management, WHM/cPanel and backups, supporting the one client on it, comes to over $500 (and that's already assuming backup space of that size comes for less than the 50GB blocks advertised).

Now.. where does the cost go? Why is dedicated, once fully dressed up with management, backups, etc, so much more expensive? Why is it so much more fuss for the owner? I guess much of that is in the non-standard, largely out of JagPC control nature of the beast, right? If instead a server would be just another one of the same series JagPC is familiar with (in both hard and software), it may cost a lot less.

So.. I think larger standardized accounts are an excellent idea. I'd even go as far as to create standardized dedicated packages. I.e. the client doesn't pay for a specific server, but for a certain amount of fully managed power at his fingertips and (if he wants that) for the fact that he's alone on his server. Everyone sells VPSses independent of the hardware, so why not dedicated services? Of course, this is only for folk that need nothing but the standard features.

[Doug Nelson]

I'm less concerned with hd space (I don't use half of what I have now) and bandwidth (I use an even lower percentage there) than I am with pure horsepower. Before I turned off all my bells and whistles (see my other thread) the techs told me I was using more than my fair share of CPU and RAM. But I have no idea what CPU setup I'm on (or was on when I was on the SDX plan, or how much RAM that plan had). So if I turned everything back on and shared this new service with 4 other users at least as resource-intensive as I would be, could it handle it without degraded service (or worse)?

[Doug Nelson]

Some additional thoughts:
If you used the most current OS, PHP, and Mysql versions, you'd avoid people using ancient apps, which would more than likely free up a lot of resources.
If you used dual quad-cores with 8GB of RAM you could promote it as "2 cores and 2GB minimum per user"
Is limiting it to 1 cpanel per acount the same as blocking resellers?

Sounds exclusionary, but the idea IS to be more "pro" than other semi-dedicateds.

[JPC-Greg]

Its not a large jump or out of anyones control really. On sdx your sharing that cost with lots of others but to us we still pay the same for that hardware, bw, power, etc etc. One version has the costs divided and so the resources are too. Dedicated servers have just one owner and he has to foot the bill solo.

Im not sure I follow your thoughts on the dedicated server and management though in the last paragraph.

[Ron]

Up here you're talking $280-$400 (4-5x $70-80) for a fully managed, fully backed-up up bad ass machine and supporting 4-5 clients on it. Yet, taking an Odyssey class server (looks like same drives and mem, less cpu), management, WHM/cPanel and backups, supporting the one client on it, comes to over $500 (and that's already assuming backup space of that size comes for less than the 50GB blocks advertised).

Because he's trying to fill a hole is his product line at a pricepoint that can both attract customers and support his business model?

Even if it's $80 x 5 or $80x8 it is in the same ballpark as $30 x 20 on current SDX, no?

He's just working the details and the numebrs at this point, feeling around trying to find out for what features/benefits/pricepoints people are looking.


@JAG yeah, $80 would be near the right spot for me for an SDX with WHM. After that I'd be looking at a dedicated box. What would be my next step up from 1/5th of that server/services in a dedicated machine? Figure around $200 to $250 a month, will I be able to at least match performance?

Just looking ahead....

But again, I'm wondering about the target audience; perhaps this is someone who wants to be a big-time WHM reseller and resell hundreds of CPanels for that price. Me, I might be just as happy moving laterally to a current SDX with my subaccounts as addons or one SDX for my main site and one longhorn for my minor accounts.

[Gwaihir]

Hmm.. I'm being clear as mud, eh? Let me see if I can reword that a bit..

Because he's trying to fill a hole is his product line at a pricepoint that can both attract customers and support his business model?

And he (Greg) is - IMHO very correctly - noting a market for high end all included hosting. I.e. a hosting service that offers lots of power (resources), without requiring any management or long term commitment from the client; he (the client) simply outgrows a package (SDX) and gets moved to the next step on the ladder. Nothing else new; it's still managed, monitored, backed-up, etc and he certainly doesn't have to guess what exact type of hardware he'll need to get through the next two years. Not he; if he wants to he can simply go up or down the ladder again a month or two later, depending on how his business develops. That's all very contrary to dedicated, now the next thing on the ladder.

However, up the ladder from SDX-Pro, there'd IMHO still be that gap, so I was pondering on..

Even if it's $80 x 5 or $80x8 it is in the same ballpark as $30 x 20 on current SDX, no?

Exactly, so apparently to profitably run one standardized bad-ass class JagPC server with all the usuall frills included (management, cPanel, support, backups), it needs to bring in about $400/month.

Then why not complete the line?
-> Gigadeal : 50 accounts @ some $9-10/month
-> SDX: 25 accounts @ $30/month
-> SDX-Pro: 5 accounts @ $80/month
-> 2 huge accounts @ $200/month
-> 1 account @ $400/month
Sounds good, no?


However, there are underlying assumptions about the costs structure / business model, about which I can only guess and hypothesize, so that's what I did in my last post and will redo in some more detail now.

The hosting business is a pretty fierce competition, so I think it's reasonably safe to assume that all JagPC's pricing needs to be competitive and therefore, given that JagPC is successfull, that all JagPC's current pricing is competitive, i.e. in line with the actual cost/risk profile of offering a particular service. Now bring in those current prices of both shared and dedicated. One can't help but notice two things:

-> The low end accounts seem to bring in much more than $400 per server. Probably the most discounts are given there (to resellers, etc), but then again there's the best options for overselling too. So.. why do they still need to bring in more? I'm assuming this is because support's work load is depending on the number of clients / websites not just on the amount of server power allocated.

-> That would imply that with just one account on it (dedicated), the server would be profitable bringing in less money than with five. But no, the dedicated server offerings cost a lot more than that $400 per server (for a comparable hardware configuration and level of management and added services). Why? I can think only of the non-standardized nature of these accounts/machines, causing high setup and management costs, and the risk of loosing money when the client leaves it somewhat soonish, because yesterday's hardware cannot be leased out again at today's rate. That's why I'm wondering if there can't be "standardized" offerings all the way up to the dedicated level, for those that don't need a highly customized setup (and certainly not the worries associated with running one's own server), but just more power.


There's probably some room to mix and match, so you can offer price points of $150 and $300 as well. Also, you could mix in one or two slightly less bad-ass machine configurations too, so the client can opt to be on a server without other accounts from around $225, enough to still make that a dual core with enough memory and RAID 1 drives. The point is that you work with standardized setups which you keep around and running (so no per customer setup cost, long wait for assembling, or need to commit for a one or two year contract for the specific machine), between which you move accounts around as needed as easily as you do between all other shared machines.

As you've probably noticed: I don't believe in low end dedicated for the masses at all. Someone outgrows SDX and gets a $80 server as the next step. But what he doesn't realise (and IMHO shouldn't have to realise) is that suddenly a) he's a system admin, who needs to take care of updates and backups, as well as monitor the server 24/7, b) he's on a "light" machine with no burstable power to handle peaks, c) he's risking his data on just one HD (no more RAID) that will take everything down when it fails. This is not what such a client wants; all he wants is more power, not more worries.

So, offering high end all included accounts is a great idea. Please, offer plenty of them, one for every "power level" around .

[Note to self: next time you have a complicated thought, but no where near the time to voice it in enough detail to get it across, keep your mouth shut, no matter how good the idea might be! ]

[JPC-Greg]

wow, theres lots of good feedback , obversations, and questions in there. I'll have to get back in this thread in the morning.