Are managed load balancers useful?

Advin

Hi,

We’re working on a new VPS panel. More information will be announced at a later date, but, it’ll have postpaid and hourly billing features like some of the cloud providers (e.g., Vultr).

Would a managed load balancer product be useful to you? For example, something along the lines of what Vultr and Hetzner Cloud offer, where you can create load balancers and they provide you with a GUI to manage it. You can add services, domains, and have it balance between multiple IPs (incl. VPC/private network IPs).

The idea is that we’d offer it for around $5/month, maybe more or less, with fair use resources.

But I’m curious, would you rather just provision your own servers if they were around the same price, and do you see a need for this product?

havoc

@Advin said: would you rather just provision your own servers if they were around the same price,

They're not really like for like. A LB would need substantially higher throughput than a provisioned server with LB software on it.

If I put a 1gbps DIY loadbalancer "server" in front of a 4x cluster each with a 1gbps connection that's a bottleneck not a LB.

do you see a need for this product?

Those that need it are likely to go for bigger providers tbh. But if you're trying to grow then it's a bit of a chicken & egg situation

yoursunny

Tiers:

• Free: single location, can send traffic to Advin servers only, limited to two backend servers.
• Hobby: single location, can send traffic to Advin servers only, unlimited backend servers.
• Team: single location, can send traffic to any server in the world.
• Pro: multiple locations.
• Enterprise: 24/7 telephone support.

DrNutella

@yoursunny said:
Tiers:

• Free: single location, can send traffic to Advin servers only, limited to two backend servers.
• Hobby: single location, can send traffic to Advin servers only, unlimited backend servers.
• Team: single location, can send traffic to any server in the world.
• Pro: multiple locations.
• Enterprise: 24/7 telephone support.

Free $0/LESBian
Hobby $1/yr
Team $3/yr
Pro $4/yr
Enterprise $5/yr

Pricing strategy complete. Invoice in mail.

skorous

@havoc said:

@Advin said: would you rather just provision your own servers if they were around the same price,

They're not really like for like. A LB would need substantially higher throughput than a provisioned server with LB software on it.

If I put a 1gbps DIY loadbalancer "server" in front of a 4x cluster each with a 1gbps connection that's a bottleneck not a LB.

Slightly different perspective. A load-balancer's purpose isn't solely to maximize throughput by distributing load across all nodes. There's the service redundancy aspect to it as well. I may have an LDAP service running on two nodes because I still need to be able to login if one node has an issue or Wordpress sites running on three nodes so I can do rolling upgrades without taking service offline. It may be a bottleneck if you were running flat out but as you say people running in that kind of configuration likely aren't low-end.