Summer discounts and news

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Edge100x
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Summer discounts and news

Post by Edge100x »

We have a bunch of price decreases and other news!

Dedicated servers:
  • We're now offering E3-1275v6 machines in New York City! These are some of the fastest server chips that Intel offers, on a per-core basis, and work fantastic for game servers and other intensive applications. We've priced them aggressively out of the gate.
  • We've dropped prices again. We dropped prices on dedicated servers across the board last month (for many customers, it was a $20 difference) -- and now we've dropped them further. Our popular E3-1270v3 and E3-1271v3 configurations, for instance, have gone down another $15. Now's a great time to order a new machine or upgrade.
Game and voice servers:
  • We've started a sale on game and voice servers that gives $10 off every order of $100 or more, and $5 off orders between $50 and $100.
Virtual servers:
  • VDSes already offered an outstanding value, but as with dedicated servers, we have dropped prices for most plans even further.
  • We have adjusted our Windows fee to better match how we are charged by Microsoft. The fee is now calculated based on the number of ordered cores, instead of being flat. This means that smaller servers do not have to pay as much for the Windows installation, but larger servers have to pay more. We still heavily subsidize the fee to make it as affordable as possible.
  • We have bumped up our requirement for managed game-server-only VDSes to 6 cores at minimum. We have been seeing many customers running into resource limitations with the old 4-core option, and with the new lower pricing, it is too inexpensive for us to be able to support smaller configurations.
Webhosting:
  • We've dropped the price of our 'Standard' plan to 4.99 and our 'Pro' plan to 9.99.
If you have a service with us already, make sure to visit the order page and check to see if your price has gone down -- and lock it in if it has, by submitting an adjustment there. Adjustments are quick and easy, and our system handles them automatically. (Dedicated servers are more complicated and those customers will need to contact us). If you'd rather continue your current configuration at its current price, you can also do that, thanks to our grandfathering policy.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by $atanic $pirit »

Can you provide a side by side comparison of the price drops? I haven't really checked the prices in a long while, and just want to see if an upgrade is worth it.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by MPQC »

$atanic $pirit wrote:Can you provide a side by side comparison of the price drops? I haven't really checked the prices in a long while, and just want to see if an upgrade is worth it.
Here's what I see:

2 Core Windows server - price decrease by $9/month.
4 Core Windows server (+2gb ram/month) - price decrease by $5/month (this one had the grandfathered price from before July 2016, when the price for small windows VPS increased a lot - it's now cheaper than before the change happened).
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by $atanic $pirit »

Seems like only Windows price has been affected. As a Linux user there is no incentive for me.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by Edge100x »

$atanic $pirit, VDS base prices overall came down a bit on all packages except for the one- and two-core servers. At the 16-core level, for instance, it was a $10 (about 10%) difference. You should go to the order page and check out how your specific set of options changed.

Windows servers came down even more, for small servers, and went up a bit for large servers. For instance, a one-core Windows server was $22.98 and is now only $10.49. A two-core Windows server was $29.98 and is now $19.99. A four-core Windows server was $44.98 and is now $34.99. It is now affordable again to have a small Windows VDS, and even for large Windows VDSes, prices are lower than they were last year (before the Windows cost break-out) -- with extra bandwidth, to boot.

Microsoft very strongly penalizes virtual servers when it comes to OS licensing, so for Windows customers who are considering large VDS sizes, we recommend considering a dedicated machine. Our dedicated machines also come with much more RAM and have faster individual processor cores. For Linux customers who use a VDS for webhosting or other well-threaded tasks, and who don't need a particularly large amount of RAM, a VDS of any size will typically still offer a better value.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by It'sRandinator »

Is the decrease in vps pricing permanent or temporary?

I must say as a avid vps user having used many many hosts and used a vps for about everything. Such as game servers, development/testing, web hosting, dns, ssh gateway, vpn, storage etc.. I believe the resource balance per price is great, through not everyone needs that specific balance unless you host game servers / web hosting so possibly to balance this out NFO should offer a smaller end vps as I would find it handy and not wasteful as the $8 vps plan as I don't utilize all it or don't need it.

I recommend NFO every chance I get for who it's best suited for. Many users don't understand that the pricing for XEN HVM and the balance of resources is pretty great when compared to others, but it's possible that those other hosts which have plans such as 4 cores with 8GB of ram are cutting corners, through using openvz and the customer is not aware or may have bad support/network. Just felt this should be said.

My questions as per resource for the price.
  • Is the cpu usage dedicated (where you are pinned to your own cores, and cgroups specify no other VPS is allowed to pin on those cores) or fair share?

    Do clients get access to 100% of the Disk IO for that configuration of drive(s). i.e. all clients are not on the same disk array?

    Ram guaranteed? Network?
Suggestions

-Smaller end vps package
-As like mentioned above perhaps more customization as not all users host game servers (contrary to your catered crowd, money is money), but because the allocated resources aren't sufficient for users to be paying more and they don't need the extra 200GB storage on 4 core for example. Bringing the cost down.
- SSD main storage given smaller partitions than HDD and bring the cost further down.
- Snapshots / backup via CP

However I'm more interested in a smaller end vps as well as SSD as main storage.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by $atanic $pirit »

Edge100x wrote:You should go to the order page and check out how your specific set of options changed.
Where can I do that? Is there a link?
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by Edge100x »

$atanic $pirit, you'd have to visit https://www.nfoservers.com/order-virtua ... server.php and re-select your specs. When you submit it as a change order, it will let you know what you changed on the confirmation page, so you can double-check that you remembered them right.

It'sRandinator, this is the new standard pricing for us. In the future, prices are likely to go down further, but there is always the change that they'll have to go up. If they do go up, current customers will be able to continue to retain their old pricing, through our grandfathering policy.

Our original system was to have each ordered HT core correspond to an HT core on the system. We have found over time that this is inefficient and has resulted in sub-par performance (sometimes heavy-usage customers were given HT cores on the same physical core, for instance, which was suboptimal), so we are working towards a better system. I do not know of a different host that has dedicated cores.

Customers on a machine share the same backing RAID. It would not be possible to try to give customers their own physical drives -- machines don't support that number of hard drives. (Nor would it make financial sense if they did!) I do not know of a different host that has separate physical drives for every VPS customer.

RAM is physically assigned and guaranteed. Unlike OpenVZ and KVM, Xen does not support fake RAM and paging to disk, by default -- that's traditionally been one of its differentiators.

As with all hosts, the same physical network card is shared by customers on the same machine.

We do not plan to offer smaller VDSes at this time. To do so would mean putting many more customers onto each machine, and that would impact performance.

Our primary limited resource is CPU cores, so we base our pricing -- our plans -- on CPU cores. Because we rarely run out of hard drive space on a machine, it doesn't make sense for us to offer a discount to customers who plan to use less hard drive space. Memory is a similar story, so we do not offer a discount for using less memory. We do offer the option of paying more for more memory, since we have extra in most machines (the same is not true of disk storage).

Disk storage is moving to all-SSD. It won't be necessary for us to shrink the size of partitions to enable this. With a Linux VDS, you can use reconfigure your VDS to use an SSD partition as primary storage after you set it up, if you wish.

Snapshots and backups aren't feasible from outside the OS in an unmanaged environment because it would lead to disk corruption. This is something that customers can do from inside the OS.
stickz

Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by stickz »

Will NFO offer a VDS package to compete with [another specific host]? They're offering 4 cores and 2gb of ram for $12 in two flagship locations. The hardware is just as strong as what NFO offers. I can run my game servers better there at a lower cost because of a higher core count. And the Gentoo Linux image is much better than NFOs. It doesn't take ages to compile things at high optimization levels. It's not bloated with tons of junky packages I don't need. The kernel is also newer which makes things easier. Plus I get SSD storage. Have you guys thought about having removing two and three cores packages and just scaling ram on four cores? Wouldn't this reduce your costs and benefit customers?
stickz

Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by stickz »

I would really like to move one of my VPSs to NFO, but costs are the biggest thing for me. If I could get the following specifications it would probably be enough:
  • 4 cores on an e5-2690v2
  • 2gb of Ram
  • 200gb of storage
  • $15 USD base price
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by $atanic $pirit »

stickz wrote:I would really like to move one of my VPSs to NFO, but costs are the biggest thing for me. If I could get the following specifications it would probably be enough:
  • 4 cores on an e5-2690v2
  • 2gb of Ram
  • 200gb of storage
  • $15 USD base price
Not the one to take NFO's side, but if you are getting a better offer from the other guys then why are you willing to switch to NFO? Why not just stick with the other host, instead of making NFO compete with them?
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by stickz »

$atanic $pirit wrote:
stickz wrote:I would really like to move one of my VPSs to NFO, but costs are the biggest thing for me. If I could get the following specifications it would probably be enough:
  • 4 cores on an e5-2690v2
  • 2gb of Ram
  • 200gb of storage
  • $15 USD base price
Not the one to take NFO's side, but if you are getting a better offer from the other guys then why are you willing to switch to NFO? Why not just stick with the other host, instead of making NFO compete with them?
I want to utilize the exchange points NFO (in)directly has access to. Running a game server on SIX, NYIX or Equinix has its advantages. It's a little something extra. (if you know what I mean) I wouldn't get hung up over a few extra bucks for that, but double the cost makes me host my game-servers elsewhere. :( (when other facters are equal or better)

Anyways, i'm gonna go back to swimming in expensive transit on my other hosting provider. If NFO becomes more competitive, i'll reconsider hosting with them.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by Edge100x »

stickz, as you have seen, we're always lowering prices. But, our aim is not to try to price-match specific hosts and we don't want to compete for the very low end of the market.

It's good to hear that you don't need much memory. That's not common. It's also good to hear that you're lucky enough to be on a currently underloaded machine elsewhere -- also uncommon at most hosts. If you're all set where you are now, you should certainly consider staying there.

Our machines are on average a bit faster than what you quoted. The bandwidth is better. Service is better. DDoS mitigation is better. Reliability should be better (and supported by a real SLA). In general, our costs are going to be higher than the very cheapest places.

Your complaints about our Gentoo image don't make a whole lot of sense, because Gentoo is a rolling-release distribution, and our default image is just the standard install created by following their guide, with zero bloat. You can create a new Gentoo installation from scratch pretty easily, if you'd like, and I definitely recommend that you do that if you go with Gentoo (it's an important part of the process). The kernel version that gets used by Gentoo is simply the one that you install. All that said, I don't generally recommend choosing Gentoo, since maintaining a Gentoo installation is much more time-consuming than maintaining an Ubuntu or Debian installation. And I say that as someone who has used Gentoo extensively for just about everything over the last 15 years.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by stickz »

A few more things.

Why should people be allowed to fill up Windows machines with single cores? Is this not unfair to people who are running higher core counts, to have additional costs passed onto them because more Windows licenses have to be purchased?

Why run XEN instead of KVM on Linux based machines? KVM is faster in almost all cases and has better support on Linux. Plus ballooning works properly allowing for more flexibility over memory while reducing costs. https://major.io/2014/06/22/performance ... vm-vs-xen/

Why does NFO not support hot-swapping? It would be nice to be able to add additional memory without a reboot.
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Re: Summer discounts and news

Post by Edge100x »

stickz wrote:Is this not unfair to people who are running higher core counts, to have additional costs passed onto them because more Windows licenses have to be purchased?
This is the scenario that is most fair. Microsoft licenses Windows using a per-core model. We changed it specifically because the other model was not as fair.
Why run XEN instead of KVM on Linux based machines? KVM is faster in almost all cases and has better support on Linux. Plus ballooning works properly allowing for more flexibility over memory while reducing costs. https://major.io/2014/06/22/performance ... vm-vs-xen/
We have found in our own testing that Xen is faster/smoother in almost all cases on Linux and Windows for game servers, which is good, because trying to switch to KVM would cause compatibility problems with older customer installations. Both Xen and KVM support ballooning, but using it causes extra overhead, and we avoid it. Both Xen and KVM also now support swapping memory to disk, something that we avoid for performance reasons (it's one reason why OpenVZ container hosts tend to have such terrible performance) -- customers will continue to have their own exclusive, unshared block of memory.
Why does NFO not support hot-swapping? It would be nice to be able to add additional memory without a reboot.
You must mean changing a domain's assigned amount of memory, which would be handled as a hot-add on the domU side. We do not support it because it causes extra overhead to use it, many OSes do not support it, and there is very little customer demand for it.
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