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  1. #1

    Revenue per server

    I have access to a half rack at a major data center here in Dallas and I'm racking my brain, no pun intended, to figure out a way to make some money off of it. I've settled on Xen VPS for a product managed with either FluidVM or HyperVM now that it's open source.

    I would like to ask other VPS providers that have been doing this for a while, what revenue do you expect on a per server basis? For example, and this number is just a guess, do you spec your machines to have capacity to generate $1k/month in revenue on average?

    Also, at what point do you think it's financially feasible to expand capacity? Like, if you bring a machine up to 100% utilization and it's meeting your revenue target, at that point do you invest in another server and work on bringing it to 100% utilization? Or would you bring another server online when the first is at, say, 80% capacity? On one hand you don't want to over invest and get in a bad debt situation, on the other, you don't want to run at 120% and have to turn away customers or sacrifice performance.

    Thanks in advance for all the replies

    PS I understand there's other hardware involved (backup, HA, ect) I'm just wondering about actual VPS nodes for now.

  2. #2
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    Well, it's simple math.
    Let's say you are able to get a decent Quad Core (no Xeon nor i7) with 8gb RAM. You could get a pretty nice one at around 900-1100$.
    With the 8GB of RAM, let's say you use 7.5GB for your containers. (Assuming that your primary OS runs fine with 512 Mb or RAM)

    At 15$/month per 512Mb that's 225$ per server. With a colo at 90$ with 3-4TB & enough IP that's 135$/month revenue per server. After 8 to 9 month the server is paid and all the rest is pure profit.

    Of course that does not include any other related fees (sysadmin, client management system, support, etc)

  3. #3
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    Or if you got a $2000-2500 server, With dual quad cores and 24-32g of ram, you can make more profit per rack unit etc.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by oldunis View Post
    After 8 to 9 month the server is paid and all the rest is pure profit.
    Only happens in dreamland, the reality is be prepared to have your server underutilized for the first 3 months, but if you keep a positive outlook and determination you will overcome it and make profit soon after

    Also remember it normally cost 3-5x more to get a client then what you will get from them in the first month.

    All the best.
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  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by linuxissues View Post
    Or if you got a $2000-2500 server, With dual quad cores and 24-32g of ram, you can make more profit per rack unit etc.
    This is true, as when it comes to colo/VPS, go with the big beefy servers and it will pay its self off quicker as it will allow you to load more virtual machines per node.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by AquariusADMIN View Post
    This is true, as when it comes to colo/VPS, go with the big beefy servers and it will pay its self off quicker as it will allow you to load more virtual machines per node.
    But customers wont be happy that there's so many people on the same server. The above is all but our policy.

    Thomas
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  7. #7
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    HyperVM is open source but only has been for a few weeks now so personally I would still hold off for a few more months mainly because its still going to have loads of bugs. You simply can't go through that much code that quick.

    Also no one knows yet if the projcet will even stay alive against the test of time.

    Your first month the plan should be to load the host with enough to cover next months costs, then over the next few months load it up. genearlly if your doing budget hosting expect to make about $200~ per host, anywhere up to $1000+ if your going to oversell and/or do managed vps services.
    BotWars.io - Code the AI of your Battle Bot!

  8. #8
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    If you run un-managed VPS, then revenue should be around $500~1000, and up to $2000 if you run managed VPS. Calc based on 24GB RAM.

    Profit will vary depend on your cost.
    I don't know the price structure of BURST openvz vps, its totally diff from my assumption.

  9. #9
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    Hi!
    There are more concerns with HyperVM as well. If you have been following what has been going on..much of the "C" source code is altogether missing..so it is far from complete.

    No..I would have to put in a vote for none of the above. Although FluidVm and SolusVM seem to be the most commonly used control panels..I don't like either of them. If I had to start a vps host..I would use virtuozzo.
    Bryon L Harvey
    Soil Relocation Engineer

  10. #10
    Overselling always burden to the customers and your servers. sometime when you not focus, it will get trouble. Of course, this will generate more revenue for you.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by jeff-ay View Post
    Overselling always burden to the customers and your servers. sometime when you not focus, it will get trouble. Of course, this will generate more revenue for you.
    When you have a beefy server, it will support more vps's, does mean it's overselling..

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by AquariusADMIN View Post
    This is true, as when it comes to colo/VPS, go with the big beefy servers and it will pay its self off quicker as it will allow you to load more virtual machines per node.
    The OP has a rack and was talking about colo, hence that suggestion..

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by gplhost View Post
    But customers wont be happy that there's so many people on the same server. The above is all but our policy.

    Thomas
    When you have a core2quad with 8G of ram, and 8-10 customers, it the same as having a dual quad core with 32G of ram and 18-20 customers. Customers happiness comes into question when the server starts getting laggy. Also depends on what technologies you are using. Openvz VS Xen. One overloaded vps on Openvz can kill the node, not on xen..

  14. #14
    Thanks everyone for the replies.

    Is a "managed" VPS just a VPS with a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk installed?

    what about disk I/O performance considerations? It's pretty straightforward to measure RAM usage and CPU load but how do you do capacity planning for disk? Is there a rule of thumb for VPS count and disk performance? I'm definitely going the RAID10 route but may or may not start off with ISCSI on a separate server.

    I was considering having a plain vanilla VPS product, a LAMP product (including cacti and phpmyadmin preinstalled) and a Tomcat/Java VPS which would also include cacti and phpMyAdmin. I would also like to offer PostgreSQL as an alternative to MySQL.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by chasd00 View Post
    Thanks everyone for the replies.

    Is a "managed" VPS just a VPS with a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk installed?

    what about disk I/O performance considerations? It's pretty straightforward to measure RAM usage and CPU load but how do you do capacity planning for disk? Is there a rule of thumb for VPS count and disk performance? I'm definitely going the RAID10 route but may or may not start off with ISCSI on a separate server.
    Managed vps is that you will manage it for the customers, such as os updates, creating/migrating accounts, firewall, installing basic scripts, backups etc etc, but people draw different lines to what actually is done or not.

    SAS drives are definitely going to help in case of larger servers where more number of vps's are going on.

  16. #16
    Going a Hardware RAID10 is an excellent way to go, and in terms of disk you need to figure what kind of capacity your boxes could do.

    What kind of drives you are comfortable with? If you can do 3.5" drives remember that the really high capacity 2TB, 1.5TB have substantially higher fail rates than smaller and more regular 750GB drives.

    ISCSI is not necessary to have some really nice I/O numbers a good hardware raid solution should run perfectly fine if you are doing a single server to start.

    If you have the funding to do a SAS solution I would recommend it as you will be able to get the most out of that half rack with that solution. Just make sure the data center you are at are able to support high density solutions because if you have SAS you could do some massive 4x Xeon 6 core 196GB 1U and some data centers have issues getting you the power to run those or even the cooling solutions.
    Last edited by Atelra-Rob; 11-09-2009 at 03:32 PM. Reason: Grammar

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Atelra-Rob View Post
    Going a Hardware RAID10 is an excellent way to go, and in terms of disk you need to figure what kind of capacity your boxes could do.

    What kind of drives you are comfortable with? If you can do 3.5" drives remember that the really high capacity 2TB, 1.5TB have substantially higher fail rates than smaller and more regular 750GB drives.

    ISCSI is not necessary to have some really nice I/O numbers a good hardware raid solution should run perfectly fine if you are doing a single server to start.

    If you have the funding to do a SAS solution I would recommend it as you will be able to get the most out of that half rack with that solution. Just make sure the data center you are at are able to support high density solutions because if you have SAS you could do some massive 4x Xeon 6 core 196GB 1U and some data centers have issues getting you the power to run those or even the cooling solutions.
    I believe I'm going to stick to around 1.5 TB of disk available on the first server. Lets say the average VPS is purchased with a 30gig virtual disk then 1.5TB yields 45 VPS's with 1.5 gig left over. I don't plan on running 45 VPS's on a single server so the 1.5 TB should be plenty of space. I'm going to buy the most reliable drives I can and not worry too much on individual drive performance. RAID 10 configuration and a good controller will boost performance.

    What I like about ISCSI is it makes it easier to move things around. I can map the virtual hard drives onto another server without having to physically touch anything, this opens the door to more flexible HA solutions down the road. The drawback is it adds the complexity of another separate network and additional configuration.

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