At the beginning of this month, a hard decision was made: the swizznvme plans offered at swizzin.net have hit the end of the line. Understandably, many folks are upset with the change and folks have been left wondering why. Anyone who already has a service has been contacted regarding the end of days; however, this message serves and an announcement to help folks understand what happened to the service.
Simply put, the unlimited nature of the swizznvme plans required a non-insignificant amount of funding to keep alive. As is, the service simply wasn’t bringing in enough revenue to make a profit — in fact, the service itself has been riding the line of no-profit to losing significant amounts of money since the service itself was launched.
I kept the service online and attempted to tweak the plans as I could to help encourage folks to sign up:
- Iota (300GB) plans caused a huge strain in resources as these users generally used as much or more system resources than users on larger plans. These plans were nixed over the summer when resource issue became an issue.
- Prices were raised to help offset the issue in general; however, signups dried up — folks did not want to pay higher prices so, prices were shortly lowered back to their original prices.
- The Black Friday promotion was aimed at getting a number of users on the machine to help bring the revenue up to the point of at least breaking even. While all the nvme promotions sold out (12 in total); the resource usage spike as a result started causing instability on the server as the CPU started running at 75% average and RAM started to become scarce for the first time in a year.
Yes, the addition of only 12 users to the machine took the server from completely stable to fighting with OOM (out of memory) scenarios as new users tested the limits of the server. Even at this point, the server was not bringing in a positive revenue.
So, with resource usage nearing maximum, outgoing bandwidth at an all-time high and a significant amount of free space still unused on the server (read: technically room for more users, but at what cost?), it was at this time that I made the hard decision to shut the server down.
Thus, after almost exactly 1 year of service, the NVMe plans are no more. New orders and renewals have been disabled and affected folks have already been contacted. This message is largely for folks who stumble across the site and are wondering where the plans have gone.
It was a good run and I had high hopes for the service; however, in reality, there are significant challenges I had not anticipated when I eagerly started dreaming up the service. That said, the HDD line is alive and well and there’s no plans to make any changes to the service itself at this time. If folks are still looking for NVMe plans, please do checkout out Ultraseedbox — their hardware is exactly the same as mine; albeit, with metered bandwidth.
Until next time, stay safe and stay warm.