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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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