Great Business idea #2: Managed MySQL or PostgreSQL on SliceHost and EC2
Are you a MySQL or Postgresql scalability expert? Here’s an idea for you. Create and manage a MySQL and/or Postgresql cluster on SliceHost and one on Amazon’s Ec2 cloud. The customers would be people hosting their services in these clouds.
Your job would be to manage scaling, security, monitoring, backups and all of those things. We your customers would sign up and you would give us our connection details, provide monitoring services and links to backups on s3. As a matter of fact the gui would probably benefit if it was as nice and simple as the SliceHost gui.
EngineYard already does something similar as part of their hosting plan. More than the individual slices I feel this is their real value add.
The business model? You could either do tiered plans ala slicehost. Hook it up with Amazon’s Flexible Payment System and you could offer nice metered plans ala EC2.
Future services? How about remote mirroring between slicehost and ec2? Your customers could switch at will.
A simple version of this could be launched into beta by a single dba and a half decent rails programmer. If you’re both, what are you waiting for?
Starting costs? The cost of two slices at slicehost or two on EC2. You could make serious money doing this quickly. You would probably only need 10 or so paying customers to break even. This you could almost certainly get within a month. This is good steady monthly cashflow I’m telling ya.
Customers? Well me for one. I know it’s not that hard to setup MySQL clusters. I’d just rather not have to. I’d happily pay $10-20 for a low volume plan and considerably more for high volume. I’d be perfectly happy with a metered plan as well. With that I wouldn’t hesitate in moving all my rails projects onto it.
Go on do it, and let me know when I can sign up.
Update: See the comments below ScatterHost is being launched offering exactly this service for MySQL on EC2. Great news.
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Hey Pelle-
you should email me to talk, we have something in the works you may want to beta test ;)
Has potential, but I worry RackSpace ( who bought Slice Host last week ) would behave in their usual way ( read: evil, hostile, etc. ) and not allow the idea.
I would also bring Sun to your attention, they have a Cloud storage offering too, all in-house, they are not re-selling anyone else’s service.
A few Rails developers and DBA’s I know put together just that type of service. We started last month with our EC2 offering for MySQL databases and have been rolling it out to our previous customers and clients. So for they’re loving it!
We’re now accepting new customers on an individual basis and we hope to launch a fully automated sign-up and provisioning system by the end of the month. We’re also going to start offering managed Rails instances on EC2.
Anybody who’s interested is welcome to contact me for more information!
Drew,
That looks perfect. Thats exactly what I want. Any chance of adding slicehost as well?
Pelle
We’re definitely looking into it but we need to talk to Matt and Jason at slicehost about it. With their new buyout by Rackspace, this may not be something that they will allow. If you’d like to send me an e-mail though, I can be sure to give you updates when we have more information.