HN user
Founder & CEO at Strasmore, Inc.
Blog: https://mgc.io and https://blog.ssdnodes.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MattGConnor and https://twitter.com/SSDNodes
Reach out any time: matt[@]strasmore.com
SSD Nodes is a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. Our servers are 90% lower cost than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode when you commit to 1 or 3 years in advance.
We recently launched a Performance line of servers leveraging NVMe technology that boasts millions of IOPS and up to 6,400MB/s disk throughput, while still being 75% lower cost than what you would pay with at competitors.
SSD Nodes is a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. Our servers are 90% lower cost than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode when you commit to 1 or 3 years in advance.
We recently launched a Performance line of servers leveraging NVMe technology that boasts millions of IOPS and up to 6,400MB/s disk throughput, while still being 75% lower cost than what you would pay with at competitors.
Agreed. Duck.com redirects to on2.com which, surprisingly, links to DuckDuckGo.
If you meant to visit the search engine DuckDuckGo, click here.
I wouldn't have expected that from Google.
Hey there,
Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear about the issues you’re experiencing. We use several different services for managing fraud, and one of them flagged your IP. Not sure why since everything else looks fine, so we reviewed and approved your order.
We also use Stripe for payment processing, so we never see your credit card details.
Let us know if you have any questions.
Totally understand, and thank you for taking the time to provide feedback.
In most cases our annual price is equivalent to 1-3 months of a competitor's monthly price. You mentioned AWS so I'm going to use them as an example, even though it's not an apples to apples comparison. Their m5.xlarge is similar to our X-Large plan (16GB RAM + 4vCPUs). I'll ignore that it doesn't include storage or bandwidth, for simplicity. The m5.xlarge (with no storage or bandwidth) costs $140/month on-demand, which exceeds the annual price of the X-Large plan. If you reserve an m5.xlarge for 1 year (paid upfront) with AWS, the cost is a little less than $1K, which is close to 10X the cost of our X-Large.
If customers cancel their server with us after the 14-day refund period, we provide a prorated credit for the remainder of their billing cycle[0]. So if someone cancels after 2 months, they get the remaining 10 months as credit. They can use that towards renewals, new services, etc. I totally respect it's not for everyone, but the cost savings can be substantial for those who are able to use our services.
We are also expanding to Europe in the near future.
We're definitely planning on offering Windows in the future. There are some licensing headaches, and it also means having people on staff that are experts in both Linux AND Windows (for customer queries, etc). So it's a bit more involved than just having a Windows install, but we're working on it.
The 16/32GB RAM options are actually the lowest we offer. We did the side deal thing in the past, but having different pricing on the main site and a landing page just made things more complicated and led to unhappy customers.
We will definitely add support for Fedora in the future.
It's super easy. Just log into the dashboard and select your server, then "Upgrade" to see the options. From there, choose the package you want and your KVM server will be automatically scaled up (with zero downtime).
For those of you looking for competitive prices with servers in the U.S., take a look at SSD Nodes—a bootstrapped hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. I'm the founder and CEO, so I'm a little biased, but we're offering 16GB of RAM plus KVM for a price that's more than competitive with Hetzner, and have clients posting excellent benchmarks, like 1.1 GB/s throughput and 480K IOPS[0].
Check out our pricing:
https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/
Happy to answer questions if there's any.
I lurk on here and don't really contribute (mostly due to time constraints). I keep coming back because of the quality of comments and discussions and the positive way people treat each other.
Hey there, those are great questions! First to answer your security questions. We're using KernelCare, which is like Ksplice. It keeps all our host kernels updated with no reboots needed.
OpenVZ, when used properly, provides us with massive performance gains along with the flexibility of "live scaling." Since we're providing containers, our customers can scale up to a larger plan with zero downtime. Their RAM and disk resources are available immediately after choosing the next package (additional cores require a reboot).
Thanks for taking the time to respond, really appreciate it. You mentioned hourly billing, but the OVH plans you reviewed are monthly[0], and all the pricing you listed on the site is monthly.
We're trying to go in a different direction from hourly, and instead offer very deep discounts for annually. So customers can get 8GB RAM for $6.49/month ($77.99/year) and have stellar performance with a provisioning time of about 10 seconds.
I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc., which is a bootstrapped SSD-based hosting provider for startups that I've been working on since 2011. Some of our clients have posted benchmarks showing great performance, such as 800MB/s+ throughput and 292K IOPS: https://lowendbox.com/blog/ssdnodes-high-ram-ssd-vps-startin...
Direct link to the benchmark: https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw
Special pricing for startups: https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-specials/
/shameless plug
I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc., which is a bootstrapped SSD-based hosting provider for startups that I've been working on since 2011. We have several locations which are great for VPNs: NYC, Dallas, Seattle, and Montreal. We're really good about curbing abuse, so our IPs usually don't have any issues (there's also a 14-day refund if it doesn't work out, we're very generous with refunds).
https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-specials/
/utterly shameless plug
Have you considered charging by number of fans per outlet, instead of a flat $1/credit? Seems to me the value is in the blog's reach, similar to CPM in advertising. It goes against the simplicity of your platform, so you could make it very simple: $5 for high traffic, $3 for medium, $1 for low (or a variation of that).
If you're concerned about the overhead of an SSL handshake, another option is simply using '//embed.example.com' so it automatically chooses http/https based on the main site.
(Responding here since I can't reply directly)
No problem. We actually ran a sale a few weeks ago at LowEndBox and added several hundred customers for our OpenVZ offerings, so I would point at the numbers as proof :-)
Across the company we use all of them, because our enterprise clients all have different needs. For this deal we use OpenVZ, with our own proprietary workload balancing algorithm that migrates containers so that each gets optimal performance.
We operate out of several datacenters, the servers for this deal are located in Montreal, Canada. We don't have EU servers yet, but are planning in expansion.
I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, a US-based cloud provider, and we have special HN pricing where you can get 1GB RAM instances for only $2.99/mo
* You can upgrade with zero downtime to a larger server (it will live resize)
* 100% uptime SLA
* Fastest SSDs (we've achieved over 200K write IOPS and 1GB/s writes)
* Direct support from engineers
* Bitcoin payments accepted
* 7-day no-hassle refund guarantee
/plug
Not quite a SaaS company, but I'll chime in anyway. For SSD Nodes we've done "trials" for enterprises with an explicit expiration date where the service gets disabled if we don't receive their payment. This tightens our AR and incentivizes them to push the payment through their channels faster.
Sometimes a dev from a large company will test us on a smaller package with a company credit card and expand from there after we push them through the sales funnel.
Most of our enterprise clients pay using either ACH or check, while the remaining typically use credit cards.
My bad, it's sometimes easy to overlook the sidebar.
A bit off topic, it looks like Sam Altman is ramping up his blogging activity due to YC's S15 open sign-ups.
Sloppy? Written on the left column (emphasis mine):
Geoff Ralston Startups, technology, and education. ==> Partner at Y Combinator <== Founder and Partner at Imagine K12
I apologize if there was any confusion. We're running a holiday promo, which is written above the pricing table: "Get 14 days free + 90% off for 3 months during the holidays!"
We try to keep it as clear and concise as possible by showing the pricing you get with the promo + the normal pricing after that.
I happen to be Matt Connor :-) My username also happens to be "XERQ," and my profile lists SSD Nodes, JARVYS, and XERQ. I'm transparent when it comes to the projects I'm a part of, if that's a concern.
If the main concern of this post is pricing: our service isn't the cheapest, nor do we want it to be. We want JARVYS to provide the most value and peace of mind to our customers. It allows us to focus on delivering quality instead of searching for the next buck. Is the loss of your data worth the money you'd be saving from choosing one providing over another?
We actually called up iDrive to learn more about their Linux product and to ask them for help installing it, and their response was to read the documentation. Linux felt almost like an afterthought with them, with their core product being Mac and Windows. Instead of us half-way supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, and everything else, we want to be the best Linux backup service available and to focus solely on it.
Heroku is one of the offenders, but you're absolutely right and I went ahead and fixed it.
Hi there and thank you for taking the time to look into JARVYS. I'd happily go through and answer your questions. Some of them are answered here[0]
No word on encryption.
We encrypt data in motion, but not at rest (yet). Since this is a beta product we wanted to get it out there first with a free version that would bring the barrier down and allow us to learn as much from users as possible.
No word on what is actually backed up, how to include or exclude files.
By default it backs up everything except /proc and /sys, which you can change here (with detailed instructions): /var/jarvys/etc/include
No word on when anything is backed up and how (cronjob, daemon?).
It's a cronjob that checks in with our servers every hour and backs up once a day. The reason it's not a daemon is because daemons die, and we needed something as bulletproof as possible. Checking in every hour allows us to tell you when your server hasn't been checking in (which means you can proactively see if your cron daemon is broken or if something else went wrong before it affects your backups).
No word on how running services and databases are backed up that may need special procedures for a consistent snapshot.
We include a special script that allows you to run things like mysqldump before the servers back up to JARVYS: /var/jarvys/etc/run-before-backup.sh
No word on how to restore or access backups when the backed up host has failed.
That's also included in here[0] - that feature is still in testing and hasn't been released yet.
All things considered I have a strong feeling you are not qualified to run a service like this. Your expertise seems to be in webdesign, not in Unix and servers.
Another backup concern you didn't mention is bit rot, which we're using ZFS to mitigate.
Thank you for your kind words regarding our website, our designer actually wrote a detailed blog post on how they came up with the logo[1]. We've been providing managed backup services (among other managed services) for our SSD Nodes[2] clients, which is for whom we originally built this service.
[0] https://my.jarvys.io/docs/home [1] https://blog.jarvys.io/2014/11/04/the-jarvys-logo-design/ [2] https://www.ssdnodes.com
Honestly didn't expect this submission to go anywhere, and only had a minute before jumping on a call :-)