Writing a good quote request
We build to order, so we do not have a list to point you at. The quality of the first quote depends almost entirely on what you tell us.
What actually helps
Six things. Nothing here requires you to know hardware.
- What the machine will run
- “A PostgreSQL database for an e-commerce platform” tells us far more than “a database server”. Name the software if you know it.
- How much work, at once
- Requests per second, concurrent users, simultaneous streams, number of virtual machines. Peak, not average — the peak is what the hardware has to survive.
- How much data
- Total size now, growth per month, and roughly how much of it is hot. A 20 TB archive with a 200 GB working set is a very different machine from 20 TB that is all active.
- Bandwidth
- Peak rate and whether it is sustained. If you are delivering video, say so and give a bitrate — see what unmetered actually means.
- What would hurt most
- Latency, throughput, capacity or cost. Every specification is a trade and this tells us which way to lean.
- Constraints
- A deadline, a budget range, a required operating system, a compliance requirement, hardware you already own and want to colocate.
A good example
“We run a SaaS platform on PHP with MariaDB. About 400 requests per second at peak, database is 300 GB and grows 20 GB a month, almost all of it active. Latency matters more than raw throughput — our 99th percentile is the number our customers complain about. Currently on three VPSes and hitting disk limits. Budget is flexible if the jump is worth it, and we would like to move within a month.”
That gets a specific quote with reasoning, first time.
What does not help
- A parts list with no context. If the workload does not fit it, we will say so — but then we have spent a round trip discovering what you actually need.
- “What is your cheapest server?” It is almost certainly not the right one, and we would rather sell you the right one.
- Copying a competitor's configuration. Fine as a starting point, but say what you are running so we can check it makes sense.
If you do not know the numbers
Measure for a day — how much server do you actually need lists exactly which four figures to take. Or tell us what you have now and what is going wrong with it; that is often enough.
Send it through the quote form or straight to support@novogara.com. An engineer reads it, not a sales script.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base