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XERQ

Re:Ask HN: What projects are you working on now? on Saturday March 21, 2020 @08:18PM (#22651472)
https://www.ssdnodes.com/

SSD Nodes is a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. Our servers are 90% lower cost than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode when you commit to 1 or 3 years in advance.

We recently launched a Performance line of servers leveraging NVMe technology that boasts millions of IOPS and up to 6,400MB/s disk throughput, while still being 75% lower cost than what you would pay with at competitors.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? on Friday July 05, 2019 @12:09AM (#20359776)
SSD Nodes is a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. Our servers are 90% lower cost than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode when you commit to 1 or 3 years in advance.

We recently launched a Performance line of servers leveraging NVMe technology that boasts millions of IOPS and up to 6,400MB/s disk throughput, while still being 75% lower cost than what you would pay with at competitors.

https://www.ssdnodes.com

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic on Saturday September 29, 2018 @05:43PM (#18103035)
Agreed. Duck.com redirects to on2.com which, surprisingly, links to DuckDuckGo.

> If you meant to visit the search engine DuckDuckGo, click here.

I wouldn't have expected that from Google.

Re:I kill every VPS I touch on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @05:51PM (#17973779)
Hey there,

Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear about the issues you’re experiencing. We use several different services for managing fraud, and one of them flagged your IP. Not sure why since everything else looks fine, so we reviewed and approved your order.

We also use Stripe for payment processing, so we never see your credit card details.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @06:15PM (#16218809)
Totally understand, and thank you for taking the time to provide feedback.

In most cases our annual price is equivalent to 1-3 months of a competitor's monthly price. You mentioned AWS so I'm going to use them as an example, even though it's not an apples to apples comparison. Their m5.xlarge is similar to our X-Large plan (16GB RAM + 4vCPUs). I'll ignore that it doesn't include storage or bandwidth, for simplicity. The m5.xlarge (with no storage or bandwidth) costs $140/month on-demand, which exceeds the annual price of the X-Large plan. If you reserve an m5.xlarge for 1 year (paid upfront) with AWS, the cost is a little less than $1K, which is close to 10X the cost of our X-Large.

If customers cancel their server with us after the 14-day refund period, we provide a prorated credit for the remainder of their billing cycle[0]. So if someone cancels after 2 months, they get the remaining 10 months as credit. They can use that towards renewals, new services, etc. I totally respect it's not for everyone, but the cost savings can be substantial for those who are able to use our services.

We are also expanding to Europe in the near future.

[0] https://www.ssdnodes.com/features/

Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @03:55PM (#16217591)
We're definitely planning on offering Windows in the future. There are some licensing headaches, and it also means having people on staff that are experts in both Linux AND Windows (for customer queries, etc). So it's a bit more involved than just having a Windows install, but we're working on it.
Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @03:52PM (#16217571)
The 16/32GB RAM options are actually the lowest we offer. We did the side deal thing in the past, but having different pricing on the main site and a landing page just made things more complicated and led to unhappy customers.
Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @03:50PM (#16217559)
We will definitely add support for Fedora in the future.
Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @03:49PM (#16217549)
It's super easy. Just log into the dashboard and select your server, then "Upgrade" to see the options. From there, choose the package you want and your KVM server will be automatically scaled up (with zero downtime).
Re:Hetzner Cloud on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @01:41PM (#16216112)
For those of you looking for competitive prices with servers in the U.S., take a look at SSD Nodes—a bootstrapped hosting provider I've been working on since 2011. I'm the founder and CEO, so I'm a little biased, but we're offering 16GB of RAM plus KVM for a price that's more than competitive with Hetzner, and have clients posting excellent benchmarks, like 1.1 GB/s throughput and 480K IOPS[0].

Check out our pricing:

https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/

Happy to answer questions if there's any.

[0]: https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw

Re:Ask HN: Why do you keep coming back to Hacker News? on Friday October 13, 2017 @04:00PM (#15468834)
I lurk on here and don't really contribute (mostly due to time constraints). I keep coming back because of the quality of comments and discussions and the positive way people treat each other.

Ask HN: How do startups build trust with customers?

Given that every technology startup's stack is immature compared to more established players, how have you gotten people to trust your startup? Is it in the marketing? Transparency? In the availability/speed/features of the product itself? Does it simply come naturally as you treat your users with respect? I'd love to hear what you all think either as founders or as users of various startups.I...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 2 points | on HN )
Hey there, those are great questions! First to answer your security questions. We're using KernelCare, which is like Ksplice. It keeps all our host kernels updated with no reboots needed.

OpenVZ, when used properly, provides us with massive performance gains along with the flexibility of "live scaling." Since we're providing containers, our customers can scale up to a larger plan with zero downtime. Their RAM and disk resources are available immediately after choosing the next package (additional cores require a reboot).

Thanks for taking the time to respond, really appreciate it. You mentioned hourly billing, but the OVH plans you reviewed are monthly[0], and all the pricing you listed on the site is monthly.

We're trying to go in a different direction from hourly, and instead offer very deep discounts for annually. So customers can get 8GB RAM for $6.49/month ($77.99/year) and have stellar performance with a provisioning time of about 10 seconds.

[0] https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml

I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc., which is a bootstrapped SSD-based hosting provider for startups that I've been working on since 2011. Some of our clients have posted benchmarks showing great performance, such as 800MB/s+ throughput and 292K IOPS: https://lowendbox.com/blog/ssdnodes-high-ram-ssd-vps-startin...

Direct link to the benchmark: https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw

Special pricing for startups: https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-specials/

/shameless plug

I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc., which is a bootstrapped SSD-based hosting provider for startups that I've been working on since 2011. We have several locations which are great for VPNs: NYC, Dallas, Seattle, and Montreal. We're really good about curbing abuse, so our IPs usually don't have any issues (there's also a 14-day refund if it doesn't work out, we're very generous with refunds).

https://www.ssdnodes.com/startup-specials/

/utterly shameless plug

Have you considered charging by number of fans per outlet, instead of a flat $1/credit? Seems to me the value is in the blog's reach, similar to CPM in advertising. It goes against the simplicity of your platform, so you could make it very simple: $5 for high traffic, $3 for medium, $1 for low (or a variation of that).
Re:HTTPS provides more than just privacy on Tuesday January 26, 2016 @04:05PM (#10976063)
If you're concerned about the overhead of an SSL handshake, another option is simply using '//embed.example.com' so it automatically chooses http/https based on the main site.
Re:Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:46AM (#10866173)
(Responding here since I can't reply directly)

No problem. We actually ran a sale a few weeks ago at LowEndBox and added several hundred customers for our OpenVZ offerings, so I would point at the numbers as proof :-)

Re:Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:36AM (#10866086)
Across the company we use all of them, because our enterprise clients all have different needs. For this deal we use OpenVZ, with our own proprietary workload balancing algorithm that migrates containers so that each gets optimal performance.
Re:Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:33AM (#10866053)
We operate out of several datacenters, the servers for this deal are located in Montreal, Canada. We don't have EU servers yet, but are planning in expansion.
Re:Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:15AM (#10865895)
I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, a US-based cloud provider, and we have special HN pricing where you can get 1GB RAM instances for only $2.99/mo

https://www.ssdnodes.com/hn/

* You can upgrade with zero downtime to a larger server (it will live resize)

* 100% uptime SLA

* Fastest SSDs (we've achieved over 200K write IOPS and 1GB/s writes)

* Direct support from engineers

* Bitcoin payments accepted

* 7-day no-hassle refund guarantee

/plug

Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? on Thursday February 19, 2015 @07:18PM (#9078131)
Not quite a SaaS company, but I'll chime in anyway. For SSD Nodes we've done "trials" for enterprises with an explicit expiration date where the service gets disabled if we don't receive their payment. This tightens our AR and incentivizes them to push the payment through their channels faster.

Sometimes a dev from a large company will test us on a smaller package with a company credit card and expand from there after we push them through the sales funnel.

Most of our enterprise clients pay using either ACH or check, while the remaining typically use credit cards.

Re:Startup Priorities on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @03:21PM (#9035471)
My bad, it's sometimes easy to overlook the sidebar.
Re:China on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @03:15PM (#9035433)
A bit off topic, it looks like Sam Altman is ramping up his blogging activity due to YC's S15 open sign-ups.
Re:Startup Priorities on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @03:12PM (#9035411)
Sloppy? Written on the left column (emphasis mine):

Geoff Ralston Startups, technology, and education. ==> Partner at Y Combinator <== Founder and Partner at Imagine K12

Re:Show HN: Simple Linux Backups on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @10:18AM (#8762536)
I apologize if there was any confusion. We're running a holiday promo, which is written above the pricing table: "Get 14 days free + 90% off for 3 months during the holidays!"

We try to keep it as clear and concise as possible by showing the pricing you get with the promo + the normal pricing after that.

Re:Show HN: Simple Linux Backups on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @09:55PM (#8760852)
I happen to be Matt Connor :-) My username also happens to be "XERQ," and my profile lists SSD Nodes, JARVYS, and XERQ. I'm transparent when it comes to the projects I'm a part of, if that's a concern.

If the main concern of this post is pricing: our service isn't the cheapest, nor do we want it to be. We want JARVYS to provide the most value and peace of mind to our customers. It allows us to focus on delivering quality instead of searching for the next buck. Is the loss of your data worth the money you'd be saving from choosing one providing over another?

We actually called up iDrive to learn more about their Linux product and to ask them for help installing it, and their response was to read the documentation. Linux felt almost like an afterthought with them, with their core product being Mac and Windows. Instead of us half-way supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, and everything else, we want to be the best Linux backup service available and to focus solely on it.

Re:Show HN: Simple Linux Backups on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @09:05PM (#8760713)
Heroku is one of the offenders, but you're absolutely right and I went ahead and fixed it.

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