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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

What's new about this? Alibaba cloud has been around for 8 years, it's called Aliyun in China (literally Ali-cloud). They didn't build datacenters in 7 countries overnight.

Could anyone explain the sudden excitement about their service?

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To be honest, I'd just never heard of this. I'm excited to hear they've got a Dubai datacenter because every now and again my company is asked about starting an instance of our app over there. I've done lots of searching for UAE based cloud hosting and somehow never came across Alibaba. I was resigned to just leasing some servers if we ever actually had to do this but it's great to know we've got another option.

They rebranded the international service.

Also $30/year for a cheap virtual server from a pretty major provider is nice. I'll probably pick one up just for some network testing purposes.

That cheap $30/year server turns to $200+ per year after the 1st. Go for vultr at $2.5/month. It has been good thus far.

Vultr has like half the specs and different locations if I recall correctly.

Anyone looking for a cheap VPS should review this discussion:

Show HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538

I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them

----- 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.

You were $5.94 in debt, so they decided to take $275? Bit extreme...

How could you carry a balance there anyway? Was considering using Vultr at one point.

I don't know either, I bought a vps, left it there for a year and kind of forgot about it

Saw the email and scrambled as fast as possible to contact their support and close all my accounts.

How much was the VPS you purchased?

Maybe the $300 new user credit or $30/year SSD cloud server is new. Probably not too many people knew about these things even if they weren't. Always fun to play around with something different at low or no cost. I actually didn't see too much excitement in the comments!!!

30/year is just a promotion. After a year the price is almost 10x higher.

Datacenter locations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud#Data_Center_Loca...

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