I've just tried this out - you can sign up without CC details. I don't think it's fair to characterise this as just bait - there has to be a reward for both parties in an offer like this. I think this is of interest to the HN crowd, and as long as they don't keep spamming HN with it, it's useful info. So not flagged.
The service looks great - control panel looks good and covers much of the same stuff as linode, setup is a breeze. I think the design of the panel is nice and clear. One thing I would recommend is that you guide customers not to leave root login open, and perhaps request a key during setup instead (at least as an option), as leaving ssh open on port 22 and accessible by root by default is going to leave a lot of your servers more vulnerable than they should be, particularly if people change the root password to something silly.
Do you offer DNS? That'd be a nice addition if not, haven't looked around fully so might have missed it.
I'll be testing this out in a small way for personal projects, but it looks comparable to something like Linode IF you can match their uptime and service, which is a really hard thing to do. Obviously I wouldn't trust it for anything important until I and many others have tested it for quite some time and found any issues, so you might find it difficult to collect serious customers at first, but I think this offer is a great way to entice people to try it out.
I like that backups have a very low price per hour - £0,000056
A few tiny localisation hints:
Customers in the english speaking world will find commas as separators on prices confusing.
There is no verb 'backuping' that should be backing up - I'm trying one now!
Uptime and service is definitely something which is hard to do, but at the top of our list on things to focus. And as always with services like ours - we are in the business of trust, we need to earn it over time so we're not expecting miracles.
Thanks for the localisation tips as well - much appreciated :)
One other thing I noticed - backups are attached to servers at present. What I would really like to be able to do is this:
1. Backup any server to a central store of backups
2. Set up new servers from those backups
Having the backups attached to a server make them a little less useful (I assume they'll go away if you delete a server?). The above would let me have a known-good setup saved and ready to use and use that to create new servers (rather than cloning off an existing server as you currently offer), and thus save on setup time for common server types.
If you have to clone a current server to set up new ones, either you have to keep a blank 'template' current server around, or live with duplicating all the existing server files even though you might not want them for the new server.
Even though our control panel describes the backups as server dependant, backups are in their technical sense separate storage entities.
The downside is that our control panel doesn't currently allow the creation of new instances from backups (but you can naturally clone running or stopped instances - which many of our customers do). You can circumvent this through our API for the time being, which allows backups to be cloned to regular disks through the clone storage -function. We're adding this functionality to our control panel soon though.
Commas on prices are a peculiar thing in many parts of the word but if you've been to Europe you get it. Although given all the details for contact are in the UK I was bit puzzled at that as well.
And to add the fine print:1) We give 100 euro of credit that enables you to run it for more than 70 days.2) No commitments, credit cards needed. 3) Non-transferrable, non-refundable, one per account - 1000 servers given out in total.
We're just eager to make a splash and hear feedback on how people use and would like to use a service like ours.
Is there a time limit within which I can use the 80GBP credit? i.e., if I only run the server part of the time, can I use the credit over the period of say, a year? or does it expire after a certain time has passed?
Hi, I've just signed up for a server, and my initial impression is a happy one. I'm going to trial a service on it and I'll try and provide as much feedback as I can.
Interesting. Good luck with the service!
Where can we read more about it? What technology are you using? Are you using any of the popular cloud platforms (openstack, cloudstack, opennebula etc)?
I (and prolly many others) would be very interested to hear about any open source technologies you are using, if at liberty to discuss.
The features page is nice, but not really technical, I imagine it's addressed to "IT managers" and such kind of people. :)
I can (have) rack 2 x 1U top spec Dell servers (12 2.8ghz cores, 32gb mem, 4tb hd) with 3 year hardware warranties (next day), in separate locations with 1000mbps pipes at a grand cost of ~£200 a month over a 3 years period.
The equivalent with yourselves (max 8cores and 1tb hd) is well over £800 .. I've not spent much time looking into the advantages of cloud servers but can you at least give me a quick list of reasons you think your service is worth so much more?
I'm guessing the key is only spinning up what you need. Doing a quick calculation of peak times for my services, which is about 12 hours per day not including weekends the cost drops to about £300 per month. But this doesn't take into account the overhead of having to plan and implement something that can spin up resources when unexpected traffic hits.
I can see the value in your service for low value customers whose blogs suddenly hit the front page of HN or reddit for example .. but the cost of servers and rack space is so low I find it hard to justify the massive cost involved in cloud servers when you can just rack stupid amounts of computing power for such a low cost yourself.
I think that's the standard question for cloud computing.
Is your system:
* Very consistent (no significant peaks or troughs of ~5x normal usage)
* Has predictable growth
* Comfortable with half of your capacity being down for x hours due to hardware failure
If you can answer all of that with "Yes", then cloud computing (and even virtualisation) is probably not for you, you'll be paying a premium for something you don't want or need.
But if you were to scale up your own application to have peaks that needed the capacity of 20 physical servers instead of 2, but with 18 of those same servers running idle 5 days a week, then the answer might start to look different.
I had a problem with registration. My last name was treated as invalid value, so I went with ASCII version (without diactric). Same letter seems to work fine in first name, but to be consistent I used there only ASCII letters too in the end.
Thanks for letting us know - if you can't sign-in or activate your account for this reason, please contact our support to solve the issue. You can e-mail them here: support@upcloud.com.
I've put together a few very quick tests I carried out after the last story on here about Upcloud, you can see them here if you don't want to go through the hassle to just run some perf tests:
I think it's an interesting approach that they're taking, but they'll need to build out more services like load balancing, DNS, hosted databases and so on, before they can make a significant impact as a cloud service provider.
A minor note on the form's validation: if you enter a phone number with a space separating the code and number, it'll be rejected, but with no indication as to what failed, or why. (Not that UpCloud is alone in being flummoxed by spaces in numbers - witness the many, many credit card entry fields around the web that refuse to strip spaces out)
Also, on activating the account, if you don't have JS and cookies enabled, the page is simply reloaded, failing silently. That done, however, it works fine, even with, in my case, a relatively unknown browser. ^_^
We currently use servers with SSD and I am always interested to look at new offers.
I found your site very nice in term of design but the message is really not clear. "Excellent CPU- and IO-Performance 24/7" does not mean anything, I want to have more concrete information with for example an overview of I/O performances.
The 100% SLA agreement does not mean anything for me. I would prefer to have an overview of the technical architecture and decide myself if it worth it or not...
And the end I did not found enough technical information to go further.
Thanks for the honest feedback! We're going to be benchmarking ourselves against other providers on Serverbear and CloudHarmony, for example, in the near future.
I can only comment on our offering, but naturally DigitalOcean is putting up great competition in terms of pricing.
A few things to consider when hosting with us:
1) We only use enterprise grade hardware currently from Dell and all network related devices are from Cisco (so high performance is guaranteed through out the device lifecycle in SSDs for example).
2) We take redundancy very seriously. All of our stack is redundant from routers, switches to the software level - basically. Performance is nothing without control meaning your data is hosted always on two separate storage backends, both RAID5 secured. In addition to this, you can naturally take backups which are hosted on a different physical machine.
3) Control: we have Android and iOS apps to control your servers when not in front of your computer. You can create the most basic server tasks while on the go. In addition to the mobile apps, our API enables more demanding solutions to be put in place by clients. We also use our own API for our Control Panel, so it is always up to date with the latest additions.
4) 100% SLA: as we have built everything by ourselves we can guarantee extreme availability (and also taking into account our redundancy).
Kudos for having iOS/Android apps available already. It may be just a small touch, but as a new Digital Ocean subscriber, I was a little irked to find out they only had an Android app done via a third party and no iOS or mobile web view equivalent.
As for network connections, we have two providers of internet connections always available for such cases. One goes down, the other one takes over. We take redundancy very seriously.
100% SLA means that we guarantee that the services will be available 100% of the time, OR we give 50x compensation for the downtime. Basically if the servers are down/unreachable for 1 hour - we credit your account with 50 hours worth of credit.
Registration page (from the email link once you've signed up) appears to be broken on Safari on my iPad. Basically every character entered causes the page to refresh and hide the keyboard.
Otherwise I've just signed up and like the look so far - the control panel and machine deployment is clearly presented and straightforward.
From UpCloud's AUP: Intentional or careless use of the Services in excess of a typically expected server load, such as continuosly high CPU or I/O use rate.
Does this mean that uses cases like ZenCoder (video encoding "in the cloud") would not be allowed on UpCloud, since they would max out the CPU?
Thanks for the question! ZenCoder and other resource intensive cases are what our service was built for.
The item in the UAP is there by our lawyers to make sure we can take steps to prevent abuse on the infrastructure by others (and thus possibly hurting others' performance).
So please run ZenCoder on our platform and do let us know how it compares to others :)
To enable the firewall - we ask users to deposit the 10 euro minimum to the account. This releases the limitations as a free server with no pre-configured firewall rules could increase abuse on the network substantially.
They should! We just had a major push on our partners' SMS gateway so if it hasn't come by now - please use the voice activation we have in place (please check instructions in your e-mail).
just checked out the service, and i really like the administration pages. i could see this as a viable alternative to other vps services, but would love to see some more server location choices.
what i was wondering tho: the activation sms originated from the same number as google's calendar reminders, what's up with that?
wow, you're really fast sending the sms, it arrived just when I clicked the button.By the way, I don't really like your administration panel, it's kind of ugly and it reminds me very much gandi's admin panel.
Thanks for the comment - we just fixed this. We're a Finnish company and for some reason this page refused to read the proper language file for those two parts (the text was Finnish).
Mt = megatavu = megabyte in English. Finnish 101 :)
Flagged as blatant advertising. 100€ is nothing, and I have to make the investment to work out how to use your cloud infrastructure. That investment (of time) is worth much more than 100€, so once the 100€ run out I will feel that I have invested so much already, it will be cheaper to keep using your service.
I'm sorry, but that is not a give-away, it's just a bait.
Btw. Google App Engine is currently "giving away" 1000$ for startups if you register through some affiliate. Technically of course it's the same but the 1000$ will probably last a lot longer than two months on App Engine (depending on the web site of course).
As a small company, we can't give out machines/resources indefinitely so we need to have a cap on this.
However, I do believe 100 euros towards a free server is a significant giveaway on our part and due to the nature of cloud computing, not everyone needs to host their services from here on onwards (think campaigns, etc.).
Sad to have received the flag, but we're just trying to offer a server for developers to test/play with.
I can understand your motivation, maybe I just take issue with the wording. There's nothing wrong with offering a free trial. I just wouldn't call it a give-away.
Edit: unflagged... Your terms sound good anyway :-)
Probably because you need to have an "investment of time" much bigger tryin to adapt your infrastructure/app to Google App Engine compared to using a simple IaaS provider where you just have to spin up a virtual machine and use it like a normal VPS/physical server (if you dont want to integrate their API of course)
The service looks great - control panel looks good and covers much of the same stuff as linode, setup is a breeze. I think the design of the panel is nice and clear. One thing I would recommend is that you guide customers not to leave root login open, and perhaps request a key during setup instead (at least as an option), as leaving ssh open on port 22 and accessible by root by default is going to leave a lot of your servers more vulnerable than they should be, particularly if people change the root password to something silly.
Do you offer DNS? That'd be a nice addition if not, haven't looked around fully so might have missed it.
I'll be testing this out in a small way for personal projects, but it looks comparable to something like Linode IF you can match their uptime and service, which is a really hard thing to do. Obviously I wouldn't trust it for anything important until I and many others have tested it for quite some time and found any issues, so you might find it difficult to collect serious customers at first, but I think this offer is a great way to entice people to try it out.
I like that backups have a very low price per hour - £0,000056
A few tiny localisation hints:
Customers in the english speaking world will find commas as separators on prices confusing.
There is no verb 'backuping' that should be backing up - I'm trying one now!