vilpponen

Here's their official blog post on the announcement: https://www.hackerone.com/blog/The-best-security-initiative-...

"Given the choice, I'm sure most rational businesses would prefer the uptime over the credit."

How would you propose to compensate with uptime (if I've understood correctly)? Interested to learn your thoughts on this.

If I've understood your situation correctly - then yes, this would be an issue that is covered by our SLA. Our customer data is actually hosted on two separate storage backends for issues like failing disk drives.

Our approach on this is that when we offer a service to you, you should not be worried about how the physical equipment functions - it should just work. Hence all issues on that front would be our responsibility. Glad to talk more on this if you're interested. My contact details can be found on our company website.

I would definitely buy a car if they advertised it to never break down - if the compensation on the promise would be good enough!

But seriously speaking, a 99.99% SLA is not more realistic or achievable in itself than any other SLA promise. It all depends on the provider (how they strive to reach that promise) and what they promise in return if the promise is broken.

Thanks for the comment! A 100% SLA is actually a promise of future uptime. Nobody can of course guarantee their uptime, no matter what the SLA percentage. Thus, the company includes compensation in the agreement if the service level is not met. All this of course is decided based on historical data and what makes business sense for the company, ie. how much money are they willing to lose if their services go down.

Thanks for the comment. I work at UpCloud so I'll chip in my 2c on the issue. Your description of "how much money providers are willing to risk" is a great way to approach this. While it doesn't probably give you the most universal view on redundancy - it is a good, comparative measure of how much companies are willing to risk if their services go down.

Building multi-cloud services is of course a way to try and avoid this, but I would say that this approach isn't very well adopted as of yet.

Having said that, those utilising cloud hosting services will need to balance their own risk levels with those of the companies they are looking at and find the best match. Another way to approach this is to ask; how much am I willing to risk my business for the benefit of this company offering me a cloud hosting service?

Full disclosure: I work at UpCloud, a cloud hosting provider and I think business in this industry day and night.

One thing that gets overlooked in almost all comparisons is the pricing models. I actually use Glacier through Arq (brilliant backup for Mac), but the catch is in the requests. I recently uploaded 200GB of photos to glacier and the upload process cost me about $10. The monthly storage is about $2.

The thing is that you shouldn't compare the sole storage price, but the total of cost of storing your data in glacier, which was also overlooked in the original article.

I'm sure AWS has understood this through their S3 storage lifecycle and thus developed an appropriate pricing model for glacier that arouses interest in the product like no other.

Hey, this is the GM of UpCloud. Feel free to ask me anything or e-mail me. You can find my e-mail from our company page under contacts.

I used to work on ArcticStartup with Karri Saarinen for several years. Grew to respect his views on simplicity, beauty and function.

Congrats gents on the latest developments!

Naturally the user is always responsible for the purchase he/she makes. However, if I (OP) make my selections and need to re-enter some information based on their request - I don't think that allows them to change my decisions from what I have chosen earlier, especially if you get an error message similar to "please check your credit card number".

It is also a de facto standard in general that sites do not change once set selections when fixing errors in the original form and once you differ from this you're bound to increase burden on your customer support.

OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be and maybe it will go away".

We offer completely scalable hosting at UpCloud. You get to choose your CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth is billed by the actual traffic.

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

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

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

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

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

Best of luck to US though!

Thanks for the honest feedback! We're going to be benchmarking ourselves against other providers on Serverbear and CloudHarmony, for example, in the near future.

Thanks for the suggestions! We will be adding service areas later this to North America and Asia.

For our SMS delivery, we use an international provider - could be that Google uses the same provider.

Well said, sir. The only thing I'd add is that few people/companies want to carry the risk of paying the fixed sum for 36 months.

If this is not an issue, then your own equipment is definitely a better way to go.

Thanks for the comment. Haven't signed up for Digital Ocean my self, but applaud them for the prices they're offering.

Thanks for letting us know - if you can't sign-in or activate your account for this reason, please contact our support to solve the issue. You can e-mail them here: support@upcloud.com.

Thanks for the question! ZenCoder and other resource intensive cases are what our service was built for.

The item in the UAP is there by our lawyers to make sure we can take steps to prevent abuse on the infrastructure by others (and thus possibly hurting others' performance).

So please run ZenCoder on our platform and do let us know how it compares to others :)

Thanks Nux! We're really excited :) Our technology is home grown, there's a lot of information on our site regarding the decisions we have made.

You can find the information here: http://en.upcloud.com/features

Thanks for the feedback!

Even though our control panel describes the backups as server dependant, backups are in their technical sense separate storage entities.

The downside is that our control panel doesn't currently allow the creation of new instances from backups (but you can naturally clone running or stopped instances - which many of our customers do). You can circumvent this through our API for the time being, which allows backups to be cloned to regular disks through the clone storage -function. We're adding this functionality to our control panel soon though.

Much appreciated - and if you like to reach me personally, you can e-mail me at antti.vilpponen@upcloud.com. :)

To enable the firewall - we ask users to deposit the 10 euro minimum to the account. This releases the limitations as a free server with no pre-configured firewall rules could increase abuse on the network substantially.

We hope this isn't too much of an inconvenience.

Thanks!

Thanks for the comment - we just fixed this. We're a Finnish company and for some reason this page refused to read the proper language file for those two parts (the text was Finnish).

Mt = megatavu = megabyte in English. Finnish 101 :)

Wow, thanks for this! We'll definitely investigate this further.

Thanks for the comment and initial feedback!

Uptime and service is definitely something which is hard to do, but at the top of our list on things to focus. And as always with services like ours - we are in the business of trust, we need to earn it over time so we're not expecting miracles.

Thanks for the localisation tips as well - much appreciated :)

Thanks for asking!

As for network connections, we have two providers of internet connections always available for such cases. One goes down, the other one takes over. We take redundancy very seriously.

100% SLA means that we guarantee that the services will be available 100% of the time, OR we give 50x compensation for the downtime. Basically if the servers are down/unreachable for 1 hour - we credit your account with 50 hours worth of credit.

Thanks for the comment!

As a small company, we can't give out machines/resources indefinitely so we need to have a cap on this.

However, I do believe 100 euros towards a free server is a significant giveaway on our part and due to the nature of cloud computing, not everyone needs to host their services from here on onwards (think campaigns, etc.).

Sad to have received the flag, but we're just trying to offer a server for developers to test/play with.

They should! We just had a major push on our partners' SMS gateway so if it hasn't come by now - please use the voice activation we have in place (please check instructions in your e-mail).

Thanks, looking forwards to it!