Cloudatcost: 35$ one-time virtual servers

I don't see any way to back these things up... Only two OS's? Sticking with DO. Somebody talk me into this.

I paid 15 minutes ago and still have nothing; it seems like the 'instant' setup is not quite so instant. The page should probably not advertise "pay and you'll have it in 1 minute".

Basically the DO backups are for machines that can tolerate 24/hrs data loss-- which to be honest is the vast majority of things. Would I run critical stuff this way? No. My personal websites/blogs and jerkoff clients? Yes. What do you want for $1/month for a backup?

For things I'm a bit more paranoid about I do postgres/mysql backups at regular intervals, and rsync any data directories to another server.

To me the advantage of the backups is this-- if something awful happens, I can restore 99% of my data in, 60 seconds? Then you're only moments away from a working server if you need to shuttle additional data/sql backups over? So be it.

I was an admin for a UC at one time in my life and there I learned that backups are THE most important part of any job. Being a good admin is like being a father I suppose, you do a lot of shit to protect people that will never be needed or noticed. I got myself out of numerous hopeless situations with a good backup strategy which I tested on a regular basis. PRACTICE YOUR RESTORES. The best example of this was my last day at this particular job-- I had an affection for my colleagues and threw a brand new set of AIT tapes into the backup system, and did a full L0 backup of our 7 sun A1000 arrays. In my mind this was the last thing I'd be able to do for my friends.

I swear to jebus the next morning my phone rang-- it was my replacement. He'd rm -rf'd the entire lab's home directories, decades of research worth millions of dollars-- gone. I told him to look to his left and pray to god the light was green and not red. :)

The lifetime costs seems quite high in comparison to the monthly cost. It works out cheaper if the VPS is still running after 3 years. Then you are getting a discount.

But, in 3 years, what will the VPS market look like? VPS pricing is dropping considerably year over year, so these will look expensive in 2-3 years anyway, and then there's the lifespan of that particular spec.

Their 2 year pricing looks better, however. The sort of price that's decent value if they last 6 months to a year.

The lifetime 2Gb one looks interesting. But $4 a month gets you what kind of virtualisation? OpenVZ, so you're dealing with contention ratios and overselling. Xen or KVM - then that $4 is a basement price now, but in 3 years?

I'm not sure $140 once-off lifetime cost for a 2Gb is actually worth it - it's risky, considering the lack of visibility and experience with this company. If Linode or DigitalOcean or VooServers did something like this, it would sell out very very quickly.

I guess these are probably useful as a remote shell server, a private git repo, a private documentation server. Running single-user web apps / cloud. Personal use stuff.

I've seen these kind of deals in Cpanel/WHM Reseller packages around (ebay are littered with them). The typical business rationale is to bulk up their customer numbers in preparation for selling out, or to eek out as much cash from an old server on it's last legs . Or the traditional cash-grab and run. These packages have a tendancy to last about 2 -6 months before things start going off the rails.

Where are their data-centres located? Looks like Canada, from some quotes in this thread.

Some bandwidth tests:

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://canadianwebsolutions.ca/speedtest/test.zip HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 3982587 (3.8M) [application/zip] Saving to: `test.zip'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 3,982,587 1.39M/s in 2.7s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin --2013-10-17 08:42:14-- http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: `100MB-fremont.bin'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 104,857,600 7.98M/s in 8.2s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin --2013-10-17 08:42:32-- http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: `100MB-london.bin'

58% [===================================================> ] 61,442,944 16.2M/s eta 3s ^C

Inbound speed seems to be very adequate.

However, outbound/uplink is very slow:

Testing from Europe (UK) the speed is not constant and stable. I was able to see 3-7Mbps at a maximum (350Kb/s - 873Kb/s).

Not very happy about that, hopefully something will be done to improve uplink speed to at least 10Mbps.