(updated 25.12.2010, 4.2.2012, 17.2.2013) If you find the prices of our services suspiciously low, you are not alone. Despite the low price, our services are not compromised and in many ways we are better than our competitors.
Although the prices of some of our services are a fraction of those of our competitors, it is not because our services are worse, slower, more common or less reliable. The difference is in the costs, which we have managed to reduce to a minimum, while maintaining quality.
Here’s a look at the ways we’ve been able to save. Some of these may seem like small things, but when you add more of them together and multiply them by the lifetime of the technology, you get cost differences in the tens to hundreds of millions. And this is of course reflected in the end prices of our services.
Datacenter
The basis of everything is our own datacenter. Our technology is located in our own building, we built and purchased everything ourselves. It follows that we don’t have to pay any rent to anyone. If we wanted to rent a similar space in Prague, we would have to pay hundreds of thousands a month – we would have to pay that amount month after month and we would never get anything back.
In the case of your own building and your own technology, although an investment of millions is needed at the beginning, there is a return. The competition has to reflect the rents it will pay continuously and will not get rid of in the end prices. We don’t pay any rent.
Advantages of having your own datacenter:
- we don’t pay any expensive rent
- we are not dependent on anyone, we do everything to our own exact specifications, so we are able to better optimize for our needs
Hardware and electricity consumption
We really put a lot of effort into the hardware selection. The main criterion was electricity consumption. Every 1 Watt plays a role. There is a big difference when you have a server running in a datacenter for 5 years with 100 W or 110 W consumption.
If the server has 10 W more power consumption, not only do you have to pay this extra 10 W, but you also have to oversize the air conditioning system, whose power consumption for extra heat dissipation will be about 3 W more. And all the more reason to oversize the UPS, backup generator, power connection, transformers, electrical panels, …
In the long term, our highest recurring cost will be electricity. And if we count in hundreds of kilowatts for the whole datacenter, the differences are huge.
Example: for a 10 W consumption you pay 28.80 CZK per month at normal electricity prices. Now multiply this by the number of 6000 servers (the approximate capacity of our datacenter) and you are at 172 800 CZK per month. But add to that the energy and other costs you have to incur to keep the extra heat in and you are at about 300,000 CZK per month. Now multiply that by the expected lifetime of the servers of 3-5 years. So what do you buy for the 10 W you save on 1 server? 🙂
Because we were starting from scratch, we could choose what we wanted, we weren’t constrained by having to maintain any existing applications and technologies.
For the above reasons, among others, we prefer:
- blade servers – have lower overall power consumption because they share some components (especially power supplies)
- energy-efficient processors – we use Intel Xeon processors from the energy-efficient L series in all servers, whose consumption is several tens of watts lower than in other series
Another interesting result of our choice of energy-saving technologies is that although we have air-conditioningunits installed in the datacenter, they are turned off for the time being because they have nothing to cool – the servers are cooled by space, especially in winter. On the other hand, you may need to turn up the heat in the server room 🙂 .
When the air conditioners come on line, we plan to use the heat to heat the offices. This involves various freecooling technologies – direct use of the colder air outside the building.
Updated 4.2.2012 – The air conditioning units in the datacenter have been running for about 8 months now, as there are almost 150 servers there. In colder seasons we use the so-called. freecooling, where cold air from the outside is used. In addition, in the past week we have put 10 racks into operation and so we have installed the so-called cold aisle, where there are additional energy savings (in the order of tens of percent). How does it work? The servers are in rack cabinets in two rows. The front part of the servers is always towards each other, towards the so-called. cold alleys. This aisle is closed on all sides (with plexiglass and doors). Cool air is blown through the floor into this aisle, which “flows” through the servers (where it cools them) and comes out the back wall of the racks as heated air. This heated air is sucked by fans into the air conditioner (or mixed with outside air) and thus is cooled and again directed to the space under the floor (where it goes again to the cold aisle and cools the servers). The air cannot circulate any other way than through the skzre servers. Therefore it is important that all the racks are fully populated and there is no gap between the servers.
Update 2/17/2013 – A few days ago we started freecooling, which will cover cooling with outside air for over 310 days a year. It is an extremely economical solution that is 12.5 times more efficient than air conditioning. We have reached the top and now we are the most economical datacenter in the Czech Republic (in combination with economical servers we have no competitors 🙂 ).
Domains
We offer domains at relatively extremely low prices, yet they are not subsidized as we keep hearing. We have calculated that from a certain quantity onwards all costs will be paid.
Sometimes we even sell domains at the purchase price as part of special offers. We think of it as a form of advertising. Instead of investing in advertising campaigns, we will reduce the fees for domains and they will advertise themselves at a lower cost.
Of course, we don’t make money on the domains themselves, but it is an essential part of our other hosting services that we offer.
The basis for success is full automation. Registration, re-registration, invoicing, payment processing, online payment systems, domain changes, DNS – all this is fully automated without the need for a single human intervention on our part. Everything can be done online at any time via our administration. This of course saves us costs – especially on manpower.
You may take it for granted, but it’s not a given. We know of competing companies that have to have a number of administrative staff specifically to deal with common domain issues manually.
Web hosting
Several factors make the low cost of web hosting possible:
We have only one variant that has everything you need in it. If we had multiple variants, we would have to deal with transitions between variants and the associated problems.
Again, full automation plays a major role – ordering, paying, setting up, changing settings – again all without the need for any human intervention. Everything is on-line controllable from the administration. Setting up 1 webhosting is the same cost for us as setting up 1000 of them – everything will do itself and we won’t even know about it.
We do not measure or limit data traffic. This may seem like a disadvantage at first glance, but the opposite is true. We save on additional equipment that would measure the transmissions of individual customers, we do not have to develop applications necessary for measuring and evaluating the obtained data, we do not have to solve any technical problems with the measurement, we do not have to deal with limiting, billing for excess transmissions, we do not have to argue with customers how much they have transmitted and how much they have not, etc.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
In addition to cost-effective technologies, full automation and other issues mentioned above, our choice of modules is also decisive for VPS. VPS can only be ordered from us in multiples of modules (1 module = 15 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM, 1 virtual processor to 4 modules). This means that we have precisely oversized resources (memory, storage space, processor performance). We don’t do individual variants, otherwise it could happen that we run out of one of the sources and the other one would be left over and we would not be able to sell it.
Example: if we were to give customers more RAM and less disk space on their individual request, we would run out of memory on one cluster, but have a lot of unused storage space. We would not be able to add another VPS to this cluster, and we would never be able to sell the remaining disk space because we don’t have the additional resources needed to make it a VPS.
And this “scattering” of resources and not providing individual variants is the main reason why our VPS are suspiciously cheap.
Dedicated servers
Again, the Fujitsu Primergy RX100 and RX200 are based on energy-efficient servers with low-power consumption components.
So what decides the prices?
- our prices reflect our previous experience in the field
- our entire system is built on the so-called. on the green field and we tried to fully automate so that we didn’t have to do anything
- we have our own building (there is only one other company in the Czech Republic that owns its own building and does not pay expensive rents)
- the datacentre is in our own building and is built from our own resources, by our own forces and when completed will be one of the most modern in the Czech Republic
- all installations are designed to achieve the lowest possible electricity consumption
- the datacentre is on the backbone of O2 fibre optic cables and the price for the lease of the circuits is very good and not increased by any additional investment in the excavation
- we have chosen the servers so that the electricity consumption is minimal
- we have our own autonomous system, our own IP addresses
- we have our own team of programmers and engineers – no expensive outsourcing to feed other armies of managers, directors, advisors, consultants, …
- our wage costs are lower in South Bohemia than in Prague