On March 25th we open our “Public Beta”, anybody who signups from that date until the end of April will get the first month for $10 or £10 (depending on your location)
Starting on May 1st, the default pricing will be as follows:
For all existing Private Beta Testers !! (people who signed up BEFORE March 25th), we have not forgotten your help 
, those beta testers will not be charged until May 1st, after that your pricing will be $10/£10 per node for 6 months (until November), then the pricing will revert to the default one.
Hello, good site, but the xen vps price is a bit expensive, Dropping to $15/mo is better
We do, at 3 nodes
Or 7, but 3 does sound better.
can I suggest you offer free for non profit
$15/mo doesn’t come up until 6.5 nodes.
£15/mo is 3.
I’m tempted to join up, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the extra. For $10/mo, I’d almost definitely join. For more? Eh, I’m not sure it’s that good.
Oops, my apologies, I was indeed referring to GBP
Our price was tailored to be extremely competitive, it will never be as cheap as a regular VPS provider, nor can be priced like Shared Hosting, our Clouds investment are in the Millions (USD/GBP) .. unfortunately quality and reliability does not come cheap.
It does sound very temting indeed, I’d really like to check how it compares to other Clouds like Mosso. I like the idea of up/downgrading your system with the number of nodes you currently need and I think the pricing is fair, however I would like to see more than 250GB bandwidth available with each node even if it would mean reducing disk space to say, 5GB per node.
Simplicity in choosing a package is great but I would suggest making it more flexible.
Matt
We debated allot with the simplicity vs full flexibility, in the end what we came up was with a pricing that would be fair to just any ONE of the resources it gives you.
This way if you must you can focus on adding resources based on one of the specific item you need more of and just receive the others as a added bonus.
I am a bit confused, so maybe you can clarify this for me.
You say if I sign up now I only pay $10 USD for each node, so would pay 40$ on sign up for four nodes, but this will increase to 80$ for my next payment that comes due in May. Is this correct? OR: I will continue to pay 40$ a month since I got in early… Please clarify…
Your scalable VPS platform, is quite impressive!
This is something that I am very interested in as I am sort of between, shared hosting and a dedicated server.
I did have a VPS for a very short time, as it was also unmanaged but did not have the same type of control panel that you do.
Do you have a central area where those of us who are new to VPS can go and learn how to best manage our VPS?
Thanks so much for your time!
Do the prices include tax (i.e. VAT in the UK)?
It’s a shame the new pricing excludes single node users getting good value, services such as Mosso or Slicehost (both backed by the extremely high level of service of Rackspace) allow users to scale-out at lower cost from single-node to a huge cluster. The pricing of £10/month for BETA would have been right on the spot to compete with the likes of these providers, especially since there are other providers such as Tagadab, with some good experience in the area, offering a single node (on Xen) for £10+VAT.
But I guess having a fancy website and the clever marketing of “VPS” as the much loved “buzz-word” that is Cloud Computing may just work for you. I can’t however believe that “developers” would opt to give more (or even the same) amount of cash to another provider when Rackspace are in the equation, unless they are getting something very unique.
People may disagree with this, but it really is fact, and end-users are continuing to drive down the cost of virtualization, so entering the market at costs above the rest doesn’t really seem to make good business sense. OK I agree that introducing a clever SAN device into the equation is a good USP, but technically this will lower your ongoing costs and makes your internal cluster maintance a doddle, rarely having to upgrade server hard disks (etc).
Big thumbs up for supporting openSolaris though, this would have been the selling point for me if your prices were right.
Single-node VPS are very appealing for developers such as myself who have lots of ideas and projects that they work on out of business hours. They allow us to have the full capabilities of a dedicated server without the cost. I believe there are many “enthusiasts” or developers wanting to try to launch the “next big thing”, and if you can get these people early, then they will be likely to expand their network to a potentially huge cluster with you. But if you are just not affordable/comparable from the beginning, there is a huge potential loss there.
RE: openSolaris
Having researched your site a bit more, I’m not actually sure whether my statement on openSolaris is correct. This assumption was made from the appearance of a forum post on Google (that no longer exists in your forum).
Jamie
Our pricing is very competitive, and with our node setup you can deploy multiple vps’s, we dont lock them into a single vps as most of the competitors do, Mosso starts at $100 /moth, so I dont understand your comment that it allows you to scale at a lower cost ?.
I would also like to know the answer to Shirley’s question: Does the price at $10 USD for each node continue until November for a new customer who signs up today?
Hello Doug
The $10 pricing per node is for April only, it will revert to the standard pricing next month for nybody signing up this month.
This was just a “welcome” special for new users.
Jamie
I checked out Tagadab, but it’s just a VPS provider, we cannot compete pricewise with that kind of setup, we have deployed a cloud setup, you have features such as self healing, redistribution of resources, etc, who are not present on a traditional setup.
We know our solution wont be for everyone, but for those who need the upmost reliability and flexibility.
Simply put, the cost of this infrastructure does not allow for standard VPS pricing, if we went with a price of $10 for a single node as standard, we would actually loose money.
The descriptions indicate that I can increase the number of nodes for spikes in demand, but if I do that am I committed to paying for the extra nodes for a full month? Or can I purchase nodes for only part of a month?
Also I couldn’t find your SLA – is one available? Are there any refunds for downtime etc?
Thanks
Richard
Mosso does not start at $100/month. That’s Cloud Sites, not Cloud Servers which are closer to what you are offering.
A cloud server with 256MB Ram, 10GB Storage & 250 GB Transfer at mosso is $48.45 (Equivalent to our 1 Node)
Except I doubt anyone with a single node will be ramping up anywhere near 250Gb of bandwidth before they are needing to upgrade the amount of RAM. But very fair point, I am a fan of knowing how much I will pay each month.
Out of interest, how does the SAN device work across your different locations (i.e. UK/USA). If an account has a node in the UK and a node in the USA, will they see different content mounted? Is everything installed onto a node stored on the SAN?
I am also a little unclear how having multiple nodes actually works. Is it only possible to purchase nodes as 256mb vps? Let’s say I purchase 5 nodes, is it possible to have 2x 512mb servers and a 256mb one? Is each node spawned as an independant Xen domain?
The “nodes” per say are just a representation of your resources, they are the building blocks for your VPS
If you buy 5 nodes, they are not location dependent, so if you use them to create say 3 VPS’s
1 – (2 nodes) 512MB in UK
2 – (2 nodes) 512MB in USA
3 – (1 node) 256MB in UK
Each one is an independent XEN VPS wiith it’s own mount-points, they are not related to each other, now because the “nodes” are just a building block, you could (as an example) remove a node from VPS1 and add it to VPS2, etc.
Hope this help to clarify
I was about to sign up (based on beta-price) but also think the original price is a bit steep when bying only a few nodes. I’m standing between Gandi.net and vps.net but don’t know much about these things. Gandi.net is a bit cheaper per node (I think it starts at about 16USD + VAT), what is the difference between you and them?
VPS.NET is not standard VPS hosting (where by you get a slice of a server), we are instead cloud based, please read this post for more understanding of the difference.
http://vps.net/blog/fluffy-vps-cloud/
Would have signed up for a single node system if it was £10 per month.
Yeah, I would have signed up for a £10 node too, if that were the price it were going to remain. I just don’t get the reliability argument. I don’t see that there is really a market for this. With other providers like Amazon about, what is it exactly you’re selling that’s different – I mean, pound for pound Amazon EC2 beats this hands down. And it is extremely good on reliability, blowing that argument out of the water. You know at the end of the day, your customers don’t care whether you are cloud based or not – they just want value for money and reliability and, as far as I can see, you can get that elsewhere for much less. If, with your marketing speak, you’re aiming for the enterprise market it’ll never work – the offering is just too airy fairy. There are no hard facts to back up your “redistribution of resources” or “self healing claims”. Enterprise clients want facts and figure with which they can go to their boss and ask for money… this doesn’t offer that. All very disappointing really.
Ross
Thats your view, and we respect that, but your assuming people are unable to understand the difference between a standard vps offering and our cloud setup, the customers who have signed up and taken close to 1000 nodes in 3 weeks beg to differ, they have the need for the service and so far everybody is well pleased with the system and it’s functions, the features we have announced are not vaporware, they are present on the control panel and easy to use and understand.
But this is not a bottom of the barrel service, costs to deliver such a system are high and £10 a node would not cover it.
I’m not sure how it’s “disappointing” when it’s clearly not a service you need or can budget for.