SGP Packages - What Are They?

First of all a fat welcome to our new website. Our main website, blog, and knowledgebase have been rebuilt and redesigned from the ground up. We welcome any feedback on the change. So let’s dive in to these new SGP packages.

Whats An SGP Package?

SGP packages are a new type of package we're testing out. If you think back to our old website you might recall we used to offer Budget, Performance, and Impact packages. With a range of RAM options between them. This meant we had nearly 50 packages. Team that with upgradeable threads, dedicated IPs, split slots, etc we had a lot of options at the checkout. To help with this for games like Minecraft we made a package helper, select the modpack or version you're running and we'll give you the best package. But this also led to a lot of options. Users would need to wade through all the versions of Minecraft, then all the package options before finally landing on the checkout page.

So starting yesterday we rolled out our SGP packages for testing. These packages take our 50 package options down to just 2. An 8gb Budget, and a 16gb Performance. With the budget package being ideal for unmodded servers, and the performance for modded. No more needing to upgrade, no more worrying about what package to choose. A simple, two package option.

But Doesn't That Make Them Costly?

Nope, for those in the US our 16gb package comes in at $14.99, and our 8gb at $6.99. When looking at a lot of other hosts, we found most charging around $11.99 for a 3gb package. So this still keeps us at an amazing value.

How Do They Cost So Much Less?

Two things we targeted right away. Around 70% of all orders had a money off code attached. These ranged from 15% off to 25% off, with most codes being 25% off. As we were already taking a 25% hit on most orders and the cost of this was already factored in, we scrapped the codes and just set the price 25% lower for everyone.

Sales Tax and VAT

Alright, the next one is sales tax and VAT. We’re a UK-based company, but still have to charge EU VAT, US sales tax, etc. The highest tax comes from the EU, with places sitting at 25%. To keep things simple, we just included that 25% in all our prices, no matter where you are. This is common practice in the hosting space. However, if we wanted to get our price down, we needed to do something about this. The website will now add tax based on your region.

Example: The base price for our 16GB Performance plan is $14.99. This would be £11.17 if you flat converted it. However, as the UK has a VAT tax, this is now £13.99. This gets our pricing down by around 50% for some people around the world, but we still need to cut more if we want to hit our low goal.

Not Stripping Features

While we didn’t want to strip features out of the packages, we knew something had to give in order to offer these low prices. For us the least impactful ones were splits and storage.

All our packages up until now had unlimited storage, you hit the cap, you asked for more, you got it. To help push our prices down, the SGP packages now charge for storage. Every package comes with 30GB by default, any extra storage after this is $0.30/GB.

The next were splits. Before we offered 5 splits per package, now it defaults to 2. When looking over our clients, we found that most people didn’t use more than 30GB of storage or more than 2 splits, so this was an easy way to push the income of the new packages, while impacting the least amount of people.

Keeping in mind, if you’re on one of our old packages, this doesn’t apply, you still get 5 splits and unlimited storage. It’s just the SGP packages that don’t.

Managing Servers Better

The next one is how we manage servers. When you don’t interact with, or log in to your server for a prolonged time, we now power it down. We’re playing around with the best time span for this, personally, I think 3 weeks is a good spot. This allows us to free up more space on a node as servers that are powered down. We’ve been playing around with doing this for the past 6 months or so, even on our other packages. It seems to have had no impact on the end user, and we’ve been able to balance our nodes well with it.

The goal here is to not leave system resources wasted. Let’s put this into an example. If we have a 192GB server, in the past this meant we could fit 12 servers on this node. But if 4 of these servers are powered down, we can now allocate another 4 servers to this node.

But here is the issue, what if everyone on that node powers up their server at the same time? We can now move most servers from one node to another, without any impact to them. Same connection address, same files, same hardware, same location. This means that if all 16 people on that node do power up their server, servers are moved to other nodes with space to allow them to all boot freely. This happens before your server is powered on, and you won’t even know it’s happened.

If you own a dedicated IP, your server is a proxy, or a game that isn’t Minecraft, then you won’t be moved. This is due to us not yet being able to move these servers without impacting the end user. As over 80% of our servers at the moment are Minecraft, this is fine for node balance. As our other games grow, we’ll apply new tech to allow these to be moved too. But only if we can ever do it without impacting you.

All nodes are monitored 24/7 by our team. Any node tips over 85% RAM usage, our team is alerted. Same with excessive CPU loads. You can also monitor this yourself at https://stats.kinetichosting.net

What About Current Packages?

Current packages are unchanged, they work just as they always have. These changes are only applied to our SGP packages.

Can I Move My Current Package To An SGP Package?

Right now we're still testing our SGP package to see if people like the idea. If they are a success we will allow anyone on a current package to migrate over to an SGP package. We just want to hold off on that now, as we're not sure if they're going to be staying around. So far the feedback has been really positive, but we want to be 100% sure these are a success first.

What If You Scrap SGP Packages, Will My Server Close?

Nope. Even if we stop offering SGP packages, anyone who orders one while they're in testing will get to keep them.

How Do I Order An SGP Package?

Right now you can order them via your chosen game store page, or via the billing panel. While we test them, SGP packages will be all that we offer on the main site, however, you can order our other packages at any time from the billing panel.