
Cloud At A Cost – Hosting For Suckers - DLion
http://www.cloudatacost.com/
======
gizmo
When you charge $1 per month for cloud hosting you attract pathological
customers like the one who wrote this hate page. It should be obvious that a
company can't afford effective customer support and high quality hardware at
this price point.

The lesson here is that the moment you accept a penny from people they believe
they're entitled to the world because they're now your customers. Raise your
prices and you won't have to deal with people like this.

~~~
threeseed
The quote from the article: "It’s funny that the $35 dollar VM isn’t having
the trouble. Just my higher end ones." So unless I've missed something this
isn't a cheap customer. Which then renders your entire point moot.

~~~
ryanackley
The $35 price point is the _lifetime_ hosting plan that normally costs
$1/month. There is no way to determine what "higher-end" plans he is referring
to. Possibly the $70 _lifetime_ hosting plan?

~~~
cloudatacost
Hello, the page was created to let people know that this company has serious
issues. Cloud At Cost is newer company and partnered under Fibernetics. Cloud
At Cost sells this as a professional classed service backed up by Fibernetics'
world class network.

\---- Taken from Fibernetics page: Over the last ten years, Fibernetics has
emerged as one of Canada’s fastest growing and largest telecommunications
companies. Fibernetics is an operating Competitive Local Exchange Carrier
(CLEC) regulated by the CRTC, that has direct connectivity into the heart of
the incumbents fiberoptic networks across Canada.

\---- Taken from Cloud At Cost's page: We are a new Cloud company that does
things differently. We are partnered with Fibernetics, a national carrier and
ISP in Canada. We leverage our own data centers across the country, and our
own national network to bring you the best cloud services at the best rates
anywhere.

\---- There are possibly thousands of VMs down for well over a week. Check
social media. My article explains that I run services for my friends and
family. These are _FREE_ services. I use to pay a monthly fee and when I found
Cloud At Cost decided to try them. If you buy a few DEVs like I did. The fact
that two different DEV2 and DEV3 VMs crashed days apart being down for a week
each should be your warning bell.

------
ricardobeat
Lesson learned: don't host your stuff at unknown cheapskate companies, you got
what you paid for. $1 a month or "one time fee" for hosting, really?
[http://www.cloudatcost.com/pricing.php](http://www.cloudatcost.com/pricing.php)

~~~
randunel
Their plans look really attractive from a dev's perspective tbh.. simply use
them for dev and deploy somewhere reliable.

~~~
moe
Only if your time is worthless.

The difference between e.g. a DigitalOcean VM that will just work™ and a
constant headache from one of the LEB[1] providers is, at most, $48 dollars
per year.

[1] [http://lowendbox.com/](http://lowendbox.com/)

~~~
rahimnathwani
Not _all_ providers listed on LEB are unreliable or unprofessional. My
favourite VPS provider is one I found on LEB. They have fantastic routes to
mainland China, which means I get ping times of ~85ms vs. at least 250ms with
Digital Ocean.

~~~
tmikaeld
What provider is your favorite then?

~~~
rahimnathwani
Oneasiahost: [https://www.oneasiahost.com/](https://www.oneasiahost.com/) is
great if you need access from mainland China.

Otherwise, Ramnode is a good solid one. Others here:
[http://lowendbox.com/tag/top-providers/](http://lowendbox.com/tag/top-
providers/)

------
st3fan
Same kind of problems here. I have two VMs. Grabbed them early on, expected
them to improve. They did not. Packet loss, slow speed, reboots, kernel
panics, filesystems mounted read-only.

They made (and are making) lots of other really stupid beginner mistakes too.
For example they planted an rc.local script to tune some kernel params to deal
with panic regarding filesystem timeouts. Unfortunately that script contained
a typo on the very first line and thus was never executed.

Combine that with possibly the worst support and messaging int he industry ...
still not sure if CloudAtCost is a total scam or just very incompetent.

I really wish we had a really awesome VPS provider in Canada. CloudAtCost is
not that company.

Avoid them.

~~~
blibble
how much support time do you honestly expect for $1/month?

source: [http://cloudatcost.com/](http://cloudatcost.com/)

~~~
69_years_and
Yes exactly that - I am a customer with several vps, I signed up knowing that
it could be a dud (when something seems too good to be true, it normally is),
$12 a year I think is pretty cheap (price of 4 coffees, one days caffeine for
some) for the lowest spec. I'm happy enough, so sorry to hear you are having
trouble, I hope you get it all resolved.

~~~
ewzimm
This article has actually been a pretty good advertisement for me. If I need
some quick, cheap servers for non-critical stuff, I will definitely consider
using this.

~~~
hobs
If you are interested in slow but usable, no they are not. I bought one early
and any network connection to the server is hellish to maintain. There are
plenty of cheap options that actually work, choose one of those.

~~~
ewzimm
Thanks for the advice. I would still consider at least trying them, as I've
seen VPS providers change a lot over time. I did see the links posted here to
other cheap VPS's, so I'd check those out too.

------
dkhenry
This is why having a monitoring solution for all your cloud hosted instances
is so important, and its not mentioned here, but you should never trust the
monitoring provided by your cloud host. One of the first things I do with any
cloud provider I have is add it to three monitoring tools. One at a hosted
data center. One in "The Cloud" (AWS,DigitalOcean,...) and one in my basement.
I can then set it up to send me e-mails if I start noticing performance
problems from any of those sites.

~~~
tmikaeld
One such amazing and free monitoring is
[http://www.uptimerobot.com](http://www.uptimerobot.com) been using them for 3
years.

------
noir_lord
This is why I use Linode, 5 years no issues, superb support.

The difference between $5 per VPS and $20 per VPS is offset as soon as I have
to spend half an hour figuring out an issue.

If I have clients on that machine the difference is offset the second I get a
ticket from them, loss of goodwill is worth way more than $20 with my
customers.

~~~
threeseed
Linode's support is only good if you have basic issues. But the minute it
becomes complicated or it is an outage then suddenly they are no where to be
seen. Combined with their disgraceful record on security disclosure I would
think twice about calling their support "superb".

~~~
noir_lord
Not my experience but then I've never had even basic issues and I've run
anywhere from 4 to 12 nodes at varying points.

The security thing however _was_ unfortunately handled initially however their
response since has been good to excellent - they stopped all new development
for 6 months while they assessed and improved their security infrastructure
and they've brought in two-factor authentication amongst other improvements.

No company is immune to this stuff (Adobe, Target, Evernote, Living Social)
and the reality is that I doubt anyone else in the market is any better
certainly not the $1 dollar per month hosts.

------
alexchamberlain
Hardware fails occasionally... that's why you're using the Cloud... if you
can't rebuild a machine in 5 minutes, you're not using the cloud!

------
lnanek2
This is pretty standard for the hosting industry. If you submit a support
request, you cost more than most users, so they'd rather lose you than support
you.

------
sandstrom
This benchmark is both interesting technically, and offers some advice on
different hosting alternatives.

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud-
compute...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud-compute-
services.html)

------
makmanalp
> Finally on July 3rd, I receive a friendly update advising me that my issue
> has been corrected. To my surprise I was not able to SSH into my machine.

This is a great BOFH
([http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard01.php](http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard01.php))
story if I've ever heard one! "Thank you for your concern, your business
matters greatly to us and we've 'solved' your problem. Have a nice day! <
_deletes VM_ >" :-)

------
dade_
I've been using a couple of their VMs for 6 months for some personal projects
and haven't had an issue. In fact, they are up and running right now (40 days
and 28 days since the last time I rebooted the servers for software changes).
That said, most people I meet that have signed up for their service thinks it
is a scam because they couldn't figure out the admin and console pages. Mostly
front end developers that don't understand networking and virtual machines;
they thought they bought a web host service. With some explanation, I have
shown each of them how to start their server, image it with the OS they want
and how to login. So at least part of the social media complaints are user
errors, but I think it is perfectly fair to blame the lack of documentation.

I have never pushed my VMs hard, but I am also running Debian, so I wonder if
there may be a problem with the CentOS image being used (the author mentioned
typos in config files).

------
masnick
I tried them back when they had a promotion several months ago.

So many problems.

\- Their control panel was over plain HTTP (not HTTPS)

\- Super confusing interface, very difficult to set up, looked like it was
held together by chewing gum and duct tape

\- They continue to refuse to actually delete my account, even though I asked
for (and got) a refund

Digital Ocean is 1000x better if you want cheap cloud hosting IMO.

------
thspimpolds
Looks like some provider got in over their head in openstack. The VNC console
gave it away.

------
OedipusRex
YES! I had hosting through them. I had to abandon the servers because they
were shit. I didn't buy the low $35 ones either, I bought the 2nd highest box
they offered. Still shit.

------
Tepix
I've been using a dirt cheap VM from VPSdime - they've been great so far, they
even processed all my tickets very quickly. I got much better service than I
expected at $8/year (this particular deal I found at
[http://lowendbox.com/blog/vpsdime-7month-6gb-8year-128mb-
and...](http://lowendbox.com/blog/vpsdime-7month-6gb-8year-128mb-and-more-
openvz-offers-in-three-locations/) but it is no longer available, sorry)

------
dn2k
its quite obvious that it shouldn't be used for production.. but might be
still useful.. I personally have one that I use as minecraft server (if its
down who cares?) and for pair programming with tmux/vim .. still if its down I
don't care.

------
pella
more cheap hosting comparison list

[http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/value](http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/value)

