# Feedback on prices for backups/snapshots



## Francisco (Sep 1, 2013)

Hello everyone,

We're currently working on adding snapshots & automated backup options to stallion.

For backups we're looking to offering keep 2 weeks of rotating snapshots as backups for each user that buys on.

Users will also be able to take snapshots at any point and reinstall their VM's from either (be it KVM or OpenVZ).

For now we won't offer backups on storage plans as we'd have to charge too much to make that viable.

For all the other plans we're wanting some feedback from everyone so we can move forward. We felt doing a "% of plan cost"

way as the best route for it. The cost isn't that high this way yet we will break even over time.

Please select what you think is a reasonable price for such an option.

Francisco


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## Francisco (Sep 1, 2013)

That opening line is so bad.

I need to stop changing my mind on sentence construction mid way.

Francisco


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## wlanboy (Sep 1, 2013)

15% is fine.

So for a 5$ per month service I have to pay 5.75$ per month to have this service with snapshots.

A good feature for everyone wanting to test something like upgrades.


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## drmike (Sep 1, 2013)

I went with 20%.

I am all for actually useful ala carte pricing for addons/features.  Other useful features like the DDoS filtering are over half of the the $5.95 monthly on the medium sized 512MB plan.  That uptick I still think is downright cheap regardless of comparison to the base price.

My installations aren't really complicated these days and for the most part, I have them documented for reinstallations.  Down to < 1 hours from based OS install to fully rebuilt (goal is to get things automated and down to say 20 minutes).

20%+ surcharge with buy-in option for those that need/want the backups, that's the good win for everyone.


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## thecgmguy (Sep 1, 2013)

You mentioned automated... any details on that?  If it's fully automated and I have the option of scheduling when the backups take place, I think 20% is totally reasonable.

On the flip side, if this were completely manual then I'd vote for 10%.


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## Francisco (Sep 1, 2013)

thecgmguy said:


> You mentioned automated... any details on that?  If it's fully automated and I have the option of scheduling when the backups take place, I think 20% is totally reasonable.
> 
> On the flip side, if this were completely manual then I'd vote for 10%.


15% is sounding pretty OK.

Originally it was going to be 'all backups fire at this time', but it wouldn't be very hard to allow users to change what time of the day backups fire. Give them a 1 week view, let them set their start times and it'll automatically fire.

Backups are automated and snapshots are "on demand" as you see fit. Snapshots would be good for people that want to test how an upgrade goes, etc.

Snapshots would also be pooled, meaning you can restore a snapshot to any VM you like (assuming it's the same plan on KVM).

Francisco


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## Ruchirablog (Sep 1, 2013)

20% or maybe even 25% is completely fine for me as I used to pay $5 a month for Linode backups. I still have a 1 Linode (previously I had 4) that I use to host very important data because of the backups feature. Its not that I rely on them but having 1 click backup and pooled restores is very important to quickly recover from failures. 

Nice Job as always Fran. I already have 2 BuyVMs but I will purchase more when you add backups feature  And dont forget about integrating DNS to the Stallion 2


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## bluebit (Sep 1, 2013)

wlanboy said:


> 15% is fine.
> 
> So for a 5$ per month service I have to pay 5.75$ per month to have this service with snapshots.
> 
> A good feature for everyone wanting to test something like upgrades.


Based on this, 15% is fine with me. I'd like the ability to backup an instance before applying upgrades or significant changes in case something "goes wrong", but it would also be nice to download a specific backup as well.


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## johnlth93 (Sep 1, 2013)

I voted for 15% though it is optional right? I believe it is since you said it's an option.

I am not going to opt for backup as i don't really need it for my usage.


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## Francisco (Sep 1, 2013)

johnlth93 said:


> I voted for 15% though it is optional right? I believe it is since you said it's an option.
> 
> I am not going to opt for backup as i don't really need it for my usage.


They're entirely opt-in 

Francisco


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## Oxide (Sep 1, 2013)

15% sounds fair


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## peterw (Sep 2, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Snapshots would also be pooled, meaning you can restore a snapshot to any VM you like.


Cool feature. Worth the money.


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## Francisco (Sep 2, 2013)

So one fun thing I'm plotting for this system is the ability to mount a read-only backup/snapshot into your running VM. This will only be supported in KVM for now until I can come up with a really clever way of doing it on OVZ. I may end up providing a file browser of sorts to allow them to browse a backup and just hitting 'restore'.

Example of how it'd work.

- User dinking around and nukes something they really shouldn't have --- ffuuuuuuu

- User logs into stallion and tells the system to mount an old backup [1]

- Stallion will attach the backup in question as a read-only filesystem (/dev/vdb, etc)

- User can then pull the file as they see fit

- User unmounts from their VM and can 'Unmount' from Stallion

1) Hopefully this should work all while the VPS is running.

The OpenVZ filebrower would be a 'later this year' thing where as the KVM stuff would be this month if I get my way.

Depending on what deals I can pull we'll see about also doing a weekly off-site pull (Thanks SonicVPS for bringing this up).

Francisco


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## drmike (Sep 2, 2013)

^--- that sounds most excellent.

Being able to mount the backup and poke through it is great idea.


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## keltorsori (Sep 4, 2013)

I would happily pay 25% or more for automated, versioned backups. It's been the only thing keeping me from moving my other services over to BuyVM.

Keep up the awesomeness.


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## Francisco (Sep 4, 2013)

keltorsori said:


> I would happily pay 25% or more for automated, versioned backups. It's been the only thing keeping me from moving my other services over to BuyVM.
> 
> Keep up the awesomeness.


It's for sure in the works 

Francisco


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## johnlth93 (Sep 4, 2013)

Francisco said:


> They're entirely opt-in
> 
> 
> Francisco


Awesome!


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## zzrok (Sep 4, 2013)

Where would the backups/snapshots be stored?  On the same server?  Would it be possible to do offsite backups?  I would really like to be able to specify my own storage location (e.g. via SFTP) and have automated full VM backups be sent there, but I imagine that is rather complicated.  That way I could potentially recover from an outage just by uploading the VM to a different provider and booting it, instead of having to do a reinstall + data restore.


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## Francisco (Sep 4, 2013)

zzrok said:


> Where would the backups/snapshots be stored?  On the same server?  Would it be possible to do offsite backups?  I would really like to be able to specify my own storage location (e.g. via SFTP) and have automated full VM backups be sent there, but I imagine that is rather complicated.  That way I could potentially recover from an outage just by uploading the VM to a different provider and booting it, instead of having to do a reinstall + data restore.


The backups will be off node, on LAN.

I've considered the SFTP/SCP options but I couldn't justify charging for that. That then causes the problem of a ton of disk/network load w/o any way to cover the cost.

Francisco


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## ultimatehostings (Sep 4, 2013)

I think 15% of the plans total cost per month is good!


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## Francisco (Sep 6, 2013)

ultimatehostings said:


> I think 15% of the plans total cost per month is good!


It's likely what we'll go with 

Francisco


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## rupe (Sep 6, 2013)

Just to clarify, would a snapshots only have a "life expectancy" of two (2) weeks maximum? Or would they be like the AWS/Digital Ocean Snapshots, where they would be available until deleted by the user. If it is the latter, I assume there would be a limit on the amount of snapshots/snapshot size one could have before having to either pay more, or delete old snapshots?

I agree with the rest, that 15% is very reasonable


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## Francisco (Sep 6, 2013)

snapshots last the life of the VPS.

We'll be deduping the space so assuming you aren't keeping snapshots of 100% different data every time the cost of it shouldn't be very high for us.

Francisco


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## rupe (Sep 6, 2013)

That's great! Now the obvious follow-up question...when?


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## Francisco (Sep 6, 2013)

I'm just working out all the details right now as well as how to integrate parts of it 

We had some design issues with OpenVZ but I think Anthony & I have come up with a positive solution.

Francisco


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## rupe (Sep 6, 2013)

While I've got your attention  , I have an off-topic suggestion/wish feature for your Stallion Control Panel. If you could add a status indicator (online/offline) to the Dashboard's Virtual Servers list.


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## Francisco (Sep 6, 2013)

rupe said:


> While I've got your attention  , I have an off-topic suggestion/wish feature for your Stallion Control Panel. If you could add a status indicator (online/offline) to the Dashboard's Virtual Servers list.


It's in the works 

The_Hatta asked for that awhile back, I've just not had a chance to test it.

Francisco


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## clarity (Sep 6, 2013)

This is why I love BuyVM! You guys never except the status quo, and it is great for the customers. I am really looking forwarded to the SSD based plans, and the other secrets that I am sure are in the works.


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## wolfpackmars2 (Sep 6, 2013)

I'm not really interested in backups, mainly because my VPS is a storage VPS that I use as a backup server anyways.  Since "I'm not interested in backups" was an option on the questionnaire that's how I responded.  I would hate for you to go into this expecting X number of customers and you only get 0.5X real customers.  However, I think 20% would be fair for those who do use the service (which someday I may).  I bounced around between 15 and 20%.  At 20% you realize that's 1/5th of the cost of getting a whole VPS.  Or you could get a storage VPS and maintain your own backups.  buuuuuttttttt....  there is something to be said for the convenience of automated snapshots.  Plus, this could be a sort of simple way to set up a "base" image and rolling it out to multiple servers easily, which is worth it's weight in gold.

Also, what's so special about SSD?  In a shared VPS environment, I would think the bottlenecks would be system load and network bandwidth before HDD speed would ever play a factor?  Maybe for some really heavy database servers, SSD could be useful?  Do people feel they're not "cool" unless they have an SSD, or is there real value with having a Solid State Drive?

EDIT:  Just as I post this, dclardy says he is "really looking forward to the SSD based plans".  I should point out, I'm not a "real" sysadmin, just a hobbyist - so don't be too harsh on me.  Obviously some people find value in SSD, and I'm not saying I don't think it's valuable - I'm just naive and don't know what the value is.


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## Francisco (Sep 6, 2013)

Snapshots would allow the base image idea you have  Once billing 2 rolls out we'll likely allow 'snapshots only' support and bill it by the GB.

With boxes getting to 24+ cores the disk becomes an issue. A single user can burn at max the cores they're allocated but a really really really poorly indexed database/etc can tank a whole node if the database gets wrecked enough. We can throw a lot of SSD caching at everything but at some point we may as well just do pure SSD nodes.

Francisco


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## clarity (Sep 6, 2013)

wolfpackmars2 said:


> EDIT:  Just as I post this, dclardy says he is "really looking forward to the SSD based plans".  I should point out, I'm not a "real" sysadmin, just a hobbyist - so don't be too harsh on me.  Obviously some people find value in SSD, and I'm not saying I don't think it's valuable - I'm just naive and don't know what the value is.


I like the slight performance boost without needing so much disk space.


For the backups, I can get rid of my backup vps and save some cash. I might trust BuyVM a little too much, but they are good people.


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## wolfpackmars2 (Sep 7, 2013)

Thanks Francisco - makes perfect sense.  I wasn't thinking outside my own VPS.  Servers are essentially split up according to CPU and RAM, but I've not seen anything mentioned about limiting HDD reads/writes.  It's understandable that a potential problem with an unrelated user's vps could affect others, when large amounts of data are involved.

My use is fairly light as far as system resources.  I use another provider for private websites, and I use my BuyVM Storage server for private backups, so nothing critical.  However, if I ever did build a public facing web service, resources and speed would be critical.  I've submitted my questionnaire based on what I would be interested in right this minute.  Just because I'm not interested in either feature right this minute, I do believe that what you are suggesting is a great value.

Thanks - and I am very happy with my storage vps


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## wolfpackmars2 (Sep 7, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Snapshots would allow the base image idea you have  Once billing 2 rolls out we'll likely allow 'snapshots only' support and bill it by the GB.


A base image should easily be doable within 1GB.  If using something like SaltStack (or Chef or Puppet), then all you need is a base image set up as a Salt Minion.  You could blow servers away all day long and get them back up with little effort.

Not that I'm suggesting anyone should make a sport of "blowing servers away"


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## Francisco (Sep 7, 2013)

wolfpackmars2 said:


> A base image should easily be doable within 1GB.  If using something like SaltStack (or Chef or Puppet), then all you need is a base image set up as a Salt Minion.  You could blow servers away all day long and get them back up with little effort.
> 
> Not that I'm suggesting anyone should make a sport of "blowing servers away"


It depends.

If someone packs up a custom Windows 2008/2012, that'll take up 10GB 

Francisco


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