Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#11

Post by anon4711 » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

Quick rundown of alternatives and up/downsides (e.g. everybody has Debian so that's not noteworthy) of which I've personally used the first four:

  - DigitalOcean
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Vultr
    has FreeBSD
    has Fedora
  - Linode
    has Fedora
    cheaper than the others
    relatively fast CPUs
      e.g. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
    UI not as nice as the others'
  - Exoscale
    has OpenBSD
  - CloudScale
    only does daily (rather than hourly) billing

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#12

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

This looks interesting, but I'm very hesitant to try a new cloud provider with anything critical. What do people do to gain confidence in a cloud provider, other than wait and see if early adopters report anything breaking?

Also, does this provide access to a management API, to programmatically start, configure, and stop servers?

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#13

Post by mankash666 » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

There's an issue using smaller vendors if your app happens to scale. AWS and the like have a modular approach where you can add things that are bottlenecking your scaling. Like additional DB instance, etc. That's a killer feature if you're stuck with unexpected growth

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#14

Post by jjkmk » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

anderiv wrote: post #8

$ whois datamantle.com | grep "Name Server" Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM Hrm...using dreamhost for their nameservers. Interesting choice. $ whois $(dig +short datamantle.com) | grep OrgName OrgName: Google Inc. Not dogfooding their own service? I think I'll pass.

Whats wrong with using Dreamhost for nameservers, does it make any difference at all?

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#15

Post by ohstopitu » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

I'm wondering what the policy on hosting seedboxes and torrenting is?

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#16

Post by throwaway1974 » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

Can I pay with bitcoin? if not then why? I currently use vultr and it spins up/down instances when my program needs it an automatically pay them with bitcoin

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#17

Post by kristianc » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

Why is minimalism a benefit here?

Other than that it doesn't look too different from DigitalOcean, which comes with great support and the confidence of a lot of people using it.

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#18

Post by datamantle » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #17

Why is minimalism a benefit here? Other than that it doesn't look too different from DigitalOcean, which comes with great support and the confidence of a lot of people using it.

No benefit, we just wanted a straight-to-the-point VPS. An alternative for those whom want a VPS closer-to-home (Waterloo)

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#19

Post by tholford » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

jjkmk wrote: post #14

anderiv wrote: post #8

$ whois datamantle.com | grep "Name Server" Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM Hrm...using dreamhost for their nameservers. Interesting choice. $ whois $(dig +short datamantle.com) | grep OrgName OrgName: Google Inc. Not dogfooding their own service? I think I'll pass.

Whats wrong with using Dreamhost for nameservers, does it make any difference at all?

Not the op of that comment, but in my experience, DH is something to be avoided :) it's been a few years, but still have unpleasant memories of cryptic errors, stability issues, and a clunky control panel.

Re: Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider

#20

Post by datamantle » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

This looks interesting, but I'm very hesitant to try a new cloud provider with anything critical. What do people do to gain confidence in a cloud provider, other than wait and see if early adopters report anything breaking? Also, does this provide access to a management API, to programmatically start, configure, and stop servers?

We're working on the API (we use one internally, but we just need more testing / robustness of it before we launch anything)