Feedback on prices for backups/snapshots

[Francisco]

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

 

[Francisco]

That opening line is so bad.

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

Francisco

 

[wlanboy]

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.

 

[drmike]

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.

 

[thecgmguy]

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%.

 

[Francisco]

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

 

[Ruchirablog]

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

 

[bluebit]

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.

 

[johnlth93]

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.

 

[Francisco]

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

 

[Oxide]

15% sounds fair

 

[peterw]

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

Cool feature. Worth the money.

 

[Francisco]

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

 

[drmike]

^--- that sounds most excellent.

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

 

[keltorsori]

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.

 

[Francisco]

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

 

[johnlth93]

They're entirely opt-in


Francisco

Awesome!

 

[zzrok]

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.

 

[Francisco]

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

 

[ultimatehostings]

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