Your interest in a Hybrid Cloud / IaaS Platform?

[robbyhicks]

We're currently in the beginning stages of developing an IaaS & Cloud Platform with integrated billing, support & ordering.  This is tailored exactly for businesses in the VPS, IaaS & Cloud Space.

Would you consider switching from your current platforms (IE: WHMCS/SolusVM/Onapp/proxmox etc.) to a more simplistic, all-in-one solution, similar to what digitalocean has going for them. The cost would be about 30% more than what you pay for a WHMCS+SolusVM setup, and allow you to offer your clients a much larger product offering along with ease of management through a single pane of glass.

This platform will enable secure & stable management, billing, support and selling of the following products, able to work in ANY environment:

• OpenVZ & KVM Cloud Servers w/ optional self-healing, high-performance storage (No need for a NAS/SAN)
• Bare-Metal Dedicated Servers
• DNS Service
• CDN Service
• Block File Storage
• Firewall Service
• Colocation Services

Further details:

Complete Security Audits from 3rd party for EVERY update & release.

2-factor auth for both clients & admin available

Full support for any hardware or network configuration.

Easily Migrate & import virtual machines from any OpenVZ or KVM setup.

Setup any billing term for your products - Hourly, monthly, setup fees, etc.

Full Integration with SalesForce, Zoho & other CRM

One-click provisioning & ordering of any service for clients + optional Live inventory of available infrastructure

Integration with stripe, paypal & other 3rd party payment gateways for billing agreements.

DigitalOcean-like simplicity & full API for all functions.

Is this something you would be interested in? Please give me as much feedback as you can, and hit me with the tough questions!

 

[willie]

By "cloud" I assume you mean hourly billing.  What is the biggest hardware you are planning to offer under this scheme?  Will you have single tenant servers?  How much will they cost?  Thanks.

 

[robbyhicks]

By "cloud" I assume you mean hourly billing.  What is the biggest hardware you are planning to offer under this scheme?  Will you have single tenant servers?  How much will they cost?  Thanks.

Cloud meaning distributed storage (our self-healing storage option), with multiple compute nodes, so there will be no single point of failure, and yes, hourly billing is included with that model.  VPS on hourly billing is also possible if you do not want to run our self-healing storage option.

In terms of hardware, we plan to build this so you can use whatever kind of hardware you like, it will be billed on usage, so pricing will likely be between $15-30/mo per physical server. We also plan to have a free version for up to 5 physical servers, however it would revert back to a limited feature-set after a 30-day full-featured trial period.

Single tenant servers are an option here whether you're talking about full bare-metal, or a private cloud. 

Let me know if I've answered all of your questions, we really appreciate the feedback!

With this being said, and given the platform will be offered with free trial, is this something you would be interested in?

 

[willie]

Oh ok, I see what you mean, yeah, storage separated from the server is another characteristic of clouds.

Currently I'm using enough storage that I'm fairly sensitive to its cost, and most of my stuff is on a Hetzner dedicated server (2x 3TB disks and 4-core i7 cpu) that I also use for most of my computational requirements. 

I was asking about big single tenant servers because of occasional situations where I need to do something compute and ram intensive beyond the reach of the Hetzner box.  Where I worked we had some 256gb 2x E5-2670's that I could use for such purposes and there are some even bigger EC2 and similar instances available and that's the kind of thing I had in mind.

I occasionally do like to spin up a temporary VPS just to test something so if you have a product like that I might make use of it, but that's not all that exciting for anyone I'm sure.  I should probably figure out how to run VPS's on my dedi instead of using external ones: right now I just run bare metal.

WAIT, looking over your post again, I may have been completely confused about what you are doing.  You're not hosting cloud servers but rather you're making a software product for people wanting to host the physical hardware?  If that's the case I'm not in the target audience at all, sorry.

 

[robbyhicks]

Oh ok, I see what you mean, yeah, storage separated from the server is another characteristic of clouds.

Currently I'm using enough storage that I'm fairly sensitive to its cost, and most of my stuff is on a Hetzner dedicated server (2x 3TB disks and 4-core i7 cpu) that I also use for most of my computational requirements. 

I was asking about big single tenant servers because of occasional situations where I need to do something compute and ram intensive beyond the reach of the Hetzner box.  Where I worked we had some 256gb 2x E5-2670's that I could use for such purposes and there are some even bigger EC2 and similar instances available and that's the kind of thing I had in mind.

I occasionally do like to spin up a temporary VPS just to test something so if you have a product like that I might make use of it, but that's not all that exciting for anyone I'm sure.  I should probably figure out how to run VPS's on my dedi instead of using external ones: right now I just run bare metal.

WAIT, looking over your post again, I may have been completely confused about what you are doing.  You're not hosting cloud servers but rather you're making a software product for people wanting to host the physical hardware?  If that's the case I'm not in the target audience at all, sorry.

Yeah this is a platform to enhance and automated cloud services for IaaS / dedicated server / vps providers.  It would be an alternative to onapp/solusvm with a bit more features and integration.  This is still something you could use on your bare-metal dedicated servers with hetzner if you wanted to create cloud instances across them, or monetize your unused power.

 

[redswitches]

TBH i feel this is really amazing currently WHMCS just isn't feasible for Dedicated Servers and Collocation providers on the other hand Hostbill and UberSmith are damn costly for SMB's. So having such a service will be really great.