

Cloudatcost: 35$ one-time virtual servers - lxfontes
http://cloudatcost.com

======
Isofarro
The lifetime costs seems quite high in comparison to the monthly cost. It
works out cheaper if the VPS is still running after 3 years. Then you are
getting a discount.

But, in 3 years, what will the VPS market look like? VPS pricing is dropping
considerably year over year, so these will look expensive in 2-3 years anyway,
and then there's the lifespan of that particular spec.

Their 2 year pricing looks better, however. The sort of price that's decent
value if they last 6 months to a year.

The lifetime 2Gb one looks interesting. But $4 a month gets you what kind of
virtualisation? OpenVZ, so you're dealing with contention ratios and
overselling. Xen or KVM - then that $4 is a basement price now, but in 3
years?

I'm not sure $140 once-off lifetime cost for a 2Gb is actually worth it - it's
risky, considering the lack of visibility and experience with this company. If
Linode or DigitalOcean or VooServers did something like this, it would sell
out very very quickly.

I guess these are probably useful as a remote shell server, a private git
repo, a private documentation server. Running single-user web apps / cloud.
Personal use stuff.

I've seen these kind of deals in Cpanel/WHM Reseller packages around (ebay are
littered with them). The typical business rationale is to bulk up their
customer numbers in preparation for selling out, or to eek out as much cash
from an old server on it's last legs . Or the traditional cash-grab and run.
These packages have a tendancy to last about 2 -6 months before things start
going off the rails.

Where are their data-centres located? Looks like Canada, from some quotes in
this thread.

------
flylib
found this

"Hello All,

I work for CloudAtCost.com The business model was carefully thought out to
figure the only way we felt possible to provide a one time fee for a hosted
server. You can look us up - check out what we have done with freephoneline.ca
- There was a post on RedFlagDeals for 5000 beta accounts in 2007, and thats
how we launched.

Freephoneline.ca sold/sells $50 one time phone lines, started in 2007 and
still offering the same great service. (profitably) Actually some of
Freephoneline's work has got us where we are today.

One of the philosophies we have is to own and pay for the network, remove any
recurring fees by renting other peoples stuff. This leaves little recurring
cost - which translates to savings. Deliver strong value and savings for
Canadian consumers, in doing so - some of them decide to buy other things from
us and be life-long customers.

How can a server be free? / or of little one time cost, I will share how it is
done.

First buy 100's (or 1000's) of physical servers with piles of CPU cores,
mountains of ram, for the best deal possible, and pay cash. We owe nothing on
the gear, it's not leased. They are all on the rack, so if they are sold now -
or not sold they cost about the same monthly overhead to us. Specifically we
have 40,000 VPS's worth of equipment on the rack (so far).

Next, build a very efficient, and redundant storage infrastructure, use SSDs
to make people happy - do not use expensive name brand storage solutions (or
you are dead in the water and out of business.) Use something groovy, say one
of the network file systems from the OpenStack project. Something that scales
endlessly.

Then buy or build some of your own data centres, ( www.rackanddata.com +
www.data-vault.ca + Fibernetics.ca ) Cost advantage - we don't have to pay
$600 /$900 / $1200 per rack. (actually we don't charge ourselves anything for
space, we use some of the empty racks - so its $0/mo )

Then build 30,000 Sq/Ft of solar on your roof so you can produce 4 x the
electricity you use - to sell to the grid (and be green).

Then Build a national network with 100's of thousands of Canadians who use and
rely on it daily (Fibernetics.ca + Worldline.ca) One of Canada's largest
private CLEC's The idea here is the access to bandwidth at this volume, is
really quite in-expensive and sort of already paid for.

Then, we consider a small % of the people find out who we are and buy internet
from us for their homes and office, or maybe even buy an office phone system.
(actually we sold $200K worth of phone systems this month from people using
our cloud.) ... this good will we built is worth more then just about any
regular fee per month.

Summary; \- colocation space, free \- bandwidth, almost free \- server
hardware, far less then the $35 - maybe even under $10 ;-) \- power - hedged,
\- profit margin on the servers, we invest it, in infrastructure - usually in
things that have a +30% return - so in effect we make our own recurring income
on the server - to build a better company, which in turn offers better deals.
\- goodwill to customers - just like master card, Priceless.

It's so good, we were just going to offer them free... but we knew no one
would believe it.

Cheers,"

~~~
nl
It polite (at least!) to link to where you copied text from[1], so people can
see the context.

[1]
[http://forums.redflagdeals.com/archive/index.php/t-1392062.h...](http://forums.redflagdeals.com/archive/index.php/t-1392062.html)

------
vizzah
Some bandwidth tests:

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget
[http://canadianwebsolutions.ca/speedtest/test.zip](http://canadianwebsolutions.ca/speedtest/test.zip)
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 3982587 (3.8M)
[application/zip] Saving to: `test.zip'

100%[=========================================================================================>]
3,982,587 1.39M/s in 2.7s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget [http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-
fremont.bin](http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin)
\--2013-10-17 08:42:14-- [http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-
fremont.bin](http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin) HTTP
request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M)
[application/octet-stream] Saving to: `100MB-fremont.bin'

100%[=========================================================================================>]
104,857,600 7.98M/s in 8.2s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget [http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-
london.bin](http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin) \--2013-10-17
08:42:32-- [http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-
london.bin](http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin) HTTP request
sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-
stream] Saving to: `100MB-london.bin'

58% [===================================================> ] 61,442,944 16.2M/s
eta 3s ^C

Inbound speed seems to be very adequate.

However, outbound/uplink is _very slow_ :

Testing from Europe (UK) the speed is not constant and stable. I was able to
see 3-7Mbps at a maximum (350Kb/s - 873Kb/s).

Not very happy about that, hopefully something will be done to improve uplink
speed to at least 10Mbps.

------
nl
This isn't as crazy as people seem to think.

Firstly, they have partnered with a telecom[1], which means they get bandwidth
at vastly reduced rates.

Secondly, their prices are roughly 1/3 _more_ than what you'd pay elsewhere
for a year of hosting[2]. If they already have paid for infrastructure (which
it says they have), selling off underutilized servers quickly like this isn't
a bad way to get cash.

Thirdly, I'm sure they have done the math, and can guess how many of these
VPSs will be basically unused. If they are already paying to keep the servers
running, most of the extra VPSs have negligible influence on their costs.

I wouldn't rely on it for something you expect to be around for ever, but it's
probably not an outright scam.

[1] [http://www.fibernetics.ca/](http://www.fibernetics.ca/)

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

~~~
0xEA
I think this is probably a fair assessment. I just wish their website was
slightly less shady.

~~~
leephillips
What did you find shady there?

------
lxfontes
Op here: they do exist and the backing company is Fibernetics.ca (Canadian
Clec based in Kitchener/Waterloo)

Their other lead project is Fongo - Dell Voice, which got a lot of attention
last year.

The uplink is nothing close to digital ocean, but decent.

Disclaimer: I've worked for Fongo until a few months ago.

------
mathrawka
I upvoted this in hopes of seeing it get more comments, and hopefully someone
who is known on HN will vouch for them, or at least have a discussion about
the company behind this.

They have 10,000 servers at this price... so it sounds like a promotion to get
eyeballs for a newly launched service.

And that is why I will pass over them, my business depends on stability of the
infrastructure, and these promotional details are not where to look for
stability.

On the other hand, this sounds great for personal usage.

------
od2m
I don't see any way to back these things up... Only two OS's? Sticking with
DO. Somebody talk me into this.

~~~
mathrawka
Honest question here.

How do you use backups on DO? I use salt stack to manage state on all my
servers. The only server I care about would be the server that manages salt...
but creating a one-time image of the OS and saving all the salt files in a git
repo is enough of a backup for me.

As for databases, I have a script that runs and stores them on S3.

~~~
od2m
Basically the DO backups are for machines that can tolerate 24/hrs data loss--
which to be honest is the vast majority of things. Would I run critical stuff
this way? No. My personal websites/blogs and jerkoff clients? Yes. What do you
want for $1/month for a backup?

For things I'm a bit more paranoid about I do postgres/mysql backups at
regular intervals, and rsync any data directories to another server.

To me the advantage of the backups is this-- if something awful happens, I can
restore 99% of my data in, 60 seconds? Then you're only moments away from a
working server if you need to shuttle additional data/sql backups over? So be
it.

I was an admin for a UC at one time in my life and there I learned that
backups are _THE_ most important part of any job. Being a good admin is like
being a father I suppose, you do a lot of shit to protect people that will
never be needed or noticed. I got myself out of numerous hopeless situations
with a good backup strategy which I tested on a regular basis. PRACTICE YOUR
RESTORES. The best example of this was my last day at this particular job-- I
had an affection for my colleagues and threw a brand new set of AIT tapes into
the backup system, and did a full L0 backup of our 7 sun A1000 arrays. In my
mind this was the last thing I'd be able to do for my friends.

I swear to jebus the next morning my phone rang-- it was my replacement. He'd
rm -rf'd the entire lab's home directories, decades of research worth millions
of dollars-- gone. I told him to look to his left and pray to god the light
was green and not red. :)

~~~
ddmf
"Being a good admin is like being a father..." best quote ever.

~~~
od2m
Thank you kindly.

------
mayrun
Can run network/memory speed test?

$ wget -O /dev/null
[http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test](http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test)
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

------
leephillips
I just bought one. Seems to be legit. A couple of minutes after handing over
my $35 I'm ssh'd into a Debian server with the specs that they claim. Even if
they go away after a few months it's not a bad deal.

------
epo
Just signed up, response time from the UK is a bit sluggish. I got my login
details by signing into my account at CloudAtCost but not had formal
notification details of my hosting credentials by email yet.

------
flylib
there is 8 pages talking about it here but the forum is down so I can't see
what the conclusion they came to was, only the first page

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GOrNxy8...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GOrNxy8MdOkJ:forums.redflagdeals.com/new-
provider-cloudatcost-com-cheap-vps-1-month-
first-10000-servers-1392062/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

------
hkhanna
This seems too good to be true. I tried researching it, and apparently there
is nothing on the internet at all about this company.

Can anyone confirm that this is legitimate?

~~~
roadster
Disclaimer - I work there.

It is very legit, we have infrastructure built out for 100,000 servers. We
wish to hand out the fist 10,000 one time to reward early adopters. But we
intend to always provide a solid service at the best price we can provide.
Cheers,

PS. look up sister companies: Fibernetics.ca Fongo.com Freephoneline.ca - one
time $50 for a phone line - 6years old

~~~
stevoo
Sorry Roadster ... we cant really take your word for it. You just had your
account created like 6 hours ago.

The whole whois and the website ... they just dont add up. Well have to wait a
little longer and see.

If there still there i might get one, but like everyone we want something that
will last and not worry that it might die 3 months from now

------
tuananh
It's hard to believe anything like "lifetime package". The company's
reputation is way too low for that.

------
xxdesmus
Yep, seems pretty darn sketchy --> PayPal says: "This recipient is currently
unable to receive money."

~~~
roadster
Fixed :-) Sorry for the inconvenience.

------
cheapsteak
discussion on /r/web_design a few days ago
[http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/1ontby/canadian_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/1ontby/canadian_hoster_cloud_at_cost_is_offering/)

------
pritambaral
Paypal isn't accepting payments.

There's a problem with the merchant's PayPal account.

~~~
tehwebguy
If they are new and had a ton of revenue in one day it probably triggered an
automatic lock of their account.

------
gergles
Looks like it was too good to be true:

> This recipient is currently unable to receive money.

~~~
roadster
This is fixed. Seems like this post caused a pile of rapid signups (thank you
!) Seems PayPal blocked the account for a few minutes... But its back on.
Thanks

~~~
gergles
I paid 15 minutes ago and still have nothing; it seems like the 'instant'
setup is not quite so instant. The page should probably not advertise "pay and
you'll have it in 1 minute".

~~~
roadster
Is it working yet? - email sales[at] and I can help.

------
voltagex_
It's not on LowEndBox, which is strange. I'm going to go in for the annual one
at $12.

------
0xEA
Must be a scam...

~~~
komljen
It is not a scam...

~~~
kawsper
It doesn't seem to be sustainable with a one-time price.

