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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Anyone that buys a $35 lifetime VPS values their time at $0. For further evidence of this, he's taking the time to write a "sucks" website over a server that:
Luckily for me , this is just a personal server used by my friends and family.
The funniest part of all of this is that anybody who would take the warning about how bad this company allegedly is wouldn't have bought from a $35 lifetime VPS hosting provider to begin with. In an ironic twist, if the HN comments are to be believed, this protest site is serving as an effective advertisement for people that want a low priority server.
There's valid uses for the $1/mo. server, I can have five boxes for the price of one. Spread out amongst different providers, that's called redundancy. I don't get that hosting everything w/AWS. Customer service? What's that? I have ssh I don't need customer service, only if the box goes down. My $1 servers been up for months, and if one drops, I have four others. I've had great experience paying $1/mo and never contacting the provider for anything.
"Don't use $1 servers" is FUD and probably will be showing up "news stories" from Amazon soon about how terrible and evil these low cost provider are..
Let me address the security issue quickly too. Look, anything - you put on a server not owned by you, is not your data anymore. That's what people need to understand about the cloud. I don't care if its Bob's hosting, or AWS or Dropbox or Onedrive. Anything you don't want others to read should be encrypted before it leaves your PC, period.
I don't think the parent comment was saying that $1/month attracts _only_ pathological customers.
Like you, I have a bunch of $1/month servers used for different things (mostly VPN, as I live in a country where many web sites are blocked), and have had mostly good experiences. I have also had bad experiences (providers going out of business without warning, servers down for a week with no email response etc.). You are right - always have backups and a backup plan.
I can see support being too expensive to offer for a business like this. Actually I can't see how they could afford to offer remotely acceptable support. However it seems to me that this level of support is not ok. At all.
The company should just advertise, "We're too cheap to have support! VM down? Check out our outage monitor page, and if it's just you - build a new VM."
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.