# Cloud At Cost Offlined by Car Crash.



## drmike (Apr 30, 2015)

Taken from their site:

http://members.cloudatcost.com/


```
Network Outage local Fiber Cut.
We are having an issue accessing some of our network subnets due to a local car crash that caused fiber to be cut.

Network Update: Our fiber technicians have confirmed that the target for full restoration is 8 PM EST today. 
We will provide updates as we get them.
```


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## drmike (Apr 30, 2015)

So I'll start by asking how a car crash takes fiber out unless they hit poorly location termination cabinet or you have fiber pulled from aerial lines.

Aerial is fine, but that whole pull multiple from different locations and with entirely different non-common path runs part wasn't adhered to by someone.

CloudAtCost is a subsidiary of a cut rate telco, low cost ISP, etc. and is known in VPS world for $35 lifetime VPS offering and constant DEEP cut pricing as normal promos.


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## souen (May 1, 2015)

Fwiw ...


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## Munzy (May 1, 2015)

Has anyone bought a server with them, I really want to grab one for the life of it being forever, but I'd like to see some reviews first?


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## Francisco (May 1, 2015)

drmike said:


> Taken from their site:
> 
> http://members.cloudatcost.com/
> 
> ...


This is why running fiber on the poll for anything DC related is stupid.

Level3 did an article about this and the TL;DR is that while it's really cost effective to run, you're left open to people being shit heads or animals being animals.

CloudAtCost is an interesting one. They claim to get 'very strong deals from their datacenter'...but their 'datacenter' is their parent anyway so it's kinda silly. I still feel that they're just an IP grab, nothing more.

They rolled out (be it temp I can't remember) that "feature" that powered down your VPS if it didn't detect a login/etc on it for X days "for security reasons", but that was rolled out during the high times of "I get 5KB/sec IO & network speeds".

Francisco


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## drmike (May 1, 2015)

Munzy said:


> Has anyone bought a server with them, I really want to grab one for the life of it being forever, but I'd like to see some reviews first?


I tried them early on - in past year.   It was lousy.    Never got better for me.  

Remember this is the company that decided turning containers off was a good way to reduce resources.  So you buy and are idle and your stuff per se went offline.

I had more downtime there than I probably had sleep hours during said period.  Save your money and deal with a better company.


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## souen (May 1, 2015)

I have a 512MB box there, a year and ticking.

*Usage:* VPN, storage. Had a web server with low traffic Wordpress site (since moved).

*Network speed:* mediocre at the moment. Speeds were better last year.

Sample 1 (typical up to December 2014):


CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2266.747 MHz
Total amount of ram : 498 MB
Total amount of swap : 1023 MB
System uptime : 48 days, 4:40,
Download speed from CacheFly: 77.9MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 12.6MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 7.72MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 3.01MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 7.57MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 6.48MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 3.29MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 15.2MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 6.36MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 41.8MB/s
I/O speed : 8.5 MB/s

Sample 2 (typical since January 2015):


wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2266.747 MHz
Total amount of ram : 498 MB
Total amount of swap : 1023 MB
System uptime : 46 days, 4:03, 
Download speed from CacheFly: 10.3MB/s 
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 1.95MB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 777KB/s 
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 1.62MB/s 
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 223KB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 2.96MB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 618KB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 1.58MB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 662KB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 1.39MB/s 
I/O speed : 6.5 MB/s

*Network uptime:* between 83-99.8% on a given month, previous post is typical of the service so far. Two instances of storage array failure (April and July 2014), downtime was a day and about a week respectively. For a few months there were small blips lasting a few minutes 2-5 times a day, every few days, though the network seems to have stabilised in the past 2-3 months before this latest incident.

*Disk seq. I/O:* day 1 - 149 MB/s, 6 months - 8-20 MB/s. Sample taken today.


dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=16k count=8k conv=fdatasync && rm -rf test
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 14.5347 s, 9.2 MB/s

*Support:* no input here, never had to contact them. As an aside, I did open two tickets following their announcement about template suggestions, both of which were closed after three days without reply by the same person. Guess they just didn't like my ideas. :lol:

*Summary:* it works, my site was up whenever I occasionally check, not so reliable for day-to-day VPN usage. Okay for development, cannot recommend for production use.

Other comments:

- YMMV, mine may just happen to be on a abused node.

- Control panel stats are buggy, i.e. RAM usage does not correspond to command output. To their credit, they've been gradually adding features to their custom CP (rDNS, add/remove storage, events, API, etc.), haven't tried them yet.

- IP address changes with reinstall. This didn't used to be the case, a bit annoying.

- The "feature that powered down your VPS" for inactivity can be disabled. Aside from the overselling theory, my guess is they introduced it to batch shut off troubled containers rather than looking too much into it.


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## souen (May 1, 2015)

Just got this today.


```
Cloud At Cost System Message:

05/01/2015 05:36 PM
FREE CloudPro for all existing customers.

CloudatCost is offering for a limited time existing customers which have purchased servers using the "OneTime" option can migrate FREE to CloudPRO service with no monthly costs.

CloudPro is the next generation of CloudatCost which will soon offer many extra features such as multi datacenter, redundant networks, additional OS Choices, advanced API and many more features scheduled for release in the next few weeks.

To migrate your existing server resources simply login to the panel at https://panel.cloudatcost.com, find your server you wish to migrate and select the "Migrate" option.

Please ensure you backup your data.

Once completed you can click CloudPRO and you will see all your resources you can start using.

For a quick video on using CloudPro please see..

http://youtu.be/AXrqa_Tok58
```


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## drmike (May 1, 2015)

souen said:


> Just got this today.
> 
> 
> Cloud At Cost System Message:
> ...


They just love these insane promo emails.  They send more promo emails than Nigerians and Viagra mailers.

The other day it was like 60% off.  One of them prior was giving away 100 VPSes....

These aren't good promos.  Just perma lower the pricing.  Their website is all these HUGE numbers for "LIFETIME" VPS.  It's insanity.   

Big Dog 1 = $280/one time

4 Xeon vCPU

1 public IP

4GB ECC RAM

60GB SSD

100 Mbit Network

3TB monthly transfer


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## drmike (May 1, 2015)

$280 for a 4GB VPS .... with proven lousy performance, disk speeds (disk is on a SAN).... downtime... support that is overwhelmed and ticket shuttering.. constant re-marketing to formerly robbed customers...

How many years before this is even financially worth it?

$70 a year x 4 years?  Come on, durability of such a company and offering is a year, for a select few two years.  Looking at $140 a year.    

For the price, performance, etc.   I'd buy a ChicagoVPS package instead.  Now you know the track history here and that's how fubared CloudatCost is.

I am pretty irritated by CloudatCost.  This is another company with multiple subsidiaries and brands posing as this or that.   Yeah they make money and probably do a lot of volume.  So do drug cartels, robbers on Wall Street and other unscrupulous VPS resource imaginary sellers.


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## drmike (May 1, 2015)

and... more downtime:

*Helio Oliveira* ‏@heliohead  2h2 hours ago

hey @*cloudatcost* http://panel.cloudatcost.com  is down 

....

*Nicholas Diotte* ‏@nicholasdiotte  26m26 minutes ago

@*cloudatcost* Why cripple your service days after an outage? CloudPRO is supposed to fix the stability issues? Why are we down then?


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## drmike (May 1, 2015)

This is... COMEDIC.
 


CloudatCost @cloudatcost · 10h 10 hours ago
Network Status can be tracked here.
https://goo.gl/lIGXr1 

UPDATE: There has been a second fibre break found and it being repaired.

So....   they had fiber taken out yesterday by a car crash somewhere.. and now today they have more fiber out.

The Google short link... well people would look at it but...



> *A fatal error has occurred:*
> Error: Too many connections
> 
> Error Code: 1040


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## souen (May 1, 2015)

Haha, I got one of those promo emails as well. At least they're getting better with important notices via email. No notifications on one of the occasions they had the storage array failure or when they rolled out that inactivity mode feature (I only found out because someone posted about it here.)

The short link worked for me:


### 5/1/2015 3:30PM EST

The Rogers Tech team has advised that the circuit is back up, stable and repair work is complete. You should no longer see any flaps. They are still waiting on technician notes on the work completed and more updates will follow on the full cause and resolution of this incident. 

Just noticed the Rogers name ... they're not well-known for good uptime either, at least not on residential services. Maybe business plans get better treatment.


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## Munzy (May 1, 2015)

Well I got a developer 3 and installed debian... my lord there image is shit. Spent about an hour cleaning up all the BS that they had installed and setup. Random shit in /etc/rc.local and even more shit with apts sources.list. Didn't even do a nice apt-get update fresh.....


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