back
58 comments
This is pretty much a free advertisement for non-competitive pricing.

You have no idea how many neighbors you have on that vps.

And that "vcpu" is likely a hyperthreaded core, not physical, so it's a "half core" in reality.

    Monthly	vCPU	Memory	SSD	Transfer
    $6		1	1GB	10GB	1TB
    $12		1	2GB	20GB	1TB
    $18		1	3GB	30GB	2TB
    $24		2	4GB	40GB	3TB
    $48		2	8GB	60GB	4TB
    $96		4	16GB	100GB	5TB
    $192	8	32GB	200GB	6TB

At that "4 core" (virtual) pricing I'd take dedicated from OVH instead [1]

The $6 pricepoint is likely to just get you in the door for an upsell.

Why would you subject yourself to unknown neighbors with unknown abusive habits on the server resources when you can just get a dedicated with SSD for less money and co-host your own projects with known behaviors (and without the overhead of a vps hypervisor).

[1] http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp_32g_ssd.xml

As long as you're realistic it's not a bad deal, it'd act as a lovely irssi/ssh machine that I don't need to worry about for me.
You can also get 2 free servers a month from Amazon.com (1 Linux one windows). It's actually 750 hours each so could use more than one at a time if you turned them off afterword. http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Note: These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date

Please don't present this as equivalent. AWS's free tier, amortized over the life of a five-year web service, isn't free, or even cheap.

Now, I did make pretty good use of AWS myself for that first year... and then it ran out, and suddenly AWS was much more expensive than Linode (and more recently, DigitalOcean.)

When all you want is "a thing to keep your Rails app running for its measly 10K hits a day" AWS loses hands-down. It's just not their use-case.

I did. I got charged, I'm still trying to sort that out with Amazon.
Why not buy your own server and get it collocated?
Co-lo for a single server is not practical if you are relying on the datacenter techs for repair/replacement. When it's their own hardware and the have hundreds (or thousands) of identical systems, much easier/cheaper.
Hetzner.de is also cheap for dedicated servers.
Here's the #1 question I have for any of these hosts, and I never see it answered: how stable is network throughput?

I run what amounts to a fancy real-time chat service. Are my users guaranteed a slice of the pipe? Do you have the resources to make sure they won't lag horribly if my neighbor is getting DDoSed?

Keep in mind that there is a difference between "we actively make sure you'll have a good experience" and "you happened to get provisioned on a machine with good neighbors", even though the anecdotes will be identical.

Disclaimer: I work for UpCloud, also a cloud hosting company.

This is a great question. Something I've been thinking about a lot is also the benchmarking of redundancy and the protection of one's data.

It's easy to benchmark performance, but as Pirelli stated in their advertising: speed is nothing without control. I feel the same about online hosting providers.

Naturally I have no knowledge of US redundancy solutions, but it's one of the most critical yet toughest things to compare when choosing a new hosting provider.

Best of luck to US though!

A part of your question is answered here:

https://www.ubiquityservers.com/ddos-protection

There's providers who cater to real time hosting needs: i.e. http://www.synapseglobal.com/index.php
Bingo. Thoughput of all kinds is the number one gotcha of low end budget hosts. Disk, network, etc. I work with tons of these kinds of hosts for clients and I'm just not at all surprised anymore when everything goes to shit a month after I sign up and suddenly the VPS gets transferred off that special "new customers" node for any number of bullshit reasons.

Bottom line: You get what you pay for. End of story.

LOL the site is now down :) bad sign for a hosting service!
Yeah that about kills the allure for ... well, anyone who wants a site that's up.
Not so ubiquitous... oh! the irony!
Interesting it is working for me.
Why does every host offer a plan that scales at the same rate in every column (CPU, RAM, Disk space, bytes/month)?

I can think of almost no application which requires lots of all of these. Why isn't there a host which allows you to scale your own requirements? Is it a technical thing, or just another form of "oversell and underprovision because most people won't use their plan"?

It makes things easier for the provider, build 1000 identical boxes then sell by the slice. It means they don't have to build odd boxes to deal with odd demand, or try to pair up high memory use low compute use with a low memory use high compute use client nodes.
We offer completely scalable hosting at UpCloud. You get to choose your CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth is billed by the actual traffic.

So I wouldn't call it a technical thing, but more of a strategic decision in how you want to position your company + offering.

> and bandwidth is billed by the actual traffic

Is that billed by usage, or billed by throughput? I'd love to get a cheap rate on something like "guaranteed 10Gbps port; 100GB monthly transfer cap."

I did not see it mentioned except in the copy for the free trial: Are your servers at UpCloud all equipped with SSDs?
Also check patio11's article on simplifying your pricing models: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/
http://steadfast.net offers customizable resources (CPU dedication, CPU cores, Memory, Storage, Network interfaces)
it's far easier to standardize (xsmall, small, medium, large, xlarge) than to allow for custom requirements for the purposes of communication. Most people don't necessarily know exactly how much they'll need, so its easy to just say "large".

Plus, in a virtual setup, optimizing allocations with custom requirements is a far trickier algorithmic problem.

Well there are many host that does this. Dediserve for example. But most of these Host are comparatively more expensive.
At www.gandi.net you can add processor core, ram, disk space and network interfaces separately.
Resulting at higher prices for almost all use cases than this and DigitalOcean ...
Red flags:

> Ubiquity offers a 100% uptime SLA on our entire Cloud infrastructure

> In the unlikely event that one of the solid state hard disks fails on the Ubiquity Cloud there will be no data loss and no impact on the cloud instance's performance

The reddest flag of them all being that the site is currently down, especially if they were promising 100% uptime.
First one is not necessarily a red flag. It doesn't mean that you get 100% uptime. It just means you get paid back if you don't get it. It's an service-level agreement, not a guarantee. (it also doesn't necessarily mean that uptime == your machine is responding... read the document carefully)

The second can be interpreted two ways... Do we start at any state or a perfect state? If you start will all good drives and one fails, it shouldn't affect anything assuming they're using raid. With raid mirroring there shouldn't be an impact on the performance either. However if you start with some number of disks already failing, of course there will be data loss. They could probably say that they're doing N+X redundancy instead to be clear.

I'm now confused about what "Cloud Hosting" is. I thought it was a "virtual" dedicated server. All that ubiquity provides is a control panel: > Our managed cloud servers come with cPanel/WHM access. No root access is provided. How is this different from regular hosting you can get elsewhere far cheaper? Is it just the promises of RAM and SSD?
today everybody is on "cloud", it sounds cool not to be there.
Server down. I hope this doesn't reflect their offering.
Seems to be a pretty good offer, even in comparison to digital-ocean (https://www.digitalocean.com/). Has anyone hosted anything with them before? I'd like to know whether they're dependable.
DigitalOcean's deal still seems nicer. Two times the disk and two times the traffic.

I guess it depends on what you want for your fiver (5-6$). Ubiquity's deal has twice the RAM.

I'm suspicious regarding dependability, which I assume one should be in this price range irregardless.

Lol, I migrated from Linode to DigitalOcean one month ago. The pricing of UbiquityServers seems very tempting, however I will calm down this time :) Anyway, has somebody had a chance to try both DO & US?
Could you possibly take some time to tell us how the switch from Linode went and how you feel about it now? (I'm a Linode customer)
I made the same switch.

I had a Linode 512 and switched to a 2x512 Dropplet setup and put my Database on one 512 and my Rails app server on the other.

My stuff runs as quickly if not quicker and I spend $10/mo less. In addition to this I also have a clear scaling path (e.g. If my DB grows I can up it to a 1gb. If my traffic grows I can either move the app server to a 1gb or maybe get a few more 512's and setup a load balancer.)

I was an extremely satisfied Linode customer for several years. A few months ago I migrated to Digital Ocean to save money and for the SSD performance. I'm happy that I made the move. I get better performance for less money. Also, I have spun up and down a lot of different servers for testing purposes. It's fantastic to pay by the hour for servers so that testing a beefy server for a day or two costs very little.
Whoa - Sweet Price.

If you want to compare to digital ocean they are having a coupon code on Twitter - Includes 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD Disk, & 1TB Transfer for $5/mo.! Use promo code "SSDTWEET" for a $10 credit.

Website seems down. Not a good sign.
It was still down when I checked about 22 minutes after your post. Definitely not a good sign.
At first glance, it doesn't seem any more compelling than DO. DO and upcloud were nice enough to offer some free credits to the HN crowd for testing.
I use ChicagoVPS as my VPS and it is pretty decent for being so cheap.
I did until their massive security breach a few months ago.

Also I lost all my data and backups.

Anyone can give a first-hand experience on this cloud hosting offer?
Page wont load, great advertising lol