Vultr Raises $333M at $3.5B Valuation
wsj.com
wsj.com
Joke aside, 300M for 10% of your company in its only ever funding round is a pretty sweet deal. It made its founder a billionaire "overnight".
He stands at a company with about the same market cap as DO, but private, with full control and very low dilution. I would consider that a win.
Yeah, jokes aside I think David Aninowsky is a super smart guy, I actually quite like him. Funnily enough, I'd even emailed them a couple years ago to pitch them letting me build this VERY idea for them, never heard back. :)
~18 years ago I owned a Belkin router that would hijack on the order of 1/10000th of plain http requests and send them to a belkin.com domain to try to get people to buy more Belkin products.
I have not bought another Belkin product since.
We really have let this go too far when a mid tier VPS provider is now a "cloud AI startup".
[1]ClanServers Hosting LLC
I don't see why Constant exist now tho that it's all Vultr.
EDIT: News about their brand consolidation [1]
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20010405033628/http://choopa.com...
June 20, 2006: "Clan Servers Announces New Identity and Launch of GameServers.com"
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-aninowsky-b1241924/ shows current role as Founder/Executive ChairmanFounder/Executive Chairman, Vultr, but also lists CEO/FounderCEO/Founder GameServers.com Mar 2003 - Feb 2021
(As someone who played a bunch of TFC, UT, Quake 3 and Counter-Strike back around the turn of the century it's fun to see someone from that world who rode the wave all the way to modern GPU hosting.)
The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.
I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.
It's a mundane business in a crowded market, providing services they copied from other companies, which in turn anyone can copy. Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.
As of a couple (2-3 years ago) Akamai had no plans or interest to expand into Cloud. They wanted to remain on-prem/hybrid because of existing synergies and strategies. Their CDN business was also heavily used by companies that have cloud BUs.
I don't think this strategy has changed.
Just because they aren't aggressive about expanding Linode doesn't mean that Linode is not a serious competitor to Vultr. Linode offers nearly everything Vultr does, at a similar price point.
Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220524005336/en/Int...
> the AI revolution is powered by technologies that are either built on MinIO or integrated with it.
By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.
The other thing that stands out in that space is that their pricing isn't linear by vCPU and RAM. e.g. larger instances give better ratios and also offer bare-metal servers if you got to a scale and stability where that would be better suited.
No complaints.
Perhaps they act quickly on DMCA reports, so if you're in a gray area don't use them?
I was just curious what kind of promotions they have and saw this one for $300 in credits and $100 free trial[0].
mostly works, there's maybe a "restart" once a year due to hardware problems
all handled transparently without you intervention
support is responsive enough
for personal use works perfect
---
from a business account with many servers expecting higher reliability sometimes they don't correspond and have too many maintenance windows with _guaranteed_ downtiem
Unless someone buys them out in the future and platform decay[1] happens, you can trust them.
Vultr is great!
I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.
Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).
Maybe they did a risk analysis. Maybe they don't have the bandwidth to create a vetting process. Either way, be transparent.
How would you go about discouraging spammers, if not using a block that is removed if you ask?
(They removed my block in the first 2 months of my service, all I did was ask)
The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.
Lots of DMCA requests from news publishers means the binary extension is actually hosted on GitFlic.ru instead of Github or Firefox Addons site.
Going out on a limb to say that nobody should install this.
DigitalOcean is also currently valued at 3.5 billion right now, does ~800m ARR, 125m FCF, and profitable.
Anyone know how Vultr compares to this?
AMD EPYC™ 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads, + 128 GB DDR5 ECC + 3.84 TB NVMe SSD for $221 and a $88 one time set up fee on Hetzner. Even if they could do it at $100 more expensive at $321 would still have been good enough.
But their Cloud / VPS offering are still very good. Now that Linode is nearly gone. DO is mostly Intel based. Vultr is mostly AMD. The other one that is close if not better is UpCloud.
"Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. A sudden reboot has been detected. Our engineering team is currently investigating the issue that caused this, but we expect no impact on data and/or configurations."
IMO Vultr is best cloud provider and I’ve tried many. I can’t give a single reason but more they seem to get the balance of features correct for me.
Having spent a bunch of time talking in person with the Vultr team, they are a great group of people.