Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Seems that Digital Ocean comes up quite a bit on HN; Linode does from time to time... who else is in this market segment?

View on HN

Everytime I see it posted, I am linked to vultr[1] and Upcloud[2]. Hetzner[3] and OVHCloud[4] are slightly different market segments, but comparable. Worth noting is Amazon Lightsail[5], which is ec2-but-different.

[1] https://www.vultr.com/ [2] https://upcloud.com/ [3] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud [4] https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/ [5] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

I’ve had years of experience with OVH. I would never choose them for a new project. Their product is acceptable , but the customer support people are jerks. Consistently, for years. I can provide very specific examples if you want.

EDIT: also have years of experience with Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, and even Upcloud (Spanish company as I recall).

I believe UpCloud is Finnish:

https://upcloud.com/about/

Last time I tried OVH, their interface was so confusing I just gave up before even considering it seriously.

The other ones are quite straightforward.

I left linode almost a decade ago specifically because Chris at linode was an utter dick in in their irc channel, but their other support staff is usually pretty cool.

I use Vultr for a hobby project, I have two servers: one with an IP address for $5, one without for $3.50. I use the first server as a proxy to the second, saving $1.50 a month.

I gave up on OVH after my VPS burned to ashes.

https://mnx.io -- We recently acquired Joyent Triton DataCenter[0,1,2] and commercial business, and are expanding our datacenter footprint this year.

Triton is open source[3], so you can run it in your own facility, at home, and our Public Cloud with the same experience.

[0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com

[1]: https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-...

[2]: https://www.mnxsolutions.com/triton-faq

[3]: https://github.com/TritonDataCenter

Hetzner is pretty similar in its cloud offerings, but it's also not uncommon on HN.

And is way way cheaper, but still not very coludy, they still don't have object storage, and their resource limits are lower than others

They have storage box, which allows for SFTP and other more familiar and easier to use protocols than S3 and very cheap except they only provide European region.

Their cloud servers are very cheap (like half the cost of other low cost competitors) but again, very limited regional presence outside Europe. At least they added US region lately.

Storage box is pretty good, however its not a s redundant as most other object storage providers.

Its basically protect by one single raid cluster.

I'm really looking forwards to Mega's S4 offering, it very compatitvely priced and is encrypted, and it looks like of have the same kind of data protection as normal mega services.

Object Storage is high on their roadmap, says an internal source.

Any guess why Hetzner Cloud isn't visibly moving towards offering more managed services in general (the kind of stuff Digital Ocean offers, like databases, Kubernetes etc.)?

Their key business is dedicated servers, even their Cloud is IO limited (1-2K on 4K) in ways that will force any growing business on their cloud to move to dedicated eventually (Even their "dedicated CPU" instances have a cap of 5K IOPS).

UpCloud (more expensive, were v fast IO when I started using them, not benchmarked for a couple of years)

Vultr (have had reliability issues; again no recent data)

anecdotally of course, I’ve really enjoyed working with vultr the last few years. Great performance, and their services are simple and well thought through.

It’s perhaps a little too easy to bump into their initial account spending limits, but that’s about the only nit I can pick. It’s probably pretty tiresome fighting fraud on a VPS platform.

I wanted to like Vultr, but had reliability issues from day one, even while running nothing but a basic Nginx instance. And instead of the support staff acknowledging the issues or offering any solutions (or even reading my emails, frankly), they rather aggressively told me they don't see an issue, and even if there is an issue that I would need to fix it myself -- completely disregarding the visible evidence that it was at the networking layer.

It was one of the most infuriating exchanges I've had with support staff from any company. If there was any redeeming factor, it's that the COO sent a long email apologizing for the CSR's behavior. But when all was said and done, the VPS was still inaccessible a dozen or more times per day, and an apology from an executive doesn't change that.

To me Vultr had a network problem in a specific region (Silicon Valley) in the past intermittently but not recently. I never had any problems in Tokyo region.

One unique thing about Vultr is that they provide HDD block storage which is way cheaper than SSD one which seems to be the only option for any other clouds. If you need a large disk like for backups, Vultr is pretty attractive.

Using Vultr for about 5 years now, and I agree that they indeed had some problems with networking, but they had them resolved fairly quickly. No issues whatsoever on the past 2 years.

Up until recently, I had free block storage and snapshots from them, plus a bunch of credits for discovering some security vulnerabilities in their web site. Pretty good value even at today's pricing.

We stumbled upon UpCloud last year and have been using them for a few production workloads in their Seattle, WA facility. They have the simplest offering of all the various "second-tier" cloud providers--which is something we appreciate because sometimes all you want is a compute resource. For what we pay, the CPUs feel much faster than Linode and Digital Ocean which are often faster than AWS and GCP for similar price points. The evidence is anecdotal but we have noticed that all the jobs we run on UpCloud finish noticeably faster than the other cloud providers.

Your mileage may vary.

The Finnish company Aiven.io is doing really cool stuff with managed services for most things you'd want as a startup to mid-size business.

+100 for Aiven on managed databases. We moved from AWS Aurora (MySQL) to Aiven years ago because wanted to be on MySQL 8.x (unavailable on AWS at the time). We've been running a 3-node HA cluster using Aiven's control plane with peering int our VPC and it's been solid since 2019--including with auto-failover for MySQL patches that are applied from time to time during the scheduled maintenance window.

Aiven actually powers DigitalOcean's managed databases.

Tilaa[1]. They also recently launched a managed database service[2] (beta).

[1] https://www.tilaa.com/ [2] https://www.tilaa.com/en/blog/tilaa-cloud-database-beta-is-l...

One I only recently heard of through HN is Contabo. 8GB Ram for 5 EUR/mo. I've not used them, but given I pay $6 to DO for 1GB to run a single Mongo instance, I may give them a go.

Credit where its due though, DO have a great UI for resource visualiation and firewall rules which is what's currently keeping me from moving.

Scaleway, although they're EU-only atm the price is right for my use case.

Scaleway unfortunately have the worst network of the above mentioned services :(

I guess that's why my VPS is so cheap!

Curious to know if any have a good presence in East Asia too

Exoscale (CH).

I wish they had some kind of block storage support.

If you‘re looking for a Swiss provider with block storage: cloudscale.ch uses Ceph as a storage layer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com