Just over two years ago I put pen to paper on BigV‘s specification. It now hosts hundreds of live sites: citrulu.com for web site monitoring, luzme.com for up-to-the-minute eBook price comparisons, folktunefinder.com helps you “name that tune”, itsdanbull.com has rap and activism, quizible.com for quiz obsessives, bullfarmoast.co.uk is a lovely B&B, Tilley and Grace sell jewellery, and has weathered links from McFly… it’s a very long list. It gives me a lot of pleasure to flick through the hostnames and see what sites our testers have entrusted to our new platform. There are machines running Windows, machines running OpenBSD and of course, lots of Linux too. Even though we’ve had our odd hour or two of down time, BigV seems more reliable and more transparent than some “finished” VPS and cloud products out there, judging from the last 24 months at least.
The official launch won’t be for another couple of months. But we’re about to pass a big milestone: turning on our billing system, and actually collecting some money. By taking money for BigV while it’s a stable hosting platform, we can complete empty our beta test list and rapidly ramp up production of new features: disc snapshots, archiving, popular API support and everything else that’s queued up for “after the launch”.
To that end, we’ll create accounts on our billing system for all of our testers. If that’s you, you will get some instructions in the next few days on how to pay for your BigV usage. In exchange, we’ll publish (and stick to) our Service Level Agreement, and you can finally point your customers at a serious, paid-for service.
We will start emailing bills at a 100% discount during September, and start charging our full published rates from October. Testers who signed up with us before August 2011 will receive a £60 credit; that’s our thank-you for being interested before we’d announced very much. I hope that everyone else will feel that they have had a lot of free, reliable hosting already.
So you should now delete any VMs you don’t want to pay for. Even if you don’t want to use BigV for now, you can keep your account reserved without charge, assuming there are no active VMs on it, and come back at any time
Our billing system isn’t yet complete, and will charge on a daily resolution, so a minimum charge of 33p for creating a virtual machine. That’s why it’s still a beta test, although one that’s being wound down very slowly.
This puts our full launch into late October/November; in the mean time, please report anything you think is unusual, surprising or incorrect about the bills you see. We’ll be watching them too! And please also let us know if you have any particularly exciting sites or demonstrations that are using BigV in unexpected ways, because we’d love to feature your sites on the revamped bigv.io.
Happy B-day! (billing that is)
Hello Matthew and thanks for everything so far : )
One question: is billing gonna be from 1st to 1st in month or from time we create machine?
Hi Amar, the billing date will be set to the day of the month that you first created a BigV virtual machine. Each create/delete operation will then create a pro-rated invoice or credit to the next billing date.
Hi Matthew. I’m pleased that things are moving in the right direction. I’m still a little worried about backups. At the moment I have used LVM to divide up my disk space and have allocated a volume for backups. This is not completely satisfactory from a disaster recovery point of view. My original VM has access to a separate machine for backups in another data-centre (hopefully). When can we expect something like this for BigV, and will the space be bundled or an extra cost?
I do recall some mention of ‘snapshots’. I don’t know how these would work, unless they were LVM like and could be mounted whilst files were recovered.
To complicate things slightly, I have also encrypted my file system, and unless we have some way of encrypting backups onto remote disk space, this is of course, all for nothing.
Best wishes,
Tony Rogers.
At present I don’t have a great solution other than to create a backup VM, and copy stuff to that. That’s not a great solution because there’s no guarantee that the discs won’t be on the same array (unless you ask for different storage grades).
I’m intending to tackle this soon after launch, I hope by the end of the year – the first big update is going to be storage related but I don’t want to say more until we’ve started on it.
If we have discounts on our current standard VMs ( from referrals, etc ), can this be migrated across ?
If you’re receiving referral discounts on other customers’ Bytemark products, they will still be applied against bills for BigV (BigV isn’t using a separate accounts system, so if you’re already a Bytemark customer your invoices will be the same, just have some new items on them).
At the moment there are no referral discounts for recommending BigV but that is a hole I hope to remedy next year.
If the billing will be on a monthly cycle, how do you envisage applying the published discounts for annual services? eg. the base config is £10/month or £100/year, so how does the billing system know that we’ll have it for a year – or is it that the last 2 months in every 12 are billed at zero?
We are already running some production services on BigV (albeit rather lightweight ones for now) and are very much looking forward to the official launch.
Pete
Annual and monthly billing will work the same – so if you ask for annual billing, the system will invoice you the annual rate for the whole year in advance, and credit you to your renewal date when you cancel a VM.
e.g. so if you take out a 1GB machine on January 1st, you will be billed £100, then cancel it again on January 2nd, you will be credited with £99.73.
At present these would translate to a card charge & refund, but we can manually change busier account to only bill once per month.
Sorry your comment got buried in a spam avalanche, only just dug it out. No we won’t start blocking VMs until we’re sure we’ve been in touch with everyone and got them onto our billing system. At least we’ll try. At the moment a few people are being surprised by bills, but we won’t to charge you for VMs you don’t want as we’re a little bit behind where I wanted to be with regards updating the main site.