Cloudatcost: 35$ one-time virtual servers

But, in 3 years, what will the VPS market look like? VPS pricing is dropping considerably year over year, so these will look expensive in 2-3 years anyway, and then there's the lifespan of that particular spec.

Their 2 year pricing looks better, however. The sort of price that's decent value if they last 6 months to a year.

The lifetime 2Gb one looks interesting. But $4 a month gets you what kind of virtualisation? OpenVZ, so you're dealing with contention ratios and overselling. Xen or KVM - then that $4 is a basement price now, but in 3 years?

I'm not sure $140 once-off lifetime cost for a 2Gb is actually worth it - it's risky, considering the lack of visibility and experience with this company. If Linode or DigitalOcean or VooServers did something like this, it would sell out very very quickly.

I guess these are probably useful as a remote shell server, a private git repo, a private documentation server. Running single-user web apps / cloud. Personal use stuff.

I've seen these kind of deals in Cpanel/WHM Reseller packages around (ebay are littered with them). The typical business rationale is to bulk up their customer numbers in preparation for selling out, or to eek out as much cash from an old server on it's last legs . Or the traditional cash-grab and run. These packages have a tendancy to last about 2 -6 months before things start going off the rails.

Where are their data-centres located? Looks like Canada, from some quotes in this thread.

"Hello All,

I work for CloudAtCost.com The business model was carefully thought out to figure the only way we felt possible to provide a one time fee for a hosted server. You can look us up - check out what we have done with freephoneline.ca - There was a post on RedFlagDeals for 5000 beta accounts in 2007, and thats how we launched.

Freephoneline.ca sold/sells $50 one time phone lines, started in 2007 and still offering the same great service. (profitably) Actually some of Freephoneline's work has got us where we are today.

One of the philosophies we have is to own and pay for the network, remove any recurring fees by renting other peoples stuff. This leaves little recurring cost - which translates to savings. Deliver strong value and savings for Canadian consumers, in doing so - some of them decide to buy other things from us and be life-long customers.

How can a server be free? / or of little one time cost, I will share how it is done.

First buy 100's (or 1000's) of physical servers with piles of CPU cores, mountains of ram, for the best deal possible, and pay cash. We owe nothing on the gear, it's not leased. They are all on the rack, so if they are sold now - or not sold they cost about the same monthly overhead to us. Specifically we have 40,000 VPS's worth of equipment on the rack (so far).

Next, build a very efficient, and redundant storage infrastructure, use SSDs to make people happy - do not use expensive name brand storage solutions (or you are dead in the water and out of business.) Use something groovy, say one of the network file systems from the OpenStack project. Something that scales endlessly.

Then buy or build some of your own data centres, ( www.rackanddata.com + www.data-vault.ca + Fibernetics.ca ) Cost advantage - we don't have to pay $600 /$900 / $1200 per rack. (actually we don't charge ourselves anything for space, we use some of the empty racks - so its $0/mo )

Then build 30,000 Sq/Ft of solar on your roof so you can produce 4 x the electricity you use - to sell to the grid (and be green).

Then Build a national network with 100's of thousands of Canadians who use and rely on it daily (Fibernetics.ca + Worldline.ca) One of Canada's largest private CLEC's The idea here is the access to bandwidth at this volume, is really quite in-expensive and sort of already paid for.

Then, we consider a small % of the people find out who we are and buy internet from us for their homes and office, or maybe even buy an office phone system. (actually we sold $200K worth of phone systems this month from people using our cloud.) ... this good will we built is worth more then just about any regular fee per month.

Summary; - colocation space, free - bandwidth, almost free - server hardware, far less then the $35 - maybe even under $10 ;-) - power - hedged, - profit margin on the servers, we invest it, in infrastructure - usually in things that have a +30% return - so in effect we make our own recurring income on the server - to build a better company, which in turn offers better deals. - goodwill to customers - just like master card, Priceless.

It's so good, we were just going to offer them free... but we knew no one would believe it.

Cheers,"

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://canadianwebsolutions.ca/speedtest/test.zip HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 3982587 (3.8M) [application/zip] Saving to: `test.zip'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 3,982,587 1.39M/s in 2.7s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin --2013-10-17 08:42:14-- http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: `100MB-fremont.bin'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 104,857,600 7.98M/s in 8.2s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin --2013-10-17 08:42:32-- http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: `100MB-london.bin'

58% [===================================================> ] 61,442,944 16.2M/s eta 3s ^C

Inbound speed seems to be very adequate.

However, outbound/uplink is very slow:

Testing from Europe (UK) the speed is not constant and stable. I was able to see 3-7Mbps at a maximum (350Kb/s - 873Kb/s).

Not very happy about that, hopefully something will be done to improve uplink speed to at least 10Mbps.

Firstly, they have partnered with a telecom[1], which means they get bandwidth at vastly reduced rates.

Secondly, their prices are roughly 1/3 more than what you'd pay elsewhere for a year of hosting[2]. If they already have paid for infrastructure (which it says they have), selling off underutilized servers quickly like this isn't a bad way to get cash.

Thirdly, I'm sure they have done the math, and can guess how many of these VPSs will be basically unused. If they are already paying to keep the servers running, most of the extra VPSs have negligible influence on their costs.

I wouldn't rely on it for something you expect to be around for ever, but it's probably not an outright scam.

[1] http://www.fibernetics.ca/

[2] http://lowendbox.com/

Their other lead project is Fongo - Dell Voice, which got a lot of attention last year.

The uplink is nothing close to digital ocean, but decent.

Disclaimer: I've worked for Fongo until a few months ago.

They have 10,000 servers at this price... so it sounds like a promotion to get eyeballs for a newly launched service.

And that is why I will pass over them, my business depends on stability of the infrastructure, and these promotional details are not where to look for stability.

On the other hand, this sounds great for personal usage.

$ wget -O /dev/null http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GOrNxy8...

Can anyone confirm that this is legitimate?

There's a problem with the merchant's PayPal account.

> This recipient is currently unable to receive money.