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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't heard of Vultr before, so out of curiosity I had a look. I am actually in the market for some lower-end cloud services.

- On their homepage, they list "Cloud Compute - starting at $2.50/month". However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying.

- So I created an account. The first thing that pops up is "enter a payment method". What was that about being a "free account"?

- You can click away from that and go to "Deploy New Instance". Choosing the cheapest options and disabling all the automatically selected extras, the lowest possible price seems to be twice that advertised "starting at" price.

Ok, I looked around. Now I would like to delete that account I had to create. No such option. Asking Google, apparently you can only delete an account by submitting a support ticket.

My first impressions are not particularly positive...

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> However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying.

Are these not details?

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

I found this by spelunking deeply into... the main menu where there's a Pricing option. I'm not a Vultr customer and I don't have an account with them.

I was curious and I made an account. And the "enter credit card" thing you complain about is just part of the onboarding flow, along with things like "set up your profile". Is it so crazy that you might want a fast track to put your card in for a hosting service? It's all optional anyway.

Ignoring that (I didn't enter a credit card), there's a prominent Deploy button you can hit.

The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that.

Once Atlanta is selected, they also auto select a better compute class by default ("AMD High Performance"). Setting that to "Regular Cloud Compute" gets you down to that $2.50/mo price.

Except for one more thing, they default select Backups for it, and that's another $1/mo.

They could do better about this stuff but it's barely something to get upset about. Before you spin up the server, the final price is listed right there in both hourly and monthly units, which is better than AWS does.

The site is broken until you pay something on your account, including 2factor auth.

doesn't inspire much confidence.

That's not true. The pricing page I link does not require an account, and after you create an account, you can access the actual provisioning UI without entering a credit card. I just did it.

The two factor is a check that you actually control the email you purport to own, it's a perfectly fine thing to do. Are you arguing against two factor by default? Are you arguing that a service shouldn't validate email addresses? Seems especially important for a service that can be used for hacking or DDOS attacks, no?

Parent is saying 2FA is broken until you pay something into your account.

That's also not true, two factor works before putting in a credit card, as I've said in a related post. I completed an email based two factor request when I did my test and I still have not given them a credit card.

> The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that.

They have a one year free-tier you can sign-up for during your trial. I am on that plan now. Still I always forget to search different regions when attempting to launch a free VM, so there is some delay until I remember to choose Atlanta.

Free compute attracts bitcoin miners. Payment methods are a sort of proof that the user is less likely to be abusive, or at least it's much easier to deduplicate accounts by preventing reuse of payment methods across free accounts. In these cases, nothing will be charged, the payment method is just a way of delegating trust to the financial system for having authenticated a human being.

If that’s the problem for them, should at least be communicated to potential customers before they put in their payment info.

But, realistically, they should simply change the onboarding process in order to avoid that issue transparently. Allow free signup and access but require a payment method to spin up a server, for example. Or showing all the features+benefits+pricing without signup.

The cheapest instances are only in specific regions I think and they are ipv6 only. I’ve been happy with them as a hosting platform.

Something similar happened to me. I was in a hurry so I even put some money in my account, then the $2.50/mo offering was nowhere to be found. I'm guessing they have limited numbers of these and only make them available sometimes... definitely a case of false advertising.

As far as I've seen $2.50 plan is always available. Right now you need to select the following options for it to show up.

Type: Cloud Computer - Shared CPU

Location: New York

OS: Debian

Plan: Regular Cloud Compute

Auto backup: Disable

No doubt, they will make it even harder to find in the future - behind some new feature toggle.

- They're a pretty large cloud services provider (frequently spoken of in the same breath as Digital Ocean and Linode, last I checked).

- Dark patterns are bullshit but are hardly unique to them.

- They probably require a credit card to cut down on scams.

- Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.

For what it's worth, they lost me as a potential customer too, having read the parent post, so there's at least 2 of us.

> they lost me as a potential customer too

They probably lost a sizable percentage of those who read these comments as well.

not trying to be facetious or anything, but I doubt their product team is worried about customers that are mad they have to click a few extra buttons to save 1 or 2 dollars per month

For every person who comments there are thousands and thousands who are reading. This is their target customer base -- highly sophisticated technical professionals who have the potential to influence many more non-technical people who take their expertise and opinions as a given. If they aren't worried about it then maybe they should think about it a bit more.

Would that not be their target market? They seem to market their low prices heavily.

On the other hand, a competent team would care about a negative message being listed first on a popular internet forum frequented by their target demographic.

The corporate leviathan has to first detect that event and analyze it for sentiment. Before any loss mitigating response can be possible in the first place.

Digital Ocean now and Linode in the past have been considered viable providers at the companies I've worked with. Never have I ever heard the same about this company.

> Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.

Do you have an interest in this company or something? Oddly passive aggressive comment.

Vultr is pretty well known amongst the small technically innovative "cloud" hosting companies, and IMO has better offerings than DO. They also have a peering agreement with Backblaze and Cloudflare; no transfer costs between any of the three.

No financial ties, just annoyed by the mob that comes out of the woodwork to pick apart every shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious, instead of just being stuck in the middle of an accidental PR nightmare.

> shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious

It is proof of that though. Becouse employing dark patterns is being overtly malicious for us who "see through" dark patterns.

Dark patterns mostly work due to the victim not understanding them, so it makes sense to point them out.

Check out ionos.de. it's pretty cheap. Like 1 Euro for 1gb and 1 core

How did they get it so cheap? Even lower than OVH cloud.

They are shit. ionos.com Bad reivews on reddit.

Really depends on what you expect for 1 Euro. A single CPU core of an Intel Xenon Gold 6230R isn't much but it handles small loads very well. 1 GB memory is okayish. 10 GB SSD? Meh. A dedicated IPv4 address? That's hot! The uptime is flawless and it's fine to host or forward requests and serve as VPN gateway for my personal stuff or host a few small services. For 1 Euro/month it's a good offer. I used it to encode videos for months. No complaints or something from them. But according to Reddit, once you get into trouble, the support is the biggest weakness. I'm just parroting what other people probably also parroted.

The cheap instances are ipv6 only and only a couple of their regions have them. Atlanta, I think, does. But yeah, it's a teaser that isn't realistic. At least for me.

There are a lot of low-end cloud services, for example you should take a look at virtono.com. They have good prices and they are running promotions all the time.

To get the 2.50 deal, you need a VPS that is, I think, in NYC and runs a certain Linux distribution, I think Debian. Everything else is $5 and up.

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