Today, 03:57 PM I'm trying to get a feel for what customers would consider a fair price for a basic geo-hosting plan (where geo-hosting is defined as content hosted across geographically-dispersed web servers and load-balanced over an anycast DNS network).
I know many folks are willing to pay between $3-5 for a small shared hosting plan to host their website and resellers often pay more for obvious reasons but I'm curious how that number would change if the content was presented differently. What if the website had worldwide redundancy and visitor traffic was directed to the closest server?
I hope this sort of question is allowed. 
Today, 04:22 PM 
That's called a "CDN". And it costs far more than $3-5 for a quality CDN.CloudFlare is a low-end option, and with free plans.
But do you really need a CDN? Most don't. (Even if they think otherwise.)
Today, 04:30 PM Originally Posted by kpmedia 
That's called a "CDN". And it costs far more than $3-5 for a quality CDN.CloudFlare is a low-end option, and with free plans.
But do you really need a CDN? Most don't. (Even if they think otherwise.)
Well, there's CDN but that's for static files only. I'm talking about a hosting plan for dynamic files (i.e. PHP, mySQL databases, etc). Very different.If you had your entire site hosted on an infrastructure with nodes like CDN, what do you think would be a fair price for a basic plan? I agree a well-designed system would not be $5. I saw Site5 but they have a cloud hosting option with your server hosted in one of their data centers. The idea I'm trying to gauge here is where your data is hosted across multiple data centers simultaneously.
Today, 04:41 PM From CloudFlare's website:Our CDN automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server. What I'm talking is not a CDN. The above means static files are served from the edge of the CDN but all dynamic data and databases are accessed from a central location - from the web server wherever it sits. And if it's sitting in Amsterdam and you're sitting in Australia or China, static files are presented quickly but dynamic files are not. What I'm wondering is what would people be willing to pay for a basic plan if everything - dynamic data, mySQL databases and static files - is all presented from the server closest to the visitor.
Aside from how this is done, I'm wondering what people would be willing to pay for a basic hosting plan with that kind of infrastructure on the back-end.
Today, 06:10 PM Originally Posted by aplawson What I'm talking is not a CDN.Wow! You are thinking to sell CDN services without a clue about what a CDN is.__________________
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Today, 07:07 PM Originally Posted by dotHostel Wow! You are thinking to sell CDN services without a clue about what a CDN is."Seek first to understand then to be understood." -Steven Covey Okay, in a way one could probably see this and call it a CDN but given the way every CDN service works that I've researched so far, none of them operate the way I've described above. I'd be happy to continue this dialog with you offline but I prefer to keep the thread on topic.
Last edited by aplawson; Today at 07:11 PM.
Today, 07:17 PM Regarding of price, I suspect any CDN style solution for dynamic content would suffer from customer frustration. For a solution like this to succeed, it would have to completely shield the webmasters from the complexities of geo-clustering. For example, if a webmaster used WordPress, they would not want to learn about how the database and files from each node are kept in sync. It would have to just work. That is why static CDN solutions are popular but you don't see the same popularity for dynamic CDNs. Do you actually have an idea for making a specific application like WordPress geo-clustering aware, or do you have an idea for making any PHP/MySQL application geo-clustering aware? I am curious about the technical stuff. Static CDN solutions are pretty easy compared to dynamic CDN. Simply replicating the MySQL tables in real time between all of the nodes is not a viable option, because that adds an extra layer of complexity that would be difficult for webmasters to debug. The applications would need to be rewritten to be geo-cluster aware. Otherwise, there would be index collisions in the MySQL tables.
Today, 07:32 PM Totally hear you. Yes, replication of content and databases is one of the chief components that was addressed and resolved among other cloud providers earlier (resolved in terms of strategy and available products/tools). As it stands, a global replication strategy that abstracts webmasters from everything under the hood is something I figured would confuse more than help. As for making apps like WordPress cluster-aware, I have my own blog using WP and it won't need special changes because the replication design and private DNS configuration (some of which I've discussed publicly, some of which I haven't) allows it to work as though it was installed locally. The LAMP model is already working fine in our sandbox with simulated latency between nodes - we're currently doing some use cases to see how it performs with popular modules. Time will tell what comes next. ; )
"The applications would need to be rewritten to be geo-cluster aware. Otherwise, there would be index collisions in the MySQL tables." This has been addressed not by addressing how the apps write/read to the DB but where my mySQL implementation is allowing apps to write to it and where reads come from. Our approach eliminates the issue of collision detection/prevention and focuses more on routing incoming queries.Last edited by aplawson; Today at 07:38 PM.
Today, 07:46 PM I can say there are some mySQL proxy-like components involved (most of which I really don't understand completely but my DBA does) that are directing traffic to different nodes depending on the nature of the query and which node has the most recent information. Basically, DB read/write queries are routed differently if the data was written within the last minute or two otherwise they're executed locally. From what I was told, the SQL commits were taking the longest so our implementation avoids some of the performance hits we've seen in other approaches by exploiting the DB traffic routing components pretty heavily. Today, 08:22 PM From My reading of this, you are saying that you have a "POC" that essentially is a dynamic CDN solution and are looking for feedback on what people would pay for a solution. In a lot of ways, you need to look at this in the reverse order - how much is it costing you to support the environment and how much do you want to make from it.
Such a solution is obviously far more complex than what you get with a $5 shared hosting acount, and even a step above that shared hosting account + static CDN solution.
You need to also factor in the support scalability as well - how many clients can you have before you need more DBA's and other specialized support staff (clustering, backup, network etc)
I really only think that the Big social Network sites are the ones who currently have engineered solutions (on a big scale) to what you are proposing.
I cannot offer a price, but if you consider all of your costs, what the infrastructure could support, then you can go from there. This is a very specialized offerring and I could only guess that you would need to be asking for high $xx to low $xxx for failry modest resource usage to be able to offer a solution.
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Today, 08:41 PM Excellent points RRWH. We've already broken this down in reverse order and know in detail what it will cost initially and scaled out based on various user load and infrastructure upgrade scenarios. This is really just a market eval to understand what people would be willing to pay for a service they're probably not accustomed to. If offering something like geo-hosting service costs the Supplier $500/month with a 7000 user load on the infrastructure, it becomes cost prohibitive because the cost/benefit ratio falls off the proverbial cliff and you have to start wondering what are you offering and does it all have to be included. So with this thread I'm trying (trying) to find out what people would feel comfortable paying for base service of this nature, compare that against what it actually costs then come up with a set of hosting plans and price points that align with reality and pays the bills. Today, 09:18 PM * note I have no vested interest or a need for such a solution at the moment! I guess, since what you seem to have is a fairly unique offerring, that you can set your own price!
Lets face it, as nobody has a solution out there, My instinct would be to put a price on it so it is profitable on your cost basis.
From there, it comes down to how well you market the service. You have to be able to demonstrate why your service, even if it was say $100/mth for x resources is better than the shared host + static CDN for say $20/mth. You might want to factor in x number of locations into the cost as well, more locations, pay more.
If you look where it fits into the market, it could be argued that it is better than a cloud solution + static CDN, so price accordingly.
Because it is a unique offerring you can put a premium pice on it - this sort of hosting is not required for the masses for sure.
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Today, 09:22 PM I think this would be an awesome thing to make... but please do it seamless if you do. It should just work, as someone mentioned before. VPS.net has a service like this in beta already. But, they are (as far as I know) the only ones doing it and there's a lot of room for competition!
Today, 11:27 PM A nice sharing thread, anyway you have the point but the problem is the price. Judge about it when your customer compare in between, price always come first before quality... this is the common survey nowaday.__________________
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