

We're giving out free 1CPU, 2GB, 10GB SSD -servers, celebrating our launch. - vilpponen
https://secure.upcloud.com/freeserver

======
grey-area
I've just tried this out - you can sign up without CC details. I don't think
it's fair to characterise this as just bait - there has to be a reward for
both parties in an offer like this. I think this is of interest to the HN
crowd, and as long as they don't keep spamming HN with it, it's useful info.
So not flagged.

The service looks great - control panel looks good and covers much of the same
stuff as linode, setup is a breeze. I think the design of the panel is nice
and clear. One thing I would recommend is that you guide customers not to
leave root login open, and perhaps request a key during setup instead (at
least as an option), as leaving ssh open on port 22 and accessible by root by
default is going to leave a lot of your servers more vulnerable than they
should be, particularly if people change the root password to something silly.

Do you offer DNS? That'd be a nice addition if not, haven't looked around
fully so might have missed it.

I'll be testing this out in a small way for personal projects, but it looks
comparable to something like Linode _IF_ you can match their uptime and
service, which is a really hard thing to do. Obviously I wouldn't trust it for
anything important until I and many others have tested it for quite some time
and found any issues, so you might find it difficult to collect serious
customers at first, but I think this offer is a great way to entice people to
try it out.

I like that backups have a very low price per hour - £0,000056

A few tiny localisation hints:

Customers in the english speaking world will find commas as separators on
prices confusing.

There is no verb 'backuping' that should be backing up - I'm trying one now!

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the comment and initial feedback!

Uptime and service is definitely something which is hard to do, but at the top
of our list on things to focus. And as always with services like ours - we are
in the business of trust, we need to earn it over time so we're not expecting
miracles.

Thanks for the localisation tips as well - much appreciated :)

~~~
grey-area
One other thing I noticed - backups are attached to servers at present. What I
would really like to be able to do is this:

1\. Backup any server to a central store of backups

2\. Set up new servers from those backups

Having the backups attached to a server make them a little less useful (I
assume they'll go away if you delete a server?). The above would let me have a
known-good setup saved and ready to use and use that to create new servers
(rather than cloning off an existing server as you currently offer), and thus
save on setup time for common server types.

If you have to clone a current server to set up new ones, either you have to
keep a blank 'template' current server around, or live with duplicating all
the existing server files even though you might not want them for the new
server.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the feedback!

Even though our control panel describes the backups as server dependant,
backups are in their technical sense separate storage entities.

The downside is that our control panel doesn't currently allow the creation of
new instances from backups (but you can naturally clone running or stopped
instances - which many of our customers do). You can circumvent this through
our API for the time being, which allows backups to be cloned to regular disks
through the clone storage -function. We're adding this functionality to our
control panel soon though.

~~~
grey-area
Great, thanks...

------
vilpponen
And to add the fine print:1) We give 100 euro of credit that enables you to
run it for more than 70 days.2) No commitments, credit cards needed. 3) Non-
transferrable, non-refundable, one per account - 1000 servers given out in
total.

We're just eager to make a splash and hear feedback on how people use and
would like to use a service like ours.

ps. Here's our recent discussion on HN:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5317647>

~~~
ajbetteridge
Hi, I've just signed up for a server, and my initial impression is a happy
one. I'm going to trial a service on it and I'll try and provide as much
feedback as I can.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks, looking forwards to it!

------
lucaspiller
Why do ISPs always have sysadmins who look so smart? Where do you find them?
<https://en.upcloud.com/images/ourmanindc.jpg>

------
Nux
Interesting. Good luck with the service! Where can we read more about it? What
technology are you using? Are you using any of the popular cloud platforms
(openstack, cloudstack, opennebula etc)?

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks Nux! We're really excited :) Our technology is home grown, there's a
lot of information on our site regarding the decisions we have made.

You can find the information here: <http://en.upcloud.com/features>

~~~
Nux
I (and prolly many others) would be very interested to hear about any open
source technologies you are using, if at liberty to discuss. The features page
is nice, but not really technical, I imagine it's addressed to "IT managers"
and such kind of people. :)

------
xd
I can (have) rack 2 x 1U top spec Dell servers (12 2.8ghz cores, 32gb mem, 4tb
hd) with 3 year hardware warranties (next day), in separate locations with
1000mbps pipes at a grand cost of ~£200 a month over a 3 years period.

The equivalent with yourselves (max 8cores and 1tb hd) is well over £800 ..
I've not spent much time looking into the advantages of cloud servers but can
you at least give me a quick list of reasons you think your service is worth
so much more?

I'm guessing the key is only spinning up what you need. Doing a quick
calculation of peak times for my services, which is about 12 hours per day not
including weekends the cost drops to about £300 per month. But this doesn't
take into account the overhead of having to plan and implement something that
can spin up resources when unexpected traffic hits.

I can see the value in your service for low value customers whose blogs
suddenly hit the front page of HN or reddit for example .. but the cost of
servers and rack space is so low I find it hard to justify the massive cost
involved in cloud servers when you can just rack stupid amounts of computing
power for such a low cost yourself.

~~~
EwanToo
I think that's the standard question for cloud computing.

Is your system:

* Very consistent (no significant peaks or troughs of ~5x normal usage)

* Has predictable growth

* Comfortable with half of your capacity being down for x hours due to hardware failure

If you can answer all of that with "Yes", then cloud computing (and even
virtualisation) is probably not for you, you'll be paying a premium for
something you don't want or need.

But if you were to scale up your own application to have peaks that needed the
capacity of 20 physical servers instead of 2, but with 18 of those same
servers running idle 5 days a week, then the answer might start to look
different.

~~~
vilpponen
Well said, sir. The only thing I'd add is that few people/companies want to
carry the risk of paying the fixed sum for 36 months.

If this is not an issue, then your own equipment is definitely a better way to
go.

~~~
EwanToo
Very good to see a cloud provider agree with that, it seems a lot of them want
to try and force the wrong workloads into their systems :)

------
przemoc
I had a problem with registration. My last name was treated as invalid value,
so I went with ASCII version (without diactric). Same letter seems to work
fine in first name, but to be consistent I used there only ASCII letters too
in the end.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for letting us know - if you can't sign-in or activate your account for
this reason, please contact our support to solve the issue. You can e-mail
them here: support@upcloud.com.

------
EwanToo
I've put together a few very quick tests I carried out after the last story on
here about Upcloud, you can see them here if you don't want to go through the
hassle to just run some perf tests:

[http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/1228/upcloud-cloud-iaas-
perfor...](http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/1228/upcloud-cloud-iaas-performance-
tests-and-initial-thoughts)

I think it's an interesting approach that they're taking, but they'll need to
build out more services like load balancing, DNS, hosted databases and so on,
before they can make a significant impact as a cloud service provider.

------
jlemoine
We currently use servers with SSD and I am always interested to look at new
offers.

I found your site very nice in term of design but the message is really not
clear. "Excellent CPU- and IO-Performance 24/7" does not mean anything, I want
to have more concrete information with for example an overview of I/O
performances.

The 100% SLA agreement does not mean anything for me. I would prefer to have
an overview of the technical architecture and decide myself if it worth it or
not...

And the end I did not found enough technical information to go further.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the honest feedback! We're going to be benchmarking ourselves
against other providers on Serverbear and CloudHarmony, for example, in the
near future.

------
porsupah
A minor note on the form's validation: if you enter a phone number with a
space separating the code and number, it'll be rejected, but with no
indication as to what failed, or why. (Not that UpCloud is alone in being
flummoxed by spaces in numbers - witness the many, many credit card entry
fields around the web that refuse to strip spaces out)

Also, on activating the account, if you don't have JS and cookies enabled, the
page is simply reloaded, failing silently. That done, however, it works fine,
even with, in my case, a relatively unknown browser. ^_^

------
yankcrime
Registration page (from the email link once you've signed up) appears to be
broken on Safari on my iPad. Basically every character entered causes the page
to refresh and hide the keyboard.

Otherwise I've just signed up and like the look so far - the control panel and
machine deployment is clearly presented and straightforward.

~~~
vilpponen
Wow, thanks for this! We'll definitely investigate this further.

------
rustc
How does this compare to DigitalOcean, which is about a quarter of the price
of this? ($19+ vs $5), for similar specs?

~~~
vilpponen
I can only comment on our offering, but naturally DigitalOcean is putting up
great competition in terms of pricing.

A few things to consider when hosting with us:

1) We only use enterprise grade hardware currently from Dell and all network
related devices are from Cisco (so high performance is guaranteed through out
the device lifecycle in SSDs for example).

2) We take redundancy very seriously. All of our stack is redundant from
routers, switches to the software level - basically. Performance is nothing
without control meaning your data is hosted always on two separate storage
backends, both RAID5 secured. In addition to this, you can naturally take
backups which are hosted on a different physical machine.

3) Control: we have Android and iOS apps to control your servers when not in
front of your computer. You can create the most basic server tasks while on
the go. In addition to the mobile apps, our API enables more demanding
solutions to be put in place by clients. We also use our own API for our
Control Panel, so it is always up to date with the latest additions.

4) 100% SLA: as we have built everything by ourselves we can guarantee extreme
availability (and also taking into account our redundancy).

Just to name a few.

~~~
jschuur
Kudos for having iOS/Android apps available already. It may be just a small
touch, but as a new Digital Ocean subscriber, I was a little irked to find out
they only had an Android app done via a third party and no iOS or mobile web
view equivalent.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the comment. Haven't signed up for Digital Ocean my self, but
applaud them for the prices they're offering.

------
soult
From UpCloud's AUP: Intentional or careless use of the Services in excess of a
typically expected server load, such as continuosly high CPU or I/O use rate.

Does this mean that uses cases like ZenCoder (video encoding "in the cloud")
would not be allowed on UpCloud, since they would max out the CPU?

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the question! ZenCoder and other resource intensive cases are what
our service was built for.

The item in the UAP is there by our lawyers to make sure we can take steps to
prevent abuse on the infrastructure by others (and thus possibly hurting
others' performance).

So please run ZenCoder on our platform and do let us know how it compares to
others :)

------
foohey
« During the trial period, you cannot change firewall configuration. »

Please allow us to add in/out rules !

~~~
vilpponen
To enable the firewall - we ask users to deposit the 10 euro minimum to the
account. This releases the limitations as a free server with no pre-configured
firewall rules could increase abuse on the network substantially.

We hope this isn't too much of an inconvenience.

Thanks!

------
MysticFear
Does the SMS activation messages come to US phone numbers? I haven't received
mine yet.

~~~
vilpponen
They should! We just had a major push on our partners' SMS gateway so if it
hasn't come by now - please use the voice activation we have in place (please
check instructions in your e-mail).

------
alternize
just checked out the service, and i really like the administration pages. i
could see this as a viable alternative to other vps services, but would love
to see some more server location choices.

what i was wondering tho: the activation sms originated from the same number
as google's calendar reminders, what's up with that?

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the suggestions! We will be adding service areas later this to
North America and Asia.

For our SMS delivery, we use an international provider - could be that Google
uses the same provider.

------
Robby2012
wow, you're really fast sending the sms, it arrived just when I clicked the
button.By the way, I don't really like your administration panel, it's kind of
ugly and it reminds me very much gandi's admin panel.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the comment!

Design is something we're really keen on, so all comments regarding usability
are taken seriously.

~~~
unwind
The front page uses both "MB" and "Mt" when talking about the server's memory
size. "Mt" is really weirding me out, no idea what it means.

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the comment - we just fixed this. We're a Finnish company and for
some reason this page refused to read the proper language file for those two
parts (the text was Finnish).

Mt = megatavu = megabyte in English. Finnish 101 :)

~~~
lucb1e
Like the French megaoctets. Just use megabytes everyone!!1 :P

(I'm not French btw)

------
nu2ycombinator
What is the default username/password to SSH into the sever?

------
logical42
the form's validation message is rather hilarious.

~~~
lucb1e
What is the message?

------
Tichy
Flagged as blatant advertising. 100€ is nothing, and I have to make the
investment to work out how to use your cloud infrastructure. That investment
(of time) is worth much more than 100€, so once the 100€ run out I will feel
that I have invested so much already, it will be cheaper to keep using your
service.

I'm sorry, but that is not a give-away, it's just a bait.

Btw. Google App Engine is currently "giving away" 1000$ for startups if you
register through some affiliate. Technically of course it's the same but the
1000$ will probably last a lot longer than two months on App Engine (depending
on the web site of course).

~~~
vilpponen
Thanks for the comment!

As a small company, we can't give out machines/resources indefinitely so we
need to have a cap on this.

However, I do believe 100 euros towards a free server is a significant
giveaway on our part and due to the nature of cloud computing, not everyone
needs to host their services from here on onwards (think campaigns, etc.).

Sad to have received the flag, but we're just trying to offer a server for
developers to test/play with.

~~~
Tichy
I can understand your motivation, maybe I just take issue with the wording.
There's nothing wrong with offering a free trial. I just wouldn't call it a
give-away.

Edit: unflagged... Your terms sound good anyway :-)

~~~
vilpponen
Much appreciated - and if you like to reach me personally, you can e-mail me
at antti.vilpponen@upcloud.com. :)

