
Pay $35 once and get a VPS for life: too good to be true? - scardine
http://cloudatcost.com/
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jerf
Well, if nothing else, it's only for the life of the company, not your life.

The T&Cs include several outs for them, too:
[http://www.cloudatcost.com/terms.php](http://www.cloudatcost.com/terms.php)
Including, but not limited to, an open clause that allows them to change the
pricing any time (arguably intended for the monthly service but not so
restricted in the T&Cs), 10.4 and 10.5 defines "abusive usage" and allows them
to shut off VMs according to certain standards, but they get to judge them
entirely, and section 20 has the standard "The terms of this Agreement,
including fees, charges, features, content or any other aspects of a Service,
may change at any time and without prior notice."

These are not particularly unusual clauses, which you know if you are in the
habit of reading these agreements, so I'm not making any accusations that
cloudatcost is trying to defraud you, or that they have any intentions at this
time of not honoring the agreement. I am only pointing out that in the future
they have several escape hatches, if you were for some reason _counting_ on
this service. If you are interested, go ahead and sign up, I would just
account for every month after the 4th or 5th one as a nice bonus, rather than
your right. Have a backup plan.

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StreamBright
"For life" aka until the company lasts. The problem with these "for life"
promises that it is hard to believe that they are going to be around longer
than a year or so. If there was a big company behind such a project I would be
more inclined to take it seriously.

~~~
brudgers
In theory, a for-life service could operate similarly to financial instruments
such as annuities and life insurance. Insurance and reinsurance could cover
"catastrophic" events such as the company failing. Essentially, actuarial
science could underpin such a venture.

Not that I think that's happening here or that the price would be anywhere
near as attractive...but then again, a bet on cheaper computing and network
bandwidth in the future seems like a sound one.

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icuken
Don't be surprised when you get the bill for the service you've never ordered:
You currently have a balance of $1,568.00 due on your account with Cloud At
Cost.

Invoice Description:

#40761 - CloudPRO / CloudPRO - 1 Month (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $0.00 #40761
- CloudPRO - CPU's: 100 Cores (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $300.00 #40761 -
CloudPRO - RAM: 512 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $768.00 #40761 - CloudPRO -
Storage: 2000 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $500.00

Total Due: $1,568.00 Paid: $0.00 Balance Due: $1,568.00

And don't be surprised that nobody at that company is going to answer your
questions (support, billing, etc).

~~~
kormoc
So you signed up for the $35 one time fee VPC and you are now getting charged
$1,568.00 for the first month of service?

~~~
icuken
They just added a new service to my account without my wish.

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dogma1138
You only get 1CPU (probably heavily limited), 512MB of RAM and 10GB of
storage.

This is basically the AWS micro instance which you get for free: "AWS Free
Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for
one year" (If you want it free for life, just create another AWS account ;)).

These instances are way to limited to run anything even remotely intensive at
best you'll be able to use it as some VPN/Proxy or a small scale hosted VOIP
server, but what more often than not will happen is that tons of people
(hopefully) will register pay the 35$ and never use them, this is pretty much
the Gym membership business model.

With thin provisioning at the fact that at best one out of 10 registered
instances will actually be used they can make a huge profit, especially in the
short term and considering that with how hardware scales overtime and the fact
that more of the few actual users that they'll on board that would actually
use that instance will drop off as time passes, it will become exponentially
cheaper for them to support this type of business model with time.

This is a pretty ingenious quick cash grab if they'll manage to attract a
large amount of people because 2 years down the line they'll probably could
support their entire actual user base with a few RasPi's in a broom closet
some where (And yes I'm aware that you can purchase much bigger VPS's from
them for a much higher (onetime) cost, but the overall premise still
stands)....

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gexla
We have been here before. Check out the history of Textdrive and Joyent. If
the company succeeds (receives funding and has to answer to investors) then it
will need to eventually push these accounts out. If it doesn't succeed, then
it will eventually die.

Further, as the hosting landscape changes, any sort of hosting environment may
become obsolete and less useful. The first "lifetime" hosting offers from
Textdrive were for shared hosting. Today, I would consider shared hosting next
to worthless for my purposes. The same could happen to with VPS hosting.

Will they be upgrading these things over time? You would likely be continuing
to shell out money over time to upgrade your resources.

The world of the internets is constantly changing. Anything which is "for
life" doesn't reflect that. This is a marketing campaign which doesn't reflect
reality.

I would rather pay the monthly fee. Cloud hosting providers are driving costs
always lower. Container hosting on these clouds provide even cheaper options.

Who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to live forever through the blockchain.
;)

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alanfranzoni
1) Those aren't necessarily scam offers. You probably get a very low service
and performance, and the company is betting that a lot of people will
subscribe to their service because of the attractiveness, but then won't use
it 2) At the same time they're betting on the fact that the price of hardware
and bandwidth goes down with time, making your server less and less expensive
for them, and at the same time power requirements go up for applications,
making the server useless for you, so you'll basically stop using it. 3) If
those bets pay, they stay in business and possibly charge for other, different
plans. If those bets don't pay, they close and you lose your money.

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minsight
I got a "for life" server years ago. I didn't expect it to really be for my
life, but I at least hoped it would be for the life of the company. It wasn't.

Oh well. At least I got a few years out of it and learned never to deal with
Joyent.

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Veratyr
I've bought a few. They work but they're slow and unreliable. The network goes
down semi-regularly while they deal with spam too.

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steff81
These servers have a real bad performance. I would suggest to avoid them if
possible.

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bryanrasmussen
i was going to flag as spam like, but yeah any service that is for life
especially in the cloud is too good to be true.

