I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them
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Dear Vultr Customer,
Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.
In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.
Yes, but it's still stupid. Cloud hosting companies who are using hourly billing are used to spin instances up and down all the time. Imagine your app has a busy day and you need 500% more resources than usual, with the system of Vultr you will be automatically charged 500% of your regular usage only because of one days spike (obviously only if you are near the $0 balance mark)
- They are not a bank, so the money in your "account" with them is just an unsecured, general liability to you. If they go bust, they owe you money but you will never see it.
- If you want to withdraw that money from your "account" and they refuse, then your options are pretty limited.
Once they take it from your payment method, it becomes their money, not yours. That's a charge.
I am not disagreeing with what you say, but "charged" as it was used in the GP comment, it might have lead someone to believe that VULTR charge for usage per month.
To be honest, I have no idea what you are talking about. Your card is being charged and that's all I said. Sure you have credits to spend, but the cash you have no immediate need for on your Vultr account sits now there because of their billing practices.
Wow. Have you contacted them about it? That's crazy, I'd have to assume it's a bug.
I've never been charged on vultr, as I use bitcoin to always pay my bills (which is push only). I think they have stopped accepting that for new customers due to abuse though, which is quite a shame (but understandable).
They do send out emails like this, however they seem fairly flexible. I have several Vultr instances running, and they're quite happy for me to fund the account as and when if required, and have never automatically charged me.
That said, it is an odd message to send out, and I had my concerns when I first received a similar email. Maybe it's something they should look into altering.
I've been using packet.net for a small side project, they do bare metal / single tenant servers but the provisioning is very similar to linode/digital ocean. Their ~$35/mo ($0.05/hr) option is on par with digital ocean's $80/mo offering.
I don't believe he directly requested a comparison. What he asked was why the commenter above him chose not to. You seem to acknowledge that in your second sentence, but then go on to state that his comment is reminiscent of asking questions one could answer themselves - asking a commenter why they chose (not) to do something doesn't strike me as answerable by a second or third party.
I just had a look through their ToS for the catch.
For the most part it's reasonable, but there's a freaking litany of reasonable things you're not allowed to run, including IRC, audio/video streaming, game servers, and so on.
Why on earth do you sell me X block of resources for Y$/month if you're going to tell me what I can and can't do with them? Surely unreasonable use would be covered by resource limits already in place?
* they oversell, so they assume that only small fraction of web servers will consume 100% of resources, while almost every torrent client will consume 100% of the bandwidth. There is nothing wrong with overselling hosting within a reasonable margin, but most of the people here want to run more than a LAMP stack on the server.
* they get too much admin overhead replying to Tor "abuse" letters etc., so they just decided to deal with it in the simplest way possible.
Most VPS providers already limit the options to run Tor nodes or SMTP servers in one way or another. However forbidding things like IRC and audio streaming is quite unusual and I wonder how oversubscribed their bandwidth must be on these hosts.
I doubt CPU or RAM allocation is the issue here given AWS already have a good CPU time credit system to manage it.
In the old days (90s-2000s), allowing IRC bots opened yourself to being a DoS target and general receiver of harassment complaints from perceived social abuses that happened in the chat rooms. I assume things haven't changed that much.
All major IRC networks hide your IP address when you connect now (mode +x), but I bet the perception still exists. Most of these ToS'es are thoughtless copypasta from other services.. every now and then there's a Show HN from a new hosting company that has absurd nonsense in their terms, and the creator gets suitably chastised for it.
I don't really care. My $6/month deal beats any $5/month deal from the major players, and by a huge margin. I recently tested the internet speed on it, and I got 850 real Mbps out of the promised 1Gbps channel, which is good enough for me. I can give Memcached 1GB of RAM and not worry about killing everything else.
I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.
All the critical things should sit in RAM anyway. The SSD will beat the HDD if you read/write to disk heavily. But not if you need space.
If I need an SSD, there are options too, though DigitalOcean is indeed one of the best if you need a cheap US-based server. If the ___location doesn't matter, EU, Russia, Ukraine have some great deals.
He is free to use his server how he sees fit. And are you really sure that Amazon is going after a very different market with their 5$/mo. offer than a low-cost VPS provider?
I think comparing a (NVMe?) SSD solution to a HDD one shows the OPs ignorance of the differing market segments each is going after. They aren't comparable solutions.
Possibly because (except for Leaseweb), they're all European and of limited usefulness as a result. Linode, Vultr, DO and AWS all have numerous regions around the world.
They're also typically leased for at least a full month and can't be spun up/down on demand like you can with these services.
Plus they focus on large (>16GB) dedicated servers.
That's simple. When DO came on the scene it was the only one of its kind. Now there are 4 almost identical services: DO, Linode, Vultr, and Lightsail. On the surface those seem the same because of the near linear pricing and similar allocation of resources. The ones you listed aren't even close. Each of those may have some but they don't have all of what makes the DO model so useful to some of us:
1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues)
2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation
3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors
4. Tier 3/4 redundancies
5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services)
6. No setup fee on new instances
7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource)
8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images
9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph
10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10
While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail.
Could you link the offer? I couldn’t find any in their VPS or Dedicated offers better than the 16$ VPS (which I then used for the 40$ and 80$ tier, too)
I've used it and am happy with it. It's reasonably reliable, but has more downtime than the big providers. I wouldn't run mission-critical software that needs 5 9's uptime on it, but for anything else it's fine, certainly for personal projects. They're transparent with any outages, so you can check up on the outage history on their blog: https://prgmr.com/blog/
It's a small business run by a few people (though it's been around for 10 years, so a pretty stable one), which has the pros and cons that go along with that. The tech staff is good, techies who know what they're doing and generally assume that you do also. So if you send a request or problem report, you aren't going to get a form reply that asks if you tried turning it off and back on again. But it's just a handful of people, so if there's a major issue, fixing things is pretty manual and slower than at places that have armies of 24/7 devops staff.
One specific thing I really like about it: it gives you SSH access to a proper text console, in case you want to install a custom OS, recover a broken install, etc. Most VPS providers give you console access, but most do it via VNC in the browser, which is not my favorite way to do sysadmin work.
Yeah, you have a choice of using their prebuilt disk images, running one of the officially supported OS installers from the console menu, or downloading your own installer. The list of prebuilt images and supported installers is here: http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Distributions
You can install a custom OS. But it can be difficult to use an installer we don't provide right now because we only allow serial console access, not VNC. This means most installers won't work out of the box. Worst case you can dd an image to the disk using ssh from the rescue image.
FYI we don't do overage charges right now. For network, if we can't throttle your traffic down then we will shut your service off.
Our blog is a little misleading these days in that for downtime for individual servers, we started emailing customers directly rather than posting to the blog. This is because we want to make sure customers see the downtime notice. We also got confused responses sometimes to the blog wondering whether a given service was affected or not and if we email directly there is no such confusion.
I think our worst case downtime barring about 5 services this year has been the following:
* 2.04 hours downtime from start of maintenance window, planned due to security upgrade - 2016-11-18 (gave proportional credit)
This is a total of up to 12.69 hours downtime over the year so far, assuming downtime started at the beginning of maintenance windows (it usually started after.) Of that 6.05 hours, or less than half, was unplanned.
So far this year there's been about 336 days or 8064 hours. 12.69/8064 is 99.84% uptime overall, which is significantly lower than we would like. For some servers the uptime has so far been significantly better in that there were no hardware failures, one of the security upgrades was unnecessary, and the turnaround time for the remainder of the security upgrades was much faster than for this particular server.
For this particular server, the largest downtime contributors were security upgrades and network outages in that order. For network downtime, we got around to setting up our second upstream but there's a number of single points of failure we should take care of in 2017. There is also some additional scripting we should probably do that would cut down on the network downtime a lot, such as automatically taking down BGP if connectivity beyond the first hop is lost.
For the security update downtime, I think our most realistic bet right now is to get ourselves on the latest version of Xen once it comes out. That will hopefully have a stable implementation (not a technology preview) for live patching.
Are cores really comparable between DO and Lightsail. Are we sure that 1 core isn't really something not quite a real core but something that is already over allocated based on the assumption of less than 1 core of actual usage? Thus we need to know what the actual over allocation number is to realy figure out if they are comparable.
To me this is what's important. I mainly use VPSs because I'm lazy! I have a bunch of 5$ droplets that I use for development, and even sometimes just to move things around the net more easily... For my particular use case, I don't need to change unless Lightsail offers me a less crowded core.
Really, it just seems like AWS is fighting DO on this one, to get a share of their profits. My impression is they're looking for DO & AWS customers to stay on an Amazon-only stack. The comparison made by the commenter above actually makes me consider Vutlr and Linode :)
That's exactly what makes Lightsail attractive to someone like me. I have production services on AWS and Linode, and I have only positive things to say about Linode, but it would be very nice to manage everything in one place.
More of the same with Ramnode. Really not a lot of competition, is there? Every plan starts around $5/mo for a KVM instance, and each tier increases all of the specs, while doubling the monthly fees each time. No ability to customize to your specific requirements.
What if I need a lot of CPU power, but not much bandwidth? What if I want lots of RAM, but don't need much disk space? What if I'd rather have an HDD with more storage than a faster SSD? There's nobody offering a "configure your own VPS specs" plan.
Since Oct 2014 I've paid $79.90 per month for 16 GB memory, 24 cores, 1 TB hard drive, 128 GB SSD, unmetered i/o, static IP, Windows O/S, on a dedicated physical machine.
I have no idea why people think Amazon pricing is worth it.
Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc).
In an easier to read gist: https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813