*sigh* Reality intrudes, as it so often does! I really ought to start making a proper effort to find virtual server customers — I have the physical servers, I have them colocated in my own cabinets, on my own network, at the centre of the UK internet (Telehouse in the London Docklands), I have spare RAM and SSD space on those servers, and I really ought to find people to make use of them so the machines can pay for their own upkeep!
So, is anyone I know looking for a good virtual server provider at the moment? I have been doing this a long time, tweaked my setups for rather high levels of reliability (I hosted a financial price index's servers at one point and they were really concerned about reliability) and I think I'm pretty good at it, I'm just awful at marketing and promoting myself and my services.
One big problem I have with promoting these things is seeing people here talking about VPS providers, usually very much from the point of view of price. It seems there are *very* *very* *extremely* cheap VMs available if you know where to look, and it's hard to figure out what to say to give anyone a reason not to go to them. Obviously *I* think what I do is better because I've spent over a decade tweaking and rebuilding and working on reliability and (to a lesser extent maybe) performance, but how to convince people to part with money for it.
So I guess here's a couple of questions for anyone who feels they have an answer: what per month would you be willing to pay to get your stuff reliably hosted, if you wanted a better than bog standard VPS provider? And also, what extra things (features, services, whatever) over a bog standard VPS provider would you be willing to pay a bit more for?
