As you might have seen we have announced our MySQL Support offering which includes pricing per server.  Did not I frequently said pricing per server makes little sense ?  Yes I did.  So why are we having this offering ?  It is because how people often like to buy it, that’s why !

We all may have a good idea how to price something in a better and more fair way.  For example  it would make more sense to sell gasoline per pound, as this is what defines its energy value, yet we all got used to buying gasoline per gallon (or litter outside of US) and hence getting a little bit different energy value for our buck depending on the temperature.   Yet how do you think the gas station selling gas per pound would do ?  Probably not so good even if prices will be competitive as it is confusing for people.

At Percona we learned the same things apply to support.  First people would like to buy support on fixed budget and have us to take a risk whenever they will need to have a little help or a lot of help in the given year, so hourly caps are gone.   There is also standard of per-server pricing in the industry and even MySQL Space, check out for example Oracle or SkySQL.   We want to be be easy to do business with so if purchasing support priced per server is how you prefer to see the world, we’re ready.

Another advantage of per server pricing it allows us to make Percona Services more affordable – smaller shops having  just one MySQL  Server in production can get Support just for $1500 per year which I think is a very good deal,  previously they would have to shell out at least $7500 for Silver subscription.

For people running “larger” installations, with large being as much as 10 servers there are better options available with unlimited options.  This is because as long as you get to 10+ servers server number starts to matter even less – you just have “many” of servers with most likely many of them running similar load – either being replicas or shards.

You may also note all our support is 24/7 which we think is how support should be.  Business hours only support  makes as little sense as business hours only emergency room or car insurance which only covers you on highways.  You do not know when you may run into the problem and if you’re looking for production support you need it to be 24/7.

Does support comes with limits ?   Of course.  If you have the plan with unlimited hours you can’t have the same open ended services as we do in MySQL Consulting where we can write code for you or just log in and make your problem go away.  We define support as response to specific incident or coaching you to resolve the problem. We however can’t write your application code or re-design your application architecture as part of our support offering.

Does this mean Percona is moving away from our per hour pricing. No! It is still available and it will continue making sense for a lot of our customers looking for services truly consulting in nature. With new MySQL Support offering we’re  just enhancing your choices and making support more affordable for you.