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We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

secure.upcloud.com

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Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#21

Post by grey-area »

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!

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#22

Post by vilpponen »

110010010000111 wrote: post #19
vilpponen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

>"100% SLA" really? what if the network goes down?

Thanks for asking!

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.

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#23

Post by vilpponen »

grey-area wrote: post #21

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…

Thanks for the comment and initial feedback!

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 :)

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#24

Post by 110010010000111 »

vilpponen wrote: post #22
110010010000111 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"100% SLA" really? what if the network goes down?

Thanks for asking! 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 wit…

Clever. IF your service goes down for 5 years I get 250 years free, so much win :)

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#25

Post by grey-area »

vilpponen wrote: post #23
grey-area wrote: post #21

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…

Thanks for the comment and initial feedback! 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.

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#26

Post by yankcrime »

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.

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#27

Post by ghoul2 »

vilpponen wrote: post #2

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. ps. Here's our recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

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?

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#28

Post by vilpponen »

yankcrime wrote: post #26

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.

Wow, thanks for this! We'll definitely investigate this further.

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#29

Post by Tichy »

vilpponen wrote: post #20
Tichy wrote: post #10

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" 1…

Thanks for the comment! 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…

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 :-)

Re: We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch.

#30

Post by vilpponen »

unwind wrote: post #12
vilpponen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comment! Design is something we're really keen on, so all comments regarding usability are taken seriously.

The front page uses both "MB" and "Mt" when talking about the server's memory size. "Mt" is really weirding me out, no idea what it means.

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 :)

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