Customer Rewards

A

Andrew

Happy Customer(Linux Rox)
Hey,

I been a customer for a long time, and I have to say the service is 110% better then any other VPS provider out there. KnownHost is always willing to help you, and even set you individually from other customers.

I was thinking that KnownHost should have a customer reward plan. If you are with KnownHost for 3 months, you get 25% off your next month. If you were with KnownHost for 6 months, your next month is free, or you could do rewards based on contest. Enter to win free VPS hosting for 1 month. I think this is great to keep customers happy, because most of the time, Knownhost introduces a new special, and those existing customer wish they had that discount, or wish they had signed up during that month instead of the month before.

I would also make a side suggestion (add new add ons for ram, 384MB is not enough for an add on, now these days cPanel and other control panels use a lot of memory, more then CPU. I suggest that memory upgrades be cheaper, and also that memory upgrades should range from 128 - 512MB. I my self have a VPS with 704MB of ram and it needs more ram, because it ends up going into burstable ram, which most of the time ties up the VPS for some reason... Its like having no swap, and your server ends up slowing down.

-Andrew
 
Thanks for the suggestion. The main thing to think about with RAM upgrades is does it make sense other then just from the perspective of someone needing more RAM. So the servers need factored in and how they have been sold since day 1. If we all of a sudden change how upgrades work this could negatively affect other customers potentially. So basically this isn't as easy as just adding another upgrade slot. There are other things to consider too as I will confirm we were going to have a 512 MB upgrade spot then we decided to not do it.

One thing to make note of, we don't allow upgrades to be added together either but to date this never has been a problem. So you can't add 2x 256MB RAM's together essentially.

Thanks,
Joel
 
I would like to see KnownHost allow 512mb add-ons, because now these days, servers use alot of memory, mainly because of Apache, a configuration to reduce CPU usage, and speeding up MySQL query's by cacheing them.

I would like to see if we can buy 2x 256mb, but i have already asked once and was turned down. The only option for me is to spend 50 to upgrade to hybrid, and add the extra ram to the max. VPS's are really inefficient in terms of allowance of memory given.

In total, if I upgrade to the Hybrid, it will cost me 110, including the upgrade to highest memory which is 17.50. It will only give me under 900mb, no more then 1gb. I really do not want to move to dedicated soon, because of KH support and my CPU usage is always under 1.0 and at night less then 0.05, but the dedicated servers sounds more realistic then a VPS. Most Dedicated servers cost less then $160, includes a medium market CPU, 2gb of ram, a 120gb - 250gb HDD, and cPanel can be thrown in at 25 dollars or included, plus its unshared with others, you crash your own server, your fault.

I think KnownHost should bring in Dedicated servers, and at least bring the ram for VPS's up, since the market is going to increase as VPS providers will see that RAM is used quickly now these days. It is not like it use to be, and I hate going into Burst Ram, because, there is no burstable ram in my eyes, since i have been into 100% guaranteed memory, and my services went down quick, site didn't load and my VZPP showed i was using 51% memory out of the burstable + guaranteed. It looks bad when customers look at the memory in cPanel and see 100% and 0% swap.

I hope you take my little speech to next KnownHost meeting and talk about it with your co-workers.

If we could get swap space that would be great!

-Andrew
 
Andrew,

The main thing needing focused on is how adding 512 MB of RAM affects others on the server. The idea makes sense of course but other things need considered before adding it. One of the reasons we are who we are is we have tons of experience with servers and VPS's and last time this was brought up we got 384 added (didn't always exist). We will bring this up again in our next meeting though for sure.

As for dedicated servers, if we do offer them I would expect to see prices way above entry level servers as we want nothing to do with that market as VPS's blow them away if you know what your doing. With our quality of service as it is maybe Rackspace prices would be what we would do if we launch it.

Thanks,
Joel
 
KnownHost-Joel said:
Andrew,

The main thing needing focused on is how adding 512 MB of RAM affects others on the server. The idea makes sense of course but other things need considered before adding it. One of the reasons we are who we are is we have tons of experience with servers and VPS's and last time this was brought up we got 384 added (didn't always exist). We will bring this up again in our next meeting though for sure.

As for dedicated servers, if we do offer them I would expect to see prices way above entry level servers as we want nothing to do with that market as VPS's blow them away if you know what your doing. With our quality of service as it is maybe Rackspace prices would be what we would do if we launch it.

Thanks,
Joel
Click to expand...

Yes, I can see the sense in the 512MB being a problem with others on the server, but If you could make a server which has 8 - 16GB of ram at which you can fit a lot of VPS on 2x dual core Xeon's, you can have enough room for that 512MB+ add-on's, (1gb for every 1 customer with a 4GB extra to ensure Burstable would be 16GB for that one server and 12 customers.)

Even this would eliminate the need for burstable because I am sure many VPS customers go into burstable because the guaranteed ram is not enough to run MySQL query's, and keep Apache Keep Alive on with KeepAlive set to 15. I would like to hear on how this will roll out, and once your meeting is done, I hope that the issues are discussed and I know that KnownHost's main focus is to keep all customers arranged so that there is enough ram and space for each customer.

- Andrew (I am always 24/7 on the internet to answer to your thread replies)
 
Andrew,

Currently we cannot and do not plan to offer 512 MB addons. At the end it all comes to the following major factors:
- Resource availability. As of right now we stop provisioning accounts to servers once server reaches 75-80% capacity. Last 2 years shows that this tactics does work well and almost always we were able to satisfy resource upgrade requests without moving a VPS to another physical machine. Customers like no downtime upgrade/downgrades. With 512 MB add-on in mind we will have to cap servers at 60-65%. Sorry but I can't see any reasonable justification for higher amount of idle (read: wasted) resources;
- Supply and demand. There is close to no demand for such memory upgrade option. Just run numbers - less than 1% of VPS accounts got +384MB memory addon. With such demand it makes better sense to stop selling +384MB than to add +512MB.
- With such memory requirements you should be looking at high end dedicated server. Please note that most of "cheap" dedicated servers won't satisfy your memory requirements. I'm not even talking about CPU and disk subsystem. Comparable dedicated would cost more that, say, 2 VPS accounts that will deliver you more memory than (possible) more expensive dedicated server;
- Disk I/O. This is the most important thing on the VPS market. It is not a secret that in most cases the more memory/CPU intensive VPS will also put higher load on disk subsystem. If this is the case - dedicated server is the way to go.

Regards,
Paul
 
KnownHost-P said:
Sorry but I can't see any reasonable justification for higher amount of idle (read: wasted) resources;
Click to expand...

What about the fact that cPanel now complains incessantly if it doesn't get at least 512 all to itself? Obviously the application could and should be optimized, but since this isn't likely to happen at any point in my lifetime there's very little choice in the matter.

I don't follow the logic in your other points regarding disk I/O; having too little memory is going to result in a much heavier drive pummeling than having too much. A well designed app will cache as much as possible in volatile memory so as to minimize the amount of disk access necessary. I'm sure that the vast majority of customers are running very poorly designed apps which do not do this, but the over-generalization is still not entirely valid. There are plenty of very realistic situations where one would need more memory without the additional disk space a more expensive plan would force one to pay for. If there truly are fewer than 1% of all customers exercising the 384MB addon, wouldn't even fewer be picking up the 512, and wouldn't that mean that there wouldn't be a significant problem limiting the number of these customers per physical box?
 
khiltd,

Are you referring to a warning that is returned by easyapache? If so - not a big deal. This warning just says that 512MB of free memory is recommended for recompilation and I bet this crazy number comes that Apache compilation with all possible options enabled including things like Tomcat.

Some (I'd even say most) of the customers who purchase higher plans for some reason expect that, say, Triple X can handle google-like load. And, in turn, with higher memory limits they're trying to squeeze as much as they physically can from the single system. When this happens (and trust me - it happens all the time) disk i/o plays very important role.
 
KnownHost-P said:
khiltd,

Are you referring to a warning that is returned by easyapache?
Click to expand...

That and the number of emails I get telling me that cpanel had to be restarted. The frequency with which these are received seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of RAM I've got, and no matter how much I throw at it, it's pretty difficult to get active usage down below 70% for any significant amount of time.

KnownHost-P said:
Some (I'd even say most) of the customers who purchase higher plans for some reason expect that, say, Triple X can handle google-like load. And, in turn, with higher memory limits they're trying to squeeze as much as they physically can from the single system. When this happens (and trust me - it happens all the time) disk i/o plays very important role.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it does happen, but it's still an inaccurate over-generalization. There's always going to be people who want to abuse whatever leeway they're given no matter what, but I believe they are better dealt with through TOS agreements than policies which penalize others with a legitimate need. 512MB really isn't very much these days, so it seems like a somewhat anachronistic limit.
 
KnownHost-P said:
khiltd,

Are you referring to a warning that is returned by easyapache? If so - not a big deal. This warning just says that 512MB of free memory is recommended for recompilation and I bet this crazy number comes that Apache compilation with all possible options enabled including things like Tomcat.

Some (I'd even say most) of the customers who purchase higher plans for some reason expect that, say, Triple X can handle google-like load. And, in turn, with higher memory limits they're trying to squeeze as much as they physically can from the single system. When this happens (and trust me - it happens all the time) disk i/o plays very important role.
Click to expand...

Knownhost-P,

You have hit a good point. I get alot of google queues, that simulate those of a DOS attack, because we get more then 20 open apache request from google bot's. The request cause server to become loaded to the point that the server will sometimes use way too much memory. It would be an asset, to have known host when setting up cPanel, ensure and harden cPanel, as well as edit php.ini, httpd.conf, and my.cnf to standards that they would set for the system to ensure that it can handel request with out going through so much CPU.

Also, for the 512MB upgrade, if you find that I am the only customer requesting that, could I not get that upgrade just my self, as a special case? I don't think just me requesting it will cause much problems, as its only 128mb more then the upgrade that I already upgraded too?

- Andrew
 
Andrew said:
Also, for the 512MB upgrade, if you find that I am the only customer requesting that, could I not get that upgrade just my self, as a special case? I don't think just me requesting it will cause much problems, as its only 128mb more then the upgrade that I already upgraded too?
Click to expand...

Andrew,

I would PM Paul directly. ;)

Regards,
 
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