[sirn]

I was wondering about bandwidth limit of their VPS, and found this in their pricing page:

> We don’t charge for bandwidth. You’ll save a ton of money with our network and it's easy to get started. No need to figure out how much bandwidth you’re going to use, whether that traffic is in or out. Set your site up and pay no extra if it takes off.

Whenever I see statement like this I'm not sure whether I should trust it; what if I use 1 TB/month, would I get kicked out for "using too much bandwidth"? What's your real soft cap?

[raiyu]

We are figuring out what the soft cap will be based on our customers usage and averaging that out, right now we are considering something in the 2TB-5TB range.

Honestly we just didn't prioritize traffic accounting as other features were a priority =]

[sirn]

Thanks, that's nice to know. I wish there would be some mention of soft cap somewhere in the website, though.

[raiyu]

We're big on listening to customer feedback so we're going to address that issue sooner rather than later. =]

When bandwidth pricing is introduced it will be in line with the pricing that we have for SSD/512MB servers so it will still be one of the lowest in the industry, that much is guaranteed.

[e1ven]

Thanks! Seeing "unlimited" bandwidth is actually a deal breaker for me and may other people.

Even if you mean it in all sincerity, when I see that, what I assume is that there's a secret hidden limit, and I can't know what it is. So that means the site is instantly useless, no matter how good of a deal it might have otherwise been!

An thought-experiment example I've given otherplaces - Let's say I start a site called DevUrandom.org - It has an API which pushes out network-limited random bits.

I fire up computers around the world, and have them filling up their crypto systems using DevUrandom.org, at 100Mbit/sec.

Is that OK? What if I love the service so much, I spin up 100 such boxes? etc, etc.

It's not that your service doesn't sound awesome, it's just that if I'm going to rely on it, I don't want it pulled away for arbitrary reasons, because I hit a double-secret limit. I'd rather know what's OK and what's not OK going in.

Further, it aligns our interests- If I'm paying you, for the things that cost you money, I have an incentive to minimize them! If you have to pay for it, and I don't, I'll do whatever's easiest for me, and not bother spending time/money to reduce bandwidth.

(A classic example of this is seen in with Landlords/Tenants - Tenants pay for Electricity, but Landlords generally buy appliances. This means that Landlords have little incentive to buy energy efficient appliances.. They won't be paying for the energy anyway)

[sirn]

Thank you for being so transparent. I'm impressed at how easy it is to spin up a new VPS and network link from Bangkok to your New York data center isn't very bad either. :)

Great job!