Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

datamantle.com

  $ whois datamantle.com | grep "Name Server"
     Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
     Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
     Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM

Hrm...using dreamhost for their nameservers. Interesting choice.

  $ whois $(dig +short datamantle.com) | grep OrgName
  OrgName:        Google Inc.

Not dogfooding their own service? I think I'll pass.

Whats wrong with using Dreamhost for nameservers, does it make any difference at all?

Not the op of that comment, but in my experience, DH is something to be avoided :) it's been a few years, but still have unpleasant memories of cryptic errors, stability issues, and a clunky control panel.

Also that time they messed up their auto-billing and stole $7 million from their customers.

"Stole" is very misleading. Yes, their billing system had a bug and charged a bunch of customers in error. But DH handled it very well, were very transparent about what happened, refunded all the money (of course), and even went so far as to reimburse people that incurred overdraft fees.

"Even went so far as to reimburse people"!? They directly caused those people to lose money! Of course they reimbursed them; the alternative would have been to reimburse them after a slam dunk legal case.

Dress it up however you like, they took $7 million that wasn't theirs.

And then they gave it back, that doesn't seem that bad. They made a mistake, and they fixed. No one is perfect.

What hosting providers in that range are better?

I'm fairly satisfied with them, but I only really use static web hosting for low traffic sites. Apparently their mailing list services go down all the time.

Compared to the hosting provider I used over a decade ago, 1and1, Dreamhost is top notch... but I'd like to hear of anything better. I still believe in shared hosting!!!

I've used Dreamhost as my primary registrar for something like 15 years now and generally I've used them for DNS too. Their nameservers and DNS updating is pretty wonky. Really slow to update and admins that insist the update made in the Control Panel has fully propagated across their internal nameservers when it clearly hadn't. Had to wait hours for it to actually propagate out to their real public-facing nameservers a few times. Not worth it, especially when you just need to make a quick change.

I basically quit using Dreamhost for any hosting-related activities other than DNS a long time ago. Even though my shared account is old and so it supposedly has unlimited everything, it's throttled to like 300k (I assume all shared plans are). Also not worth it in the age of the $5/mo VPS.

I flirted with Hover as a registrar for a few names but didn't like it either.

I've started using Route53 for all DNS-related services, including name registration, and I'm happy with it. Wish I didn't have to pay the registration fee again to move all of my domains over to Route53 or I'd be off DH completely by now.

Honestly, it's the network capacity / DDoS. Hence why we are using Google to host the site.

Name-servers? Yeah, we need to change that, but dreamhost was simply the first register we used for the site so we kept it the same. We'll be switching to the same nameservers as our rdns host soon.

If their service goes down I'd rather their site stay up to tell me when they're back to be fair.

> Not dogfooding their own service? I think I'll pass.

The opposite. If they went down no one would be able to view a status page.

It's actually best practice NOT to host your site on your own network.

Just like you should not use an email address @ the same domain you are registering. If your domain had a problem they could not email you at that domain.

Quick rundown of alternatives and up/downsides (e.g. everybody has Debian so that's not noteworthy) of which I've personally used the first four:

  - DigitalOcean
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Vultr
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Linode
    has Fedora
    cheaper than the others
    relatively fast CPUs
      e.g. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
    UI not as nice as the others'
  - Exoscale
    has OpenBSD
  - CloudScale
    only does daily (rather than hourly) billing

Vultr has many more locations than the others. There aren't too many good, affordable providers in AU/NZ.

Vultr: Lets you upload your own ISO, and run whatever OS you want

Map Comparison for DO, Vultr and Linode: http://imgur.com/mesaHoN

http://upcloud.com simple efficient and cheaper than many. Yet it's quality, so it isn't really cheap like providers like http://time4vps.eu

ovh is a cheaper (& better?) alternative : https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml

  OpenStack KVM
  1 vCore
  2.4 GHz
  2 GB RAM
  10 GB SSD
  Local RAID 10
  $3.49/month

Upvoted. Thank you for reminding me again about OVH. I was considering DO, but at these prices. I can spin something up and not even think about the cost.

I'm currently running some OVH boxes and my largest gripe is the low storage space.

That's the only thing that would draw me to another provider

Scaleway (scaleway.com) offers similar pricing to OVH but with more storage. They only have a datacenter in France, though, so if you use the OVH data center in Québec it will not be of much use.

I personally haven't tried them, but they are part of Iliad, the large French telecom / Internet business, so I would expect them to be reliable and to stick around.

Wow those look like an amazing deal! Storage really is my bottleneck on a couple of projects...

I'm in the UK so France is perfect.

Thanks

If feasible development wise, you could also try 'outsourcing' your storage to S3 or something similar.

S3 actually works out more expensive for the majority of my use cases

Be warned, they do NOT use ECC memory.

Can't really go into details, but I've got plenty of servers at OVH. It's cheap and works, when it works. When it doesn't it doesn't. Don't expect issues to be resolved swiftly or them reacting to your trouble at all. Latest ticket opened today. Average disk I/O is under 1 MB/s for sequential disk read and disk I/O flat lines for tens of seconds every now and then.

If you find this acceptable, no problem. But for some use cases this just won't do. - Disk I/O IOPS & latency really does make difference between many vendors. UpCloud got free trial, try it. You might like it or not. You won't lose anything. - I've gotta be honest. Some of the OVH instances are performing great for the price. But others are as described above.

Thanks for introducing time4vps: I was very surprised I can get a box for $1/month. Going through their website I found that in fact it is being run by IV (a major and reliable long-time local player in VPS/VDS/hosting market), so I wouldn't worry about the quality. Their network and infrastructure is superb.

For cheap dev server: https://contabo.com/?show=vps

8.99 Eur/Month || Four cores ; 12 GB RAM ; 300GB Disk 100% SSD

"Sign up to view more plans"

Except that after I sign up, I still can't view the plans until I set up my billing details. Meh.

This looks interesting, but I'm very hesitant to try a new cloud provider with anything critical. What do people do to gain confidence in a cloud provider, other than wait and see if early adopters report anything breaking?

Also, does this provide access to a management API, to programmatically start, configure, and stop servers?

We're working on the API (we use one internally, but we just need more testing / robustness of it before we launch anything)

In an ideal world, consider providing a standard API (e.g. OpenStack) rather than a provider-specific one.

Thanks everyone for the comments!

If any of you want to try the service for free, use the promo code LAUNCH and it'll add credit to your account.

Still need to add credit card details. Can understand why you might want to do that, but it is now a barrier too high for me in order to just try out something which could be interesting.

EDIT: As per the comment below, this does indeed work. I initially tried on my phone and I kept seeing an error to complete the missing fields. On my desktop, it worked. Thanks.

You can get the free credit if you just press ENTER after entering the promo code (without needing to enter the credit card details). It's not very intuitive, but it worked for me.

I've fixed this by adding a button for replying :)

What's the bullshit?

I guess the bullshit is "everything that you might ever possibly want that isn't a Linux KVM instance".

How is this different from Digital Ocean?

We aren't other than our Waterloo, Ontario location.

We're focusing on some new features which are comparable to Digital Ocean.

It's a dollar or two cheaper than DigitalOcean, with hybrid drives instead of SSDs. I don't really see any appeal; DigitalOcean already pitched this years ago (and has done very well)

Why is minimalism a benefit here?

Other than that it doesn't look too different from DigitalOcean, which comes with great support and the confidence of a lot of people using it.

No benefit, we just wanted a straight-to-the-point VPS. An alternative for those whom want a VPS closer-to-home (Waterloo)

I really appreciate the lack of BS in this comment. Thank you for refreshing simplicity and transparency.

VPS != cloud.

I'm sure you know this though.

Can I pay with bitcoin? if not then why? I currently use vultr and it spins up/down instances when my program needs it an automatically pay them with bitcoin

We're going to integrate this with Stripe soon.

+1 for Bitcoin

I would suggest you display payment methods on the website. If I need to register to see it, I am not going to look at it at all

There's an issue using smaller vendors if your app happens to scale. AWS and the like have a modular approach where you can add things that are bottlenecking your scaling. Like additional DB instance, etc. That's a killer feature if you're stuck with unexpected growth

Trying to register but keep getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. Is it just me?

Edit: Even the home page throwing up 502 now.

Sorry about that, we're back up now!

Looks like they were rebooting or something. All working fine now, got the $5 credit using the promo code LAUNCH (without cc)... Can't wait to spin up an instance and try things out!!

I'm wondering what the policy on hosting seedboxes and torrenting is?

Not sure if this is helpful, but here's some output from one of their 4 USD/month servers:

  root@localhost:~# lscpu
  Architecture:          x86_64
  CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
  Byte Order:            Little Endian
  CPU(s):                1
  On-line CPU(s) list:   0
  Thread(s) per core:    1
  Core(s) per socket:    1
  Socket(s):             1
  NUMA node(s):          1
  Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
  CPU family:            6
  Model:                 2
  Model name:            QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.1.2
  Stepping:              3
  CPU MHz:               1899.998
  BogoMIPS:              3799.99
  Hypervisor vendor:     KVM
  Virtualization type:   full
  L1d cache:             32K
  L1i cache:             32K
  L2 cache:              4096K
  NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0
  Flags:                 fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm rep_good nopl pni cx16 popcnt hypervisor lahf_lm abm

  root@localhost:~# sudo lshw -short
  H/W path      Device      Class      Description
  ================================================
                            system     Bochs
  /0                        bus        Motherboard
  /0/0                      memory     96KiB BIOS
  /0/401                    processor  QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.1.2
  /0/1000                   memory     512MiB System Memory
  /0/1000/0                 memory     512MiB DIMM RAM
  /0/100                    bridge     440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma]
  /0/100/1                  bridge     82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II]
  /0/100/1.1                storage    82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
  /0/100/1.2                bus        82371SB PIIX3 USB [Natoma/Triton II]
  /0/100/1.2/1  usb1        bus        UHCI Host Controller
  /0/100/1.3                bridge     82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI
  /0/100/2                  display    GD 5446
  /0/100/3      ens3        network    Virtio network device
  /0/100/4                  storage    Virtio block device
  /0/100/5                  generic    Virtio memory balloon
  /0/1          scsi1       storage
  /0/1/0.0.0    /dev/cdrom  disk       DVD reader

The RAM is ECC, according to the "dmidecode -t memory" command.

  root@localhost:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
  16384+0 records in
  16384+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 12.5635 s, 85.5 MB/s

Just a current curiosity: how did you choose a minimum password length of 8 characters? Was there any insight into the decision or did it 'feel right'?

I've seen many articles that suggest a minimum password length of 8 characters. For example, the latest update published on Naked Security - https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/08/18/nists-new-passwo...

You're only in Waterloo, Ontario, right? Perhaps you should price yourself significantly lower than a provider like Digital Ocean that offers more choice.

Will definitely give it a try. Looks really promising, and love the low prices.

PS: Your front page has a tiny bit of horizontal scrolling. Have a look at your CSS.

Thanks man! I'll fix that.

The website graphics reminds me of Kihi Hosting, which also was from Canada.

Is this company a descendant of Kihi Hosting? I used to like Kihi hosting.

How is this differentiated from Digital Ocean?

Your twitter / fb link is wrong

IPv6? If not, this is a non-starter.

Unfortunately the DC we're at has yet to implement IPv6.

Can I use it in Europe?

Trying it out from Brazil. Any heads up? Doesn't get cheaper than Bluemix/Softlayer (currency difference), but I am willing to try and :-)

You say you are cloud provider... Can I work with containers? Auto scaling?

OK: I liked to get up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Feedback/idea: maybe you can improve the flow putting the ssh/key before setting up a server (and maybe even making a before step).

Some twitching when mouse-over the "deploying" status icon after setting up a server. Plus, apparently didn't update the status when it got online, needed to refresh the page.

Problem: Started with Ubuntu 16, successfully ssh'd into it, but couldn't run `apt-get update` and had some script using apt before I even first logged (http://i.imgur.com/exATwTD.png), I think it's this same issue: https://github.com/boxcutter/ubuntu/issues/73

Will post more as it comes or you can reach me on twitter (@aleattorium - DMs are open)

On the same machine... When deleted got in a weird flow... Was forced to login again and it tried to come back to the machine original URL after it was deleted and gave me a 404.

www.arubacloud.com is cheaper as well. I'm using a 1GB RAM Ubuntu for 1 USD/month

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