We launched our IaaS business in Europe today - what do you think? | Hacker News Reader

We launched our IaaS business in Europe today - what do you think?

gigaom.com

22 pointsvilpponen13 comments

I'm the guy interviewed in the article. Would love to learn more what you guys value in cloud infra solutions. We're still a small, growing startup and all feedback is extremely valuable.

We believe in providing extreme redundancy, with enterprise grade hardware bundled with constantly high performing resources at internationally competitive prices.

Sounds very interesting, congrats! Look forward to seeing your progress.

Thanks, we're also on Twitter @upcloudcom if you want to follow us for more frequent updates.

> UpCloud claims to have 100 percent homegrown virtualization tech

What does that mean? Did you build your own hypervisor from scratch!?

Even though our management services, billing, API and high availability automation, among others, are homegrown - on the hypervisor side there is no added value in building your own, and we are using the open source KVM virtualisation.

Thanks for the comment!

Ok, that makes more sense. I don't much about virtualization but my understanding is that building an hypervisor is quite a lot of work and I couldn't understand why an IaaS startup would want to build its own.

Thanks for the answer!

My initial thought after signing up, is that it's a shame that I can only deploy a trial server with 512MB of RAM, that pretty much rules out testing any non-trivial application?

We're prepared for a ton of interest in our service and thus we need to limit the free trial somewhat (but we still want to give everyone a go at it). However, for 10 euros we are removing all limitations and also giving you 100 euro worth of free credit towards our service (part of the launch campaign).

Let me know how this works for you, thanks for the feedback!

Thanks, will write up what I've found after a bit more testing.

One quick extra, you don't have the outgoing port allowed in the firewall settings for Ubuntu's apt-key to add new trusted keys, using the hkp service (port 11371), it would be nice if you could add that.

1/ Why do you have different rates for Helsinki and London? I appreciate those datacenters might cost you different amounts, but as a customer, this complicates my purchase. Are you attempting to push people toward London?

2/ I noticed something about 'Availability Zones'.. but now I can't find it again. Do I need to setup servers in different zones, or do you handle it transparently? Hint: I want you to handle this for me. To me, engineering this is still a major drawback to AWS.

I like the private VPN, especially that it's multisite. Nice work.

Hey, thanks for the questions!

1) Many different providers have different pricing for their different availability zones. On our part this is partly due, because we want to offer competitive pricing out of London (but also because there are different costs involved per zone). But thank you for the comment regarding the unified pricing, we'll add a tick to that in our roadmap :)

2) When setting up servers in Helsinki, for example, you can clone the server to London with just a few clicks. This automatically sets up the same server in London based on its status it was copied from in Helsinki.

We believe this is currently as far as we want to go with the automation (meaning that our clients choose where they want to clone the servers to) as it would not make sense for us to clone servers without customers' consent to other availability zones.

Let me know how you feel about the above mentioned setup!

Thanks again for your feedback, greatly appreciated!

Finnish startups killing it as usual :)

Thank you :) Would love to hear your feedback on us as well.

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