I did notice that they are now based out of the middle east vs india. Customer service did improve a lot over last couple of months. Still powered by the same team. So who knows.
>
You must have been lucky, my tickets with them, actually since they changed their ticket system, has taken longer to answer and the answer has not been very helpful until you bounced it back and forth a couple of times.
Their live-chat, which they decided to use instead of Skype, is worse.
Ask a heated question, like how long until they start using the EZ templates in OpenVZ7 and they ignore you until the chatbox autocloses and removes all traces of the chat.
mikho said: Ask a heated question, like how long until they start using the EZ templates in OpenVZ7 and they ignore you until the chatbox autocloses and removes all traces of the chat.
If you get Arvind, you will be golden. That Dude knows his stuff. Or IDK, maybe I manage to catch them at the right time. The only thing I totally hate is their "Something went wrong" type of message. Like hell, tell me what is wrong and I think I can fix it myself. Don't give me a random error and keep me guessing who let the dogs out.
@Lee said:
Oakley is like a flock of circling vultures, they know what their target is, the plan is in place, all that is left is to swoop. cPanel first, then WHMCS, then more price increases. I am glad to be out in honesty.
I'm still waiting to see the price changes for Solus.
OnApp just increased rates to $12/m/core wiht a 100 core minimum.
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
Still, anything more than like $3/m/core is going to kill a lot of hosts, that or just kill LEB pricing on Solus.
Francisco
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
@Francisco said:
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
If the prices were raised like this, 100-400% increase for slave licenses, I would absolutely switch to something different.
They've already said the price is going up but will be "lower than OnApp". OnApp used to be around $10/m/core but even a cost of $5/m/core would put out a lot of hosts. In your case you got some Ryzen box and suddenly you have $80/month in licensing.
With the new OnApp price being $12/m/core and it looks like it's retroactive to everyone, it leaves a lot of room for Solus to move up.
Francisco
So what will the majority of those hosts who can't develop or invest into something like Stallion do: Virtualizor, VMmanager, Proxmox or something else?
I don't know.
When Solus goes this way I see Virtualizor following to some degree. I see no reason for them to piss away possible revenue by sticking to a low per node cost like they are now.
Proxmox is OK but from what I've heard it needs a lot of work to be usable and or a lot of hacking about.
Francisco
Be careful with the AGPL license on Proxmox. It requires that anyone who accesses your service be given a full copy of the underlying source code and changes.
So if you do anything with the API, and let the public access a service using your custom API-driven software, you have to give that software to those users / competitors / customers / Proxmox.
A real deal breaker for customer-facing services.
Better to look at OpenNebula instead if you want something genuinely open source that you can build a service on top of.
@Francisco said:
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
If the prices were raised like this, 100-400% increase for slave licenses, I would absolutely switch to something different.
They've already said the price is going up but will be "lower than OnApp". OnApp used to be around $10/m/core but even a cost of $5/m/core would put out a lot of hosts. In your case you got some Ryzen box and suddenly you have $80/month in licensing.
With the new OnApp price being $12/m/core and it looks like it's retroactive to everyone, it leaves a lot of room for Solus to move up.
Francisco
So what will the majority of those hosts who can't develop or invest into something like Stallion do: Virtualizor, VMmanager, Proxmox or something else?
I don't know.
When Solus goes this way I see Virtualizor following to some degree. I see no reason for them to piss away possible revenue by sticking to a low per node cost like they are now.
Proxmox is OK but from what I've heard it needs a lot of work to be usable and or a lot of hacking about.
Francisco
Be careful with the AGPL license on Proxmox. It requires that anyone who accesses your service be given a full copy of the underlying source code and changes.
So if you do anything with the API, and let the public access a service using your custom API-driven software, you have to give that software to those users / competitors / customers / Proxmox.
A real deal breaker for customer-facing services.
Better to look at OpenNebula instead if you want something genuinely open source that you can build a service on top of.
That's a good point. I never thought about looking into the licensing specifics in the commercial deployment of open-source stuff. A good piece of general advice for providers to note in case of troublesome customers.
WisHosting uses OpenNebula I think, and as a customer I didn't find it difficult to use.
@Francisco said:
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
If the prices were raised like this, 100-400% increase for slave licenses, I would absolutely switch to something different.
They've already said the price is going up but will be "lower than OnApp". OnApp used to be around $10/m/core but even a cost of $5/m/core would put out a lot of hosts. In your case you got some Ryzen box and suddenly you have $80/month in licensing.
With the new OnApp price being $12/m/core and it looks like it's retroactive to everyone, it leaves a lot of room for Solus to move up.
Francisco
So what will the majority of those hosts who can't develop or invest into something like Stallion do: Virtualizor, VMmanager, Proxmox or something else?
I don't know.
When Solus goes this way I see Virtualizor following to some degree. I see no reason for them to piss away possible revenue by sticking to a low per node cost like they are now.
Proxmox is OK but from what I've heard it needs a lot of work to be usable and or a lot of hacking about.
Francisco
Be careful with the AGPL license on Proxmox. It requires that anyone who accesses your service be given a full copy of the underlying source code and changes.
So if you do anything with the API, and let the public access a service using your custom API-driven software, you have to give that software to those users / competitors / customers / Proxmox.
A real deal breaker for customer-facing services.
Better to look at OpenNebula instead if you want something genuinely open source that you can build a service on top of.
That's a good point. I never thought about looking into the licensing specifics in the commercial deployment of open-source stuff. A good piece of general advice for providers to note in case of troublesome customers.
WisHosting uses OpenNebula I think, and as a customer I didn't find it difficult to use.
Here's a thorough rundown on why AGPL is vendor lock-in evil nonsense wrapped up in hippie clothing:
AGPL is to Open Source as a whorehouse is to "free love". On paper it looks like you're getting what you want, but the details make all the difference.
@Lee said:
Oakley is like a flock of circling vultures, they know what their target is, the plan is in place, all that is left is to swoop. cPanel first, then WHMCS, then more price increases. I am glad to be out in honesty.
I'm still waiting to see the price changes for Solus.
OnApp just increased rates to $12/m/core wiht a 100 core minimum.
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
Still, anything more than like $3/m/core is going to kill a lot of hosts, that or just kill LEB pricing on Solus.
Francisco
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
Well, OnApp was $5/m/core and then moved all new users to $10/m/core.
Supposedly the new $12/m/core is retroactive as I said.
Still, you have to be in the very high end of things to make that work. You can't plan your revenue when the box is full, you have to take into consideration how long it'll take to fill and how long you're paying out of pocket.
But yeah, I don't see it only being $3/m/core on SVM2. On 4 core boxes (E3's, i7's, etc) they're almost no mark up. A lot of people on Solus use nodes like that so they're going to want to make sure everyone is paying more.
I'm thinking they'll probably do an increasing discount depending on total cores. Maybe $6/m/core on the smaller boxes (so an E3 would be $24/month alone) and then be $4/m/core on fatter E5's.
@Lee said:
Oakley is like a flock of circling vultures, they know what their target is, the plan is in place, all that is left is to swoop. cPanel first, then WHMCS, then more price increases. I am glad to be out in honesty.
I'm still waiting to see the price changes for Solus.
OnApp just increased rates to $12/m/core wiht a 100 core minimum.
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
Still, anything more than like $3/m/core is going to kill a lot of hosts, that or just kill LEB pricing on Solus.
Francisco
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
Well, OnApp was $5/m/core and then moved all new users to $10/m/core.
Supposedly the new $12/m/core is retroactive as I said.
Still, you have to be in the very high end of things to make that work. You can't plan your revenue when the box is full, you have to take into consideration how long it'll take to fill and how long you're paying out of pocket.
But yeah, I don't see it only being $3/m/core on SVM2. On 4 core boxes (E3's, i7's, etc) they're almost no mark up. A lot of people on Solus use nodes like that so they're going to want to make sure everyone is paying more.
I'm thinking they'll probably do an increasing discount depending on total cores. Maybe $6/m/core on the smaller boxes (so an E3 would be $24/month alone) and then be $4/m/core on fatter E5's.
Francisco
Honestly, the Onapp pricing scheme only makes sense if you're a corporate customer who is picking between a private cloud and a public cloud. Where, you're getting hammered so badly on price on the public cloud that paying the absurd license fee is a palatable alternative. Or, I suppose, if you're a managed service provider and you're picking between paying your first born son to VMWare, AWS, or Onapp, then, maybe Onapp is sometimes a reasonable option among the three.
But at no point does the Onapp per-core pricing model make sense for commodity hosting. You'd literally have to double your prices to make it work.
@Lee said:
Oakley is like a flock of circling vultures, they know what their target is, the plan is in place, all that is left is to swoop. cPanel first, then WHMCS, then more price increases. I am glad to be out in honesty.
I'm still waiting to see the price changes for Solus.
OnApp just increased rates to $12/m/core wiht a 100 core minimum.
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
Still, anything more than like $3/m/core is going to kill a lot of hosts, that or just kill LEB pricing on Solus.
Francisco
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
Well, OnApp was $5/m/core and then moved all new users to $10/m/core.
Supposedly the new $12/m/core is retroactive as I said.
Still, you have to be in the very high end of things to make that work. You can't plan your revenue when the box is full, you have to take into consideration how long it'll take to fill and how long you're paying out of pocket.
But yeah, I don't see it only being $3/m/core on SVM2. On 4 core boxes (E3's, i7's, etc) they're almost no mark up. A lot of people on Solus use nodes like that so they're going to want to make sure everyone is paying more.
I'm thinking they'll probably do an increasing discount depending on total cores. Maybe $6/m/core on the smaller boxes (so an E3 would be $24/month alone) and then be $4/m/core on fatter E5's.
Francisco
Honestly, the Onapp pricing scheme only makes sense if you're a corporate customer who is picking between a private cloud and a public cloud. Where, you're getting hammered so badly on price on the public cloud that paying the absurd license fee is a palatable alternative. Or, I suppose, if you're a managed service provider and you're picking between paying your first born son to VMWare, AWS, or Onapp, then, maybe Onapp is sometimes a reasonable option among the three.
But at no point does the Onapp per-core pricing model make sense for commodity hosting. You'd literally have to double your prices to make it work.
I think that's exactly right. Try to eat off VMware's plate and maybe try to snag some of the people that want to try to compete in the enterprise cloud market.
Thing is, I dont know of anyone besides vps.net and the group that got bought out by iomart using it for public offerings.
I know of a single provider that was using it for a small cluster but they got off that years ago when they started to see the price change.
@Lee said:
Oakley is like a flock of circling vultures, they know what their target is, the plan is in place, all that is left is to swoop. cPanel first, then WHMCS, then more price increases. I am glad to be out in honesty.
I'm still waiting to see the price changes for Solus.
OnApp just increased rates to $12/m/core wiht a 100 core minimum.
That leaves a lot of room for Solus to come in at $6 - $8/m per physical core, still be way cheaper, but still get a serious cash bump.
Still, anything more than like $3/m/core is going to kill a lot of hosts, that or just kill LEB pricing on Solus.
Francisco
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
Well, OnApp was $5/m/core and then moved all new users to $10/m/core.
Supposedly the new $12/m/core is retroactive as I said.
Still, you have to be in the very high end of things to make that work. You can't plan your revenue when the box is full, you have to take into consideration how long it'll take to fill and how long you're paying out of pocket.
But yeah, I don't see it only being $3/m/core on SVM2. On 4 core boxes (E3's, i7's, etc) they're almost no mark up. A lot of people on Solus use nodes like that so they're going to want to make sure everyone is paying more.
I'm thinking they'll probably do an increasing discount depending on total cores. Maybe $6/m/core on the smaller boxes (so an E3 would be $24/month alone) and then be $4/m/core on fatter E5's.
Francisco
Honestly, the Onapp pricing scheme only makes sense if you're a corporate customer who is picking between a private cloud and a public cloud. Where, you're getting hammered so badly on price on the public cloud that paying the absurd license fee is a palatable alternative. Or, I suppose, if you're a managed service provider and you're picking between paying your first born son to VMWare, AWS, or Onapp, then, maybe Onapp is sometimes a reasonable option among the three.
But at no point does the Onapp per-core pricing model make sense for commodity hosting. You'd literally have to double your prices to make it work.
I think that's exactly right. Try to eat off VMware's plate and maybe try to snag some of the people that want to try to compete in the enterprise cloud market.
Thing is, I dont know of anyone besides vps.net and the group that got bought out by iomart using it for public offerings.
I know of a single provider that was using it for a small cluster but they got off that years ago when they started to see the price change.
Francisco
VPS.net is a UK2 brand. UK2 was the company Ditlev used to be CEO of. Ditlev started Onapp.
I imagine they got a sweetheart deal.
A few years back I recall Ditlev saying that some of the mid size telecoms were either using Onapp or showing great interest in it, so they could sell their own brand of public cloud.
I also got the impression that some of their initial large customers were paying the higher prices, with high volume, and so it wasn't reasonable for Onapp to charge less to get interest from our segment of the market. Not worth it to alienate the customers who are paying all the bills, to pick up maybe some low to medium volume customers that wouldn't be paying you much.
A while back Onapp was saying they were surprised to be getting so much interest from the enterprise / corporate market, which I tweeted back that, it makes perfect sense as that customer type is used to paying way too much, either to MSP's, or AWS or VMware, and for that segment, the Onapp license fee isn't so much of an issue -- getting the right capabilities is far more important to them. I forget exactly the reply on that but it was some general agreement on the topic.
In any case, I can respect Onapp's position on this. They never priced this to compete with solusvm. The costs were not hidden or wildly altered. Sure, the billing model doesn't make sense for most of us, but it meets a market need at a price that a segment of the market finds to be a good value. Absolutely nothing wrong with targeting the segment of the market that sees the most value in your offering and is willing to pay for it.
Unfortunately for us, there is one aspect of their ethos that didn't pan out. I recall Ditlev saying several times that, coming from the hosting market, he wanted to make something to keep us hosting providers relevant in this new AWS landscape. So that we could all get together and offer competitive services and continue to thrive as we had in the past for many years to come. At the prices being charged for Onapp, that vision will not happen -- at least, not with Onapp being the thing that makes it possible.
Look at the economics of solusvm -- take a $100 / mo server and add a $10 / mo solus license to it, vs, Onapp, take a $200 / mo server and add a $200 / mo license to it. In that kind of situation, there's no way to get from here to there, the numbers don't make sense. Even if people did move over to that, what kind of vision is it where 50% of the cost of the service goes to the control panel / software provider? How is that much better than giving up and letting AWS grab all the market share.
funkywizard said: ecall Ditlev saying several times that, coming from the hosting market, he wanted to make something to keep us hosting providers relevant in this new AWS landscape.
Solus was supposed to get OnApp federation support but it never went anywhere.
It was supposed to be that providers that had the capital would spin up OnApp and then sell spare capacity on the Federation Market Place and then the plebs (read: solus users) would be able to resell it as if it was their own platform.
I don't think OnApp's SolusVM ever released a single feature though in the literal years they owned it.
@Francisco said:
Literally all but one thing in the change log was broken/reverted.
I remember that. There's a pretty good reason why many folks are either stumbling through upgrades, moving to Virtualizor, or in one case, replacing them with KVMs just to get rid of the headache.
Comments
>
You must have been lucky, my tickets with them, actually since they changed their ticket system, has taken longer to answer and the answer has not been very helpful until you bounced it back and forth a couple of times.
Their live-chat, which they decided to use instead of Skype, is worse.
Ask a heated question, like how long until they start using the EZ templates in OpenVZ7 and they ignore you until the chatbox autocloses and removes all traces of the chat.
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
If you get Arvind, you will be golden. That Dude knows his stuff. Or IDK, maybe I manage to catch them at the right time. The only thing I totally hate is their "Something went wrong" type of message. Like hell, tell me what is wrong and I think I can fix it myself. Don't give me a random error and keep me guessing who let the dogs out.
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Blesta looks much plain than WHMCS right? It's a little dated cosmetic
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Because 10 dollars / mo PER CPU CORE wasn't enough already?
That's in the ballpark of 100 - 200% of the value of the underlying server.
Be careful with the AGPL license on Proxmox. It requires that anyone who accesses your service be given a full copy of the underlying source code and changes.
So if you do anything with the API, and let the public access a service using your custom API-driven software, you have to give that software to those users / competitors / customers / Proxmox.
A real deal breaker for customer-facing services.
Better to look at OpenNebula instead if you want something genuinely open source that you can build a service on top of.
That's a good point. I never thought about looking into the licensing specifics in the commercial deployment of open-source stuff. A good piece of general advice for providers to note in case of troublesome customers.
WisHosting uses OpenNebula I think, and as a customer I didn't find it difficult to use.
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Here's a thorough rundown on why AGPL is vendor lock-in evil nonsense wrapped up in hippie clothing:
https://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2014/09/how-to-achieve-vendor-lock-in-with-a-legit-open-source-license-affero-gpl/
TL;DR
AGPL is to Open Source as a whorehouse is to "free love". On paper it looks like you're getting what you want, but the details make all the difference.
Well, OnApp was $5/m/core and then moved all new users to $10/m/core.
Supposedly the new $12/m/core is retroactive as I said.
Still, you have to be in the very high end of things to make that work. You can't plan your revenue when the box is full, you have to take into consideration how long it'll take to fill and how long you're paying out of pocket.
But yeah, I don't see it only being $3/m/core on SVM2. On 4 core boxes (E3's, i7's, etc) they're almost no mark up. A lot of people on Solus use nodes like that so they're going to want to make sure everyone is paying more.
I'm thinking they'll probably do an increasing discount depending on total cores. Maybe $6/m/core on the smaller boxes (so an E3 would be $24/month alone) and then be $4/m/core on fatter E5's.
Francisco
Yes, can vouch
Honestly, the Onapp pricing scheme only makes sense if you're a corporate customer who is picking between a private cloud and a public cloud. Where, you're getting hammered so badly on price on the public cloud that paying the absurd license fee is a palatable alternative. Or, I suppose, if you're a managed service provider and you're picking between paying your first born son to VMWare, AWS, or Onapp, then, maybe Onapp is sometimes a reasonable option among the three.
But at no point does the Onapp per-core pricing model make sense for commodity hosting. You'd literally have to double your prices to make it work.
I think that's exactly right. Try to eat off VMware's plate and maybe try to snag some of the people that want to try to compete in the enterprise cloud market.
Thing is, I dont know of anyone besides vps.net and the group that got bought out by iomart using it for public offerings.
I know of a single provider that was using it for a small cluster but they got off that years ago when they started to see the price change.
Francisco
A security vulnerability in Opennebula hit WisHosting's Opennebula installation
VPS.net is a UK2 brand. UK2 was the company Ditlev used to be CEO of. Ditlev started Onapp.
I imagine they got a sweetheart deal.
A few years back I recall Ditlev saying that some of the mid size telecoms were either using Onapp or showing great interest in it, so they could sell their own brand of public cloud.
I also got the impression that some of their initial large customers were paying the higher prices, with high volume, and so it wasn't reasonable for Onapp to charge less to get interest from our segment of the market. Not worth it to alienate the customers who are paying all the bills, to pick up maybe some low to medium volume customers that wouldn't be paying you much.
A while back Onapp was saying they were surprised to be getting so much interest from the enterprise / corporate market, which I tweeted back that, it makes perfect sense as that customer type is used to paying way too much, either to MSP's, or AWS or VMware, and for that segment, the Onapp license fee isn't so much of an issue -- getting the right capabilities is far more important to them. I forget exactly the reply on that but it was some general agreement on the topic.
In any case, I can respect Onapp's position on this. They never priced this to compete with solusvm. The costs were not hidden or wildly altered. Sure, the billing model doesn't make sense for most of us, but it meets a market need at a price that a segment of the market finds to be a good value. Absolutely nothing wrong with targeting the segment of the market that sees the most value in your offering and is willing to pay for it.
Unfortunately for us, there is one aspect of their ethos that didn't pan out. I recall Ditlev saying several times that, coming from the hosting market, he wanted to make something to keep us hosting providers relevant in this new AWS landscape. So that we could all get together and offer competitive services and continue to thrive as we had in the past for many years to come. At the prices being charged for Onapp, that vision will not happen -- at least, not with Onapp being the thing that makes it possible.
Look at the economics of solusvm -- take a $100 / mo server and add a $10 / mo solus license to it, vs, Onapp, take a $200 / mo server and add a $200 / mo license to it. In that kind of situation, there's no way to get from here to there, the numbers don't make sense. Even if people did move over to that, what kind of vision is it where 50% of the cost of the service goes to the control panel / software provider? How is that much better than giving up and letting AWS grab all the market share.
Solus was supposed to get OnApp federation support but it never went anywhere.
It was supposed to be that providers that had the capital would spin up OnApp and then sell spare capacity on the Federation Market Place and then the plebs (read: solus users) would be able to resell it as if it was their own platform.
I don't think OnApp's SolusVM ever released a single feature though in the literal years they owned it.
Francisco
Sure they did. They just didn't work.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
I mean, the funniest release they ever did was the long awaited support for...OpenVZ 7?
Literally all but one thing in the change log was broken/reverted. The one thing that worked? Updating the footer copyright.
Francisco
I remember that. There's a pretty good reason why many folks are either stumbling through upgrades, moving to Virtualizor, or in one case, replacing them with KVMs just to get rid of the headache.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.