
Show HN: A minimalistic cloud provider - twelvenmonkeys
https://datamantle.com/
======
anderiv

      $ 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.

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

~~~
tholford
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.

~~~
kej
Also that time they messed up their auto-billing and stole $7 million from
their customers.

~~~
Shakahs
"Stole" is very misleading. Yes, their billing system had a bug and charged a
bunch of customers in error. But DH handled it very well, were very
transparent about what happened, refunded all the money (of course), and even
went so far as to reimburse people that incurred overdraft fees.

~~~
kej
"Even went so far as to reimburse people"!? They directly caused those people
to lose money! _Of course_ they reimbursed them; the alternative would have
been to reimburse them after a slam dunk legal case.

Dress it up however you like, they took $7 million that wasn't theirs.

~~~
hundchenkatze
And then they gave it back, that doesn't seem that bad. They made a mistake,
and they fixed. No one is perfect.

------
anon4711
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

~~~
devicenull
Vultr: Lets you upload your own ISO, and run whatever OS you want

------
Sami_Lehtinen
[http://upcloud.com](http://upcloud.com) simple efficient and cheaper than
many. Yet it's quality, so it isn't really cheap like providers like
[http://time4vps.eu](http://time4vps.eu)

~~~
udkl
ovh is a cheaper (& better?) alternative : [https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-
ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml)

    
    
      OpenStack KVM
      1 vCore
      2.4 GHz
      2 GB RAM
      10 GB SSD
      Local RAID 10
      $3.49/month

~~~
Normal_gaussian
I'm currently running some OVH boxes and my largest gripe is the low storage
space.

That's the only thing that would draw me to another provider

~~~
ar0
Scaleway (scaleway.com) offers similar pricing to OVH but with more storage.
They only have a datacenter in France, though, so if you use the OVH data
center in Québec it will not be of much use.

I personally haven't tried them, but they are part of Iliad, the large French
telecom / Internet business, so I would expect them to be reliable and to
stick around.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Wow those look like an amazing deal! Storage really is my bottleneck on a
couple of projects...

I'm in the UK so France is perfect.

Thanks

~~~
udkl
If feasible development wise, you could also try 'outsourcing' your storage to
S3 or something similar.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
S3 actually works out more expensive for the majority of my use cases

------
anon4711
"Sign up to view more plans"

Except that after I sign up, I still can't view the plans until I set up my
billing details. Meh.

------
JoshTriplett
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?

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

~~~
JoshTriplett
In an ideal world, consider providing a standard API (e.g. OpenStack) rather
than a provider-specific one.

------
datamantle
Thanks everyone for the comments!

If any of you want to try the service for free, use the promo code LAUNCH and
it'll add credit to your account.

~~~
phillc73
Still need to add credit card details. Can understand why you might want to do
that, but it is now a barrier too high for me in order to just try out
something which could be interesting.

EDIT: As per the comment below, this does indeed work. I initially tried on my
phone and I kept seeing an error to complete the missing fields. On my
desktop, it worked. Thanks.

~~~
liberix
You can get the free credit if you just press ENTER after entering the promo
code (without needing to enter the credit card details). It's not very
intuitive, but it worked for me.

~~~
datamantle
I've fixed this by adding a button for replying :)

------
ayee
What's the bullshit?

~~~
klodolph
I guess the bullshit is "everything that you might ever possibly want that
isn't a Linux KVM instance".

------
vnglst
How is this different from Digital Ocean?

~~~
datamantle
We aren't other than our Waterloo, Ontario location.

We're focusing on some new features which are comparable to Digital Ocean.

------
ksml
It's a dollar or two cheaper than DigitalOcean, with hybrid drives instead of
SSDs. I don't really see any appeal; DigitalOcean already pitched this years
ago (and has done very well)

------
kristianc
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.

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

~~~
cardamomo
I really appreciate the lack of BS in this comment. Thank you for refreshing
simplicity and transparency.

------
throwaway1974
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

~~~
datamantle
We're going to integrate this with Stripe _soon_.

~~~
jeanlucas
+1 for Bitcoin

------
epse
I would suggest you display payment methods on the website. If I need to
register to see it, I am not going to look at it at all

------
mankash666
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

------
webtechgal
Trying to register but keep getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. Is it just me?

Edit: Even the home page throwing up 502 now.

~~~
webtechgal
Looks like they were rebooting or something. All working fine now, got the $5
credit using the promo code LAUNCH (without cc)... Can't wait to spin up an
instance and try things out!!

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

------
Rapidwire
Not sure if this is helpful, but here's some output from one of their 4
USD/month servers:

    
    
      root@localhost:~# lscpu
      Architecture:          x86_64
      CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
      Byte Order:            Little Endian
      CPU(s):                1
      On-line CPU(s) list:   0
      Thread(s) per core:    1
      Core(s) per socket:    1
      Socket(s):             1
      NUMA node(s):          1
      Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
      CPU family:            6
      Model:                 2
      Model name:            QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.1.2
      Stepping:              3
      CPU MHz:               1899.998
      BogoMIPS:              3799.99
      Hypervisor vendor:     KVM
      Virtualization type:   full
      L1d cache:             32K
      L1i cache:             32K
      L2 cache:              4096K
      NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0
      Flags:                 fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm rep_good nopl pni cx16 popcnt hypervisor lahf_lm abm
    
      root@localhost:~# sudo lshw -short
      H/W path      Device      Class      Description
      ================================================
                                system     Bochs
      /0                        bus        Motherboard
      /0/0                      memory     96KiB BIOS
      /0/401                    processor  QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.1.2
      /0/1000                   memory     512MiB System Memory
      /0/1000/0                 memory     512MiB DIMM RAM
      /0/100                    bridge     440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma]
      /0/100/1                  bridge     82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II]
      /0/100/1.1                storage    82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
      /0/100/1.2                bus        82371SB PIIX3 USB [Natoma/Triton II]
      /0/100/1.2/1  usb1        bus        UHCI Host Controller
      /0/100/1.3                bridge     82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI
      /0/100/2                  display    GD 5446
      /0/100/3      ens3        network    Virtio network device
      /0/100/4                  storage    Virtio block device
      /0/100/5                  generic    Virtio memory balloon
      /0/1          scsi1       storage
      /0/1/0.0.0    /dev/cdrom  disk       DVD reader
    

The RAM is ECC, according to the "dmidecode -t memory" command.

    
    
      root@localhost:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
      16384+0 records in
      16384+0 records out
      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 12.5635 s, 85.5 MB/s

------
ovao
Just a current curiosity: how did you choose a minimum password length of 8
characters? Was there any insight into the decision or did it 'feel right'?

~~~
markwoodhall
I've seen many articles that suggest a minimum password length of 8
characters. For example, the latest update published on Naked Security -
[https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/08/18/nists-new-
passwo...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/08/18/nists-new-password-
rules-what-you-need-to-know/)

------
bdcravens
You're only in Waterloo, Ontario, right? Perhaps you should price yourself
significantly lower than a provider like Digital Ocean that offers more
choice.

------
kinkdr
Will definitely give it a try. Looks really promising, and love the low
prices.

PS: Your front page has a tiny bit of horizontal scrolling. Have a look at
your CSS.

~~~
datamantle
Thanks man! I'll fix that.

------
znpy
The website graphics reminds me of Kihi Hosting, which also was from Canada.

Is this company a descendant of Kihi Hosting? I used to like Kihi hosting.

------
snoldak924
How is this differentiated from Digital Ocean?

------
ubanholzer
Your twitter / fb link is wrong

------
IgorPartola
IPv6? If not, this is a non-starter.

~~~
datamantle
Unfortunately the DC we're at has yet to implement IPv6.

------
vnglst
Can I use it in Europe?

------
jeanlucas
Trying it out from Brazil. Any heads up? Doesn't get cheaper than
Bluemix/Softlayer (currency difference), but I am willing to try and :-)

You say you are cloud provider... Can I work with containers? Auto scaling?

~~~
jeanlucas
OK: I liked to get up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Feedback/idea: maybe you can improve the flow putting the ssh/key before
setting up a server (and maybe even making a before step).

Some twitching when mouse-over the "deploying" status icon after setting up a
server. Plus, apparently didn't update the status when it got online, needed
to refresh the page.

Problem: Started with Ubuntu 16, successfully ssh'd into it, but couldn't run
`apt-get update` and had some script using apt before I even first logged
([http://i.imgur.com/exATwTD.png](http://i.imgur.com/exATwTD.png)), I think
it's this same issue:
[https://github.com/boxcutter/ubuntu/issues/73](https://github.com/boxcutter/ubuntu/issues/73)

Will post more as it comes or you can reach me on twitter (@aleattorium - DMs
are open)

~~~
jeanlucas
On the same machine... When deleted got in a weird flow... Was forced to login
again and it tried to come back to the machine original URL after it was
deleted and gave me a 404.

------
nesto
www.arubacloud.com is cheaper as well. I'm using a 1GB RAM Ubuntu for 1
USD/month

