[NCLUG] [Poll] VPS and web mangement hosting

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:52:29AM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On 02/20/2012 04:47 PM, Chad Perrin wrote:
> > that's pretty good.  How much does it cost?"  "Our cheapest package is
> > $1000 per month."  "Uh, yeah . . . 'bye."
> 
> That's very true.  We have a lot of customers that come to us for Linux HA
> clusters, because it's one of our specialities.  But they imagine it's
> cheap and easy, when it really is not.  HA clusters are a lot more than
> just a second machine, there's a lot of work that has to go into setting
> them up, maintaining, and testing them.  But when you have a business need
> for the availability, they are great.  It's just a business decision: if X
> times Y is less than Z, don't do it.

I think that asking how much something costs is sometimes a useful
approach to deciding whether it's worth pursuing as a whole.  That is, if
I go to a service provider to ask "How much does it cost for service
Foo?" and they give me a price that makes all the blood leave my face,
that might be an indication that I'm not ready to pursue that service
anywhere -- because my options might be either more money than I'm in a
position to spend or service I can afford to buy, but whose unreliability
I cannot reasonably afford to tolerate.

Of course, there are always people who underestimate the complexities of
certain services.  Getting a bit of a wake-up call in terms of how much
it really costs can help them reassess their needs in light of new
information.  The old "if you have to ask, it's too much" is simply not
applicable here, where someone might consider $1000/mo. too much, but
$500/mo. perfectly reasonable -- but if "your" (in the generic, not you
specifically, Sean) $499.99/mo. service is offered without a price tag
under the theory that "if you have to ask, it's too much", "you" might
just end up not getting a lot of customers who could definitely benefit
from "your" services.

Note that none of this is intended to disagree with anything you've said.
I guess I'm basically just agreeing with you, but describing it from a
would-be client's point of view for generic cases.


> 
> But, on the other hand, stories I hear all too often are things like "My
> VPS goes down once a week for a few hours" or "The instance just stops
> responding and has to be dropped and restarted".
> 
> But people often get into the VPS, get it all set up, and then instead of
> moving when they find it's not to their liking, they'll stick with the sunk
> cost.  I've been there too, it's a hard one.  Puppet can help.  :-)

Yeah, the sunk cost fallacy runs rampant.  Bringing things more directly
back to "on-topic" for NCLUG, this is a big chunk of the reason many
organizations absolutely refuse to even consider migrating to (for
instance) Debian from (for instance) MS Windows Server 2003.  I've seen
similar poor decision making regarding migrations between different open
source Unix-like OSes, between Mac and Win, and so on.  I've even seen a
case where similar fallacious reasoning stopped someone from adding an MS
Windows server to a network that desperately needed it, where everything
else was Linux-based.

I could perhaps forgive an ideological decision to make a technically
suboptimal choice, like refusing to use anything closed source for a task
for which there is no open source alternative that quite perfectly
matches one's needs, but refusing to even consider an alternative's
cost:benefit ratio based on the sunk cost fallacy kinda makes me twitch.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]