37 ms·

Vultr introduces $2.50/month plan

312 points by misframer 10y ago

mrahmadawais 10y ago
They have really stepped up their game. Love the free upgrades.
pizza 10y ago
Wow! That's the specs of the cheapest DO droplet for 1/2 the price..
pgtruesdell 10y ago
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.
- Kephael 10y ago
  I used to colocate with one of their sister companies and I've chatted with the CEO a few times on IRC. They were generally very reliable, although they didn't return my rail screws or cables oddly enough.
- mrb 10y ago
  I run my blog on 3 distributed instances, one of them being at Vultr. (The 2 others are DO and Scaleway.) In my experience, all 3 are very reliable: zero downtime since I started using them 8 months ago. Vultr has the nicest dashboard: it uses the noVNC HTML5 client to give you access to the console, it supports 2FA (TOTP) for authentication, etc. They give you $50 of free credit to use in the first 60 days (or did, when I signed up). Plus they accept Bitcoin payments! Only minor complaint I have is when you create a vps they don't give you its SSH host key fingerprint. You have to log in the console to get it...
  - pgtruesdell 10y ago
    Sounds like a solid provider, I'll give them a try with my next small project. Especially for that price.
  - kejaed 10y ago
    Would you mind sharing the technicalities of splitting requests for your blog across 3 providers? Is the 'load balancing' part done at the DNS level?
    - mrb 10y ago
      Yes—full details at http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/ Don't forget to lower your TTL to make it work decently.
      - kejaed 10y ago
        Merci bien.
- BlaXpirit 10y ago
  I've been running a lot of personal projects on Arch Linux on the $5 plan for over a year with 0 complaints.
- Mordak 10y ago
  I've been running on vultr $5/mo boxes for years now. No complaints - the boxes are snappy and the web UI/dashboard is nice. I originally picked them because they supported FreeBSD out of the box, and let you upload your own ISO to boot from if you want to run something else (like OpenBSD). I've only ever had one interaction with their support staff, and the service was prompt and professional. I've been on AWS and DO as well, and am happy with the vultr experience by comparison, so can happily recommend them if you're curious to give them a shot.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hiphopyo 10y ago
    They just recently started supporting OpenBSD officially as well. I immediately switched. This way I wouldn't have to deal with the generally more messy and weaker[1] OS that is FreeBSD, nor would I have to use old pf syntax. [1] "Theo De Raadt Says FreeBSD Is Just Catching Up On Security": https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raadt-says-freebsd-is-just-catching-up-on-security https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raa...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- cknight 10y ago
  I've just had one small $5 VPS with them for about a year now. No downtime, no complaints. Since my needs are so basic I think I could probably get away with one of these $2.50 offerings, however the problem - and it's the only problem I've run in to with Vultr so far - is that downgrading VPS plans isn't possible. You can only go up.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    Why not spin up a new one and recreate your configuration? Only weak point is if they don't let you move the IP
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - h4waii 10y ago
    Snapshot your current running instance and create a new $2.50/month server using that snapshot. Works fine, I just moved a site from $5 to $2.50 without issues.
- dwwoelfel 10y ago
  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-Infrastructure-17592197950857 https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-Infrastr... 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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Why not just get a couple of bigger instances and run all your sites on them?
- ehPReth 10y ago
  I saw this a while ago: https://storify.com/phoul/vultr-tampering https://storify.com/phoul/vultr-tampering. Unsure what to make of it really but it's made me somewhat wary of Vultr.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    That's... weird, actually. I'm inclined to think that this is incompetence rather than malice, if only because as malice its extraordinary incompetent. I mean, what would the point even be? I would think it's a MITM, but they already control the hypervisor, so I can't imagine any sort of compromise that isn't completely trivial to implement invisibly.
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  I use them. Basically DO but with better IPv6.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gravyboat 10y ago
  I was hosting a project on a vultr VPS and they rebooted my instance more than 4 times in 8 months. Definitely wouldn't recommend them.
ollybee 10y ago
There is a limit of 2 * $2.50 instances per account.
- ijafri 10y ago
  you barely can blame them. >Our most affordable way to try out cloud computing, this plan features 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD disk storage. This is perfect for test-driving your next application before upgrading to production level specifications.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    However that does sound production level, easily surpassing it even, for a small business or organizational website. There's even enough ram and storage for a light database.
    - TomMarius 10y ago
      I used to run a Debian 5 server with full-blown LAMP stack and it was enough even for larger sites. Today, the latest version will just say "out of memory" while installing packages. :/
- STRiDEX 10y ago
  It is a pretty good deal, maybe they'll raise that to 3 since most clusters require 3. I wonder if competition could otherwise spin up a bunch and make their loss leader (if it is a loss leader) into something unsustainable.
- lugg 10y ago
  Is there a limit on the $5 plans? because they're still better than DO's.
  - misframer 10y ago
    I don't think so.
Achshar 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
  - Achshar 10y ago
    Yeah right swap memory. I'm a server management newbie. This was a cent os instance and apparently it didn't have a native certbot so I had to use certbot auto.
lgierth 10y ago
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.)
nik736 10y ago
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-comparison-2017/ https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-compar... Edit: I've submitted it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023
- pgtruesdell 10y ago
  That's really impressive, I'll definitely be testing out Vultr for my next project. Great work.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  It's nice but I think you need to test on more than 2 instances per provider. Things can vary _a lot_ and I think benchmarks like this should collect a lot more data. With Ansible and such it's not too difficult to set up and run a benchmark of 100 instances per provider and it's not overly expensive either. I've even seen it recommended that when starting an instance on AWS, you spawn 100 instead and take the one that performs best.
- zuzun 10y ago
  > We are really surprised how bad OVH does in this benchmark, they claim to have local RAID 10 storage, so it could be that they are throttling, since we can't imagine that there are that many "noisy neighbors" in two locations, but we can't say that for sure. Your numbers match the numbers on vpsbenchmarks.com [1], so it probably is as bad as your test suggests. [1] https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/trials/ovh_performance_trial_13Nov2016/sysbench https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/trials/ovh_performance_trial_1...
  - throwawayish 10y ago
    These numbers match so accurately that I'd say they are throttled.
- dattl 10y ago
  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?
hiphopyo 10y ago
Big ups to Vultr for doing what DigitalOcean wouldn't do - supporting OpenBSD.
laurentdc 10y ago
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?
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  Well, they should've planned for it. In my experience their VMs were quite good, I never felt much contention. But it's VPS, of course, you can never be sure.
- nik736 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
- AtheistOfFail 10y ago
  Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr actually bill whether the VM is on or off and they lock your RAM to your VM so overallocation doesn't happen.
  - ttd 10y ago
    I don't think this is true for DigitalOcean. I believe you have to destroy your VM ("droplet") in order to stop being charged. If it's just powered off, you're still billed for it. You can take a snapshot, destroy the droplet, and restore the snapshot later, but there is a small monthly charge for storing snapshot images as well. edit: The DO FAQ (https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/general/ https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/genera...) says: "Am I charged while my Droplet is in a powered-off state? Yes. Your diskspace, CPU, RAM, and IP address are all reserved while your Droplet is powered off. If you want to save a Droplet for future use take a snapshot of it and then destroy it. You'll be able to create a new Droplet from the snapshot image anytime to bring it back online."
apeacox 10y ago
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?
- Zekio 10y ago
  They do accept paypal and bitcoin, if you don't want to give them your credit card information
  - snowpanda 10y ago
    Last time I tried that they needed a card on file to pay with bitcoin. Sigh.
    - Zekio 10y ago
      According to their site you need to either link a credit card or add 5$ credit via paypal in order to use bitcoin "Account must be funded by credit card or PayPal before making a Bitcoin deposit."
      - AtheistOfFail 10y ago
        That is quite possibly the most stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        It's probably because they don't want to run anonymous accounts, which I can see taking issue with, but it isn't really stupid.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  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.
vbezhenar 10y ago
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.
- jrowley 10y ago
  I'm curious why you'd need a specific VPN for a few hours? Get around streaming restrictions?
  - vbezhenar 10y ago
    I'm playing WoW and sometimes something goes wrong with my ping from Astana to Frankfurt (where WoW servers are located), but Paris still works fine. So VPN solves that problem.
  - NoirDesir 10y ago
    I occasionally start a VPS for a few hours to download stuff using OpenVPN AS... Living in France under constant phobia of HADOPI law :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law
- bostonvaulter2 10y ago
  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 10y ago
amorphid 10y ago
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 :)
- digikata 10y ago
  So when you try out one of these hosts do you worry about bandwidth overages? Or are the options to manage or cut off the instance if it goes over. I guess I'm interested in what other costs beyond the monthly keep-it-alive fee can come up with this tier of hosting
  - hinfaits 10y ago
    DigitalOcean's payment model is great for this. What you see is what you get without small charges or other fees. I vaguely remember Lightsail's release being met with poor feedback on HN because they really missed part of what makes DO by complicating the payment model. Currently DO does not charge for network overages. I guess they would suspend your node for going way over the prescribed limits. I'm not affiliated with DO, but I just really like the service. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw...
  - dylanpyle 10y ago
    I've got a few things running on $3/mo Scaleway boxes. Bandwidth is unmetered and 200Mbit/sec. The only extra cost I pay for is additional storage volumes (50gb included, additional 1 euro per 50 GB/month) - other than that, dead reliable and all inclusive.
- d0100 10y ago
  I am unfortunately stuck with companies that accept PayPal. Scaleway was one that I checked out first, but no PayPal support.
uladzislau 10y ago
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.
BlaXpirit 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
crisopolis 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
tribby 10y ago
nice. this makes them the cheapest to offer IPv6 support with a proper /64. I wish scaleway would follow suit.
decryption 10y ago
I use Vultr mainly because it has an AU presence, whereas Linode, DO, Scaleway, OVH, do not.
- debian3 10y ago
  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
searchfaster 10y ago
Great job on the website. Very thorough, beautiful and answered all my questions about the service.
locusm 10y ago
For those Australians using Vultr - are you charged in USD?
- Aeyris 10y ago
  Yes.
  - locusm 10y ago
    Thanks, sticking with BinaryLane then...
gravyboat 10y ago
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.
omegote 10y ago
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...
- retox 10y ago
  I signed up using that offer, $25 matched. It was obvious at every step of the sign-up what was happening with regard to the matching. Either you had the page cached or they screwed up, but worth getting in touch they are very responsive which is refreshing for a cheapo host.
- snowcrshd 10y ago
  Same here, I'll open a ticket and see what is going on too.
  - snowcrshd 10y ago
    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!
snowcrshd 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
gmiller123456 10y ago
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.
tra3 10y ago
I use and like Vultr. Host reboots are common though. As an aside; what does Vultr stand for? Is it "vulture"?
ebadao 10y ago
A blog post of Vultr performance benchmark of $2.5 plan https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-vultr-2-5-plan/ https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-...
ebadao 10y ago
A blog post of Vultr performance benchmark of $2.5 plan https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-vultr-2-5-plan/ https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-...

312 points by misframer 10y ago

mrahmadawais 10y ago

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

pizza 10y ago

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

pgtruesdell 10y ago

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.

Kephael 10y ago
I used to colocate with one of their sister companies and I've chatted with the CEO a few times on IRC. They were generally very reliable, although they didn't return my rail screws or cables oddly enough.
mrb 10y ago
I run my blog on 3 distributed instances, one of them being at Vultr. (The 2 others are DO and Scaleway.) In my experience, all 3 are very reliable: zero downtime since I started using them 8 months ago. Vultr has the nicest dashboard: it uses the noVNC HTML5 client to give you access to the console, it supports 2FA (TOTP) for authentication, etc. They give you $50 of free credit to use in the first 60 days (or did, when I signed up). Plus they accept Bitcoin payments! Only minor complaint I have is when you create a vps they don't give you its SSH host key fingerprint. You have to log in the console to get it...
- pgtruesdell 10y ago
  Sounds like a solid provider, I'll give them a try with my next small project. Especially for that price.
- kejaed 10y ago
  Would you mind sharing the technicalities of splitting requests for your blog across 3 providers? Is the 'load balancing' part done at the DNS level?
  - mrb 10y ago
    Yes—full details at http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/ Don't forget to lower your TTL to make it work decently.
    - kejaed 10y ago
      Merci bien.
BlaXpirit 10y ago
I've been running a lot of personal projects on Arch Linux on the $5 plan for over a year with 0 complaints.
Mordak 10y ago
I've been running on vultr $5/mo boxes for years now. No complaints - the boxes are snappy and the web UI/dashboard is nice. I originally picked them because they supported FreeBSD out of the box, and let you upload your own ISO to boot from if you want to run something else (like OpenBSD). I've only ever had one interaction with their support staff, and the service was prompt and professional. I've been on AWS and DO as well, and am happy with the vultr experience by comparison, so can happily recommend them if you're curious to give them a shot.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hiphopyo 10y ago
  They just recently started supporting OpenBSD officially as well. I immediately switched. This way I wouldn't have to deal with the generally more messy and weaker[1] OS that is FreeBSD, nor would I have to use old pf syntax. [1] "Theo De Raadt Says FreeBSD Is Just Catching Up On Security": https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raadt-says-freebsd-is-just-catching-up-on-security https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raa...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
cknight 10y ago
I've just had one small $5 VPS with them for about a year now. No downtime, no complaints. Since my needs are so basic I think I could probably get away with one of these $2.50 offerings, however the problem - and it's the only problem I've run in to with Vultr so far - is that downgrading VPS plans isn't possible. You can only go up.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
  Why not spin up a new one and recreate your configuration? Only weak point is if they don't let you move the IP
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- h4waii 10y ago
  Snapshot your current running instance and create a new $2.50/month server using that snapshot. Works fine, I just moved a site from $5 to $2.50 without issues.
dwwoelfel 10y ago
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-Infrastructure-17592197950857 https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-Infrastr... 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Why not just get a couple of bigger instances and run all your sites on them?
ehPReth 10y ago
I saw this a while ago: https://storify.com/phoul/vultr-tampering https://storify.com/phoul/vultr-tampering. Unsure what to make of it really but it's made me somewhat wary of Vultr.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
  That's... weird, actually. I'm inclined to think that this is incompetence rather than malice, if only because as malice its extraordinary incompetent. I mean, what would the point even be? I would think it's a MITM, but they already control the hypervisor, so I can't imagine any sort of compromise that isn't completely trivial to implement invisibly.
IgorPartola 10y ago
I use them. Basically DO but with better IPv6.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gravyboat 10y ago
I was hosting a project on a vultr VPS and they rebooted my instance more than 4 times in 8 months. Definitely wouldn't recommend them.

ollybee 10y ago

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

ijafri 10y ago
you barely can blame them. >Our most affordable way to try out cloud computing, this plan features 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD disk storage. This is perfect for test-driving your next application before upgrading to production level specifications.
- mjevans 10y ago
  However that does sound production level, easily surpassing it even, for a small business or organizational website. There's even enough ram and storage for a light database.
  - TomMarius 10y ago
    I used to run a Debian 5 server with full-blown LAMP stack and it was enough even for larger sites. Today, the latest version will just say "out of memory" while installing packages. :/
STRiDEX 10y ago
It is a pretty good deal, maybe they'll raise that to 3 since most clusters require 3. I wonder if competition could otherwise spin up a bunch and make their loss leader (if it is a loss leader) into something unsustainable.
lugg 10y ago
Is there a limit on the $5 plans? because they're still better than DO's.
- misframer 10y ago
  I don't think so.

Achshar 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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.
- Achshar 10y ago
  Yeah right swap memory. I'm a server management newbie. This was a cent os instance and apparently it didn't have a native certbot so I had to use certbot auto.

lgierth 10y ago

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.)

nik736 10y ago

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-comparison-2017/ https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-compar... Edit: I've submitted it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023

pgtruesdell 10y ago
That's really impressive, I'll definitely be testing out Vultr for my next project. Great work.
Veratyr 10y ago
It's nice but I think you need to test on more than 2 instances per provider. Things can vary _a lot_ and I think benchmarks like this should collect a lot more data. With Ansible and such it's not too difficult to set up and run a benchmark of 100 instances per provider and it's not overly expensive either. I've even seen it recommended that when starting an instance on AWS, you spawn 100 instead and take the one that performs best.
zuzun 10y ago
> We are really surprised how bad OVH does in this benchmark, they claim to have local RAID 10 storage, so it could be that they are throttling, since we can't imagine that there are that many "noisy neighbors" in two locations, but we can't say that for sure. Your numbers match the numbers on vpsbenchmarks.com [1], so it probably is as bad as your test suggests. [1] https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/trials/ovh_performance_trial_13Nov2016/sysbench https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/trials/ovh_performance_trial_1...
- throwawayish 10y ago
  These numbers match so accurately that I'd say they are throttled.
dattl 10y ago
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?

hiphopyo 10y ago

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

laurentdc 10y ago

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?

vbezhenar 10y ago
Well, they should've planned for it. In my experience their VMs were quite good, I never felt much contention. But it's VPS, of course, you can never be sure.
nik736 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
AtheistOfFail 10y ago
Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr actually bill whether the VM is on or off and they lock your RAM to your VM so overallocation doesn't happen.
- ttd 10y ago
  I don't think this is true for DigitalOcean. I believe you have to destroy your VM ("droplet") in order to stop being charged. If it's just powered off, you're still billed for it. You can take a snapshot, destroy the droplet, and restore the snapshot later, but there is a small monthly charge for storing snapshot images as well. edit: The DO FAQ (https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/general/ https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/genera...) says: "Am I charged while my Droplet is in a powered-off state? Yes. Your diskspace, CPU, RAM, and IP address are all reserved while your Droplet is powered off. If you want to save a Droplet for future use take a snapshot of it and then destroy it. You'll be able to create a new Droplet from the snapshot image anytime to bring it back online."

apeacox 10y ago

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?

Zekio 10y ago
They do accept paypal and bitcoin, if you don't want to give them your credit card information
- snowpanda 10y ago
  Last time I tried that they needed a card on file to pay with bitcoin. Sigh.
  - Zekio 10y ago
    According to their site you need to either link a credit card or add 5$ credit via paypal in order to use bitcoin "Account must be funded by credit card or PayPal before making a Bitcoin deposit."
    - AtheistOfFail 10y ago
      That is quite possibly the most stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life.
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        It's probably because they don't want to run anonymous accounts, which I can see taking issue with, but it isn't really stupid.
nodesocket 10y ago
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.

vbezhenar 10y ago

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.

jrowley 10y ago
I'm curious why you'd need a specific VPN for a few hours? Get around streaming restrictions?
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  I'm playing WoW and sometimes something goes wrong with my ping from Astana to Frankfurt (where WoW servers are located), but Paris still works fine. So VPN solves that problem.
- NoirDesir 10y ago
  I occasionally start a VPS for a few hours to download stuff using OpenVPN AS... Living in France under constant phobia of HADOPI law :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law
bostonvaulter2 10y ago
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 10y ago

amorphid 10y ago

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 :)

digikata 10y ago
So when you try out one of these hosts do you worry about bandwidth overages? Or are the options to manage or cut off the instance if it goes over. I guess I'm interested in what other costs beyond the monthly keep-it-alive fee can come up with this tier of hosting
- hinfaits 10y ago
  DigitalOcean's payment model is great for this. What you see is what you get without small charges or other fees. I vaguely remember Lightsail's release being met with poor feedback on HN because they really missed part of what makes DO by complicating the payment model. Currently DO does not charge for network overages. I guess they would suspend your node for going way over the prescribed limits. I'm not affiliated with DO, but I just really like the service. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw...
- dylanpyle 10y ago
  I've got a few things running on $3/mo Scaleway boxes. Bandwidth is unmetered and 200Mbit/sec. The only extra cost I pay for is additional storage volumes (50gb included, additional 1 euro per 50 GB/month) - other than that, dead reliable and all inclusive.
d0100 10y ago
I am unfortunately stuck with companies that accept PayPal. Scaleway was one that I checked out first, but no PayPal support.

uladzislau 10y ago

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.

BlaXpirit 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

crisopolis 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

tribby 10y ago

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

decryption 10y ago

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

debian3 10y ago
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

searchfaster 10y ago

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

locusm 10y ago

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

Aeyris 10y ago
Yes.
- locusm 10y ago
  Thanks, sticking with BinaryLane then...

gravyboat 10y ago

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.

omegote 10y ago

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...

retox 10y ago
I signed up using that offer, $25 matched. It was obvious at every step of the sign-up what was happening with regard to the matching. Either you had the page cached or they screwed up, but worth getting in touch they are very responsive which is refreshing for a cheapo host.
snowcrshd 10y ago
Same here, I'll open a ticket and see what is going on too.
- snowcrshd 10y ago
  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!

snowcrshd 10y ago

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 10y ago
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

gmiller123456 10y ago

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.

tra3 10y ago

I use and like Vultr. Host reboots are common though. As an aside; what does Vultr stand for? Is it "vulture"?

ebadao 10y ago

A blog post of Vultr performance benchmark of $2.5 plan https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-vultr-2-5-plan/ https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-...

ebadao 10y ago

A blog post of Vultr performance benchmark of $2.5 plan https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-vultr-2-5-plan/ https://www.yeool.com/blog/2017/03/performance-benchmark-of-...