Seedbox,
Before I say anything else, I've got nothing against you m8 Just trying to help a bit with your and OVH's business.
With a high turnover, you can't accurately predict the business for next month or some other time in the future. In a business world, you need to be able to do this.
Here's some examples why:
From OVH's point of view: Let's say you make a prediction of 100 new customers next week and you order 100 new servers. Due some bad luck, only 10 customers sign up. Now you're stuck with 90 unused servers.
Okay, so what does it matter if there's 90 unused servers? Well, someone had to:
- build the servers
- physically install them in the racks
- hook them up to the network
- to check their functioning
And of course the servers use all kinds of other resources, like cabling, additional racks, KVMs, and let's not forget a massive amount of electricity.
While those servers are sitting duck, you still need to pay for them. You can only hope those 10 customers will break even the costs.
Now the other way around, if suddenly 200 customers sign up, you're going to be 100 servers short.
You have to scramble like a madman to get the additional servers built, installed, etc.
In meantime, customer cry foul that you're not able to install servers in 72 hours like promised, they want their money back, complain on all kinds of message boards about mediocre service (costing you even more businesses), and so on.
Another thing, quoting
"as the servers are already in place": Never, ever assume things in a business world. What if OVH states there are 3 servers available for 1 hour deployment? By the time you're done filling out the forms to order things, 3 other people might already have ordered the same servers. Guess what? You'll have to wait since you're the 4th in line.
So what can you do? Well, it seems your business inherently has a high turnover, so you need to minimize the load on OVH instead (and I'm not going into a blame-game here).
For example, since seedboxes don't use up a lot of CPU power - just network and storage - start thinking about virtualisation. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of time to set up and it will give you greater control over things: "Want a server in 10 minutes? Done! Want a server for only one hour? Done!".
It'll also maximize utilisation of your servers and therefore your profits. You have 20 servers now (according to your tag). You can easily cut that to 1/4th, keeping the same customer base (thus the same $-£).
Lastly, because you have better control over the servers (and not so dependant on OVH), you can keep a better eye on your own business and in turn make better predictions (you can't expect OVH to make predictions on your business). So, if the pattern shows that on average you're gaining 1 customer a day (given all the customers that rent and toss the servers), then you can plan it. Ie., 1 customer a day means 7 customers a week, it takes 4 customers per server so for the next week you should have 2 new servers ready... Etc.
You solve the problem of set up fees, an annoyed Octave, make better profits, etc.
Now, the virtualisation is just an idea - it may not work for your business (I don't know, I don't run it). But you should be thinking ways to keep control over your own businesses - that's the point.
Originally Posted by slayer2005