
Atlantic.net launches $0.99 SSD-based VPS servers - ridruejo
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-launches-0-99month-ssd-based-vps-hosting-service/
======
aroch
So will I get a nastygram if I buy 10 of these and push the whole 1TB every
month?

Edit:

So their AUP[1] is full of a lot of crappy policies. Not allowed to use all
the RAM you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the bandwidth you're
assigned. Not supposed to use all the CPU you're assigned. No crons or
background services -- what the fuck? No IRC, TOR, or p2p activity. They have
an obscenity/morality clause. Cannot do any webdev that uses custom headers --
would even suggest that running wget or curl with a --user-agent flag is in
violation.

Edit2:

And they require a valid address and phone number to even register. Screw off.

    
    
        Please note that in order to protect the integrity of 
        our cloud, Atlantic.Net verifies phone and other 
        contact information prior to account activation. Please 
        be certain to provide a working phone number where you 
        can be reached in order to avoid delays in the account 
        creation process. 
    

No thank you.

[1]: [https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-
policy/](https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/)

~~~
mp99e99
Hi,

The spirit of this is to avoid abuse on our cloud. If you don't feel
comfortable providing us with contact information, we're probably not the
place for you. I'm working on the AUP tomorrow, the cron/background services
doesn't make sense or the RAM.

~~~
aroch
So you tried to launch this with great fanfare and couldn't be bothered to
review your AUP? Or the copy in most sections of your site (typos, unmatched
tenses, random spaces or lack thereof)?

Why should I trust you with my information if you can't even handle your own?

What kind of abuse do you think it is preventing? How does it prevent abuse
from anyone but the least motivated abuser? If I wanted to abuse your service,
I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical turk to register accounts for me
(indeed this is a fairly common low-skill-low-reward task on mturk).

I'm sorry but this plus the launch of your HIPAA hosting, which was also
plagued by typos and wrong ToS, doesn't inspire any sort of confidence in your
abilities at Atlantic.net.

~~~
visarga
> If I wanted to abuse your service, I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical
> turk to register accounts for me

LOL. You want to use 1 petabyte for cheap?

~~~
bmelton
They're offering a Terabyte for 0.99 cents. It doesn't seem like too much of a
stretch to assume that they'd be most attractive to people who wanted lots of
capacity for a low price.

If using the service that Atlantic is offering is going to somehow bankrupt
them, then perhaps they shouldn't offer it.

~~~
TomGullen
Upload rate would probably be restricted making it unviable as say a download
server

------
mp99e99
Hi Everyone:

Thanks for the thumbs up on this.

Firstly, we are a 20-year old startup! Everyone laughed at us when we talked
about doing the original Internet startup -- dialup Internet. Over time, we
adapted and rode the booms and busts that went on in our industry, all the
while staying cash flow positive and learning to GRIND.

We are thinking there is going to be a explosion in startups globally, that
will lead to the next big things, not just in the web but material sciences,
biotech, etc.

Our goal is to build out a global compute infrastructure and get it in the
hands of tomorrows Einsteins.. wherever they are born. We want to see the
future happen faster, and see more of it in our lifetimes. Thats not going to
happen if we wait around for today's dominant players, who for whatever reason
are moving extremely slow.

Thats our over-reaching goal. You can read about it here:

[https://www.atlantic.net/blog/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-
launch...](https://www.atlantic.net/blog/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-
launches-99-server-go-plan-to-push-the-advancement-of-startup-innovation/)

Doing a startup is really, really hard. We're trying to make it less so. We're
also ready to provide an alternative narrative to AWS conquering the world --
but we have to be aggressive and go FAST!

So, bottom line is we're trying to do something new,take some risks,be bold,
and take on the giants of the industry.

AWS's margin is our opportunity :)

Wish us luck! We're going for it!

~~~
Karunamon
This is great to hear, there's nothing ever wrong with more competition, but
could you respond to the concerns in this thread with regards to your AUP?
Your terms as currently written, are at the very least _extremely limiting_.

~~~
mp99e99
Hi, I'm going to work on the AUP tomorrow. The spirit of our AUP is to
discourage antisocial behavior.

~~~
ehPReth
Great! Could you reply when the new version is up?

~~~
mp99e99
We're working on this now, should be up in a few hours.

------
cowpewter
It's always surreal to me to see Atlantic.net in the news. I worked in their
customer service department for over six years back when their primary product
was still dialup internet. It was a pretty good job, for call center work. No
scripts, no quotas - each MSR was trained and trusted to actually be able to
solve customers' problems on their own.

I don't know if that's the case anymore. By 2007, dialup was dead and the
company had pivoted to making most of its money from hosting. I left a few
months prior, but still had friends working in the call center when they were
all laid off. I don't know if they outsource their phone-based customer
service now or if they set up a new call center in Orlando instead of
Gainesville, but if it's the former, it's a shame.

~~~
mp99e99
Hello Atlantic.net alumni! We're still grinding it out and trying to change
the world from here! Keep hope alive!

------
petercooper
What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to
keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly
tricky to get extra IPs on some hosts, yet you can pay relatively small sums
to spin up VPSes all over the place, each with their own IP :-)

~~~
aroch
If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to
get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a
/16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some
regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large
hosts are part of.

~~~
staunch
Has anyone written about this extensively?

~~~
aroch
On what, the IP blackmarket? I don't think so, but off the top of my head
Microsoft (rather publicly) bought an entire /13 for several million a few
years ago

~~~
staunch
Curious about the on-going IPv4 war in general I guess. Seems like there
aren't many who have a good view of the situation though.

------
jewel
Something is wrong with their pricing, since a server with twice the RAM,
bandwidth, and disk is $5/mo. It's too bad you can't combine two or more of
these $1 servers in order to get just the right amount of VPS.

This low price makes me wish that RAM and CPU could be added to cloud servers
on an as-needed basis, i.e. hot-swappable RAM. That would be much more useful
than autoscaling since it could react to traffic very quickly. You'd need
live-migration behind the scenes to make it work, of course.

~~~
pervycreeper
I would imagine that they are betting that most users will use this to host
small static sites with negligible traffic, allowing them to benefit from
payed for, but unused resources.

~~~
Someone1234
If that's the case then people could just use Amazon's S3. You can get a LOT
of static site for 10c/month.

More likely scenario is a tiny PHP site with the database hosted elsewhere?

~~~
Karunamon
S3's the storage - you still have to run an httpd daemon somewhere, and even
the smallest, cheapest EC2 instance will run you no less than $14 a month.
(Notwithstanding the one-year-only free tier)

(Wow, I didn't know you could just serve content straight off the storage. I
need to re-examine AWS.. thanks :D)

~~~
thinkmassive
You can host static sites entirely on S3:
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html)

~~~
hrjet
Nice to know this. One major disadvantage is no https.

~~~
tren
If you use Cloudfront you can:
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/SecureConnections.html)

------
powertower
> Atlantic.Net says it is targeting this service at _early-stage and
> bootstrapped startups_ that want develop on a dependable cheap server.

They are doing no such thing.

At 99 cents per month, they are targeting people who want things for free,
hoping that they can later up-sell, or convert them to a higher plan.

Don't know how well this is going to work in the hosting industry - usually
the lower the cost, the worse the customer is.

I'd like to say maybe as someone on the 99 cent plan sees that they need more
resources, they could click a button and get on the $9.99 plan, but that might
be wishful thinking, and they are just opening themselves up to an enormous
drain on resources.

Either way, if there is any indication of people signing up for this, all the
other hosting companies are going to match this plan within 24-48 hours, just
like they did when everyone switched to "unlimited" offerings. It's a race to
the bottom.

~~~
petercooper
I'm not suggesting Atlantic are doing this, but back in the days when shared
hosting was more popular and hosts more predatory, it was common to see hosts
offer deals like paying $99 for a year of hosting, they'd give that straight
to the affiliate who referred the sale, they'd put the prices up 2-3x in year
two, and enough people would stick around to make it all pay off.

Such a strategy could work even better with a VPS since it's harder to migrate
away due to the more complex things people tend to do with them.

------
mappu
There are lots of providers at or around this price point (check out lowendbox
or [http://www.lowendstock.com/](http://www.lowendstock.com/)). It's generally
accepted they're oversold, but that doesn't make them any less of a good deal.

For instance crissic.net (happy customer) offer 256MB ram and either 20GB SSD
or 50GB spinning-rust for 15USD/year.

The only news here is that Linode and DO don't think they can be profitable at
these price points (and it's probably not possible when using Xen/KVM that
can't easily be overprovisioned).

------
growt
SSD performance data:

    
    
      dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test   conv=fdatasync
      1024+0 records in
      1024+0 records out
      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.7785 s, 386 MB/s
    
      hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5
    
      /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5: 
      Timing cached reads:   14362 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7189.28 MB/sec
      Timing buffered disk reads: 1770 MB in  3.00 seconds = 589.21 MB/sec
    

really nice.

------
SwellJoe
There's a lot of ways to make a VPS suck, by not spending money where it's
needed. An under-powered disk subsystem is probably going to contribute to
these sucking (as Digital Ocean sucked in the beginning; not sure if they've
fixed their disk bandwidth problems).

But, assuming they _aren 't_ horribly under-powered on any of the vectors that
affect performance, this is a great deal. 256MB is just enough to run a
reasonable web server on, even with a database-backed application. Two more
servers for DNS, and one for SMTP, and you'd have a solid setup for a large
variety of tasks for under 5 bucks, and you'd control all of your services and
all of your data. You couldn't run a big community site with lots of users,
but you could definitely run a blog (for potentially hundreds of thousands of
visitors, depending on how you setup that blog) or simple site.

~~~
kevinchen
Sequential write on my $5/month DigitalOcean instance in NYC2 region:

    
    
        $ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.84267 s, 273 MB/s
    

It used to be about 80 MB/s last year, so it's gotten a lot better since.

~~~
hackerboos
Atlantic.Net 256mb VPS

    
    
        root@hackerboosblog:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.11193 s, 337 MB/s

~~~
SwellJoe
And, for comparison, the latest server I installed in our colo on the host
system (with Corsair M500 SSDs):

    
    
        [root@srv3 joe]# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M  count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.310283 s, 3.4 GB/s
    

And, from within a VM on the same machine (running KVM with an LVM volume):

    
    
        [root@joe2 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.967834 s, 1.1 GB/s
    

So, Atlantic.net isn't too bad, I guess. My newest system isn't very heavily
loaded yet; only has three VMs and a couple dozen websites on it.

------
discardorama
Not to threadjack, but: what's a good alternative for the occasional high-ram,
high-CPU-usage compute-intensive task? Say I wanted a machine to run some MCMC
simulations, and needed 32GB RAM and a fast i7-class CPU. Where would I find
one?

~~~
henpa
[http://ovh.com/us](http://ovh.com/us) is the best I found!

~~~
lelandbatey
Just to put in endorsement: I've used OVH for years, and I love their service.
Just this past week while upgrading a server I accidentally screwed up my GRUB
configuration and couldn't boot back up.

However, they noticed the downtime problem and emailed me saying that a
technician had been dispatched to look at the problem. Within 15 minutes, they
fixed my GRUB configuration and had my server back up. _And_ , they didn't
charge me any for the work the technician did.

It was awesome, and they immediately won my long-time business!

------
adnanh
Registration is too complicated and cumbersome.

I gave up when they couldn't call me on my phone and requested a copy of my
passport, driver's licence or a bank bill...

I'll just stick with DigitalOcean...

~~~
yelnatz
I'm actually waiting for their call right now.

That fact actually blindsided me since I already gave info and couldn't just
login and start up the server.

I wish I'd have read stuff carefully before blindlessy jumping into a deal.

~~~
wcchandler
I waited about 10 minutes before hitting up their chat. They were able to
finish the authentication process from there.

~~~
jperks02
Thanks, I did this too!

------
GrinningFool
If I had caught the limit of just one per customer, I wouldn't have gone to
the trouble of signing up. This would be useful to me, but I had plans that
required 4-5 instances, and no desire for the more expensive offerings.

ramnode has a roughly equivalent offering for $2/mo (8/q)

~~~
mp99e99
We are limiting these to try to have enough capacity so everyone can get one.
Its new!

------
kolanos
I'm not a fan of these pricing models for VPSs. If you're fine with an
oversubscribed OpenVZ VPS with minimal RAM/HDD then you might as well be on a
shared virtual host. Even with an oversubscribed OpenVZ infrastructure, I
can't imagine Atlantic.net makes a profit at this price point.I shudder to
think where they're cutting corners. I can only assume the strategy is to get
them (the customers) in the door at $0.99/mo. and hope they'll upgrade when
they quickly outgrow their bare minimum VPS specs. But if I'm in that
position, am I really going to stay with a OpenVZ provider instead of moving
on to a KVM/Xen one where I know I'm getting what I paid for?

~~~
derefr
Are these OpenVZ? That's a shame.

Really, all I've ever wanted is an IaaS provider that gives me VMs in the
shape of Heroku's instance partitions: a little bit of guaranteed
CPU/memory/IOPS per dollar, with cheap/free low-jitter bandwidth thrown in,
made specifically for allowing network-server applications that scale
horizontally.

My 64MB-of-memory IO-bound Erlang chat server doesn't need a 4GB instance with
eight cores. But it has to take that instance, because that's what you pay for
in order to get a good uplink.

~~~
mikeash
Now that you mention it, it seems odd that companies don't let you tweak specs
individually. RAM, CPU, disk space, network speed, etc. are all independent
variables. Why not have some pricing formula and then give us a slider for
each dimension and let us choose what we want?

~~~
Wilya
I suppose that's because in they end, they want to allocate all the RAM, CPU,
and network link available on each physical host. If a host has a 1Gb uplink,
32 cores and 256GB of RAM, and someone takes 1Gb bandwidth, 1 cores and 1GB of
RAM, all the other cores can't be sold any more. It's easier for them to just
split each host server in n VMs than to do some fancy stuff to try to maximize
allocation.

That being said, some providers let you tweak everything independently. I know
Gandi does [1], there are probably others.

(I don't use them, no idea what their cloud service is worth, I'm just showing
the sliders)

[1]
[https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy](https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy)

~~~
exit0
I wonder if this is what contributes to the large price difference - for
example, a 1Gb/1core Gandi instance is about 2x the price of the corresponding
Linode plan.

------
lsc
I find it interesting how the trend is moving towards charging less per unit
resource on the low-end plans; digital ocean gives you more disk per dollar on
the small plan, while these people give you dramatically better ram per dollar
on the low-end plans.

The interesting part (and why the pricing scheme that I chose moves in the
opposite direction, e.g. you get more resources per dollar as you buy more) -
is that while the cost of hardware is pretty linear, there is certainly a
support and abuse cost associated with every account, so the lower-end
accounts cost the provider more per unit ram to provide.

~~~
sloop
I think what we're seeing is both: 1) more cut-throat competition to have the
lowest advertised price (the ads just display the minimum available price, not
the price of a service that actually meets a customer's need) AND 2) once you
get a customer on your platform, they are likely to upgrade and/or add more
services which will be at the higher price points.

~~~
lsc
yeah, I would assume that 1. would push the price down in general.

The trend to discount the smallest plans has got to be mostly 2.

It's an interesting strategy; if it works, it would imply that there is more
sensitivity to price at the bottom of the market than there is at the top of
the market.

------
rubiquity
Didn't the 90s and early 2000s teach us all that "You get what you pay for"
when it comes to hosting?

~~~
wmf
OTOH, Moore's Law says that at some point you should be able to get a decent
amount of hardware for $1/month. No support, of course.

------
seldo
It's a pretty interesting case study of interface design that because DO's
website looks so much nicer, their servers feel like a good deal, while
Atlantic.net's old-fashioned branding makes it just feel fly by night, even
though I'm sure they're objectively pretty similar.

~~~
mp99e99
Thanks for the feedback. We have a new interface & website, but weren't able
to get it up by launch time. I agree, DO's interface is prettier, as well as
their website. They do a great job with the design over there.

------
aguki
LowEndSpirit offers SSD-based VPSes for €3 per year with a larger worldwide
coverage. Downside is you only get a IPv6 address

[http://lowendspirit.com/locations.html](http://lowendspirit.com/locations.html)

~~~
hackerboos
I find hosting providers that use WHMCS tend to disappear after a few months
and at these prices you can almost guarantee it.

------
joshmn
While I'd give them a whirl on their lower tier, their pricing for their
largest instance (16384 MB/4 vCPU/200 GB/7 TB, $160 for Linux) isn't that
competitive.

(non-affiliated plug) I've been using
[http://RunAbove.com](http://RunAbove.com) for something this large, and it's
an absolute steal. They're backed by OVH.

Versus a similarly-specced DigitalOcean node for $240 (2.5x RunAbove the
cost), we were seeing a performance increase of 35% on our high-volume API.

And that's on non-tuned Postgres/Rails4/Redis Docker containers.

~~~
srcmap
For this price/ram/cpu needs, does it make more sense to do colo your own
server? I see colo 1U server normally ~100 per month.

~~~
joshmn
It would! However colocating requires money upfront to buy the hardware. It's
a good long-term play but short-term you don't really see the benefits. There
are other things to worry about too, such as remote hands, which we really
don't want to deal with.

------
visarga
At the very least, it's a possible cheap VPN/cloud storage server. Is there an
open source stack that would replace Google's solution to mail/calendar/cloud
file storage and sync?

~~~
icebraining
[https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/)

------
bcx
It's hard to be a web hosting company, and atlantic.net has been in the
business since 1995. I am impressed that they are fighting to stay relevant,
even if it is a race to the bottom.

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and Registrars.
Domain Name: ATLANTIC.NET Registry Domain ID: 1092612_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.tucows.com Registrar URL:
[http://tucowsdomains.com](http://tucowsdomains.com) Updated Date: 2014-09-16
11:43:09 Creation Date: 1995-05-17 04:00:00

~~~
mp99e99
Thanks, its not easy!

------
themodelplumber
Couldn't find any uptime records kept by a third party, and their uptime SLAs
don't seem to have much to do with uptime guarantees (as opposed to 'we will
bring you back up in 30 minutes, etc.).
[https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level-
guarant...](https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level-guarantee/)

As a business owner, I wouldn't bet anything on that. For personal development
stuff though maybe it's great.

------
debian3
When I try to signup and I see that their "2GB RAM" plan @ $19.94 is their
"Most Popular"...

~~~
nacs
Most websites that have a "Most Popular" tag on a plan are almost always lying
I've noticed. In reality, its just the plan the company _wants_ you to get and
has no reflection on actual sales volume.

------
obilgic
I want a hosted docker service which charges me based on the MB ram used per
min

~~~
KnightHawk3
They are probably going to charge by CPU / minute instead of ram.

It's easy to make programs that run in 1mb of ram and use 100% cpu for
example. Ram costs less to be full than CPU does.

------
lsv1
I just bought 2 and will be trying them out over the next bit. I think these
boxes will be amazing to host my client static sites and basic CMS back-ends.
At $1 a month I'd like to buy 20~ in the near future.

------
diwu1989
The CPU performance is pretty good for a single core.
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/932814](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/932814)

------
jshsmn
Revised AUP is up: [https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-
policy/](https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/)

------
lprez
A real direct competitor in DO and Linode is Vultr.com

My experience with them has been positive. They have slightly higher specs and
a good variety of locations.

~~~
Kudos
Anecdotal web hosting recommendations are worse than useless and everyone
seems to have one regardless of how qualified they are to give it.

------
imdsm
So I just wasted a lot of time to find out they only accept credit cards? Not
debit cards, not PayPal, nor anything else?

Wasted my time. GFY Atlantic.net

~~~
mp99e99
We accept debit cards & prepaid credit cards, too.

~~~
cbhl
FWIW, outside of the US, debit cards are not always Visa and MasterCard
branded.

------
sauere
Reading the comments here really is funny. If you do not like their ToS, you
are free to go somewhere else. Your money, your vote.

Personally i find their policy very understandable. Obviously you won't be
able to host a TOR node on this thing or push tons of traffic over it. That's
obviously not what it was made for. This $1 deal is perfect for hosting
simple, static sites or just playing around with the OS. But some people will
complain about anything.

~~~
tomjen3
It is quite reasonable to voice your disagreement with their policies _and_
take your money somewhere else.

Besides with that TOS it should have been part of the headline.

------
jperks02
I just signed up and was able to have my account validated through the chat -
so far it seems pretty great!

------
corford
Love the price. Shame they haven't got an EU presence :(

~~~
papaf
Worth considering if you are in the EU:

[https://www.ultravps.eu/en/](https://www.ultravps.eu/en/)

I found them when I was looking for a provider that had Linux Arch images.

~~~
hackerboos
SATA storage...

------
ForFreedom
Out of curiosity, what can you runon 256MB ram?

~~~
Nux
Quite a lot of stuff. A small dns server, email server, web server etc.

~~~
ForFreedom
But the load factor? To run a http + db server?

~~~
Nux
Use a static site with nginx/thttpd/lighttpd, it will fly. Obviously there's a
limit with what you can do with those resources.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
No European data centre option(s) available. ;(

------
notastartup
what would you guys use a $0.99 server for?

~~~
kijin
Monitoring, VPN, or maybe just a spare box to experiment with.

If you're outside of the United States, VPN on a tiny server is by far the
cheapest way to access US-only content.

~~~
srcmap
Any idea if the IP address in Alantic 's network is blocked in China?

~~~
kijin
You could try for yourself:

[http://www.blockedinchina.net/](http://www.blockedinchina.net/)

[http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/](http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/)

~~~
srcmap
Very nice, thanks.

------
salgernon
I signed up for a $.99 VPS some years ago; horrible service and downtime, so I
wrote them to cancel. And wrote them and wrote them. And complained to their
domain registrar, and stopped the auto-withdrawl of $.99 from paypal, and
complained some more. To this day, I get a $.99 email bill with an invalid
reply-to address, followed by a $.99 second notice bill. Every month... I'm
sure there are people that have let their auto-pay accounts continue to feed
whoever is at the back end of this. (vpstree.com)

~~~
devicenull
So, you're complaining about a completely unrelated company... for what
reason?

~~~
javajosh
Yeah, for real - I'm sorry for your terrible experience, but surely it doesn't
have much to do with atlantic.net...

