Right up there with New Relic writing a blog post about how you couldn't trust Sumo Logic (and should move to NR) after they got bought by Francisco Partners, only to be bought by Francisco Partners themselves.
Assuming they did this raise because they need the capital to throw more into their GPU business, this is not really a remarkable quote. One of the first things noted in the article is this is soon to be the largest part of their business. This is their first capital injection too. While its fueled by the growth in AI, the business itself is mundane, they rent GPU access. Growing that requires a lot of capital.
~18 years ago I owned a Belkin router that would hijack on the order of 1/10000th of plain http requests and send them to a belkin.com domain to try to get people to buy more Belkin products.
ngl I def feel a bit smug getting to pull that one out... but they used to tweet and delete mean shit at me all the time, heh. I feel like Joyent has more reason to hate me than Vultr, I never bothered Vultr!!!! :)
Yeah, jokes aside I think David Aninowsky is a super smart guy, I actually quite like him. Funnily enough, I'd even emailed them a couple years ago to pitch them letting me build this VERY idea for them, never heard back. :)
They're not even a startup, the company is 10 years old.
The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.
I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.
Digital Ocean has a market cap of $3.49B as of yesterday, so $3.5B for Vultr sounds about right.
It's a mundane business in a crowded market, providing services they copied from other companies, which in turn anyone can copy. Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.
> Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.
As of a couple (2-3 years ago) Akamai had no plans or interest to expand into Cloud. They wanted to remain on-prem/hybrid because of existing synergies and strategies. Their CDN business was also heavily used by companies that have cloud BUs.
Yet Akamai hedged their bet by acquiring a well-known VPS company.
Just because they aren't aggressive about expanding Linode doesn't mean that Linode is not a serious competitor to Vultr. Linode offers nearly everything Vultr does, at a similar price point.
That makes more sense to me, because I remember have looked at their offerings earlier as they where one of the only places you could run OpenBSD. So I was a little surprised to see 2014 on their websites, but figured I just remembered wrong.
In all fairness, Vultr was the first hosting company to offering fractional GPUs - and they gained a lot of traction with indie developers as a result of it.
Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)
Journalists learn a new phrase that sounds techy / flashy and beat it to death. Watch CNBC for 5 minutes and you will see their "experts" use the phrase "hyper scalers" at least 5 times.
(As someone who played a bunch of TFC, UT, Quake 3 and Counter-Strike back around the turn of the century it's fun to see someone from that world who rode the wave all the way to modern GPU hosting.)
All of this just makes me suspicious, perhaps unnecessarily so. I'm old enough to remember ENRON stashing a load of debt in their various "Raptor" LLCs before the final implosion.
I don't remember the exact details, but I used to have a Vultr VPS (I think the smallest they had, for something like $2.50/month) for a few years running OpenBSD. One day I noticed IPV6 had stopped working, so I emailed support after a while because I wasn't sure if I had broken it during an upgrade a few months before or not (I don't ever really specifically use IPV6). Anyways, got a super detailed reply back from support with the exact cause / how to fix it that was specific to OpenBSD. I was pretty surprised they had someone replying to emails from a $2.50/month customer who was actually knowledgeable about a fairly niche OS!
When people try to cheap out on customer support, this is exactly what they lose, and it's something I always try to bear in mind as I go about things.
By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.
That's awesome and reminds me of a similar experience I had with Schwab some years ago. I contacted support with a question from an account with a paltry amount of money in it and got back a very detailed and helpful response. My account value to them was probably similar to your $2.50/month VPS account so I was blown away at the quality of the response. I have stuck with the company for years and recommended them multiple times.
They're also still available from Vultr. I just checked the wayback machine and the only thing that seems to have changed since their introduction in ~2017 is that the included SSD was reduced from 20GB to 10GB in early 2019.
My experience with Vultr has been better than with any of the other smaller VM providers. They always seem to provide just a little extra, and don't always nickle and dime you at every opportunity. I originally chose them because they most consistently had the best VM performance/price measured by a third party.
The other thing that stands out in that space is that their pricing isn't linear by vCPU and RAM. e.g. larger instances give better ratios and also offer bare-metal servers if you got to a scale and stability where that would be better suited.
Read the ratings/comments on the first page and it looks like one-off case complaints, though I have nothing to back that up than my experience. I've been using them 6+ years and their systems have just worked as advertised and never needed to contact their support. I've had overdue bills which I've paid maybe a month later and it was never a problem--never got any threats to suspend service or anything.
Perhaps they act quickly on DMCA reports, so if you're in a gray area don't use them?
I was just curious what kind of promotions they have and saw this one for $300 in credits and $100 free trial[0].
Maybe it was, sorry about that. It was just a top search result and said Dec 2024 in the content. The links are to https://www.vultr.com/?ref=9632479-9J so might have been a sneaky referral link that went to the main page that at some time had the promotion. It appears gone now.
I've been using Vultr for many years without issue. Currently I have a $5 VPS that has been running for nearly two years straight without any downtime.
I've been using Vultr for the past 6-ish months and I've been happy with them. They have great prices for what you get. Sadly, I feel that review sites often skew negative because I think people are more motivated to find time to share a negative experience than a positive one.
I've been happy enough over the last 5+ years, but I'm not a huge user and I've only ever interacted with their support once many years ago, and it was fine.
mostly works, there's maybe a "restart" once a year due to hardware problems
all handled transparently without you intervention
support is responsive enough
for personal use works perfect
---
from a business account with many servers expecting higher reliability sometimes they don't correspond and have too many maintenance windows with _guaranteed_ downtiem
I've been running VPSs with them for the last 9 years. Never had a problem. And unlike Digital Ocean, they allow you to mount your own ISOs and fully support the BSDs.
Unless someone buys them out in the future and platform decay[1] happens, you can trust them.
I was a happy Vultr customer until the day I tried to get port 25 unblocked. Instead of getting it unblocked I received a ”sorry not sorry” copy paste from some senior sales guy.
I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.
Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).
That's odd. I had a single HDD vps for a few months, back when they offered those, and they immediately unblocked port 25 when I asked them via a support ticket. At the time I had expected more pushback about it, or clarifying questions. I kept using that same server for many years until they stopped offering that tier of server and force stopped it many years later.
The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.
I tested them out maybe like 7-9 years ago and that's the reason I didn't continue. 25 blocked by default. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me
Lesson here is always be transparent about your product. If you're permanently blocking ports by default, put some emphasis on that limitation during the sales process.
Maybe they did a risk analysis. Maybe they don't have the bandwidth to create a vetting process. Either way, be transparent.
I use Vultr for a BGP anycast CDN (they let you bring your own ips) and they're overall excellent. They also have budget GPU VPSes that are perfect for webgl screenshotting via chrome headless. Their sales rep gave me a 10% discount and we're not even slightly in their high volume category. Extremely underrated VPS provider IMO, I've had better results with them than DO. I hope this development does not change things.
I searched for a provider that would let me do BGP on a VPS and found Vultr. Their network is solid with tons of peers, low latency, high bandwidth to my location. My brief interaction with their support was very smooth.
WSJ blocked my request to view the page after making me do a captia to see it, and then only the first paragraph is visible on the Wayback Machine. The modern web is a joy to use.
WSJ is also blocking my request to view the page. Why they need a shitty request blocker for a web article - server side rendering only the first paragraph, I don't know.
I originally signed up with Vultr because they make it easy to set up an OpenBSD server, and I wanted to experiment with hosting my own mail server on OpenBSD. I've since expanded my usage with them and host everything on Vultr. Very satisfied with their service!
When they announced Bare Metal I was hoping it was closer to Hetzner, basically old fashion dedicated server.
AMD EPYC™ 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads, + 128 GB DDR5 ECC + 3.84 TB NVMe SSD for $221 and a $88 one time set up fee on Hetzner. Even if they could do it at $100 more expensive at $321 would still have been good enough.
But their Cloud / VPS offering are still very good. Now that Linode is nearly gone. DO is mostly Intel based. Vultr is mostly AMD. The other one that is close if not better is UpCloud.
Interesting that this ends up posted on the same day I got this email from them for my VM hosting a vpn:
"Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. A sudden reboot has been detected. Our engineering team is currently investigating the issue that caused this, but we expect no impact on data and/or configurations."
I've started testing with vultr some because they offer affordable fractional GPUs. I think I had something running for about $60/month with a 'real' GPU. 1/24th a GPU, IIRC, but... better than nothing. DO and linode offer GPU service, but the minimal cost just to get something up is significantly more.
This is awesome news. The more players in this market, the more validation we (Hot Aisle) have for the things we've been working on for over a year now.
Having spent a bunch of time talking in person with the Vultr team, they are a great group of people.
