
Vultr introduces $2.50/month plan - misframer
https://www.vultr.com/news/The-Vultr-Cloud-Is-More-Powerful-Than-Ever/
======
nik736
Today I published an article where I've benchmarked and reviewed most "simple"
cloud hosting providers (Vultr, DO, Linode, Scaleway, OVH):

[https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-
compar...](https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-
comparison-2017/)

Edit: I've submitted it as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023)

~~~
dattl
Do you know why AMS is faster than FRA (ping- and speed-wise), although FRA is
quite a lot closer to me physically?

What was your experience since you are in Germany too?

~~~
nik736
What's your ISP?

~~~
dattl
Vodafone Kabel

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vbezhenar
I'm happy Vultr customer and I can only be happier. I was looking for other
providers recently for my personal needs, as I don't need that much resources
and there were other providers with less that $5/month prices, but now I'm not
looking anywhere.

Sweetest thing is hourly pricing. Sometimes I need Paris VPN for few hours. I
have some scripts, so I can launch new instance with configured OpenVPN in 2-3
minutes, use it, then dispose and I would pay only few cents. Impressive, if
you ask me. That's what cloud is for.

Network speeds are quite good, vultr has lots of features (want to install
OpenBSD from your own ISO via web 2.0 KVM, no applet nonsense? Or Windows XP?
No problem at all), and prices are just so low now. Also IPv6 works fine. I
don't know about their support, I never had to contact them yet, but otherwise
it's awesome service.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Do you have to recreate the entire system each time? That's one of the
downsides to Digital Ocean for me, you need to pay even when you're not
actually running your droplet.

~~~
Laforet
There might be better ways to do this but each new instance on vultr takes a
few minutes to set up (you can actually use their web VNC console to watch
their install script run，a unique experience not offered by other VPS
providers I have used) and then you can restore old config from a snapshot
which takes a bit more time but it is pretty fast overall.

There are options to load your own distro image and init scripts but I have
not tried them since most things I need in a transient instance can be
installed by following a simple bash script calling apt.

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amorphid
The Vultr plan looks like a nice option. For comparison, I recently started
using Scaleway for my it's-so-cheap-why-not-try-it box.

My Scaleway box's specs:

\- €2.99/month (currently $3.17 USD/month)

\- 2 GB RAM

\- 50 GB SSD storage

\- 200 Mbits/sec of unmetered bandwidth

\- data centers in Amsterdam & Paris

When I need to take hosting more seriously, I'll reevaluate. Until then,
Scaleway is a damn good deal :)

~~~
floatboth
Yeah, 2 GB RAM for ~$3 is amazing, while the mentioned Vultr plan is 512MB for
$2.5 and DigitalOcean offers 512MB for $5… Sure, these companies have other
advantages (e.g. DigitalOcean has very fast storage) but RAM is so damn
valuable if you want to run many services, run software builds, etc.

Unfortunately Scaleway is Linux-only, they use some networked block storage
that's not yet supported on FreeBSD apparently. (Needs to be mounted from
inside the VM I assume? Damn "cloud" stuff.) Scaleway also used to have no
IPv6, I think this might have been resolved though (but one address only IIRC?
no /64?)

prgmr is my current choice for personal stuff — 1.25 GB is not as good as 2
GB, but they offer normal Xen VMs with full access — install anything you
want. Also the good feeling of supporting a small team of sysadmins instead of
a big corporation (esp. vs Amazon/Google, not so much with the other small
hosters). The only downside is that they only have US servers, nothing in
Europe.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
> they use some networked block storage that's not yet supported on FreeBSD
> apparently

This may only apply to their physical offerings, not to the VM-based ones, and
you may be able to get it to run using some nasty hacks (possibly involving
loading your kernel after booting theirs). Either way, there are no official
FreeBSD images so you'd be on your own.

Their IPv6 support is indeed lacking (one address, and you lose it if you stop
the server).

~~~
floatboth
No, they told me this about the VM offerings:

[https://github.com/scaleway/image-
proposals/issues/11](https://github.com/scaleway/image-proposals/issues/11)

"FreeBSD on x86_64 (C2S, C2M, C2L, VC1S, VC1M, VC1L) needs an alternative way
to store data or an NBD driver for FreeBSD, and more work on the boot system"

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hiphopyo
Big ups to Vultr for doing what DigitalOcean wouldn't do - supporting OpenBSD.

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pgtruesdell
I don't have any experience with Vultr, nor do I know anyone who has.
Honestly, I haven't heard of them before.

Anyone have experience with them? I'd love to hear about it.

~~~
dwwoelfel
I ran [https://precursorapp.com](https://precursorapp.com) on Vultr in the
early days. I had a setup with a few dedicated servers for the DB and load
balancer, and then I would spin up and shut down application servers whenever
I deployed new backend code. Infrastructure looked like:
[https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-
Infrastr...](https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-
Infrastructure-17592197950857)

I used to recommend it to everybody, but don't any longer. I had two negative
experiences that made me stop recommending it.

The first is frequent restarts. Very small sample size, but both me and a
friend started experiencing restarts every month or so. I don't think I got
any advance warning about the restarts, but I'm not positive.

The second is that networking between instances stopped working for me in the
middle of the night shortly after Vultr did an upgrade. Support wasn't able to
help (though they did try) and I couldn't figure out anything on my end. I had
to switch everything to AWS to get the site back online before people woke up
in the morning.

I was super happy with it before those two problems, though, and the people
there seemed competent and professional. I was also using FreeBSD, so it may
not be as well supported as Linux (which may have contributed to the
networking problem).

~~~
superasn
Thanks for this comment. I was about tell my team to investigate Vultr as an
option for our next website, but I guess we'll first do some more research
into this.

We're still on AWS too. Currently spending about $50 / site which adds up
quite quickly when you have 20+ sites. Our current breakup is something like
(2 x t2.micro - one for website, one for cron created using Elastic Beanstalk,
1 x db.t2.micro for RDS + Elastic load balancer cost). I'm sure we can bring
it down to $10 / site if we were to move to Vultr or Scaleway but it's a very
small site to pay for the reliability AWS has provided to us all these years
(apart the recent S3 outage). So guess we'll too just stick to AWS for now
until.

~~~
jlgaddis
Why not just get a couple of bigger instances and run all your sites on them?

~~~
superasn
There are many reasons but a few from the top of my head are:

1) The whole system is running on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk (via Docker).
Beanstalk provisions 3 instances for every site (1 Web, 1 Worker/cron, and 1
RDS) for every app with ELB on front.

2) It makes installing updates easy and automatic using deployment scripts
which we have on every site.

3) Everything (web/cron/database) is configured to scale up and down
automatically, i.e. new servers start as per demand. This may not be possible
otherwise.

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ollybee
There is a limit of 2 * $2.50 instances per account.

~~~
lugg
Is there a limit on the $5 plans? because they're still better than DO's.

~~~
misframer
I don't think so.

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lgierth
Best thing about Vultr is that you can bring your own IP blocks and have their
BGP servers announce them.

The bandwidth overage is also pretty okay. ($10/TB in NA/EU, $25/TB in AS, and
$50/TB in AU.)

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uladzislau
I'm using similar plan from Ramnode as a sandbox for 2 years already and very
happy about it. Ramnode is a highly underrated hosting provider but it has the
outstanding support and great features/speed/reliability. I'm not using it for
production though.

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pizza
Wow! That's the specs of the cheapest DO droplet for 1/2 the price..

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apeacox
I've heard somewhere that Vultr retains your stored credit card indefinitely
(even after you close your account). It sounds a bit weird, that's why I
avoided their services. Can someone confirm this?

~~~
nodesocket
Believe it or not this is actually very common. In fact a lot of people who
integrate Stripe recommend this pattern. They recommend to never delete
customers and cards in Stripe, instead just remove the subscription from the
customer.

The idea is, if the customer wants to come back and reactivate service they
don't have to provide billing details again.

I don't do this though. When customers cancel my startup, I delete the card
and cancel the subscription in Stripe but leave the customer.

~~~
yborg
This pattern can be recommended so long as there is no liability for financial
information disclosure. When you're hacked and a customer who closed their
account 2 years ago has their CC info used for fraudulent transactions, you
just trollface and move on.

This is why I am baffled as to why the CC companies eliminated the transient
number technology, which was pefect for e-commerce vendors like this. At least
with those, after 3-6-12 months the number expires and no damage done when the
vendor is hacked. I assume it was dropped because this technology complicated
data mining.

~~~
vertex-four
Note that in the case of Stripe, the site doesn't hold onto "financial
information" per se - they hold onto tokens where Stripe is the holder of the
information, and they can't access the card number or CVV after it's been sent
to Stripe - so all fraudulent transactions would have to be requested through
that Stripe account.

~~~
hdhzy
They shouldn't have access to card number and CVV either way because usually
they are not PCI-DSS certified. Stripe handles that in an iframe (requirement
of PCI). CVV cannot be stored at all even by Stripe.

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Achshar
I was setting up a test vps there a couple of days ago and made plans to try
out the $5 plan with $20 credit they were giving me on a $5 charge. So I had a
runway of about 5 months but when I made payment, this $2.50 plan was right
there, and it wasn't there before the payment. Now I have 10 month trial
period. Never been happier.

The dashboard is nice, the ram is a bit low (but the price point is killer), I
wasn't able to deploy a lets encrypt cert without pooled memory. The service
seems to be excellenct in the few days I've used it. It doesn't seem to have a
"don't ask for 2FA on this device for n months" option but it's a small
complaint.

~~~
adiabatty
> I wasn't able to deploy a lets encrypt cert without pooled memory.

You mean you had to enable swap to run the Let's Encrypt client?

~~~
pfg
If you use certbot-auto to install the client, part of the installation
process involves compiling some crypto library (IIRC) which tends to fail on
low-memory systems, hence the need for swap.

Packaged versions of certbot (from your distribution's package manager) don't
suffer from that problem and have fairly low memory requirements.

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gmiller123456
Been a while since I've tried Vultr, but my experience with them wasn't good.
I started one instance, and all went well, decided to get a second one going.
The performance on the second instance was horrible, nothing like the first. I
occasionally got e-mails stating they were rebooting hardware my instances
were on. And after just a few months, the first instance I had refused to boot
due to file system errors.

After the performance issue with my second instance, I wrote them off as not
being good for anything serious. And after the file system issue, I decided
they weren't useful even for anything casual. Hopefully things have changed,
but don't assume that just because you've been up and running for a couple
months with good performance that things won't fall apart soon.

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searchfaster
Great job on the website. Very thorough, beautiful and answered all my
questions about the service.

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crisopolis
I recently switched to Vultr from a DigitalOcean and Compose.io setup.

Compose is nice for backups and replicas but they drop the connection like all
the time and then the replicas start playing who wants to be master. Which
brought downtime to my application at times. Also there expensive so I said f
that and manage a Mongo instance myself. Since it was a small project that had
to much overhead.

I moved from DO was primarily pricing and the lack of data centers.

Vultr's Miami DC is my jam since I'm in Tampa. Atlanta is nice too.

So far I really like Vultr. 2GB for $10!

~~~
tomschlick
I'd be curious to see the historical downtime of the Miami DC given that its
in the direct path of a yearly hurricane season.

~~~
kyledrake
I had an instance in Miami with them during Hurricane Matthew and there were
no outages.

That DC has great connectivity to South America, which is what I'm using it
for.

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BlaXpirit
Just migrated from the old $5 plan to the new $2.50 plan which even has more
SSD space. Unfortunately, that involved copying a snapshot to a new instance,
because they don't support "downgrading", though in this particular case there
was no technical reason to not support it directly.

~~~
TheSmiddy
I just "downgraded" a legacy $10 instance to a $5 instance, as it now has
better specs than what I was using, so they do allow it. It seems the $2.50
plan is a special class (probably loss-leading) and doesn't fully integrate
with the rest of their products.

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gravyboat
I was running one of my projects on Vultr for a while and didn't appreciate
the random restarts with no warning. Ended up using DO for my next project. I
hope that DO reduces their prices, right now they're getting destroyed by
Vultr and Linode.

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decryption
I use Vultr mainly because it has an AU presence, whereas Linode, DO,
Scaleway, OVH, do not.

~~~
debian3
OVH is currently building a datacenter in AU. I guess (hope) I some point they
will offer their vps/cloud there as well. But so far their pricing is higher
there then EU/CA.

[https://www.ovh.com/us/discover/australia.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/discover/australia.xml)

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omegote
Uhm not cool, I've just registered an account following a promotion that
claimed they'd match the credit I added, I've added $10 and boom, no
promotional credit whatsoever. Just opened a support ticket to see what's
going on...

~~~
snowcrshd
Same here, I'll open a ticket and see what is going on too.

~~~
snowcrshd
Just wanted to get back on this: I opened a support ticket on Vultr and they
promptly solved the issue by manually matching the credit.

They customer support worked great!

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snowcrshd
This is pretty nice!

Minor rant: for whatever reason, you can't spin up VMs using this $2.50/month
plan through their API.

Does anyone from Vultr know why? This would be _very_ useful.

~~~
TheSmiddy
You can only have two active at a time so it seems like it's a loss-leading
product just to get people through the door

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laurentdc
It's nice to see all this competition ($5 Linode, now $2.5 Vultr) but don't
they risk overallocaton?

Let's say they have physical machines with 96 GB mem that hold 200 1 GB VMs
each, in the hope that no one uses more than half their ram. Same for CPU or
disk I/O or whatever resource.

Now that the entry level prices are dropping but the offered resources remains
the same, people will spin up more VMs. Doesn't it become dog slow for
everyone?

~~~
nik736
No, it's not working like that. They use KVM, it's not like with OpenVZ/LXC
where you can put unlimited VMs on a host system.

~~~
patrickg_zill
KVM has KSM, so there is definitely the possibility of having say, 150x 1GB
VMs on a 128GB physical RAM server; possibly much more than that depending how
much KVM/KSM has improved since I last looked at it.

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tra3
I use and like Vultr. Host reboots are common though.

As an aside; what does Vultr stand for? Is it "vulture"?

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mrahmadawais
They have really stepped up their game. Love the free upgrades.

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locusm
For those Australians using Vultr - are you charged in USD?

~~~
Aeyris
Yes.

~~~
locusm
Thanks, sticking with BinaryLane then...

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tribby
nice. this makes them the cheapest to offer IPv6 support with a proper /64\. I
wish scaleway would follow suit.

