Interview with Vance Davies. ioFlare review

Introduction

ioFlare is a new VPS provider that will be launching in a week, as you will see below Vance (CEO of ioFlare) and his team are planning to offer a new VPS option for all the hacker community. They are aiming at giving us some real competitive prices, and great performance at the same time.

The basic plan looks pretty good.

• Cost $5 USD
• SSD Accelerated Storage: 15GB
• RAM: 0.75GB/1.5GB (Dedicated/Burst) KVM ballooning
• CPU: 10 CPU Cores @ 1x priority
• Bandwidth: 1.5TB 750GB IN/750GB OUT Premium Network
• Port: 1gbit
• 320gbps DDOS protection
• Location: Montreal QC Canada (BHS) More locations to come soon after opening.

But, I better stop telling you about this and present you this good news from the mouth, or keyboard of Vance Davis.

Interview

GG. Hi Vance, please introduce yourself to the audience.

VD. I am Vance Davies, am 35 years old and currently living in Seattle WA. I started Systems Administration about 10 years ago and that love affair started with my love of running gaming servers. I have run servers for a huge amount of games and that evolved into Linux Administration with a focus on Security. I have a family with 2 young boys (1.5 and 3 years). I am a avid Outdoor enthusiast and love getting out into the back country.

GG. How did you come to this project of a new VPS provider?

VD. A systems admin friend and I started talking about it over a year ago running through various ideas and if we could bring something competitive and different to the industry. Over the months our ideas evolved substantially and became something entirely different and very exciting. We knew at this point we had something amazing that could directly compete with the big guys like Linode and Digital Ocean.

GG. So, you are not alone with this. Are you only two people behind?

VD. There are 3 of us all together. 1 who handles accounting, banking, human resources, 1 that is the main systems admin and responsible for the infrastructure, updating systems, securing etc., and myself who also helps with System administration but main role is marketing, PR, and SEO.

Our systems admin is a life long systems administrator and absolutely brilliant when it comes to server hardware, networking, and Linux in general. He is also extremely good with web development (PHP, html, CSS, java.). He is 30 and lives in the USA as well.

The ioFlare group with the exception of Vance have chosen to keep themselves and their names out of the spotlight with is understandable.

GG. Well, basically three young people trying to create something new, and better than what already exists.

VD. Yes that about sums it up. We knew we could come up with something to make waves in the market and challenge some of the top companies if we really put our minds and hearts into it. We believe we have done just that and will be able to compete directly with companies like Linode and Digital Ocean. We really spent large amounts of time tweeking and testing to squeeze every ounce of speed out of the servers and also keep the price extremely competitive. If you look at the specs on our lowest offering it really is extremely competitive and the speeds exceptional.

GG. Yes it really looks good. But, going more into technical details. And going from bottom to top. What Datacenters are you going to use. How is the connection to Internet, I mean, redundant? Tier 1?.. Energy on those Datacenters?

VD. Our first location will be in OVHs new datacenter (BHS) which is Tier 3 but meeting requirements for Tier 4 and is also classified as a "green energy" datacenter which we like. The extreme east coast location also is very good for Europeans and offers better routing than even Datacenters such as Choopa and Dupont in New Jersey for Europeans.

Which city is that located?

VD. Montreal Quebec, Canada

GG. Good, and nice to see it is green. And how about the software?. What are you using as backend?

VD. Proxmox handles that. Paired with whmcs for now. But we are working on our own billing solution. All Cloud instances are KVM.

GG. Why did you choose KVM?, why in few words, you consider it to be the best technology?

VD. We believe it gives the "truest" hardware virtualization and isolation.

GG. So, you are real free software supporters.

VD. Absolutely. The billing software we are working on for our own systems we do plan on making open source when we feel it is ready for that.

GG. Sound great, congratulations. And on the topic again. What operating systems are you planning to support in the beginning?

VD. For now OS choices will be fairly basic so the usual: centos, debian, ubuntu, gentoo, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux. OS installs are not done via template at this time.

The user will need to install his own OS via the console, until we can make our own templates for easy installation.

We have discussed not using templates and leaving it as a manual install as it appeals to us that way but I doubt some of our customers would agree on that point.

GG. How are you planning to assure that all customers get the same resources… are you going to release the number of VPSs you have on each server, based on the size of the packages. I mean like Linode?

VD. Yes the same way as Linode handles it. if you need to upgrade then everything goes with you onto a new server for the larger plan, one that has the available space if the current one does not.

GG. Now, moving into the corporate area, how is this startup funded, is it only you for the moment? did you find some founders? What can you tell us about that?

VD. The project is funded by all of us. We knew this was coming for the past year and so we put away for the startup.

There are no outside investors

GG. Are you looking for investors?

VD. At this time no.

GG. OK, Finally and now more into your field.. Talking about marketing. You know that in order to break barriers to entry, you need to offer some "unique" features. Do you have some, can you give us some advance on that?

VD. We have had the developers over at Module Garden develop the first ever Proxmox API WHMCS Cloud module. This has given us a huge amount of flexibility to easily develop custom storage, networking, backup systems, and much more on top of Proxmox because of its openness. That just isn't possible in any closed source system. The down side is that Proxmox just isn't meant to be used as a customer UI. Though it does have a role/permissions system, it is best to just limit access to administration. After seeing other modules that ModulesGarden has built they were the obvious choice to build a WHMCS client interface for complete VM life-cycle automation.

GG. Thank you very much for your time. Is there anything else you would like to add, something you think we missed?

VD. You are welcome. I think you about covered it all. Maybe to say that we will be a unmanaged provider, and keep a eye on our site as we will be giving away 100 of our Nova x1 servers for the grand opening! ioFlare. Thank you for the interview.

More info: ioFlare