Posted: 2026-06-06
Many providers in the industry are raising prices as of late. Slow Servers is doing the opposite! (Probably because Slow Servers was too expensive and many providers charge too little.)
Slow Servers' pricing was based around a simple fixed cost of $6/GB of memory (paired with 32GB of disk.) This will drop to $4/GB of memory (still paired with 32GB of disk per GB of memory.)
IPv4 address: $1.50/month extra.
IPv4 address: $1/month extra.
Update 2026-06-10: You can multiply these transfer figures by 5x.
Well, starting with high margins helps a lot. Though margins for Slow Servers were never as high as you might imagine. (I have a post on pricing that elaborates quite a bit.)
This started back when tinkering with memory and power usage. As is fairly obvious, 1.35V dimms use less power than 1.5V dimms. Unregistered memory uses less power than registered memory.
But what's interesting is that 2x registered dimms use less power than 4x unregistered.
What's also interesting is that registered dimms tend to be more widely available and cost less.
My most recent test server was around 41W idle with 32GB of memory in 2x registered dimms. That's with a power hungry 1TB RE4 harddrive, too. The power cost of two extra dimms to bring it up to 64GB of memory? About 3 watts.
While I like going for absolute rock bottom power usage, in reality doubling the memory configuration probably reduces power overall, if there's enough people ordering all but the smallest servers.
Though I'm a fan of HDDs SSDs really are a better fit for VPS host applications, for a number of reasons. And it turns out that one can pretty easily find reputable and used 2TB SSDs. They cost double, or a hair more than 1TB.
It ends up being that for maybe 10% more power, if that, host capacity can be doubled. Sort of.
I'm still not comfortable overallocating hosts (from a CPU perspective,) partly because of OpenBSD's scheduling just not being the best. I'd like to stick to a max of 4 VPSs per core, which ends up being 24 VPSs max on a host.
The current model configuration is based around Loki, which has 25 GB of "capacity." Thus my income potential was $150/month on a host. And sales have been slow. I have no doubt I could sell more servers whenever I automate Slow Servers and I still plan to (even more so with these changes!) Now if I stick to a hard limit of 24 VPSs per host, the absolute worst case is 24 768MB servers at $72/month total. That should break even with hosting costs and might possibly be profitable, but really doesn't pay for my time. But the best case, I'm currently estimating 54GB of memory (between 24 servers, max) is $216/month total revenue.
The gamble here is that I can *probably* make more money, while charging less. Not selling at all makes Slow Servers burn money for even longer, so there's that risk. Of course I could avoid lowering prices at all, and based on SporeStack I expect that might work. But I think the costs are more reasonable.
I lowered the IPv4 costs because eventually, the /24 will pay for itself with enough usage. I'm paying for it anyway. It still gives people the option to save not purchasing IPv4.
This does require more money upfront, on my part. And Slow Servers, ironically, was never the best suited to really small servers, like say Tierhive. With Xen I could sell 256MB servers and have it schedule fairly well. With VMM that just doesn't work well. At the same time, given the hardware and 1 vCPU limitation, it's not well suited to large/performant servers, either. It strikes a middle ground of "many" VPS users.
Now I need to source some 2TB MLC SSDs!
I'll finish updating the pricing during next week, outside of the weekend. I've just been thinking about this a lot and wanted to get my thoughts written down.
I'd like to extend server lifetimes for existing servers accordingly, to take advantage of the new pricing. Or I can do partial refunds, whichever you prefer.
If this interests you and you want to order a new server, feel free to email any time. There's still the SSH ordering mechanism, which I need to update with the new pricing. If you use it, you have to provide a real SSH key! "ssh-keygen" is not a valid public SSH key...
I will, however, wait till Monday or process orders since this isn't an automated system and I'd like to spend more time with my family.
Yes, it is! There are still cheaper hosts and you should check them out. I think that this new pricing is more fair for what you're getting. No $7/year VPSs here. It's now priced cheaper than Vultr or DigitalOcean (sort of) and the pricing reflects the reduced performance, lack of disk redundancy, and lower network throughput. It's still quite acceptable for many uses.