> which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.
A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.
If the pricing for a product like this reflected that, it would certainly be more appealing to me. $5 a month is already so low though that unless I got way better performance for the same price or paid like, $0.50 a month or less for the same performance, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
it has to cost some amount in reserved capacity too. for every n suspended machines there is some small fraction of a machine's cpu/ram capacity that must be kept in reserve, like in a fractional lending system.
A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.