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I hadn't heard of Vultr before, so out of curiosity I had a look. I am actually in the market for some lower-end cloud services. - On their homepage, they list

I hadn't heard of Vultr before, so out of curiosity I had a look. I am actually in the market for some lower-end cloud services. - On their homepage, they list "Cloud Compute - starting at $2.50/month". However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying. - So I created an account. The first thing that pops up is "enter a payment method". What was that about being a "free account"? - You can click away from that and go to "Deploy New Instance". Choosing the cheapest options and disabling all the automatically selected extras, the lowest possible price seems to be twice that advertised "starting at" price. Ok, I looked around. Now I would like to delete that account I had to create. No such option. Asking Google, apparently you can only delete an account by submitting a support ticket. My first impressions are not particularly positive...

arcanemachiner 3y ago
- They're a pretty large cloud services provider (frequently spoken of in the same breath as Digital Ocean and Linode, last I checked). - Dark patterns are bullshit but are hardly unique to them. - They probably require a credit card to cut down on scams. - Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.
- karolist 3y ago
  For what it's worth, they lost me as a potential customer too, having read the parent post, so there's at least 2 of us.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    > they lost me as a potential customer too They probably lost a sizable percentage of those who read these comments as well.
    - gassiss 3y ago
      not trying to be facetious or anything, but I doubt their product team is worried about customers that are mad they have to click a few extra buttons to save 1 or 2 dollars per month
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        For every person who comments there are thousands and thousands who are reading. This is their target customer base -- highly sophisticated technical professionals who have the potential to influence many more non-technical people who take their expertise and opinions as a given. If they aren't worried about it then maybe they should think about it a bit more.
      - closewith 3y ago
        Would that not be their target market? They seem to market their low prices heavily.
      - Beldin 3y ago
        On the other hand, a competent team would care about a negative message being listed first on a popular internet forum frequented by their target demographic.
        makerdiety 3y ago
        The corporate leviathan has to first detect that event and analyze it for sentiment. Before any loss mitigating response can be possible in the first place.
- closewith 3y ago
  Digital Ocean now and Linode in the past have been considered viable providers at the companies I've worked with. Never have I ever heard the same about this company. > Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved. Do you have an interest in this company or something? Oddly passive aggressive comment.
  - nickersonm 3y ago
    Vultr is pretty well known amongst the small technically innovative "cloud" hosting companies, and IMO has better offerings than DO. They also have a peering agreement with Backblaze and Cloudflare; no transfer costs between any of the three.
  - arcanemachiner 3y ago
    No financial ties, just annoyed by the mob that comes out of the woodwork to pick apart every shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious, instead of just being stuck in the middle of an accidental PR nightmare.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      > shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious It is proof of that though. Becouse employing dark patterns is being overtly malicious for us who "see through" dark patterns. Dark patterns mostly work due to the victim not understanding them, so it makes sense to point them out.
rezonant 3y ago
> However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying. Are these not details? https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ I found this by spelunking deeply into... the main menu where there's a Pricing option. I'm not a Vultr customer and I don't have an account with them. I was curious and I made an account. And the "enter credit card" thing you complain about is just part of the onboarding flow, along with things like "set up your profile". Is it so crazy that you might want a fast track to put your card in for a hosting service? It's all optional anyway. Ignoring that (I didn't enter a credit card), there's a prominent Deploy button you can hit. The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that. Once Atlanta is selected, they also auto select a better compute class by default ("AMD High Performance"). Setting that to "Regular Cloud Compute" gets you down to that $2.50/mo price. Except for one more thing, they default select Backups for it, and that's another $1/mo. They could do better about this stuff but it's barely something to get upset about. Before you spin up the server, the final price is listed right there in both hourly and monthly units, which is better than AWS does.
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  The site is broken until you pay something on your account, including 2factor auth. doesn't inspire much confidence.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    That's not true. The pricing page I link does not require an account, and after you create an account, you can access the actual provisioning UI without entering a credit card. I just did it. The two factor is a check that you actually control the email you purport to own, it's a perfectly fine thing to do. Are you arguing against two factor by default? Are you arguing that a service shouldn't validate email addresses? Seems especially important for a service that can be used for hacking or DDOS attacks, no?
redman25 3y ago
The cheapest instances are only in specific regions I think and they are ipv6 only. I’ve been happy with them as a hosting platform.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
susi22 3y ago
Check out ionos.de. it's pretty cheap. Like 1 Euro for 1gb and 1 core
- cko 3y ago
  How did they get it so cheap? Even lower than OVH cloud.
- thekingshorses 3y ago
  They are shit. ionos.com Bad reivews on reddit.
  - adapiz 3y ago
    Really depends on what you expect for 1 Euro. A single CPU core of an Intel Xenon Gold 6230R isn't much but it handles small loads very well. 1 GB memory is okayish. 10 GB SSD? Meh. A dedicated IPv4 address? That's hot! The uptime is flawless and it's fine to host or forward requests and serve as VPN gateway for my personal stuff or host a few small services. For 1 Euro/month it's a good offer. I used it to encode videos for months. No complaints or something from them. But according to Reddit, once you get into trouble, the support is the biggest weakness. I'm just parroting what other people probably also parroted.
dom96 3y ago
Something similar happened to me. I was in a hurry so I even put some money in my account, then the $2.50/mo offering was nowhere to be found. I'm guessing they have limited numbers of these and only make them available sometimes... definitely a case of false advertising.
- iamcreasy 3y ago
  As far as I've seen $2.50 plan is always available. Right now you need to select the following options for it to show up. Type: Cloud Computer - Shared CPU Location: New York OS: Debian Plan: Regular Cloud Compute Auto backup: Disable No doubt, they will make it even harder to find in the future - behind some new feature toggle.
AYBABTME 3y ago
Free compute attracts bitcoin miners. Payment methods are a sort of proof that the user is less likely to be abusive, or at least it's much easier to deduplicate accounts by preventing reuse of payment methods across free accounts. In these cases, nothing will be charged, the payment method is just a way of delegating trust to the financial system for having authenticated a human being.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  If that’s the problem for them, should at least be communicated to potential customers before they put in their payment info. But, realistically, they should simply change the onboarding process in order to avoid that issue transparently. Allow free signup and access but require a payment method to spin up a server, for example. Or showing all the features+benefits+pricing without signup.
bcaxis 3y ago
The cheap instances are ipv6 only and only a couple of their regions have them. Atlanta, I think, does. But yeah, it's a teaser that isn't realistic. At least for me.
FredPret 3y ago
To get the 2.50 deal, you need a VPS that is, I think, in NYC and runs a certain Linux distribution, I think Debian. Everything else is $5 and up.
danield85 3y ago
There are a lot of low-end cloud services, for example you should take a look at virtono.com. They have good prices and they are running promotions all the time.

arcanemachiner 3y ago

- They're a pretty large cloud services provider (frequently spoken of in the same breath as Digital Ocean and Linode, last I checked). - Dark patterns are bullshit but are hardly unique to them. - They probably require a credit card to cut down on scams. - Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.

karolist 3y ago
For what it's worth, they lost me as a potential customer too, having read the parent post, so there's at least 2 of us.
- selcuka 3y ago
  > they lost me as a potential customer too They probably lost a sizable percentage of those who read these comments as well.
  - gassiss 3y ago
    not trying to be facetious or anything, but I doubt their product team is worried about customers that are mad they have to click a few extra buttons to save 1 or 2 dollars per month
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      For every person who comments there are thousands and thousands who are reading. This is their target customer base -- highly sophisticated technical professionals who have the potential to influence many more non-technical people who take their expertise and opinions as a given. If they aren't worried about it then maybe they should think about it a bit more.
    - closewith 3y ago
      Would that not be their target market? They seem to market their low prices heavily.
    - Beldin 3y ago
      On the other hand, a competent team would care about a negative message being listed first on a popular internet forum frequented by their target demographic.
      - makerdiety 3y ago
        The corporate leviathan has to first detect that event and analyze it for sentiment. Before any loss mitigating response can be possible in the first place.
closewith 3y ago
Digital Ocean now and Linode in the past have been considered viable providers at the companies I've worked with. Never have I ever heard the same about this company. > Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved. Do you have an interest in this company or something? Oddly passive aggressive comment.
- nickersonm 3y ago
  Vultr is pretty well known amongst the small technically innovative "cloud" hosting companies, and IMO has better offerings than DO. They also have a peering agreement with Backblaze and Cloudflare; no transfer costs between any of the three.
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  No financial ties, just annoyed by the mob that comes out of the woodwork to pick apart every shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious, instead of just being stuck in the middle of an accidental PR nightmare.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > shitty dark pattern as if that's evidence that this company is overtly malicious It is proof of that though. Becouse employing dark patterns is being overtly malicious for us who "see through" dark patterns. Dark patterns mostly work due to the victim not understanding them, so it makes sense to point them out.

rezonant 3y ago

> However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying. Are these not details? https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ I found this by spelunking deeply into... the main menu where there's a Pricing option. I'm not a Vultr customer and I don't have an account with them. I was curious and I made an account. And the "enter credit card" thing you complain about is just part of the onboarding flow, along with things like "set up your profile". Is it so crazy that you might want a fast track to put your card in for a hosting service? It's all optional anyway. Ignoring that (I didn't enter a credit card), there's a prominent Deploy button you can hit. The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that. Once Atlanta is selected, they also auto select a better compute class by default ("AMD High Performance"). Setting that to "Regular Cloud Compute" gets you down to that $2.50/mo price. Except for one more thing, they default select Backups for it, and that's another $1/mo. They could do better about this stuff but it's barely something to get upset about. Before you spin up the server, the final price is listed right there in both hourly and monthly units, which is better than AWS does.

1oooqooq 3y ago
The site is broken until you pay something on your account, including 2factor auth. doesn't inspire much confidence.
- rezonant 3y ago
  That's not true. The pricing page I link does not require an account, and after you create an account, you can access the actual provisioning UI without entering a credit card. I just did it. The two factor is a check that you actually control the email you purport to own, it's a perfectly fine thing to do. Are you arguing against two factor by default? Are you arguing that a service shouldn't validate email addresses? Seems especially important for a service that can be used for hacking or DDOS attacks, no?

redman25 3y ago

The cheapest instances are only in specific regions I think and they are ipv6 only. I’ve been happy with them as a hosting platform.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

susi22 3y ago

Check out ionos.de. it's pretty cheap. Like 1 Euro for 1gb and 1 core

cko 3y ago
How did they get it so cheap? Even lower than OVH cloud.
thekingshorses 3y ago
They are shit. ionos.com Bad reivews on reddit.
- adapiz 3y ago
  Really depends on what you expect for 1 Euro. A single CPU core of an Intel Xenon Gold 6230R isn't much but it handles small loads very well. 1 GB memory is okayish. 10 GB SSD? Meh. A dedicated IPv4 address? That's hot! The uptime is flawless and it's fine to host or forward requests and serve as VPN gateway for my personal stuff or host a few small services. For 1 Euro/month it's a good offer. I used it to encode videos for months. No complaints or something from them. But according to Reddit, once you get into trouble, the support is the biggest weakness. I'm just parroting what other people probably also parroted.

dom96 3y ago

Something similar happened to me. I was in a hurry so I even put some money in my account, then the $2.50/mo offering was nowhere to be found. I'm guessing they have limited numbers of these and only make them available sometimes... definitely a case of false advertising.

iamcreasy 3y ago
As far as I've seen $2.50 plan is always available. Right now you need to select the following options for it to show up. Type: Cloud Computer - Shared CPU Location: New York OS: Debian Plan: Regular Cloud Compute Auto backup: Disable No doubt, they will make it even harder to find in the future - behind some new feature toggle.

AYBABTME 3y ago

Free compute attracts bitcoin miners. Payment methods are a sort of proof that the user is less likely to be abusive, or at least it's much easier to deduplicate accounts by preventing reuse of payment methods across free accounts. In these cases, nothing will be charged, the payment method is just a way of delegating trust to the financial system for having authenticated a human being.

joshspankit 3y ago
If that’s the problem for them, should at least be communicated to potential customers before they put in their payment info. But, realistically, they should simply change the onboarding process in order to avoid that issue transparently. Allow free signup and access but require a payment method to spin up a server, for example. Or showing all the features+benefits+pricing without signup.

bcaxis 3y ago

The cheap instances are ipv6 only and only a couple of their regions have them. Atlanta, I think, does. But yeah, it's a teaser that isn't realistic. At least for me.

FredPret 3y ago

To get the 2.50 deal, you need a VPS that is, I think, in NYC and runs a certain Linux distribution, I think Debian. Everything else is $5 and up.

danield85 3y ago

There are a lot of low-end cloud services, for example you should take a look at virtono.com. They have good prices and they are running promotions all the time.