4 ms·

The Akamai acquisition has had me kind of stressed to be honest. Here in Oceania there aren't a whole lot of established "cloud" hosts to pick from that host lo

The Akamai acquisition has had me kind of stressed to be honest. Here in Oceania there aren't a whole lot of established "cloud" hosts to pick from that host locally. Linode is fantastic and I have loved them for 10+ years. Digital Ocean doesn't host here, nearest is Singapore. Vultr does but I have had poor experiences with them. The other options are AWS and Google which are potentially unbounded expenses which is hard to sell to clients that already see $12/m (aud) as a cost sink, no matter what the server+service will save them in seat time. There are of course local hosts but they're either oversold cpanel hosts or comparatively expensive (3-10x the price for the same hardware). I guess it just feeds from my existential dread of being a small fish where if any one of these upstream providers decide "oh, no we flagged that account because of [black box reason], sorry!", you can be out a lively hood with no real recourse. Guess it just kinda sucks to be at what feels like the end of the long tail of infrastructure.

prng2021 4y ago
Just curious, what caused the poor experience with Vultr?
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  Not OP but just a guess, vultr was founded 2014 and linode is 2003. Obviously not a proxy for quality, but it’s one data point as to potentially why.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    Was going to ask the same. I’ve used vultr for years and found them rock solid, and have had good support when needed. They also just opened a DC in Melbourne.
flakeoil 4y ago
These guys are in Australia amongst other locations: https://www.ovhcloud.com/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/
- sofixa 4y ago
  A caveat with them is that they're really trying to be price competitive, and can sometimes go overboard (like design their own custom datacenters and servers with watercooling, and skipping some things like fire suppression systems, and using cheap material such as plywood). Having a backup with a different provider, somewhere else, is always a good idea.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    If you're very clever, watercooling is also the fire suppression system! Possibly too clever.
ht85 4y ago
Unrelated to the Linode thing, but in 15 years building and selling SaaS products, I've encountered a number of customers who nitpick prices or try to haggle. I'm not talking about non-profits with micro budgets, rather very profitable businesses. Nowadays, whenever someone goes there, I just change my usual lighthearted tone to a serious one and say "Yeah, our prices are firm, if that's outside of your budget it's better we just move on". They 180 real fast. Every. Single. Time. Then they never mention prices again.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  In the procedure list, someone included the line "Try to get a discount". When it works, it works. When it fails, it didn't work, but the next step is not "Quit" but "Continue".
  - exikyut 4y ago
    And when it works, it contributes to the business being profitable. (Kind of rhetorical, but interesting to me)
exikyut 4y ago
If you ever plan on colocating a 1U box somewhere, count me in for nibbling a bit off the end of it for $20/mo :) (I'm in Sydney, and seriously, seriously want my latency back) I did a bunch of digging a while back and it looks like the "simply cannot go any lower" baseline is $250/mo.

prng2021 4y ago

Just curious, what caused the poor experience with Vultr?

texasbigdata 4y ago
Not OP but just a guess, vultr was founded 2014 and linode is 2003. Obviously not a proxy for quality, but it’s one data point as to potentially why.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Was going to ask the same. I’ve used vultr for years and found them rock solid, and have had good support when needed. They also just opened a DC in Melbourne.

flakeoil 4y ago

These guys are in Australia amongst other locations: https://www.ovhcloud.com/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/

sofixa 4y ago
A caveat with them is that they're really trying to be price competitive, and can sometimes go overboard (like design their own custom datacenters and servers with watercooling, and skipping some things like fire suppression systems, and using cheap material such as plywood). Having a backup with a different provider, somewhere else, is always a good idea.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  If you're very clever, watercooling is also the fire suppression system! Possibly too clever.

ht85 4y ago

Unrelated to the Linode thing, but in 15 years building and selling SaaS products, I've encountered a number of customers who nitpick prices or try to haggle. I'm not talking about non-profits with micro budgets, rather very profitable businesses. Nowadays, whenever someone goes there, I just change my usual lighthearted tone to a serious one and say "Yeah, our prices are firm, if that's outside of your budget it's better we just move on". They 180 real fast. Every. Single. Time. Then they never mention prices again.

dsr_ 4y ago
In the procedure list, someone included the line "Try to get a discount". When it works, it works. When it fails, it didn't work, but the next step is not "Quit" but "Continue".
- exikyut 4y ago
  And when it works, it contributes to the business being profitable. (Kind of rhetorical, but interesting to me)

exikyut 4y ago

If you ever plan on colocating a 1U box somewhere, count me in for nibbling a bit off the end of it for $20/mo :) (I'm in Sydney, and seriously, seriously want my latency back) I did a bunch of digging a while back and it looks like the "simply cannot go any lower" baseline is $250/mo.