So will I get a nastygram if I buy 10 of these and push the whole 1TB every month?
Edit:
So their AUP[1] is full of a lot of crappy policies. Not allowed to use all the RAM you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the bandwidth you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the CPU you're assigned. No crons or background services -- what the fuck? No IRC, TOR, or p2p activity. They have an obscenity/morality clause. Cannot do any webdev that uses custom headers -- would even suggest that running wget or curl with a --user-agent flag is in violation.
Edit2:
And they require a valid address and phone number to even register. Screw off.
Please note that in order to protect the integrity of
our cloud, Atlantic.Net verifies phone and other
contact information prior to account activation. Please
be certain to provide a working phone number where you
can be reached in order to avoid delays in the account
creation process.
In their AUP, they have headings followed by full explanations. Under their "obscene materials" section, they specifically only talk about child pornography, which seems fair enough.
I get the impression they've reused this AUP from a shared hosting environment though, as banning CGI scripts, "chat rooms", and background services are not things practical to police on VPSes anyway but are commonly policed on shared hosting. Statements like "Any database stored on Atlantic.Net servers shall be limited in size to 50% of the total disk space allotted for a particular domain" seem to back up this hunch, since it's talking about space for a "domain" and not a VPS or server.
I think they need to improve their AUP as I'm not convinced that it's what they intend for VPS services, too much of it doesn't make sense for that sort of environment.
I'm only making this jab because, like another user pointed out, there's an unprofessional amount of grammatical and typographical errors in your copy.
I respect you guys, and one of my friends has a bunch of cages with Atlantic. But not everyone has that connection or the wherewithal.
Highly doubt it. The amount of hoops you'd have to jump through to get services with this guys is not worth it. The time I wasted trying to sign up for 10 of these cost me more than the cost of the servers.
If they borrowed liberally (ie copy and pasted) an existing AUP from some one else (typos and errors included) that doesn't even apply to their services, they don't deserve the ¢99.
That subsection is a morality clause, regardless of their explanatory blurb.
These kinds of policies are unfortunately commonplace and largely ignored. Gandi.net, which incidentally powers Amazon's Route 53 domain registration, requires that you agree to their "good moral standards" [0]. Gandi reserves the right to shut down your services without notice if, among many other reasons, they in their sole discretion deem you are doing anything deviant, you're not respecting someone's honor, or if the content isn't appropriate to each person's sensibility... where "each person" can be any of the millions of users you have using your services.
The spirit of this is to avoid abuse on our cloud. If you don't feel comfortable providing us with contact information, we're probably not the place for you. I'm working on the AUP tomorrow, the cron/background services doesn't make sense or the RAM.
So you tried to launch this with great fanfare and couldn't be bothered to review your AUP? Or the copy in most sections of your site (typos, unmatched tenses, random spaces or lack thereof)?
Why should I trust you with my information if you can't even handle your own?
What kind of abuse do you think it is preventing? How does it prevent abuse from anyone but the least motivated abuser? If I wanted to abuse your service, I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical turk to register accounts for me (indeed this is a fairly common low-skill-low-reward task on mturk).
I'm sorry but this plus the launch of your HIPAA hosting, which was also plagued by typos and wrong ToS, doesn't inspire any sort of confidence in your abilities at Atlantic.net.
They're offering a Terabyte for 0.99 cents. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to assume that they'd be most attractive to people who wanted lots of capacity for a low price.
If using the service that Atlantic is offering is going to somehow bankrupt them, then perhaps they shouldn't offer it.
Thanks. I just sent in a query about that to your support email. How would you feel about someone who bought a large number of $0.99/month instances, all of which had lots of network traffic with each other and were often compute-bound? Like the things one routinely does on Amazon AWS.
(I'm exploring the possibility of a new kind of service which requires each user to have their own private cloud server, with all the cloud servers talking to each other.)
I don't feel comfortable sharing my phone number with businesses because I have seen what they do to my email inbox.
This has nothing to do with me being untrusthworthy and everything to do with _you_ being untrustworthy. Work on changing my perception of you, or don't.
Looking forward to reading the new one. I have been evaluating your company for a month now and had decided to move some sites over, however as your AUP is written they would be in violation (cron jobs).
I ran nginx as proxy + one web app in a DO instance. CPU usage always < 2% for the whole system and serving 20-40GB of mainly html,js, css, json per month.
Do you consider the web app as background services?
Is it ok to expand my next server instance to your solution per your biz model/AUP?
I'm about to get signed up and start recommending this to a few small business, I'll be looking forward to this change on the AUP. Thank you for your response.
That's good... the cron job thing (which is bizzare by the way) is a show stopper for me but if that changes I'll be spinning up several servers for sure.
Edit: Jesus the more I dig into this the more worried I become about what the hell kind of business you're running. Assuming you're on the only one to use the `mp99e99` handle with any regularity, I'm greatly concerned.
I understand that with that price for providing a server, they need to do some user validation - thus the requirement for address and phone.
But that issue with background services or cron - for that price, that's exactly why I'd consider their service. May I know what might be the reason why they don't allow this?
Nonsense. There are plenty of cheap hosts that don't do that sort of validation.
>May I know what might be the reason why they don't allow this?
Either they copypasta'd a boilerplate AUP -- in which case they're inept. Or they don't know how to properly virtualize and manage those provisions -- in which case they're also inept.
> Nonsense. There are plenty of cheap hosts that don't do that sort of validation.
And then their users run warez hosts and botnet slaves, which then get DDoSed, saturating their neighbors' links. No matter how well you virtualize and manage your provisions, if one user has caused your incoming 10G to be saturated on layer 2, there's not much you can do at layer 3 to QoS that.
Personally, the combination of "nearly free" and "personally identifiable such that there won't be people translating 'cheap' into 'good for one-off masks for illicit activity'" is a real selling point to me.
They, apparently, own their own datacenters and tout HIPAA compliant hosting. If they can't deal with incoming DoS traffic at the edge of their network I would be concerned...
People who run botnet slaves large enough to get DDoSed by their fellow botnet masters are smart enough to own Voip numbers for verification. The verification keeps 12year olds off not really anyone else. But it also stops legitimate users from signing up.
>No matter how well you virtualize and manage your provisions, if one user has caused your incoming 10G to be saturated on layer 2, there's not much you can do at layer 3 to QoS that.
well, you can blackhole the target. Essentially, you tell your upstream to drop all traffic to one of your /32s (the one being targeted) at it's upstream. It finishes the job for the attacker, which is sad, but so long as you are willing to lose the customer in question, it solves the problem for you.
For details of how to set this up if you are a he.net bandwidth customer, see:
nearly all other bandwidth providers provide similar facilities; there are a few other things you can do to make this sort of thing more robust.
But the point is that there are things you can do about incoming DDoS attacks... if you are willing to kill all traffic to the target IP address.
I mean, for most ISPs this isn't automated... in my case, my pager goes off; I log into my quagga box, and I start typing. So you still see downtime, and yeah, you want to avoid it. But there are things that can be done.
When I say "QoS", I'm referring to the quality of service of the other tenants sharing that uplink until you blackhole the DDoS. From my perspective running a VPS slice, there are periods where my uplink just dies—and there's nothing that can be done to "smooth" these away at the hypervisor level.
I don't need cheap BW but if they're going to offer it, is it a real offer it a bullshit rope people in offer? I have 20-25 "real" servers and a handful of VPSs from (good) providers that fulfill my needs well.
OVH's CEO, Oles, doesn't care about their big clients and happily changes the terms of their contract (in less than legal ways) to screw them. I'd rather not do business with them.
They will make changes to your contract, which you can only read after logging into your control panel, which you can't do unless you agree to your contract. Putting you in the catch22 of being unable to read your new contract without also agreeing to it before reading it.
Look around their forums 2-3 years ago. Many of their HG and HGXL customers had their server's 10Gbps link limited to 300mbit, their bandwidth go from unlimited to metered, internal bandwidth change, their bandwidth go from ok to shitty quality (OVH's "volume" network). Similarly, if you had an entire rack of 10Gbps servers (SO ~5-8 servers) they limited the entire rack to 1 or 2Gbps.
Firstly, we are a 20-year old startup! Everyone laughed at us when we talked about doing the original Internet startup -- dialup Internet. Over time, we adapted and rode the booms and busts that went on in our industry, all the while staying cash flow positive and learning to GRIND.
We are thinking there is going to be a explosion in startups globally, that will lead to the next big things, not just in the web but material sciences, biotech, etc.
Our goal is to build out a global compute infrastructure and get it in the hands of tomorrows Einsteins.. wherever they are born. We want to see the future happen faster, and see more of it in our lifetimes. Thats not going to happen if we wait around for today's dominant players, who for whatever reason are moving extremely slow.
Thats our over-reaching goal. You can read about it here:
Doing a startup is really, really hard. We're trying to make it less so. We're also ready to provide an alternative narrative to AWS conquering the world -- but we have to be aggressive and go FAST!
So, bottom line is we're trying to do something new,take some risks,be bold, and take on the giants of the industry.
Want advice? Accept global payments, not just American payments. The internet is global. Want more business? Sort your damn payment structure out. Yes you can have my contact details, I'm not a criminal, but you can FO if you think I'm going to jump through hoops to PAY YOU money.
Unless you sort that out, you're stopping people from buying from you, and that my friend, is your biggest mistake.
This is great to hear, there's nothing ever wrong with more competition, but could you respond to the concerns in this thread with regards to your AUP? Your terms as currently written, are at the very least extremely limiting.
hey, good luck! this is your day and if your time on hn/reddit was like mine so many years ago when my prices were good, you probably want to be racking up new servers rather than answering questions, but even though I'm a competitor rather than a customer, I imagine others are wanting to know the answers to similar questions:
what virtualization technology are you using? Is it openvz/virtuozo/container based? or is it kvm or xen hypervisor based?
Are your backups hosted on a different provider or on a different server?
>Backups are on another server in the same datacenter.
You might want to look into moving backups to an offsite location. Datacenter administration 101, if there's a fire or an earthquake or any other natural disaster, you definitely don't want to lose all your data because it was all in the same place. Just a "different machine" doesn't cut it.
>You might want to look into moving backups to an offsite location. Datacenter administration 101, if there's a fire or an earthquake or any other natural disaster, you definitely don't want to lose all your data because it was all in the same place. Just a "different machine" doesn't cut it.
You know how often earthquakes happen? fires?
You should guard against the common things first. Sysadmin error is a way more common way to lose data than earthquakes or fires. hostile compromise is also a lot more common.
Having the data on another server (rather than in a snapshot) is a good first step because it protects you from RAID screwups, and sysadmin error in whatever snapshot layer you use.
Generally speaking a reasonable defense against compromise is a reasonable defense against sysadmin error... best practices (and I know of no vps provider, including myself, that actually adheres to these best practices.) are to set up your backups so that the production root can not overwrite or delete old backups. Ideally, no one employee has write access to both production and backups, that way no one person, even if their credentials are compromised by a hostile, or even if they become hostile, can wipe all your data. (note, this requires an off-site backup. Physical access is write access, but this really only protects you from an employee who is willing to risk jail time to hurt you, and while that happens, it's pretty rare compared to an employee's login credentials being compromised. I would setup protection so that no one employee can overwrite both production and backup remotely before spending the effort and money to haul all my backups to another location.)
But like I said, as far as I know, nobody actually does that (and its a difficult sort of thing to verify.) - for the low end VPS market? if they have backups on another server (rather than in a snapshot or something on the same server) they are doing okay.
But really... if you care? you should do your own backups. As a customer, you don't have any choice about letting your hosting provider have write-access to production. Make sure you have a backup somewhere that they don't have access.
Yes, let's save money from buying fire extinguishers, that doesn't happen very often anyway. I mean, for big companies with money it's okay to have safety procedures but for small companies we can expect them to ignore it, right? After all "nobody does that anyway" :)
Sarcasm aside, such accidents can wipe out your entire business and destroy your credibility, just because something doesn't happen often it doesn't mean you should ignore it. Plus, depending on the area you live in, earthquakes can be very common, but I digress.
All of this aside, I agree with the rest of what you said, but it doesn't invalidate the fact that if you want to have proper data safety practices you need offsite backups (I'm talking as a service provider, not as a user. Of course you want to backup your data yourself too, as a user)
Nobody is saying that off-site backups are a bad thing. they are certainly part of a complete DR setup.
And yes, all of us know that if we lose the data? we lose the customer, and worse, we lose the customer and they say (justifiable) bad things about us. If you lose all your data? yeah, you are out of business.
Even so, there's a huge difference between how a low-end hosting company is run and how an "enterprise" datacenter is run, and expecting enterprise reliability at low-end pricing is... not realistic.
If you think that your low-end VPS provider is doing everything possible to back up your data... you are likely to be disappointed. Hell, I don't have regular backups, or offer for-pay backups at all myself. I'm working on it for the next version of my management software, but for now, I'm very up-front with my customers that they need to back up their own stuff, and my architecture is such that most of the time, data loss is confined to one server, and yeah, if someone got in and wiped it all out, I would very clearly be bankrupt. but... I'm only saying this because yeah, in this market, you don't get "enterprise level" backups. If you want 'enterprise backups' you have to do it yourself, or pay 'enterprise money'
You can say that it's like not having a fire extenguisher, and I'm not going to argue with you, but I've worked in this sector for well over a decade, and yeah, that's just how things are done. A low-end hosting setup is going to be way different (and way cheaper) than an "enterprise" hosting setup.
and I do know that many of my competitors have gone out of business because both backup and production could be written to by the same user (do you remember HyperVM? it was a disaster for many in the industry.)
I don't know of any competitors that have gone out of business because of physical destruction of their datacenter.
just saying... off site backups are good... but I would get the security and 'defense in depth' setup squared away first, and nobody does, because it's not on the checklists.
The idea was that lots of people used this cpanel-style VM hosting software. It worked pretty okay, from what I hear. I never used it myself. Anyhow, there was a vulnerability, and some asshole decided to use that vulnerability to hack into a bunch of different providers, wipe the production data, and then to wipe the backups, too.
Why the hell do you require a phone# to get this service?
What is going on in your ToS? Sure looks lifted from an older provider... And the morality clause with copyright violation of the ToS is rather funny, albeit sad.
It's always surreal to me to see Atlantic.net in the news. I worked in their customer service department for over six years back when their primary product was still dialup internet. It was a pretty good job, for call center work. No scripts, no quotas - each MSR was trained and trusted to actually be able to solve customers' problems on their own.
I don't know if that's the case anymore. By 2007, dialup was dead and the company had pivoted to making most of its money from hosting. I left a few months prior, but still had friends working in the call center when they were all laid off. I don't know if they outsource their phone-based customer service now or if they set up a new call center in Orlando instead of Gainesville, but if it's the former, it's a shame.
What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly tricky to get extra IPs on some hosts, yet you can pay relatively small sums to spin up VPSes all over the place, each with their own IP :-)
If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a /16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large hosts are part of.
On what, the IP blackmarket? I don't think so, but off the top of my head Microsoft (rather publicly) bought an entire /13 for several million a few years ago
I think you're right. I set up a VPS last year with a provider based in Buffalo, NY, but for a few weeks, geolocators kept placing my IP in Indonesia. But there doesn't really seem to be anything untoward about moving IPs from areas of low demand to areas of high demand.
I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world.
It has, though, become more difficult to get additional IPs than before. Linode used to hand out one additional IP per VPS on demand, but now they require a justification for all additional IPs.
> Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world.
It's worth noting, though, that smartphone users don't care whether their traffic is carried using IPv4 of IPv6, so you can slowly transition from one to the other without users noticing. 15% of T-Mobile's connections are IPv6: https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_13...
If you started only giving out IPv6 addresses to VPS customers, I don't think they would be as oblivious as the smartphone users.
I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays.
I agree, although consumer devices - especially mobiles - could be easily NATed by a provider, no? I'm not too savvy on the demands of mobile devices but I don't think incoming connections are a requirement for anything(?)
You're right, consumer devices could be easily NATed, and I've heard rumors that ISPs in some parts of the world actually do it.
But it's notoriously difficult to set up NAT on a large scale without seriously impacting performance, so large ISPs in the developed world tend to avoid it.
Is it actually hard to get extra IPs anywhere? Sometimes I've had to fill out a form or pay a $1/mo but I've never been declined. (I suppose I also always have a good reason.)
Something is wrong with their pricing, since a server with twice the RAM, bandwidth, and disk is $5/mo. It's too bad you can't combine two or more of these $1 servers in order to get just the right amount of VPS.
This low price makes me wish that RAM and CPU could be added to cloud servers on an as-needed basis, i.e. hot-swappable RAM. That would be much more useful than autoscaling since it could react to traffic very quickly. You'd need live-migration behind the scenes to make it work, of course.
I would imagine that they are betting that most users will use this to host small static sites with negligible traffic, allowing them to benefit from payed for, but unused resources.
S3's the storage - you still have to run an httpd daemon somewhere, and even the smallest, cheapest EC2 instance will run you no less than $14 a month. (Notwithstanding the one-year-only free tier)
(Wow, I didn't know you could just serve content straight off the storage. I need to re-examine AWS.. thanks :D)
You often see plans like this on LEB, the catch is usually very oversold on CPU and memory resources, more so then more expensive plans. This might be less apparent with a bigger name provider who can swallow a bit more on there loss-leader plans so YMMV here. Of course to many light uses that overselling isn't going to matter particularly particularly when SSD backed as that reduces the effect of rampant I/O contention. In fact for things that need a small burst of CPU umpf every now and then, an oversold VM on a beefy host will outperform a cheap dedicated box (with an atom chip for instance) costing much more per month.
> Atlantic.Net says it is targeting this service at early-stage and bootstrapped startups that want develop on a dependable cheap server.
They are doing no such thing.
At 99 cents per month, they are targeting people who want things for free, hoping that they can later up-sell, or convert them to a higher plan.
Don't know how well this is going to work in the hosting industry - usually the lower the cost, the worse the customer is.
I'd like to say maybe as someone on the 99 cent plan sees that they need more resources, they could click a button and get on the $9.99 plan, but that might be wishful thinking, and they are just opening themselves up to an enormous drain on resources.
Either way, if there is any indication of people signing up for this, all the other hosting companies are going to match this plan within 24-48 hours, just like they did when everyone switched to "unlimited" offerings. It's a race to the bottom.
I'm not suggesting Atlantic are doing this, but back in the days when shared hosting was more popular and hosts more predatory, it was common to see hosts offer deals like paying $99 for a year of hosting, they'd give that straight to the affiliate who referred the sale, they'd put the prices up 2-3x in year two, and enough people would stick around to make it all pay off.
Such a strategy could work even better with a VPS since it's harder to migrate away due to the more complex things people tend to do with them.
While its true we would like you to buy a larger plan, in other countries even $5 USD can be barrier to entry for a speculative idea. Plus, what if you want to tinker, toy and learn? We're trying something new, give it a chance.
There are lots of providers at or around this price point (check out lowendbox or http://www.lowendstock.com/). It's generally accepted they're oversold, but that doesn't make them any less of a good deal.
For instance crissic.net (happy customer) offer 256MB ram and either 20GB SSD or 50GB spinning-rust for 15USD/year.
The only news here is that Linode and DO don't think they can be profitable at these price points (and it's probably not possible when using Xen/KVM that can't easily be overprovisioned).
There's a lot of ways to make a VPS suck, by not spending money where it's needed. An under-powered disk subsystem is probably going to contribute to these sucking (as Digital Ocean sucked in the beginning; not sure if they've fixed their disk bandwidth problems).
But, assuming they aren't horribly under-powered on any of the vectors that affect performance, this is a great deal. 256MB is just enough to run a reasonable web server on, even with a database-backed application. Two more servers for DNS, and one for SMTP, and you'd have a solid setup for a large variety of tasks for under 5 bucks, and you'd control all of your services and all of your data. You couldn't run a big community site with lots of users, but you could definitely run a blog (for potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors, depending on how you setup that blog) or simple site.
Not to threadjack, but: what's a good alternative for the occasional high-ram, high-CPU-usage compute-intensive task? Say I wanted a machine to run some MCMC simulations, and needed 32GB RAM and a fast i7-class CPU. Where would I find one?
Depends on the value of "occasional", but did you try asking your friends?
I've seen that being done around here, since the hardware you're describing really is pretty close to a beefy desktop/home server which usually spend their lives idly spinning their fans.
For an instance you run only rarely the somewhat higher cost of EC2 instances compared to other providers should be fairly irrelevant. You'll find options from about 30 to 80 cents an hour.
Just to put in endorsement: I've used OVH for years, and I love their service. Just this past week while upgrading a server I accidentally screwed up my GRUB configuration and couldn't boot back up.
However, they noticed the downtime problem and emailed me saying that a technician had been dispatched to look at the problem. Within 15 minutes, they fixed my GRUB configuration and had my server back up. And, they didn't charge me any for the work the technician did.
It was awesome, and they immediately won my long-time business!
Rackspace recently rolled out 'cloud' dedicated servers that are designed for this use case. You just pay for the time that you have the server, so for workloads like you described I think it's worth checking out. See here for more info:
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/
If I had caught the limit of just one per customer, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of signing up. This would be useful to me, but I had plans that required 4-5 instances, and no desire for the more expensive offerings.
ramnode has a roughly equivalent offering for $2/mo (8/q)
I'm not a fan of these pricing models for VPSs. If you're fine with an oversubscribed OpenVZ VPS with minimal RAM/HDD then you might as well be on a shared virtual host. Even with an oversubscribed OpenVZ infrastructure, I can't imagine Atlantic.net makes a profit at this price point.I shudder to think where they're cutting corners. I can only assume the strategy is to get them (the customers) in the door at $0.99/mo. and hope they'll upgrade when they quickly outgrow their bare minimum VPS specs. But if I'm in that position, am I really going to stay with a OpenVZ provider instead of moving on to a KVM/Xen one where I know I'm getting what I paid for?
OpenVZ's only going to get more painful once all the major distros migrate to systemd. The systemd developers basically assume that you're going to upgrade the kernel in lockstep with the rest of the distro and that's just not feasible with OpenVZ.
Really, all I've ever wanted is an IaaS provider that gives me VMs in the shape of Heroku's instance partitions: a little bit of guaranteed CPU/memory/IOPS per dollar, with cheap/free low-jitter bandwidth thrown in, made specifically for allowing network-server applications that scale horizontally.
My 64MB-of-memory IO-bound Erlang chat server doesn't need a 4GB instance with eight cores. But it has to take that instance, because that's what you pay for in order to get a good uplink.
Now that you mention it, it seems odd that companies don't let you tweak specs individually. RAM, CPU, disk space, network speed, etc. are all independent variables. Why not have some pricing formula and then give us a slider for each dimension and let us choose what we want?
I suppose that's because in they end, they want to allocate all the RAM, CPU, and network link available on each physical host. If a host has a 1Gb uplink, 32 cores and 256GB of RAM, and someone takes 1Gb bandwidth, 1 cores and 1GB of RAM, all the other cores can't be sold any more. It's easier for them to just split each host server in n VMs than to do some fancy stuff to try to maximize allocation.
That being said, some providers let you tweak everything independently. I know Gandi does [1], there are probably others.
(I don't use them, no idea what their cloud service is worth, I'm just showing the sliders)
I wonder if this is what contributes to the large price difference - for example, a 1Gb/1core Gandi instance is about 2x the price of the corresponding Linode plan.
Very nice, just the sort of thing I had in mind. I can see how the resource allocation problem would get really hairy, though. I wonder how Gandi deals with it.
I find it interesting how the trend is moving towards charging less per unit resource on the low-end plans; digital ocean gives you more disk per dollar on the small plan, while these people give you dramatically better ram per dollar on the low-end plans.
The interesting part (and why the pricing scheme that I chose moves in the opposite direction, e.g. you get more resources per dollar as you buy more) - is that while the cost of hardware is pretty linear, there is certainly a support and abuse cost associated with every account, so the lower-end accounts cost the provider more per unit ram to provide.
I think what we're seeing is both: 1) more cut-throat competition to have the lowest advertised price (the ads just display the minimum available price, not the price of a service that actually meets a customer's need) AND 2) once you get a customer on your platform, they are likely to upgrade and/or add more services which will be at the higher price points.
yeah, I would assume that 1. would push the price down in general.
The trend to discount the smallest plans has got to be mostly 2.
It's an interesting strategy; if it works, it would imply that there is more sensitivity to price at the bottom of the market than there is at the top of the market.
also, at least until ARIN runs out, it's in your interest to qualify for as many IP addresses as you can, and VPSs are one way to legitimately "show efficient use" of your current IP addresses.
Your last paragraph is the most interesting thing I've read on this thread.
Maybe I'm just being a suspicious cynic, but do you think there could be value in a business trying to qualify for as many IP addresses as possible in the short term so that they could be capitalized on when/if the final IP address crunch occurs?
It's really not that hard to fake the "efficient usage" requirement, if that is really what you were after. If you are going through contortions to legitimately qualify for a block from ARIN rather than just lying, my assumption would be that you are doing so for honor, not money, otherwise you'd take the far more efficient route of lying.
It's a pretty interesting case study of interface design that because DO's website looks so much nicer, their servers feel like a good deal, while Atlantic.net's old-fashioned branding makes it just feel fly by night, even though I'm sure they're objectively pretty similar.
Thanks for the feedback. We have a new interface & website, but weren't able to get it up by launch time. I agree, DO's interface is prettier, as well as their website. They do a great job with the design over there.
While I'd give them a whirl on their lower tier, their pricing for their largest instance (16384 MB/4 vCPU/200 GB/7 TB, $160 for Linux) isn't that competitive.
(non-affiliated plug) I've been using http://RunAbove.com for something this large, and it's an absolute steal. They're backed by OVH.
Versus a similarly-specced DigitalOcean node for $240 (2.5x RunAbove the cost), we were seeing a performance increase of 35% on our high-volume API.
And that's on non-tuned Postgres/Rails4/Redis Docker containers.
It would! However colocating requires money upfront to buy the hardware. It's a good long-term play but short-term you don't really see the benefits. There are other things to worry about too, such as remote hands, which we really don't want to deal with.
At the very least, it's a possible cheap VPN/cloud storage server. Is there an open source stack that would replace Google's solution to mail/calendar/cloud file storage and sync?
It's hard to be a web hosting company, and atlantic.net has been in the business since 1995. I am impressed that they are fighting to stay relevant, even if it is a race to the bottom.
Couldn't find any uptime records kept by a third party, and their uptime SLAs don't seem to have much to do with uptime guarantees (as opposed to 'we will bring you back up in 30 minutes, etc.). https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level-guarant...
As a business owner, I wouldn't bet anything on that. For personal development stuff though maybe it's great.
Most websites that have a "Most Popular" tag on a plan are almost always lying I've noticed. In reality, its just the plan the company wants you to get and has no reflection on actual sales volume.
I just bought 2 and will be trying them out over the next bit. I think these boxes will be amazing to host my client static sites and basic CMS back-ends. At $1 a month I'd like to buy 20~ in the near future.
I have used Vultr's $5/month service for at least the past 6 months. It has only restarted once unexpectedly, and the CPU performance is quite impressive for that price.
Reading the comments here really is funny. If you do not like their ToS, you are free to go somewhere else. Your money, your vote.
Personally i find their policy very understandable. Obviously you won't be able to host a TOR node on this thing or push tons of traffic over it. That's obviously not what it was made for. This $1 deal is perfect for hosting simple, static sites or just playing around with the OS. But some people will complain about anything.
The only way to go below $1/mo is by using over-subscription. You don't get dedicated hardware for $1/mo.
With over-subscription, it's a mathematical fact that you cannot use all the processing power you've seemingly been given. The VPS provider could just give you only as much CPU power as you can use at any time (effectively 1/n the total power with n users) -- but that would be terribly inefficient (most of the CPU power would be unused at any given time).
This isn't for everyone, of course, but I don't see a reason to criticize this business model when it delivers a definite advantage: lower prices.
If you don't like the trade-off of a lower price at the cost of not being able to use as much CPU power or RAM as you like, you may choose a service with less or no over-subscription. But I don't see how that subtracts from what this service has to offer.
I feel like none of the people commenting on the ToS did buy the services. They were warning people who might not have read them that you're not necessarily getting what you'd expect. It's a perfectly reasonable comment to make.
I signed up for a $.99 VPS some years ago; horrible service and downtime, so I wrote them to cancel. And wrote them and wrote them. And complained to their domain registrar, and stopped the auto-withdrawl of $.99 from paypal, and complained some more. To this day, I get a $.99 email bill with an invalid reply-to address, followed by a $.99 second notice bill. Every month... I'm sure there are people that have let their auto-pay accounts continue to feed whoever is at the back end of this. (vpstree.com)
Edit:
So their AUP[1] is full of a lot of crappy policies. Not allowed to use all the RAM you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the bandwidth you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the CPU you're assigned. No crons or background services -- what the fuck? No IRC, TOR, or p2p activity. They have an obscenity/morality clause. Cannot do any webdev that uses custom headers -- would even suggest that running wget or curl with a --user-agent flag is in violation.
Edit2:
And they require a valid address and phone number to even register. Screw off.
No thank you.[1]: https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/