Providers; do you factor in 'idlers' when planning your node's capacity?

It's no secret that 'we' love to hoard Low End Boxes and thus often have a collection of idlers. I was wondering if providers factor these in while planning their node's capacity?

Comments

  • Of course they do that, likely goes into how much can be oversell number, but I doubt that anyone here is going to say these public.
    Idlers are a fucking money grab, you buy stuff and don't use it.

  • martijnkmartijnk Hosting Provider

    Not really because usually the node limit is decided by the amount of available disk and ram, not cpu. And an idle vps is using both.

  • mikhomikho AdministratorHosting ProviderOG

    @martijnk said:
    Not really because usually the node limit is decided by the amount of available disk and ram, not cpu. And an idle vps is using both.

    This.
    even if the VPS is thin provisioned (not reserving the full amount of disk at deployment) there is a lot of factors to calculate.

    For me, I estimate the number of packages that I can "fit in" on the amount of disk and RAM available.
    Then this number is adjusted along the way as services are cancelled

  • cybertechcybertech OGBenchmark King

    @mikho said:

    @martijnk said:
    Not really because usually the node limit is decided by the amount of available disk and ram, not cpu. And an idle vps is using both.

    This.
    even if the VPS is thin provisioned (not reserving the full amount of disk at deployment) there is a lot of factors to calculate.

    For me, I estimate the number of packages that I can "fit in" on the amount of disk and RAM available.
    Then this number is adjusted along the way as services are cancelled

    I'm sure SSDNodes has a solution to this.

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  • AbdullahAbdullah Hosting ProviderOG

    For OVZ NAT, ofc I factor idling, no. of vps is calculated based on available disk space & bandwidth.

    For KVM, it is different cuz the idling ones too occupy ram...so not much 'idling' is taken into consideration here.

  • Any idling VM can become an active VM, so that'd be another thing to factor in.

    I've had my share of idling servers that I decided to go use after a few months. So, yeah.

  • MichaelCeeMichaelCee ModeratorOGServices Provider

    The answer is yes but they/we shouldn't.

    Michael

  • We need a special idler product.

    Idle VPS

    • 0 CPU
    • 0 RAM
    • 10GB HDD
    • /64 IP, responds to ping and traceroute, reverse proxy to a remote IP
    • 50GB monthly transfer
    • $6/year
    • opportunity to convert to active VPS for 48 hours per month

    Active VPS

    • 1 CPU, 10% dedicated
    • 512MB RAM
    • 10GB SSD
    • /64 IP
    • 500GB monthly transfer
    • $12/year

    Collectors can buy the idler product, run YABS, and let it idle.
    UptimeRobot would still think it's online, and it can even serve websites
    via reverse proxy, but it consumes very little CPU and RAM for the reverse proxy.

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  • cybertechcybertech OGBenchmark King

    @yoursunny said:
    We need a special idler product.

    Idle VPS

    • 0 CPU
    • 0 RAM
    • 10GB HDD
    • /64 IP, responds to ping and traceroute, reverse proxy to a remote IP
    • 50GB monthly transfer
    • $6/year
    • opportunity to convert to active VPS for 48 hours per month

    Active VPS

    • 1 CPU, 10% dedicated
    • 512MB RAM
    • 10GB SSD
    • /64 IP
    • 500GB monthly transfer
    • $12/year

    Collectors can buy the idler product, run YABS, and let it idle.
    UptimeRobot would still think it's online, and it can even serve websites
    via reverse proxy, but it consumes very little CPU and RAM for the reverse proxy.

    anynode already has 2GB RAM VPS for $15/yr.

    I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.

  • It used to be that 80% of users are basically idlers. This rule holds true still if your target audience is the general people.

    But that changes when you enter lowend. These people demand a lot for a penny. Also avoid anyone who asks for dedicated cores/threads. They ain't worth the trouble.

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  • hostEONShostEONS Hosting ProviderOG

    We don't count idlers as all our KVM VPS nodes have a hard limit set for RAM as well as disk space to match the server specs usually 90%-95% of RAM And Disk space as we have to even consider possibility of client asking for upgrade in future

    So if a VPS node has 128 G RAM, we sell at the most VPS with total of 120 GB RAM, same for disk space

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  • seriesnseriesn Hosting ProviderOG

    No sir. We don't. That's exactly why we publish our limits within the TOS. We do try our best to keep things at 90%, so you know, buffer room.

  • Interesting, thanks for all the replies. I never knew the node's capacity would be limited by it's RAM and/or Storage. I always figured the CPU was the bottleneck, since 24 threads seems a lot of more restrictive than 256GB of RAM (fictive numbers of course).

  • @cybertech said:

    @yoursunny said:
    We need a special idler product.

    Idle VPS

    • 0 CPU
    • 0 RAM
    • 10GB HDD
    • /64 IP, responds to ping and traceroute, reverse proxy to a remote IP
    • 50GB monthly transfer
    • $6/year
    • opportunity to convert to active VPS for 48 hours per month

    Active VPS

    • 1 CPU, 10% dedicated
    • 512MB RAM
    • 10GB SSD
    • /64 IP
    • 500GB monthly transfer
    • $12/year

    Collectors can buy the idler product, run YABS, and let it idle.
    UptimeRobot would still think it's online, and it can even serve websites
    via reverse proxy, but it consumes very little CPU and RAM for the reverse proxy.

    anynode already has 2GB RAM VPS for $15/yr.

    Indeed, line 135
    https://github.com/Ne00n/DealsLists/blob/main/data/lowendtalk-available-posts.json

  • avelineaveline Hosting ProviderOG

    No. We only plan capacity based on allocated resources regardless if it's in use or not.

    Also, KVM will use a little more RAM than your allocation, and control-plane software also requires RAM, so we usually only allocate < 90% of RAM to customers. For disk space, same reason :-)

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  • havochavoc OG
    edited April 2021

    Surprised people are saying disk is a limiting factor. I would have thought that's the one thing you can scale fairly independently of the rest of the server as needed. Adding more CPU to a mobo could be challenging though

  • @havoc said:
    Surprised people are saying disk is a limiting factor. I would have thought that's the one thing you can scale fairly independently of the rest of the server as needed. Adding more CPU to a mobo could be challenging though

    iirc the vm's disk size for the host is different than what the users are actually using. e.g. if someone does a luks encryption, it takes up all the available space. And if someone downloaded 100GB of files and deleted 90GBs of it, the disk itself would still use 100GB, unless you do some kind of garbage collection.

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  • mikhomikho AdministratorHosting ProviderOG

    CPU will be a limiting factor when you sell dedicated cores.
    In a fair share environment, the cpu usage is not that high.

  • AbdullahAbdullah Hosting ProviderOG

    iirc the vm's disk size for the host is different than what the users are actually using. e.g. if someone does a luks encryption, it takes up all the available space. And if someone downloaded 100GB of files and deleted 90GBs of it, the disk itself would still use 100GB, unless you do some kind of garbage collection.

    exactly.

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  • @sanvit said:
    iirc the vm's disk size for the host is different than what the users are actually using. e.g. if someone does a luks encryption, it takes up all the available space. And if someone downloaded 100GB of files and deleted 90GBs of it, the disk itself would still use 100GB, unless you do some kind of garbage collection.

    Yeah I get that - can't be shared in the same way as mem/cpu from a technical perspective.

    Just not what I would have expected from a financial analysis perspective if you're looking to maximize profits (Theory of constraints and throughput accounting and CVP analysis specifically).

    Then again I've never run a VPS provider....

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  • @havoc said: Theory of constraints and throughput accounting and CVP analysis

    I have no idea :(

  • @havoc said:
    Surprised people are saying disk is a limiting factor. I would have thought that's the one thing you can scale fairly independently of the rest of the server as needed. Adding more CPU to a mobo could be challenging though

    Disk can be added, disk speed cannot.
    From my personal experience, disk io was often the bottleneck. Outdated second hand cpu and ram is pretty cheap, but disk must be new. In the age of nvme, I rarely see providers crappy in performance anymore. More often it is providers deadpool because their cannot paid their bill.

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  • @sanvit said:
    I have no idea :(

    haha. I studied finance not IT so sometimes come at things from a different angle. @elliotc explanation makes sense though

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