Cloud At A Cost – Hosting For Suckers | Hacker News Reader

Cloud At A Cost – Hosting For Suckers

cloudatacost.com

63 pointsDLion53 comments

When you charge $1 per month for cloud hosting you attract pathological customers like the one who wrote this hate page. It should be obvious that a company can't afford effective customer support and high quality hardware at this price point.

The lesson here is that the moment you accept a penny from people they believe they're entitled to the world because they're now your customers. Raise your prices and you won't have to deal with people like this.

My S3 hosting is about a dollar per month and it's solid enough to use for business-critical infrastructure.

Agreed. Based on his landing page, it looks like he is on the $1/month plan which makes it hard to take him seriously.

The quote from the article: "It’s funny that the $35 dollar VM isn’t having the trouble. Just my higher end ones." So unless I've missed something this isn't a cheap customer. Which then renders your entire point moot.

The $35 price point is the lifetime hosting plan that normally costs $1/month. There is no way to determine what "higher-end" plans he is referring to. Possibly the $70 lifetime hosting plan?

Hello, the page was created to let people know that this company has serious issues. Cloud At Cost is newer company and partnered under Fibernetics. Cloud At Cost sells this as a professional classed service backed up by Fibernetics' world class network.

---- Taken from Fibernetics page: Over the last ten years, Fibernetics has emerged as one of Canada’s fastest growing and largest telecommunications companies. Fibernetics is an operating Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) regulated by the CRTC, that has direct connectivity into the heart of the incumbents fiberoptic networks across Canada.

---- Taken from Cloud At Cost's page: We are a new Cloud company that does things differently. We are partnered with Fibernetics, a national carrier and ISP in Canada. We leverage our own data centers across the country, and our own national network to bring you the best cloud services at the best rates anywhere.

---- There are possibly thousands of VMs down for well over a week. Check social media. My article explains that I run services for my friends and family. These are FREE services. I use to pay a monthly fee and when I found Cloud At Cost decided to try them. If you buy a few DEVs like I did. The fact that two different DEV2 and DEV3 VMs crashed days apart being down for a week each should be your warning bell.

I can see support being too expensive to offer for a business like this. Actually I can't see how they could afford to offer remotely acceptable support. However it seems to me that this level of support is not ok. At all.

The company should just advertise, "We're too cheap to have support! VM down? Check out our outage monitor page, and if it's just you - build a new VM."

There's valid uses for the $1/mo. server, I can have five boxes for the price of one. Spread out amongst different providers, that's called redundancy. I don't get that hosting everything w/AWS. Customer service? What's that? I have ssh I don't need customer service, only if the box goes down. My $1 servers been up for months, and if one drops, I have four others. I've had great experience paying $1/mo and never contacting the provider for anything.

"Don't use $1 servers" is FUD and probably will be showing up "news stories" from Amazon soon about how terrible and evil these low cost provider are..

Let me address the security issue quickly too. Look, anything - you put on a server not owned by you, is not your data anymore. That's what people need to understand about the cloud. I don't care if its Bob's hosting, or AWS or Dropbox or Onedrive. Anything you don't want others to read should be encrypted before it leaves your PC, period.

I don't think the parent comment was saying that $1/month attracts _only_ pathological customers.

Like you, I have a bunch of $1/month servers used for different things (mostly VPN, as I live in a country where many web sites are blocked), and have had mostly good experiences. I have also had bad experiences (providers going out of business without warning, servers down for a week with no email response etc.). You are right - always have backups and a backup plan.

Anyone that buys a $35 lifetime VPS values their time at $0. For further evidence of this, he's taking the time to write a "sucks" website over a server that:

Luckily for me , this is just a personal server used by my friends and family.

The funniest part of all of this is that anybody who would take the warning about how bad this company allegedly is wouldn't have bought from a $35 lifetime VPS hosting provider to begin with. In an ironic twist, if the HN comments are to be believed, this protest site is serving as an effective advertisement for people that want a low priority server.

Lesson learned: don't host your stuff at unknown cheapskate companies, you got what you paid for. $1 a month or "one time fee" for hosting, really? http://www.cloudatcost.com/pricing.php

Their plans look really attractive from a dev's perspective tbh.. simply use them for dev and deploy somewhere reliable.

Only if your time is worthless.

The difference between e.g. a DigitalOcean VM that will just work™ and a constant headache from one of the LEB[1] providers is, at most, $48 dollars per year.

[1] http://lowendbox.com/

Not _all_ providers listed on LEB are unreliable or unprofessional. My favourite VPS provider is one I found on LEB. They have fantastic routes to mainland China, which means I get ping times of ~85ms vs. at least 250ms with Digital Ocean.

What provider is your favorite then?

In the past I used A2 Hosting and had excellent service. I might just go back with them as it takes some time to validate a new host. So far I'm been recommend Rackspace if you want top notice support and require business class support.

Oneasiahost: https://www.oneasiahost.com/ is great if you need access from mainland China.

Otherwise, Ramnode is a good solid one. Others here: http://lowendbox.com/tag/top-providers/

Same kind of problems here. I have two VMs. Grabbed them early on, expected them to improve. They did not. Packet loss, slow speed, reboots, kernel panics, filesystems mounted read-only.

They made (and are making) lots of other really stupid beginner mistakes too. For example they planted an rc.local script to tune some kernel params to deal with panic regarding filesystem timeouts. Unfortunately that script contained a typo on the very first line and thus was never executed.

Combine that with possibly the worst support and messaging int he industry ... still not sure if CloudAtCost is a total scam or just very incompetent.

I really wish we had a really awesome VPS provider in Canada. CloudAtCost is not that company.

Avoid them.

how much support time do you honestly expect for $1/month?

source: http://cloudatcost.com/

Note that my problems are not unique individual problems. They have had downtime and major infrastructure issues where they do not blanket communicate anything. Or just give vague promises and explanations.

I don't expect a lot. But I do expect a minimum level of dealing well with your customers. Even that is completely missing.

I've been using several services for very cheap VPS and cloud hosting and, while hit or miss, I've had my fair share of great customer support.

For example, in my experience iniz.com are really great at what they do, I strongly recommend them if you're looking for an alternative.

Yes exactly that - I am a customer with several vps, I signed up knowing that it could be a dud (when something seems too good to be true, it normally is), $12 a year I think is pretty cheap (price of 4 coffees, one days caffeine for some) for the lowest spec. I'm happy enough, so sorry to hear you are having trouble, I hope you get it all resolved.

This article has actually been a pretty good advertisement for me. If I need some quick, cheap servers for non-critical stuff, I will definitely consider using this.

If you are interested in slow but usable, no they are not. I bought one early and any network connection to the server is hellish to maintain. There are plenty of cheap options that actually work, choose one of those.

Thanks for the advice. I would still consider at least trying them, as I've seen VPS providers change a lot over time. I did see the links posted here to other cheap VPS's, so I'd check those out too.

How is that even supposed to work? Are they renting Amazon VMs on stolen credit cards underneath?

Leasing space in existing datacenters. Put in some cheap ESXi/KVM hosts and sell tiny VPS instances on them.

"Support" consists of remote hands tickets with the underlying datacenter.

edit: looks like OpenStack, actually.

That's what all cheap providers do. How come these guys are about one fifth of a price that's almost unsustainably cheap?

Oh trust me, I did not expect a whole lot. Doesn't mean I can't have complaints though.

What about OVH they claim to be Europe’s #1 ISP and they have Datcenters in France and Canada.

OVH is a bag of shit. Nothing but pain.

If you want quality try bytemark/bigv or Colo with exonetric.

Edit: I tried linode and was pretty happy but I don't trust something so far from home. Also tried digital ocean but the lagging kernels shot it for me.

What are your OVH troubles? I was thinking of getting a couple of their dedicated Infrastructure line of servers, so if you have relevant information I'd very much like to know.

Slow, painful support, absolutely crazy latency, cocked up reverse DNS, bad peering.

What year was that?

Because that's how it USED to be, their reworked network and peering have excellent performance now.

I've been using ovh's kimsufi packages for over 5 years, and their support is getting to the point of worse than reported about cloudatcost's :(

Doesn't OVH have servers in northern Canada?

NORTHERN Canada? I doubt anyone has servers there. Or is it because cooling is cheeper?

This is why having a monitoring solution for all your cloud hosted instances is so important, and its not mentioned here, but you should never trust the monitoring provided by your cloud host. One of the first things I do with any cloud provider I have is add it to three monitoring tools. One at a hosted data center. One in "The Cloud" (AWS,DigitalOcean,...) and one in my basement. I can then set it up to send me e-mails if I start noticing performance problems from any of those sites.

One such amazing and free monitoring is http://www.uptimerobot.com been using them for 3 years.

This is why I use Linode, 5 years no issues, superb support.

The difference between $5 per VPS and $20 per VPS is offset as soon as I have to spend half an hour figuring out an issue.

If I have clients on that machine the difference is offset the second I get a ticket from them, loss of goodwill is worth way more than $20 with my customers.

Linode's support is only good if you have basic issues. But the minute it becomes complicated or it is an outage then suddenly they are no where to be seen. Combined with their disgraceful record on security disclosure I would think twice about calling their support "superb".

Not my experience but then I've never had even basic issues and I've run anywhere from 4 to 12 nodes at varying points.

The security thing however was unfortunately handled initially however their response since has been good to excellent - they stopped all new development for 6 months while they assessed and improved their security infrastructure and they've brought in two-factor authentication amongst other improvements.

No company is immune to this stuff (Adobe, Target, Evernote, Living Social) and the reality is that I doubt anyone else in the market is any better certainly not the $1 dollar per month hosts.

Hardware fails occasionally... that's why you're using the Cloud... if you can't rebuild a machine in 5 minutes, you're not using the cloud!

This is pretty standard for the hosting industry. If you submit a support request, you cost more than most users, so they'd rather lose you than support you.

This benchmark is both interesting technically, and offers some advice on different hosting alternatives.

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud-compute...

> Finally on July 3rd, I receive a friendly update advising me that my issue has been corrected. To my surprise I was not able to SSH into my machine.

This is a great BOFH (http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard01.php) story if I've ever heard one! "Thank you for your concern, your business matters greatly to us and we've 'solved' your problem. Have a nice day! <deletes VM>" :-)

I've been using a couple of their VMs for 6 months for some personal projects and haven't had an issue. In fact, they are up and running right now (40 days and 28 days since the last time I rebooted the servers for software changes). That said, most people I meet that have signed up for their service thinks it is a scam because they couldn't figure out the admin and console pages. Mostly front end developers that don't understand networking and virtual machines; they thought they bought a web host service. With some explanation, I have shown each of them how to start their server, image it with the OS they want and how to login. So at least part of the social media complaints are user errors, but I think it is perfectly fair to blame the lack of documentation.

I have never pushed my VMs hard, but I am also running Debian, so I wonder if there may be a problem with the CentOS image being used (the author mentioned typos in config files).

I tried them back when they had a promotion several months ago.

So many problems.

- Their control panel was over plain HTTP (not HTTPS)

- Super confusing interface, very difficult to set up, looked like it was held together by chewing gum and duct tape

- They continue to refuse to actually delete my account, even though I asked for (and got) a refund

Digital Ocean is 1000x better if you want cheap cloud hosting IMO.

Looks like some provider got in over their head in openstack. The VNC console gave it away.

YES! I had hosting through them. I had to abandon the servers because they were shit. I didn't buy the low $35 ones either, I bought the 2nd highest box they offered. Still shit.

I've been using a dirt cheap VM from VPSdime - they've been great so far, they even processed all my tickets very quickly. I got much better service than I expected at $8/year (this particular deal I found at http://lowendbox.com/blog/vpsdime-7month-6gb-8year-128mb-and... but it is no longer available, sorry)

its quite obvious that it shouldn't be used for production.. but might be still useful.. I personally have one that I use as minecraft server (if its down who cares?) and for pair programming with tmux/vim .. still if its down I don't care.

more cheap hosting comparison list

http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/value

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