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I Have a Business Idea for a New Type of VPS...But No Cash.

raindog308

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
I had an idea for a new kind of VPS business...something I'd never seen before, and I haven't been able to find anyone offering it via Google.  I don't run a VPS business now - I do some shared hosting but not VPS.

Unfortunately, it would take probably ~$15,000 to start (minimum - could easily/probably be $25,000 once the business plan is fleshed out).  That's mostly hardware, which would be semi-custom - off the shelf, but not something the typical dedicated provider offers.  And then some custom control panel work.

These probably wouldn't be LEBs...though possibly.  Very flexible.

I certainly don't have a spare $15-25K to sink into it.  Ideas by themselves are worthless...

So.  What would you do?

This is not kickstarter-qualified.  The end product would be a VPS sort of business, not a project
 
raindog308

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
Richard Leik said:
Perhaps you'd like to share it with us. It's a myth that ideas are worth anything.
Click to expand...
Yes, I said "Ideas by themselves are worthless..."  :)

So...how about ramdisk-based VPSes?

 

- Buy a server with a ton of memory - say 256GB, 512GB, or 1024GB.  We have Windows servers at work with 1TB RAM - don't remember which model.  I googled and on some random VAR's order builder a supermicro with the best CPU + 256GB of RAM was $10K.  

 

- Offer in-DRAM VPSes (ramdisks).  User buys a monthly package of RAM and then carves it up how he wants.  Say he buys 10GB of RAM.  That can be 2GB of RAM and 8GB of disk, vice versa, etc.  Configurable in the control panel.

 

- Obviously, if the server goes down, everything is lost, but the control panel would have a "sync to disk" or "hibernate" function.  Wouldn't be instant but shouldn't take too long to write, say, 10GB to disk.  Limit how often people can hibernate so people don't script some kind of constant disk sync.

 

- Some kind of tempates with key/value config for popular uses, or "upload a script to run at startup" in panel

 

- Could also include some quantity of SSD disk.  But the idea is have high quality CPU, high quality network, and insanely fast disk.

 

$10000 over 3 years is $280/month about, plus rackspace and network.  So let's say your costs are $400/month, which is a number I just made up from looking at Joe's.

 

What would people pay for a VPS with 2GB of RAM and a 5GB RAM disk?  You could sell about 34 of those before you run out of RAM.  Or 2GB of RAM and a 10GB RAM disk?  Or you could go the opposite end - 256MB of RAM or 512MB + 2GB of disk.  There could be no overselling, realistically - I mean, sure you could sorta with swap but the idea is that the storage is unimaginably fast.

 

Not sure how much faster pure RAM disk would be over SSD disk.  There are server configs that support more RAM per server but you don't want to outstrip your CPU.

 

Memory is costing you about $1.56/month ($400/256), though it's both RAM and disk.  VPS wouldn't be cheap - if you charge $3/GB, then it's $30/month for 10GB of RAM to split up how you want.  I imagine with greater size, those costs would come down and pricing would improve, but it'd have to be a premium/specialty product.
 
Z

zzrok

New Member
You lost me at how this is really any different from what is available now.  If I wanted a RAM disk based server, why would I buy this specifically over just a regular VPS with 8GB or 16GB of RAM and slicing it up myself?  Besides, most things that need lots of RAM (e.g. Redis, Innodb, Memcached) are already setup to basically make their own RAM disks.  I could be wrong, but I don't see the benefit to something specifically setup to do RAM disks.

A VPS with lots of RAM and fast SSD storage sounds like fun though. ^_^
 
Jack

Jack

Active Member
You would need no where near to $10,000 for the hardware for this.. What other costs are required?
 
drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
RAM based VPSes.... yeah... that can be done...  Going to be support issues on corruptions, failures, reboots, etc.

Going to need to spin everything out to disk, and often...

The hot loading in and out of things chews IO.   Would have to to come up with something decent for mirroring the instances to disk and would have to include partial file continuation like on logs and such.

If I were doing this, I'd marry large RAM to disk.. and create an option to make it RAM bound....  but with caution that shit can and will break...

I've been doing RAM based systems for decades.  Marrying this to SSDs, yeah, super interesting.

But the concept is niche in nature.  Limited uses....
 
GIANT_CRAB

GIANT_CRAB

New Member
Cool idea on the pen but in practical terms, no.

However, I believe it can be further developed into an even better idea.

Instead of RAM-disk based VPS, why not RAM-disk based smart-phones?
 
M

manacit

New Member
I don't want to be offensive, this isn't a good idea. By and large, if you go with a good provider on SSDs, disk I/O is not the problem - you'll hit RAM limits or CPU issues long before you exhaust I/O. 

There's no target market for small amounts of storage on a ramdisk, especially not for the prices you would have to charge. That's not to mention the technical difficulties of doing something like this, which shouldn't be understated. The minute you have ONE unexpected power failure, everyone is shit out of luck unless they recently "synced," which would basically mean you're never going to actually want to do any work on the machine in the first place that requires writing files, which means you're never going to touch the file system, which means the whole thing is useless. For that sort of ephemeral processing, you'll just want to use AWS spot instances or similar. 

What a lot of people fail to realize around here is that a fast dd doesn't mean a whole lot - you aren't going to be doing large sequential writes and reads a lot, and the commonly used data is going to end up cached in RAM anyway by virtue of your operating system. 
 
wlanboy

wlanboy

Content Contributer
A customer can build a RAM disk on a KVM machine - no provider needed.

I created one for one of my MongoDB nodes but you have to save the data or trust the provider on a 100% uptime.
 
tchen

tchen

New Member
wlanboy said:
A customer can build a RAM disk on a KVM machine - no provider needed.

I created one for one of my MongoDB nodes but you have to save the data or trust the provider on a 100% uptime.
Click to expand...
I'm curious.  MongoDB uses memory mapped files... so what were you using the RAM disk for?
 
wlanboy

wlanboy

Content Contributer
tchen said:
I'm curious.  MongoDB uses memory mapped files... so what were you using the RAM disk for?
Click to expand...
Because of the journal files.

One other reason is that Linux is smart and does not duplicate pages between tmpfs and its cache.
 
F

Flapadar

Member
Verified Provider
I did this two years ago with an hourly cron backing up to disk. Very speedy performance - but I don't see people buying it. 
 
G

Gary

Member
GIANT_CRAB said:
Cool idea on the pen but in practical terms, no.

However, I believe it can be further developed into an even better idea.

Instead of RAM-disk based VPS, why not RAM-disk based smart-phones?
Click to expand...
Battery life. RAM needs constantly refreshed.
 
T

Thelen

New Member
Verified Provider
Very interesting idea, but as others pointed out, there are already ample solutions for the people that need such a thing, including plain KVM.
 
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