Atlantic.net launches $0.99 SSD-based VPS servers

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-launches-0-99month-ssd-based-vps-hosting-service/

by ridruejo • 12 years ago

265 195 12 years ago

jewel• 12 years ago

Something is wrong with their pricing, since a server with twice the RAM, bandwidth, and disk is $5/mo. It's too bad you can't combine two or more of these $1 servers in order to get just the right amount of VPS.

This low price makes me wish that RAM and CPU could be added to cloud servers on an as-needed basis, i.e. hot-swappable RAM. That would be much more useful than autoscaling since it could react to traffic very quickly. You'd need live-migration behind the scenes to make it work, of course.

albertoleal2• 12 years ago

Felt the same way. I'm wondering what the catch is.

akie• 12 years ago

Lock-in, that's what the catch is. It's supposed to act as a gateway to more expensive plans.

dspillett• 12 years ago

You often see plans like this on LEB, the catch is usually very oversold on CPU and memory resources, more so then more expensive plans. This might be less apparent with a bigger name provider who can swallow a bit more on there loss-leader plans so YMMV here. Of course to many light uses that overselling isn't going to matter particularly particularly when SSD backed as that reduces the effect of rampant I/O contention. In fact for things that need a small burst of CPU umpf every now and then, an oversold VM on a beefy host will outperform a cheap dedicated box (with an atom chip for instance) costing much more per month.

pervycreeper3• 12 years ago

I would imagine that they are betting that most users will use this to host small static sites with negligible traffic, allowing them to benefit from payed for, but unused resources.

albertoleal2• 12 years ago

I can do that on GitHub pages for free...

Someone1234• 12 years ago

If that's the case then people could just use Amazon's S3. You can get a LOT of static site for 10c/month.

More likely scenario is a tiny PHP site with the database hosted elsewhere?

aroch11• 12 years ago

So will I get a nastygram if I buy 10 of these and push the whole 1TB every month?

Edit:

So their AUP[1] is full of a lot of crappy policies. Not allowed to use all the RAM you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the bandwidth you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the CPU you're assigned. No crons or background services -- what the fuck? No IRC, TOR, or p2p activity. They have an obscenity/morality clause. Cannot do any webdev that uses custom headers -- would even suggest that running wget or curl with a --user-agent flag is in violation.

Edit2:

And they require a valid address and phone number to even register. Screw off.

    Please note that in order to protect the integrity of 
    our cloud, Atlantic.Net verifies phone and other 
    contact information prior to account activation. Please 
    be certain to provide a working phone number where you 
    can be reached in order to avoid delays in the account 
    creation process.

No thank you.

[1] https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/

d23• 12 years ago

I suppose there's always a catch, but no background services? Talk about useless...

zeroDivisible• 12 years ago

I understand that with that price for providing a server, they need to do some user validation - thus the requirement for address and phone.

But that issue with background services or cron - for that price, that's exactly why I'd consider their service. May I know what might be the reason why they don't allow this?

aroch11• 12 years ago

they need to do some user validation

Nonsense. There are plenty of cheap hosts that don't do that sort of validation.

May I know what might be the reason why they don't allow this?

Either they copypasta'd a boilerplate AUP -- in which case they're inept. Or they don't know how to properly virtualize and manage those provisions -- in which case they're also inept.

petercooper5• 12 years ago

In their AUP, they have headings followed by full explanations. Under their "obscene materials" section, they specifically only talk about child pornography, which seems fair enough.

I get the impression they've reused this AUP from a shared hosting environment though, as banning CGI scripts, "chat rooms", and background services are not things practical to police on VPSes anyway but are commonly policed on shared hosting. Statements like "Any database stored on Atlantic.Net servers shall be limited in size to 50% of the total disk space allotted for a particular domain" seem to back up this hunch, since it's talking about space for a "domain" and not a VPS or server.

I think they need to improve their AUP as I'm not convinced that it's what they intend for VPS services, too much of it doesn't make sense for that sort of environment.

aroch11• 12 years ago

If they borrowed liberally (ie copy and pasted) an existing AUP from some one else (typos and errors included) that doesn't even apply to their services, they don't deserve the ¢99.

That subsection is a morality clause, regardless of their explanatory blurb.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Your right. I am going to work on this tomorrow, it was adapted from a prior business model. Thanks for pointing this out!

biot• 12 years ago

These kinds of policies are unfortunately commonplace and largely ignored. Gandi.net, which incidentally powers Amazon's Route 53 domain registration, requires that you agree to their "good moral standards" [0]. Gandi reserves the right to shut down your services without notice if, among many other reasons, they in their sole discretion deem you are doing anything deviant, you're not respecting someone's honor, or if the content isn't appropriate to each person's sensibility... where "each person" can be any of the millions of users you have using your services.

[0] http://www.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.p... (Note that this is the English copy of their rules, which is not binding. You are bound to the French version.)

ehPReth2• 12 years ago

Yuck. What other providers would you recommend that don't have such in their ToS?

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Hi,

The spirit of this is to avoid abuse on our cloud. If you don't feel comfortable providing us with contact information, we're probably not the place for you. I'm working on the AUP tomorrow, the cron/background services doesn't make sense or the RAM.

aroch11• 12 years ago

So you tried to launch this with great fanfare and couldn't be bothered to review your AUP? Or the copy in most sections of your site (typos, unmatched tenses, random spaces or lack thereof)?

Why should I trust you with my information if you can't even handle your own?

What kind of abuse do you think it is preventing? How does it prevent abuse from anyone but the least motivated abuser? If I wanted to abuse your service, I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical turk to register accounts for me (indeed this is a fairly common low-skill-low-reward task on mturk).

I'm sorry but this plus the launch of your HIPAA hosting, which was also plagued by typos and wrong ToS, doesn't inspire any sort of confidence in your abilities at Atlantic.net.

blhack• 12 years ago

Who wrote this? Why did something about cron jobs even make it into the AUP?

aroch11• 12 years ago

Why does 'your' AUP contain the same errors present in an AUP written in 2007?

https://web.archive.org/web/20141001003619/http://www.pslhos...

Edit: Jesus the more I dig into this the more worried I become about what the hell kind of business you're running. Assuming you're on the only one to use the `mp99e99` handle with any regularity, I'm greatly concerned.

wosos2• 12 years ago

I'm about to get signed up and start recommending this to a few small business, I'll be looking forward to this change on the AUP. Thank you for your response.

benmorris• 12 years ago

Looking forward to reading the new one. I have been evaluating your company for a month now and had decided to move some sites over, however as your AUP is written they would be in violation (cron jobs).

Animats• 12 years ago

Thanks. I just sent in a query about that to your support email. How would you feel about someone who bought a large number of $0.99/month instances, all of which had lots of network traffic with each other and were often compute-bound? Like the things one routinely does on Amazon AWS.

(I'm exploring the possibility of a new kind of service which requires each user to have their own private cloud server, with all the cloud servers talking to each other.)

srcmap5• 12 years ago

mp99e99,

I ran nginx as proxy + one web app in a DO instance. CPU usage always < 2% for the whole system and serving 20-40GB of mainly html,js, css, json per month.

Do you consider the web app as background services?

Is it ok to expand my next server instance to your solution per your biz model/AUP?

tomjen32• 12 years ago

I don't feel comfortable sharing my phone number with businesses because I have seen what they do to my email inbox.

This has nothing to do with me being untrusthworthy and everything to do with _you_ being untrustworthy. Work on changing my perception of you, or don't.

dholowiski• 12 years ago

That's good... the cron job thing (which is bizzare by the way) is a show stopper for me but if that changes I'll be spinning up several servers for sure.

ekianjo• 12 years ago

Basically you'd be better using this for static pages hosting only...

Sami_Lehtinen2• 12 years ago

If you need cheap bandwidth, OVH is better option. https://www.ovh.co.uk/vps/vps-classic.xml More memory, more bandwidth. If talking about DO comptition, Vultr is also worth of chekcing out. https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

aroch11• 12 years ago

I don't need cheap BW but if they're going to offer it, is it a real offer it a bullshit rope people in offer? I have 20-25 "real" servers and a handful of VPSs from (good) providers that fulfill my needs well.

OVH's CEO, Oles, doesn't care about their big clients and happily changes the terms of their contract (in less than legal ways) to screw them. I'd rather not do business with them.

mappu• 12 years ago

There are lots of providers at or around this price point (check out lowendbox or http://www.lowendstock.com/). It's generally accepted they're oversold, but that doesn't make them any less of a good deal.

For instance crissic.net (happy customer) offer 256MB ram and either 20GB SSD or 50GB spinning-rust for 15USD/year.

The only news here is that Linode and DO don't think they can be profitable at these price points (and it's probably not possible when using Xen/KVM that can't easily be overprovisioned).

themodelplumber• 12 years ago

Couldn't find any uptime records kept by a third party, and their uptime SLAs don't seem to have much to do with uptime guarantees (as opposed to 'we will bring you back up in 30 minutes, etc.). https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level-guarant...

As a business owner, I wouldn't bet anything on that. For personal development stuff though maybe it's great.

SwellJoe2• 12 years ago

There's a lot of ways to make a VPS suck, by not spending money where it's needed. An under-powered disk subsystem is probably going to contribute to these sucking (as Digital Ocean sucked in the beginning; not sure if they've fixed their disk bandwidth problems).

But, assuming they aren't horribly under-powered on any of the vectors that affect performance, this is a great deal. 256MB is just enough to run a reasonable web server on, even with a database-backed application. Two more servers for DNS, and one for SMTP, and you'd have a solid setup for a large variety of tasks for under 5 bucks, and you'd control all of your services and all of your data. You couldn't run a big community site with lots of users, but you could definitely run a blog (for potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors, depending on how you setup that blog) or simple site.

kevinchen• 12 years ago

Sequential write on my $5/month DigitalOcean instance in NYC2 region:

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
    1000+0 records in
    1000+0 records out
    1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.84267 s, 273 MB/s

It used to be about 80 MB/s last year, so it's gotten a lot better since.

hackerboos4• 12 years ago

Atlantic.Net 256mb VPS

    root@hackerboosblog:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
    1000+0 records in
    1000+0 records out
    1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.11193 s, 337 MB/s

petercooper5• 12 years ago

What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly tricky to get extra IPs on some hosts, yet you can pay relatively small sums to spin up VPSes all over the place, each with their own IP :-)

eli• 12 years ago

Is it actually hard to get extra IPs anywhere? Sometimes I've had to fill out a form or pay a $1/mo but I've never been declined. (I suppose I also always have a good reason.)

aroch11• 12 years ago

If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a /16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large hosts are part of.

staunch2• 12 years ago

Has anyone written about this extensively?

Gormo• 12 years ago

I think you're right. I set up a VPS last year with a provider based in Buffalo, NY, but for a few weeks, geolocators kept placing my IP in Indonesia. But there doesn't really seem to be anything untoward about moving IPs from areas of low demand to areas of high demand.

kijin4• 12 years ago

I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world.

It has, though, become more difficult to get additional IPs than before. Linode used to hand out one additional IP per VPS on demand, but now they require a justification for all additional IPs.

petercooper5• 12 years ago

I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays.

I agree, although consumer devices - especially mobiles - could be easily NATed by a provider, no? I'm not too savvy on the demands of mobile devices but I don't think incoming connections are a requirement for anything(?)

runeks2• 12 years ago

Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world.

It's worth noting, though, that smartphone users don't care whether their traffic is carried using IPv4 of IPv6, so you can slowly transition from one to the other without users noticing. 15% of T-Mobile's connections are IPv6: https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_13...

If you started only giving out IPv6 addresses to VPS customers, I don't think they would be as oblivious as the smartphone users.

illumen• 12 years ago

Yeah, good point.

There's a lot of cheap VPS hosts which only do protocol 6. For many purposes, that is just fine.

cbhl2• 12 years ago

One thing that caught me off guard is that these are IPv4-only; if you want IPv6 you have to use HE.net tunnels or similar.

IPv6-only hosts I understand, but I can't imagine that you'd be able to get IPv4 addresses cheaply enough to maintain this pricing for long.

discardorama• 12 years ago

Not to threadjack, but: what's a good alternative for the occasional high-ram, high-CPU-usage compute-intensive task? Say I wanted a machine to run some MCMC simulations, and needed 32GB RAM and a fast i7-class CPU. Where would I find one?

aroch11• 12 years ago

Hetzner if you plan on using it fairly regularly: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

Rackspace Cloud for relatively cheap compute once in a blue moon

colechristensen• 12 years ago

AWS. (obviously)

For an instance you run only rarely the somewhat higher cost of EC2 instances compared to other providers should be fairly irrelevant. You'll find options from about 30 to 80 cents an hour.

acc00• 12 years ago

Depends on the value of "occasional", but did you try asking your friends?

I've seen that being done around here, since the hardware you're describing really is pretty close to a beefy desktop/home server which usually spend their lives idly spinning their fans.

drl42• 12 years ago

AWS spot instances

joshz• 12 years ago

AWS or www.dominoup.com if it's with Python, R, Matlab or julia

gsteinb88• 12 years ago

I've had some great interactions with the team at (but haven't had the need to use yet for anything intensive) rescale.com

henpa• 12 years ago

http://ovh.com/us is the best I found!

lelandbatey• 12 years ago

Just to put in endorsement: I've used OVH for years, and I love their service. Just this past week while upgrading a server I accidentally screwed up my GRUB configuration and couldn't boot back up.

However, they noticed the downtime problem and emailed me saying that a technician had been dispatched to look at the problem. Within 15 minutes, they fixed my GRUB configuration and had my server back up. And, they didn't charge me any for the work the technician did.

It was awesome, and they immediately won my long-time business!

mikeyur• 12 years ago

Incero Instant would probably be a good place to look. Dedicated servers with per-minute billing: http://incero.com/instant

E3 w/ 32GB ram or dual E5 with 384GB ram.

jsabo• 12 years ago

Rackspace recently rolled out 'cloud' dedicated servers that are designed for this use case. You just pay for the time that you have the server, so for workloads like you described I think it's worth checking out. See here for more info: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/

Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace

kolanos• 12 years ago

I'm not a fan of these pricing models for VPSs. If you're fine with an oversubscribed OpenVZ VPS with minimal RAM/HDD then you might as well be on a shared virtual host. Even with an oversubscribed OpenVZ infrastructure, I can't imagine Atlantic.net makes a profit at this price point.I shudder to think where they're cutting corners. I can only assume the strategy is to get them (the customers) in the door at $0.99/mo. and hope they'll upgrade when they quickly outgrow their bare minimum VPS specs. But if I'm in that position, am I really going to stay with a OpenVZ provider instead of moving on to a KVM/Xen one where I know I'm getting what I paid for?

derefr4• 12 years ago

Are these OpenVZ? That's a shame.

Really, all I've ever wanted is an IaaS provider that gives me VMs in the shape of Heroku's instance partitions: a little bit of guaranteed CPU/memory/IOPS per dollar, with cheap/free low-jitter bandwidth thrown in, made specifically for allowing network-server applications that scale horizontally.

My 64MB-of-memory IO-bound Erlang chat server doesn't need a 4GB instance with eight cores. But it has to take that instance, because that's what you pay for in order to get a good uplink.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

Now that you mention it, it seems odd that companies don't let you tweak specs individually. RAM, CPU, disk space, network speed, etc. are all independent variables. Why not have some pricing formula and then give us a slider for each dimension and let us choose what we want?

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Its KVM, not OpenVZ.

makomk• 12 years ago

OpenVZ's only going to get more painful once all the major distros migrate to systemd. The systemd developers basically assume that you're going to upgrade the kernel in lockstep with the rest of the distro and that's just not feasible with OpenVZ.

corford2• 12 years ago

Love the price. Shame they haven't got an EU presence :(

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Its coming :)

corford2• 12 years ago

Awesome!

papaf• 12 years ago

Worth considering if you are in the EU:

https://www.ultravps.eu/en/

I found them when I was looking for a provider that had Linux Arch images.

hackerboos4• 12 years ago

SATA storage...

seldo• 12 years ago

It's a pretty interesting case study of interface design that because DO's website looks so much nicer, their servers feel like a good deal, while Atlantic.net's old-fashioned branding makes it just feel fly by night, even though I'm sure they're objectively pretty similar.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We have a new interface & website, but weren't able to get it up by launch time. I agree, DO's interface is prettier, as well as their website. They do a great job with the design over there.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Hi Everyone:

Thanks for the thumbs up on this.

Firstly, we are a 20-year old startup! Everyone laughed at us when we talked about doing the original Internet startup -- dialup Internet. Over time, we adapted and rode the booms and busts that went on in our industry, all the while staying cash flow positive and learning to GRIND.

We are thinking there is going to be a explosion in startups globally, that will lead to the next big things, not just in the web but material sciences, biotech, etc.

Our goal is to build out a global compute infrastructure and get it in the hands of tomorrows Einsteins.. wherever they are born. We want to see the future happen faster, and see more of it in our lifetimes. Thats not going to happen if we wait around for today's dominant players, who for whatever reason are moving extremely slow.

Thats our over-reaching goal. You can read about it here:

https://www.atlantic.net/blog/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-launch...

Doing a startup is really, really hard. We're trying to make it less so. We're also ready to provide an alternative narrative to AWS conquering the world -- but we have to be aggressive and go FAST!

So, bottom line is we're trying to do something new,take some risks,be bold, and take on the giants of the industry.

AWS's margin is our opportunity :)

Wish us luck! We're going for it!

Karunamon2• 12 years ago

This is great to hear, there's nothing ever wrong with more competition, but could you respond to the concerns in this thread with regards to your AUP? Your terms as currently written, are at the very least extremely limiting.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Hi, I'm going to work on the AUP tomorrow. The spirit of our AUP is to discourage antisocial behavior.

lsc8• 12 years ago

hey, good luck! this is your day and if your time on hn/reddit was like mine so many years ago when my prices were good, you probably want to be racking up new servers rather than answering questions, but even though I'm a competitor rather than a customer, I imagine others are wanting to know the answers to similar questions:

what virtualization technology are you using? Is it openvz/virtuozo/container based? or is it kvm or xen hypervisor based?

Are your backups hosted on a different provider or on a different server?

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

KVM

Backups are on another server in the same datacenter.

kefka• 12 years ago

Why the hell do you require a phone# to get this service?

What is going on in your ToS? Sure looks lifted from an older provider... And the morality clause with copyright violation of the ToS is rather funny, albeit sad.

Why should I pay _you_ money?

hackerboos4• 12 years ago

They didn't call me when I signed up.

I guess they flag high risk and only call in those cases.

imdsm3• 12 years ago

Want advice? Accept global payments, not just American payments. The internet is global. Want more business? Sort your damn payment structure out. Yes you can have my contact details, I'm not a criminal, but you can FO if you think I'm going to jump through hoops to PAY YOU money.

Unless you sort that out, you're stopping people from buying from you, and that my friend, is your biggest mistake.

theshrike79• 12 years ago

"State" shouldn't be a required field on registration, not every country is the United STATES of America.

My country doesn't have states, at least ones that have any kind of influence at any level.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Interesting, added this to our list of customer suggestions for review. Thanks for the heads up!

salgernon• 12 years ago

I signed up for a $.99 VPS some years ago; horrible service and downtime, so I wrote them to cancel. And wrote them and wrote them. And complained to their domain registrar, and stopped the auto-withdrawl of $.99 from paypal, and complained some more. To this day, I get a $.99 email bill with an invalid reply-to address, followed by a $.99 second notice bill. Every month... I'm sure there are people that have let their auto-pay accounts continue to feed whoever is at the back end of this. (vpstree.com)

devicenull• 12 years ago

So, you're complaining about a completely unrelated company... for what reason?

javajosh• 12 years ago

Yeah, for real - I'm sorry for your terrible experience, but surely it doesn't have much to do with atlantic.net...

lprez• 12 years ago

A real direct competitor in DO and Linode is Vultr.com

My experience with them has been positive. They have slightly higher specs and a good variety of locations.

pdq• 12 years ago

I have used Vultr's $5/month service for at least the past 6 months. It has only restarted once unexpectedly, and the CPU performance is quite impressive for that price.

Kudos• 12 years ago

Anecdotal web hosting recommendations are worse than useless and everyone seems to have one regardless of how qualified they are to give it.

adnanh• 12 years ago

Registration is too complicated and cumbersome.

I gave up when they couldn't call me on my phone and requested a copy of my passport, driver's licence or a bank bill...

I'll just stick with DigitalOcean...

yelnatz• 12 years ago

I'm actually waiting for their call right now.

That fact actually blindsided me since I already gave info and couldn't just login and start up the server.

I wish I'd have read stuff carefully before blindlessy jumping into a deal.

wcchandler• 12 years ago

I waited about 10 minutes before hitting up their chat. They were able to finish the authentication process from there.

notastartup• 12 years ago

what would you guys use a $0.99 server for?

kijin4• 12 years ago

Monitoring, VPN, or maybe just a spare box to experiment with.

If you're outside of the United States, VPN on a tiny server is by far the cheapest way to access US-only content.

srcmap5• 12 years ago

Any idea if the IP address in Alantic 's network is blocked in China?

powertower• 12 years ago

Atlantic.Net says it is targeting this service at early-stage and bootstrapped startups that want develop on a dependable cheap server.

They are doing no such thing.

At 99 cents per month, they are targeting people who want things for free, hoping that they can later up-sell, or convert them to a higher plan.

Don't know how well this is going to work in the hosting industry - usually the lower the cost, the worse the customer is.

I'd like to say maybe as someone on the 99 cent plan sees that they need more resources, they could click a button and get on the $9.99 plan, but that might be wishful thinking, and they are just opening themselves up to an enormous drain on resources.

Either way, if there is any indication of people signing up for this, all the other hosting companies are going to match this plan within 24-48 hours, just like they did when everyone switched to "unlimited" offerings. It's a race to the bottom.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

While its true we would like you to buy a larger plan, in other countries even $5 USD can be barrier to entry for a speculative idea. Plus, what if you want to tinker, toy and learn? We're trying something new, give it a chance.

petercooper5• 12 years ago

I'm not suggesting Atlantic are doing this, but back in the days when shared hosting was more popular and hosts more predatory, it was common to see hosts offer deals like paying $99 for a year of hosting, they'd give that straight to the affiliate who referred the sale, they'd put the prices up 2-3x in year two, and enough people would stick around to make it all pay off.

Such a strategy could work even better with a VPS since it's harder to migrate away due to the more complex things people tend to do with them.

cowpewter• 12 years ago

It's always surreal to me to see Atlantic.net in the news. I worked in their customer service department for over six years back when their primary product was still dialup internet. It was a pretty good job, for call center work. No scripts, no quotas - each MSR was trained and trusted to actually be able to solve customers' problems on their own.

I don't know if that's the case anymore. By 2007, dialup was dead and the company had pivoted to making most of its money from hosting. I left a few months prior, but still had friends working in the call center when they were all laid off. I don't know if they outsource their phone-based customer service now or if they set up a new call center in Orlando instead of Gainesville, but if it's the former, it's a shame.

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Hello Atlantic.net alumni! We're still grinding it out and trying to change the world from here! Keep hope alive!

rubiquity• 12 years ago

Didn't the 90s and early 2000s teach us all that "You get what you pay for" when it comes to hosting?

wmf• 12 years ago

OTOH, Moore's Law says that at some point you should be able to get a decent amount of hardware for $1/month. No support, of course.

obilgic• 12 years ago

I want a hosted docker service which charges me based on the MB ram used per min

KnightHawk3• 12 years ago

They are probably going to charge by CPU / minute instead of ram.

It's easy to make programs that run in 1mb of ram and use 100% cpu for example. Ram costs less to be full than CPU does.

joshmn4• 12 years ago

While I'd give them a whirl on their lower tier, their pricing for their largest instance (16384 MB/4 vCPU/200 GB/7 TB, $160 for Linux) isn't that competitive.

(non-affiliated plug) I've been using http://RunAbove.com for something this large, and it's an absolute steal. They're backed by OVH.

Versus a similarly-specced DigitalOcean node for $240 (2.5x RunAbove the cost), we were seeing a performance increase of 35% on our high-volume API.

And that's on non-tuned Postgres/Rails4/Redis Docker containers.

srcmap5• 12 years ago

For this price/ram/cpu needs, does it make more sense to do colo your own server? I see colo 1U server normally ~100 per month.

joshmn4• 12 years ago

It would! However colocating requires money upfront to buy the hardware. It's a good long-term play but short-term you don't really see the benefits. There are other things to worry about too, such as remote hands, which we really don't want to deal with.

aguki• 12 years ago

LowEndSpirit offers SSD-based VPSes for €3 per year with a larger worldwide coverage. Downside is you only get a IPv6 address

http://lowendspirit.com/locations.html

hackerboos4• 12 years ago

I find hosting providers that use WHMCS tend to disappear after a few months and at these prices you can almost guarantee it.

debian3• 12 years ago

When I try to signup and I see that their "2GB RAM" plan @ $19.94 is their "Most Popular"...

nacs• 12 years ago

Most websites that have a "Most Popular" tag on a plan are almost always lying I've noticed. In reality, its just the plan the company wants you to get and has no reflection on actual sales volume.

lsc8• 12 years ago

I find it interesting how the trend is moving towards charging less per unit resource on the low-end plans; digital ocean gives you more disk per dollar on the small plan, while these people give you dramatically better ram per dollar on the low-end plans.

The interesting part (and why the pricing scheme that I chose moves in the opposite direction, e.g. you get more resources per dollar as you buy more) - is that while the cost of hardware is pretty linear, there is certainly a support and abuse cost associated with every account, so the lower-end accounts cost the provider more per unit ram to provide.

sloop• 12 years ago

I think what we're seeing is both: 1) more cut-throat competition to have the lowest advertised price (the ads just display the minimum available price, not the price of a service that actually meets a customer's need) AND 2) once you get a customer on your platform, they are likely to upgrade and/or add more services which will be at the higher price points.

lsc8• 12 years ago

yeah, I would assume that 1. would push the price down in general.

The trend to discount the smallest plans has got to be mostly 2.

It's an interesting strategy; if it works, it would imply that there is more sensitivity to price at the bottom of the market than there is at the top of the market.

visarga3• 12 years ago

They also give you an IP address if I am not wrong, included in the same $0.99/month. Any other host would charge that just for the IP alone.

lsc8• 12 years ago

While that is about market rate for a single IP, an IP address doesn't actually cost the ISP much at all.

https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html#isps

also, at least until ARIN runs out, it's in your interest to qualify for as many IP addresses as you can, and VPSs are one way to legitimately "show efficient use" of your current IP addresses.

jperks022• 12 years ago

I just signed up and was able to have my account validated through the chat - so far it seems pretty great!

visarga3• 12 years ago

At the very least, it's a possible cheap VPN/cloud storage server. Is there an open source stack that would replace Google's solution to mail/calendar/cloud file storage and sync?

icebraining• 12 years ago

https://owncloud.org/

Sami_Lehtinen2• 12 years ago

No European data centre option(s) available. ;(

bcx• 12 years ago

It's hard to be a web hosting company, and atlantic.net has been in the business since 1995. I am impressed that they are fighting to stay relevant, even if it is a race to the bottom.

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and Registrars. Domain Name: ATLANTIC.NET Registry Domain ID: 1092612_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.tucows.com Registrar URL: http://tucowsdomains.com Updated Date: 2014-09-16 11:43:09 Creation Date: 1995-05-17 04:00:00

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

Thanks, its not easy!

ForFreedom2• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, what can you runon 256MB ram?

Nux2• 12 years ago

Quite a lot of stuff. A small dns server, email server, web server etc.

ForFreedom2• 12 years ago

But the load factor? To run a http + db server?

growt• 12 years ago

SSD performance data:

  dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test   conv=fdatasync
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.7785 s, 386 MB/s

  hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5

  /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5: 
  Timing cached reads:   14362 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7189.28 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads: 1770 MB in  3.00 seconds = 589.21 MB/sec

really nice.

sauere• 12 years ago

Reading the comments here really is funny. If you do not like their ToS, you are free to go somewhere else. Your money, your vote.

Personally i find their policy very understandable. Obviously you won't be able to host a TOR node on this thing or push tons of traffic over it. That's obviously not what it was made for. This $1 deal is perfect for hosting simple, static sites or just playing around with the OS. But some people will complain about anything.

runeks2• 12 years ago

I agree completely.

The only way to go below $1/mo is by using over-subscription. You don't get dedicated hardware for $1/mo.

With over-subscription, it's a mathematical fact that you cannot use all the processing power you've seemingly been given. The VPS provider could just give you only as much CPU power as you can use at any time (effectively 1/n the total power with n users) -- but that would be terribly inefficient (most of the CPU power would be unused at any given time).

This isn't for everyone, of course, but I don't see a reason to criticize this business model when it delivers a definite advantage: lower prices.

If you don't like the trade-off of a lower price at the cost of not being able to use as much CPU power or RAM as you like, you may choose a service with less or no over-subscription. But I don't see how that subtracts from what this service has to offer.

x1798DE• 12 years ago

I feel like none of the people commenting on the ToS did buy the services. They were warning people who might not have read them that you're not necessarily getting what you'd expect. It's a perfectly reasonable comment to make.

tomjen32• 12 years ago

It is quite reasonable to voice your disagreement with their policies _and_ take your money somewhere else.

Besides with that TOS it should have been part of the headline.

imdsm3• 12 years ago

So I just wasted a lot of time to find out they only accept credit cards? Not debit cards, not PayPal, nor anything else?

Wasted my time. GFY Atlantic.net

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

We accept debit cards & prepaid credit cards, too.

cbhl2• 12 years ago

FWIW, outside of the US, debit cards are not always Visa and MasterCard branded.

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

If I had caught the limit of just one per customer, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of signing up. This would be useful to me, but I had plans that required 4-5 instances, and no desire for the more expensive offerings.

ramnode has a roughly equivalent offering for $2/mo (8/q)

mp99e9921• 12 years ago

We are limiting these to try to have enough capacity so everyone can get one. Its new!

lsv1• 12 years ago

I just bought 2 and will be trying them out over the next bit. I think these boxes will be amazing to host my client static sites and basic CMS back-ends. At $1 a month I'd like to buy 20~ in the near future.

jshsmn• 12 years ago

Revised AUP is up: https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/

diwu1989• 12 years ago

The CPU performance is pretty good for a single core. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/932814

Atlantic.net launches $0.99 SSD-based VPS servers

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