Why every Kernel6 customer gets their own server
Per-website pricing looks simple, but it prices the wrong thing. Here is why the Dedicated plan is priced on the machine instead — and what that means for you.
Most hosting is priced per website. It is easy to explain and easy to compare. It is also, we think, priced on the wrong thing — and the reason is worth a few paragraphs, because it decides what you pay and what you get.
A website count is not a cost
Two small brochure sites and one busy online shop are three websites either way. Billing them the same is simple. Running them is not the same at all: the shop needs memory, CPU and bandwidth that the brochure sites never touch. The moment one site gets real traffic, the price stops having anything to do with what it costs to serve.
Providers paper over that gap in two ways. Either they price high enough that the quiet sites pay for the busy ones, or they pack many customers onto shared machines and hope the busy ones are rare. If you have ever had your site slow down because of someone else’s traffic, you have met the second approach.
What we actually buy is a machine
Underneath Kernel6 is Amazon Web Services. What we rent from Amazon is not "a website" — it is a server, by the hour. So that is what the Dedicated plan sells: a server of your own, with 1 CPU and 4 GB of memory, for ₹2,000 a month. Your price follows the thing that costs money to run, so the two cannot drift apart.
For a sense of where that number comes from: a small instance on AWS costs roughly ₹1,570 a month all-in to keep running. The rest covers the platform on top — deploys, routing and certificates, monitoring and support.
As many websites as it will hold
Because you are paying for the machine, we do not count your websites. Put one site on it, or a handful. The limit is the server itself — its memory and CPU — and that is a limit you can see, rather than an arbitrary number on a pricing table.
To keep one app from taking down the others, each app gets a memory ceiling of half the server (never less than 512 MB). An app that leaks memory is restarted when it crosses that line, instead of slowly starving everything else on the box.
No neighbours
On the Dedicated plan your projects go on the server assigned to your account, and shared placement never puts another customer’s project on a server that belongs to someone. While your server is still being set up, the dashboard says so rather than pretending everything is ready.
What about very small sites?
A whole server is more than a single small site strictly needs. For people who would rather run everything in their own Amazon account and pay Amazon directly, we are building a Managed plan priced per website. It is listed on the pricing page as coming soon, and it is not on sale until the part that connects your own AWS account is finished. Selling it before that would mean charging for something we cannot yet deliver.
The short version
- You pay for the server you get, not for a website count.
- Run as many sites on it as it will hold.
- Your server is assigned to your account; other customers’ projects are not placed on it.
- Each app is memory-capped so one bad deploy cannot sink the rest.
- Cancel any time from your account; there is no notice period.