How do you see VPS pricing in the future on LowEnd markets?
Scaleblade
Hosting Provider
Hi,
We've been doing low end vps for a while now that being said its not been a major focus, the problem is when we released our Ryzen 5000 lineup it was "LowEnd" but in the past few years with other offers coming up its uhhh well quite expensive now in comparison.
So its time for us to do a spring clean of our vps offering and get some new hardware in.
I wanted to do a general community gauge of costing.
Mockup offer
Ryzen 9 9950X
1GB DDR5
20GB NVMe
10Gbit Port @ 2TB Month
IPv4 and IPv6 IP (routed /64 standard with all our vms)
This plan isn't for everyone, it specifically targets people who wants latest generation cpu with crazy r/w drive speeds.
What would you say is both fair and "no brainer" pricing for this kind of offering?
(fair being defined as you'd see it on a website on a random day of the week)
(no brainer being lowend exclusive deals, black friday, holiday discounts that kind of thing)
Also in your opinion is this kind of service even wanted on these sites anymore?
The more I look I see less and less latest gen ryzens appearing and more of this older Xeon E5-V4 cpu's for $7/yr.
Comments
$7.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
I should of known to expect this.
To be comparison, This exact specs on one of the provider i know costs around ~5.5USD/m, which this provider is not active in Lowend market anymore, So i'll assume that this is every day price and not lowend.
But for no-brainer ~7/y or lower of course
I'd be curious to see what kind of volume they push at that rate, I think I originally budgeted for a little lower around the 4.42USD/mo mark.
Should have, btw. But yeah the sentence would correctly be "I should have expected this."
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
$1/mo
we can also accept this
This provider has a lot location but there is only one with 9950x. So i believed they can find profit from non 9950x region to cover the low profit of 9950x node i think
But what's your ideal price anyways?
As a host I stopped offering ipv4 with plans below $4 / month.
Several providers offer services with 3GB ram, 9900x, ~60GB nvme for around $5 / month, moving that in 1/3rd would put you down to about $1.666 / month for your offer. (every provider has their quirks though) Assuming you fill up a system with 192gb of ram to about 80% your potential margins are pretty good - even if the client might get the occasional cpu steal during very busy nights. Only real concern I have is letting ipv4 addresses go at said prices, and the transaction fees would put you within range of "quarterly or yearly sales only" territory.
Normal sales prices? I'd put $2 / month / $20 / year
Blackfriday loss leaders with limited stock? $ 1 / month $12 / year
Sorry what I meant is we could do 4.42USD/month per GB at the scale/deployment we are looking at currently.
This is the main reason I am considering going the newer hardware/premium end of the lowend-market over reusing older hardware with yearly plans. Its really not worth the IP costs (and thats with us that mostly buy our ips outright now).
Could you pm me links to the sellers doing Ryzen 9900X's at $2/month as well as 9900X 3GB plans at $5/month. I'd be curious to dig into them and try to figure out how they get margins so low there.
There you go!
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/9127/z-plus-hearts-and-hooves-day-performance-vps-release
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just plot a longer ROI for the IPs and $7/yr will be good to go 🙈
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Or you can run on losses and make it free for all!
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
Thanks to Scaleblade for contributing a server to FreeVPS.org!
Much appreciated!
@Scaleblade -- A near equivalent to your mockup offer might be Linveo's offer posted here at LES on February 12:
"Ohio and AZ are fully 9950X. Texas is currently a mix, but all new nodes are on the 9950X CPU.
AMD KVM 1GB
1024 MB RAM
1 CPU Core
25 GB NVMe SSD
Port speed ??
4000 GB Bandwidth
1 IPv4 and IPv6/64
Price: $2.10/month or $21.00/year with coupon code LES65AMDKVM2025"
So I am guessing $2.10/month or $21.00/year must approximate the "fair" Low End price for your Mockup Offer. Of course, the "no brainier" price is lower, or even a lot lower.
Seems like many people do a lot with small resource VPSes. Ryzen seems super popular these days, maybe Ryzen might be the only processor Low Enders really want?
Good luck with sales!
Thanks again for your donation to FreeVPS.org! 
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Thank you for your genuinely helpful post.
Looking at Linveo maybe I have been approaching this pricing topic wrong. They seem to have that mockup plan listed significantly higher at $6/mo for “normies” with LowEnd discounts to $2.10
Our focus would be releasing this in our European site where opex costs are higher so we may have to make minor adjustments to pricing based on region.
Would you say this is a common practice or would people prefer a flat rate price across a provider that supports multiple locations even if that flat rate is slightly higher to support the more expensive locations?
We will not buy 1GB at any price.
For the doubled offer:
We pay $18~22/year on Black Friday, 10 units in stock.
If we don't get it, wait until next Black Friday.
No hostname left!
Race to the bottom, as always.
The 9900X's at $2/month pretty sure they have a 25% cap, so it feels like a good old E5.
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What we like to avoid, it’s why we have been on the pricer side in the past. We avoid aggressive cpu caps and over allocation on nodes.
My opinion on it is, if you wanna spend $24/year then you go to a provider using a 7-8 year old Xeon with enough cores to cram 500+ VMs on.
$2 a month is likely unachievable especially in our London location. I also have to take into account cost of support and our extra systems we offer like BGP and BYOIP which a lot of providers either don’t offer or charge a setup fee for too.
I think we could position ourselves relatively competitively looking at hosts like Linevo and BuyVM.
I have seemingly discovered however keeping a larger margin at baseline to offer competitive discounts on these sites seems to be a better idea than just offering the competitive rate as your standard.
Honestly, I don't know. I've been having a lot of fun here on the Low End, but I haven't yet been able to determine the best recipe. As you know, there are a lot of people here! I wish you good luck!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
This market is ecclectic and thus there is no one size fits all. At least to veterans that know what they will use.
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As said by others, there are different use cases. For hobby/testing purposes very low end is what I am looking for, reliability or extreme performance is not required. When I have a real project or a customer that is in effect paying the bill I want something more reliable with better customer service and I am willing to pay more for it. I can find both types of providers here. Which is why I normally shop at LES.
I expect that a division of sorts is required and that trying to satisfy both of the above use cases with the same product and service level would be a lose lose situation. This is just an opinion from an end user.
One of the biggest problems with pricing VPS accounts is there usually is always someone willing to sell it at rock bottom just to get the sale. Every offer is a tad different. One of the biggest things that gets overlooked is the quality of the network/internet attached to that VPS offer. Every vps provider here is reselling someone's internet uplink. The good ones will be considered tier 2. The lower cheaper offers will be tier 3+
If you want a quality VPS, you want to be as direct as you can with a provider who has TIER 1 Internet Uplinks. The more middle man you have = slightly lower reliability/network speed/latency you might have.
I also still think 1GB DDR5 is too low for the modern OS. 2GB should be the standard in 2025. Prices wise I think the above $5,$7, or $10 per month is valid again depending on tier network as I described above!
This discussion has been ongoing since 2008 LEB or so, and people often say things like "You should not expect this (low) price to stay forever" while the market says the opposite.
In the past, I paid $7 for a 64MB RAM/5GB HDD VPS. Now, I pay $7 for a 16GB RAM/100GB NVMe VPS. The low end market became huge, with things not getting more expensive, if anything, they're getting cheaper.
Besides, is an 8GB or 16GB memory VPS with a super-modern CPU still considered as low end at all?
I know that there are more factors than just resources to determine what qualifies as "low end," but if we focus solely on the resources, we're getting relatively high-end specifications for peanuts.
However, there's another problem I see from a host's point of view. YABS-ing has become a low end market religion. With that, people demand higher and higher Geekbench scores without truly understanding them or their own needs, which forces hosts to offer bleeding-edge CPUs for next to nothing.
Sometimes I feel sorry for hosts offering a decent deal at a good price, but with a Geekbench score that's just not there... and because of that, people consider it as a bad deal not worth their attention. It's a crappy situation, especially for lesser known hosts. If you don't show ultra great numbers in your offers, you don't exist.
I may be wrong, but I think the higher-end hosting market, or just the casual hosting market, is more forgiving in that aspect, and people don't care as much about the numbers as they do about the actual performance of the things they host.
I truly think that power and space costs are going to dictate our market more than ever in the very near future… just think of how dense you can stuff a rack and times that by negotiated kw price and it’s no wonder there’s so much turbulence!
That doesn’t even account for the network!
As a new provider we’ve been watching, learning, math-ing and trying to find the sweet spots, it’s really REALLY difficult! You either outlay a ton of cash for early scale, or scrimp and save in areas that might not matter upfront, but will bite/kill you in the long run. A tough game, but also exciting!
I totally agree with this, obeying the mighty YABS has become a religion, and not a good one.
99% of my vps's have a load avg below 0.5 and the majority of them are probably damn close to zero. A better benchmark would do absolutely no difference to me, in any way, since I'm not using the resources I already have. And I know I'm not the only one.
People brag about how many idlers they have, and then they claim that YABS are important. Where is the logic in that?
I'll take a 15 year old cpu and 100MBit connection over the latest and greatest everyday as long as it's cheap and stable.
Yes, the VPS does need to have a baseline performance. But at some point, having zero cpu steal is more important for me than just the raw numbers.
Hey teamacc. You're a dick. (c) Jon Biloh, 2020.
Do you ever consider VDS when this need is critical to your workload? Or do you rather run the gauntlet with a known host and more shared Cores?
so far about 80%-90% of all my vpsses have low enough cpu steal, with 95% of the ones i bought from proper hosts validating this. Only the bottom-of-the-barrel crap has high cpu steal (c1vhosting looking at you)
Hey teamacc. You're a dick. (c) Jon Biloh, 2020.
Ok that’s great to know! Glad you’ve found some reputable providers
A very well said and rational take. Between my own internal guidelines on this, and discussing with smaller/newer hosts fairly often this is a bit of an issue. YABS is an excellent tool, but just like MTR/traceroute the operator has to know how to interpret what they're reading. A good example of this is take the same hypervisor that went from ~5-10% average CPU load to ~15-25%. Nothing changed, no VMs added, no policy shifts to overselling more, etc but simply people's projects are now a bit more active. You might see your GB single core score drop from 970 to 820 depending on boost capacity that minute. You might even have someone complain about it. I can't even think of what the difference, for any use-case that VM is targeted at, would be between 820 and 970 besides number-go-up.
The flip side, when we have a HV that was at ~1k and now is ~400? We know something is up and might not have been a long enough 95th sampling window yet to pickup some new cryptocurrency transactional node processing abuser.
There is a lot more to evaluate besides that, and chasing that number will drive you insane (host or user). Personally, I went after targeting significantly better enterprise hardware in terms of reliability, flexibility, and our ability to detect issues faster and service it quietly behind the scenes. Hardware will always fail/break, but my thoughts were that if a bad disk can be alerted, automatically ticketed to be swapped seamlessly (so simple that virtually anyone off the street that can read a serial number is capable), and automatically resilvered when new disk is detected that makes the entire operation a lot more resilient.
Power and space will generally always go up, without some sort of massive sci-fi tier breakthrough in energy production. The benefit here is that better hardware (being produced in higher quantities than ever) keeps trickling down so you can kind of "maintain" that low-end market segment performance-wise. Although, E5v4 units are still really solid for the price and hold up well for most modern tasks along with being proven.
My personal experience with regards to LE* deals was that the two most expensive parts for us to operate were: customer service/abuse issues, and IP space. The rest can be made to fit (on the deployments here) within a workable envelope but those were the two hardest to maintain. Even if you buy more ranges, you don't necessarily want to burn $8k of IPv4 on $1700 worth of yearly VMs. Tried the IPv6 only option, but I think it was @host_c who said (and happened to us too): about 90-95% of those orders asked for an IPv4 address within a month.
NVMe VPS | Ryzen 7950X VDS | Dedicated Servers -- Crunchbits.com
For the low-end market, a considerable number of suppliers now offer Rayzen VPS at a price of $2 or lower. For example, kuxueyun $2.00 USD per month
1x Ryzen 9 7950X
1GB DDR5 RAM
20GB NVMe SSD
1x IPv4 & /64 IPv6
2TB@2Gbps
Free Full Backup
Salt Lake City, US。
As you said, it seems that no one knows what the GB5 score represents, but everyone is willing to see machines with higher scores ordered within a limited budget. My evaluation work always introduces CPU performance to everyone through Unixbench and Geekbench, but I think it only represents whether the supplier has reused this host too much.
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