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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.

#51

Post by vilpponen »

jschuur wrote: post #44
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…

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.

Thanks for the comment. Haven't signed up for Digital Ocean my self, but applaud them for the prices they're offering.

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

#52

Post by xd »

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.

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

#53

Post by EwanToo »

xd wrote: post #52

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 reas…

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.

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

#54

Post by vilpponen »

EwanToo wrote: post #53
xd wrote: post #52

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 reas…

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 do…

Well said, sir. The only thing I'd add is that few people/companies want to carry the risk of paying the fixed sum for 36 months.

If this is not an issue, then your own equipment is definitely a better way to go.

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

#55

Post by Tichy »

kalleboo wrote: post #42
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…

I don't see anything in the HN guidelines against advertising. Why flag instead of ignore?

Granted, it's not just the advertising but what I felt was dishonest promises. Anyway, I have unflagged it since.

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

#56

Post by Tichy »

recuter wrote: post #34
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…

> Btw. Google App Engine is currently "giving away" 1000$ for startups if you register through some affiliate. What's this now? I'd like some details, did they start a BizSpark like program?

Here: https://cloud.google.com/resources/startups/

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

#57

Post by vilpponen »

alternize wrote: post #46

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?

Thanks for the suggestions! We will be adding service areas later this to North America and Asia.

For our SMS delivery, we use an international provider - could be that Google uses the same provider.

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

#58

Post by grey-area »

vilpponen wrote: post #38
grey-area wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the feedback! 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,…

Great, thanks...

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

#59

Post by EwanToo »

vilpponen wrote: post #54
EwanToo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Well said, sir. The only thing I'd add is that few people/companies want to carry the risk of paying the fixed sum for 36 months. If this is not an issue, then your own equipment is definitely a better way to go.

Very good to see a cloud provider agree with that, it seems a lot of them want to try and force the wrong workloads into their systems :)

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

#60

Post by jlemoine »

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.

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