Re:Pay $35 once and get a VPS for life: too good to be true?
by dogma1138 on Monday February 29, 2016 @10:47AM
(#11196097)
You only get 1CPU (probably heavily limited), 512MB of RAM and 10GB of storage.
This is basically the AWS micro instance which you get for free:
"AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year" (If you want it free for life, just create another AWS account ;)).
These instances are way to limited to run anything even remotely intensive at best you'll be able to use it as some VPN/Proxy or a small scale hosted VOIP server, but what more often than not will happen is that tons of people (hopefully) will register pay the 35$ and never use them, this is pretty much the Gym membership business model.
With thin provisioning at the fact that at best one out of 10 registered instances will actually be used they can make a huge profit, especially in the short term and considering that with how hardware scales overtime and the fact that more of the few actual users that they'll on board that would actually use that instance will drop off as time passes, it will become exponentially cheaper for them to support this type of business model with time.
This is a pretty ingenious quick cash grab if they'll manage to attract a large amount of people because 2 years down the line they'll probably could support their entire actual user base with a few RasPi's in a broom closet some where (And yes I'm aware that you can purchase much bigger VPS's from them for a much higher (onetime) cost, but the overall premise still stands)....
This is basically the AWS micro instance which you get for free: "AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year" (If you want it free for life, just create another AWS account ;)).
These instances are way to limited to run anything even remotely intensive at best you'll be able to use it as some VPN/Proxy or a small scale hosted VOIP server, but what more often than not will happen is that tons of people (hopefully) will register pay the 35$ and never use them, this is pretty much the Gym membership business model.
With thin provisioning at the fact that at best one out of 10 registered instances will actually be used they can make a huge profit, especially in the short term and considering that with how hardware scales overtime and the fact that more of the few actual users that they'll on board that would actually use that instance will drop off as time passes, it will become exponentially cheaper for them to support this type of business model with time.
This is a pretty ingenious quick cash grab if they'll manage to attract a large amount of people because 2 years down the line they'll probably could support their entire actual user base with a few RasPi's in a broom closet some where (And yes I'm aware that you can purchase much bigger VPS's from them for a much higher (onetime) cost, but the overall premise still stands)....