# Vultr and false claims.



## drmike (May 18, 2015)

I just was doing some research and saw an ad for Vultr:



> *VPS* Servers‎
> 
> Vultr® Servers Are Up To 4x Faster‎ Than The Competition - Learn More!‎‎



Now this after Vultr dropped 3.5? Ghz CPUs and is pushing out 2.4Ghz CPUs to customers.

Really pushes the boundaries of false advertising and false claims if you ask me.   Whoever is cooking up these sorts of claims as ads is going to get Vultr's ass burnt legally.  Too big and visible to be pulling stuff like this.

Absent some study you push folks to that substantiates this and with noted limitations, it's bad.  Who is the "competition"?


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## Munzy (May 18, 2015)

Linode, DO, Wable.


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## DomainBop (May 18, 2015)

Munzy said:


> Linode, DO, Wable.


None of the above when talking about "4x faster"   "The competition" they're referring to is AWS and Rackspace.

I'm assuming the "4x faster" refers to I/O speed (although it could also refer to UnixBench scores for its "mid-size" instances) since the "learn more" in the ads and on their site is linked to this page:  https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/


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## perennate (May 18, 2015)

FTC's summary of the FTC Act:


Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
Advertisements cannot be unfair.
The first and third claims don't really apply: it's unlikely that a "reasonable customer" will be deceived by the claim, and the third one is mostly for products that pose a potential health/safety risk.  It seems like showing objective comparison in CPU performance against AWS would be sufficient evidence. So I don't think this would violate FTC Act, and moreover I doubt FTC would care -- Vultr is big, but FTC focuses mainly on completely different kinds of businesses (e.g. medicine).

Rather than filing a complaint with FTC, I suppose customer could say they lost money going with Vultr. But I don't think anyone will believe you if you say that you purchased the product based on that 4x claim.

Competitor can also sue. But the summary mentions main one is Lanham Act, and that has similar language ("is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive" etc.).

So I don't think they're pushing the boundary at all under U.S. law, especially since it says "*up to* 4x".


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## tmzVPS-Daniel (May 18, 2015)

That UP TO makes a big difference, lol. 

- Daniel


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## drmike (May 18, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> None of the above when talking about "4x faster"   "The competition" they're referring to is AWS and Rackspace.
> 
> I'm assuming the "4x faster" refers to I/O speed (although it could also refer to UnixBench scores for its "mid-size" instances) since the "learn more" in the ads and on their site is linked to this page:  https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/


Aren't the AWS and Rackspace packages they are comparing here more-cloud-like offerings vs. Vultr with VPS instance and in chasis disk?  Anyone familiar with those two product lines?

The diagrams have a bottom piece about Serverbear being used.  I am assuming here they ran Serverbear then compared their numbers to what was for others in Serverbear.   If that's true it's odd also since say Rackspace hasn't had a test in 580 days - over a year and a half.


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## lunanode (May 18, 2015)

Vutr is basically comparing the io performance of their unknown local disk storage setup with amazon aws DFS volumes. its apples and oranges.


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## perennate (May 18, 2015)

lunanode said:


> Vutr is basically comparing the io performance of their unknown local disk storage setup with amazon aws DFS volumes. its apples and oranges.


Sure, it's stupid, but it's far from illegal.


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## DomainBop (May 18, 2015)

lunanode said:


> Vutr is basically comparing the io performance of their unknown local disk storage setup with amazon aws DFS volumes. its apples and oranges.


...similar to some low end OpenVZ providers advertising when they compare their ploop enhanced dd test results to their competitors simfs results without divulging the reason their results are faster



> If that's true it's odd also since say Rackspace hasn't had a test in 580 days - over a year and a half.


It's possible Vultr ran the tests recently because you can run Serverbear tests and keep the results private and put N/A or anything you want to as the hosts name.


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## drmike (May 18, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> ...similar to some low end OpenVZ providers advertising when they compare their ploop enhanced dd test results to their competitors simfs results without divulging the reason their results are faster


So true... and part of this falls on the testing mechanisms - at least standard tests to be enhanced to detect what can be on file storage type and note where ploop is detected or other shenanigans.


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## Kris (May 18, 2015)

I think this is the claim they should be pulling. (or add Up To)  :lol:


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## Amitz (May 19, 2015)

drmike said:


> Really pushes the boundaries of false advertising and false claims if you ask me.


Like "Multihomed in all locations"? ;-)


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## kcaj (May 19, 2015)

The ship seems to be sailing pretty well.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vultr-announces-unprecedented-growth-in-first-year-300085498.html


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## drmike (May 19, 2015)

kcaj said:


> The ship seems to be sailing pretty well.
> 
> http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vultr-announces-unprecedented-growth-in-first-year-300085498.html


10 times in that press release the word CLOUD appears.  Not once is it actually true.  Damn shame when outside firms regurgitate untruths and push them on the wires.


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## MannDude (May 19, 2015)

@DaveA is a member here, so perhaps he can touch base on some of the claims and questions in this thread.


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## Amitz (May 20, 2015)

MannDude said:


> @DaveA is a member here, so perhaps he can touch base on some of the claims and questions in this thread.


It is kcaj's unofficial job since some weeks to speak out for DaveA on forums like LET and vpsboard. Nothing against kcaj - I think he did not even notice that he has become a social media tool for Vultr.


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## eva2000 (May 20, 2015)

MannDude said:


> @DaveA is a member here, so perhaps he can touch base on some of the claims and questions in this thread.


I doubt you'd get an explanation here if they don't even do it that on their own official support forums https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/579/price-increase or https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/567/no-more-3-4-ghz-cpu-cores nor do they on their web site news/blog pages - there's no official info on their site or forum explaining price rises other than changing the prices and product feature matrix of their plans.

closest for 3.4ghz cpu is at https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/comment/2849#Comment_2849



> We occasionally adjust our node configurations to match the needs of our customers with a keen focus on maintaining our high performance standards. Your feedback will be taken into consideration as we continue to add capabilities to our platform.
> 
> 
> 
> Some benefits of the new standard deployment include >10GbE connectivity, and eventually larger instance offerings(Cores+RAM) across our platform. These changes will allow us to offer the great new features we've been hard at work on.


unfortunately going from 3.4Ghz to 2.4Ghz doesn't maintain performance from my benchmark comparisons https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-vs-linode-benchmark-compare.2889/


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## drmike (May 20, 2015)

eva2000 said:


> unfortunately going from 3.4Ghz to 2.4Ghz doesn't maintain performance from my benchmark comparisons https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-vs-linode-benchmark-compare.2889/


Loved your detailed comparison @eva2000.


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## kcaj (May 20, 2015)

Amitz said:


> It is kcaj's unofficial job since some weeks to speak out for DaveA on forums like LET and vpsboard. Nothing against kcaj - I think he did not even notice that he has become a social media tool for Vultr.


It's not my job to do anything. I make a few positive comments about Vultr on the internet and the conclusion of the foil hat brigade is that I must be an employee? Do me a favour, you're starting to sound extremely spoilt.


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## DomainBop (May 20, 2015)

kcaj said:


> It's not my job to do anything. I make a few positive comments about Vultr on the internet


...but recent research shows Vultr is up to  7X more expensive than their much larger European "cloud" competitors and gives less "bang for the buck"!

----begin press release----

*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEW RESEARCH REPORT BY D.BOP SHOWS VULTR IS UP TO 7X MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE EUROPEAN COMPETITION*

This is what customers can get for $7  $8 at Vultr and its competitors

*Vultr mid-sized company (*_and being biased New Yorkers D.Bop Research has to deduct points from Vultr for being from frickin' Jersey_*)*

1. $8: VPS with  1GB RAM, 20GB disk,  2TB bandwidth,  choice of 4 European locations ( rents space in others people's datacenters in Europe, and from experience the network in a couple of these places like Amsterdam is only slightly more stable than CC Buffalo which is why this researcher switched to Leaseweb Amsterdam in January), KVM virtualization, VPS with a few cloud features built in

*RunAbove owned by Europe's largest host*

1. $5 VPS with 4GB, 30GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, one European location (owns all of its data centers and all are multihomed), KVM virtualization, built on Openstack Nova and Intel Cloud technology

2. $2.50 VPS with 2GB RAM, 20GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, one European location (owns all of its data centers and all are multihomed), KVM virtualization, built on Openstack Nova and Intel Cloud technology

3. $0.50 for 50GB object storage

*ArubaCloud owned by Italy's largest host *

1. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,  20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support

2. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support

3. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support


4. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support


5. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support

6. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support

7. $1.14  VPS with 1GB RAM,   with 20GB storage, 2TB bandwidth, choice of 6 European locations (owns 3 of these datacenters and rents space in the other 3...all locations are multihomed), VMware virtualization, Aruba cloud platform, points added for free phone support

8. $0.02 left over to donate to charity

--end press release---


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## telephone (May 20, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> *RunAbove owned by Europe's largest host*
> 
> 
> 1. $5 VPS with 4GB, 30GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, choice of 2 European locations (owns both data centers and both are multihomed), KVM virtualization, built on Openstack Nova and Intel Cloud technology
> ...



That's not really fair to include the Sandbox instances, as they're still in beta and come with no SLA.


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## Amitz (May 20, 2015)

kcaj said:


> It's not my job to do anything. I make a few positive comments about Vultr on the internet and the conclusion of the foil hat brigade is that I must be an employee? Do me a favour, you're starting to sound extremely spoilt.


I do not think that you are an employee at all. I think that you do it for the love of DaveA. Which is completely okay. It just lets you seem very biased.


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## DomainBop (May 20, 2015)

telephone said:


> That's not really fair to include the Sandbox instances, as they're still in beta and come with no SLA.


I included them because for something labeled "beta" they've been surprisingly stable since I started using them last year


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## willie (May 20, 2015)

I think the 4x faster claim can be meaningful, and the clock speed of the cpu's aren't really relevant.  The issue with aws is you often get badly overloaded hosts, especially with the smaller instances.  Yes the iron underneath might have 3 ghz clock or whatever, but you're sharing it with 20 other cpu-bound instances so you're really only getting a fraction of 1 core.  I've never understood why people are willing to spend so much on AWS.  I've always done better with budget vps's from places like vpsboard.

I hadn't heard of arubahost before.  Why is their 1gb instance 1 euro/month when the "best selling" 2gb instance is 6.5x that amount?  Promotional?  Maybe shouldn't really count.

Interesting about Run above.  I've been intrigued by them for a while.  I wonder what will happen to OVH's other line of cloud and virtual hosting, under the OVH brand.


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## drmike (May 20, 2015)

willie said:


> I think the 4x faster claim can be meaningful, and the clock speed of the cpu's aren't really relevant.  The issue with aws is you often get badly overloaded hosts, especially with the smaller instances.  Yes the iron underneath might have 3 ghz clock or whatever, but you're sharing it with 20 other cpu-bound instances so you're really only getting a fraction of 1 core.  I've never understood why people are willing to spend so much on AWS.  I've always done better with budget vps's from places like vpsboard.


I fully agree Willie.

I think what DaveA is trying to sell is a dedicated or rather semi-dedicated core offering.  Otherwise when you have such performance numbers and customers buy and get way less experience, what are they are to think?  That they got stiffed?  Or that it's more marketing BS to mislead.

Problem is, nowhere does Vultr say it's dedicated core or dedicated thread.  These tests could be performed on empty nodes. Absent total configs and some honesty, all you have is hype.   But in honesty no way Vultr can / will be a dedicated core company.  I mean VPS providers can and have done the SAME bullshit even dolling out DEMO accounts on special nodes to testers to show great CPU/dd nonsense.  Hell even then and there the tests performed were done by 'independent' third parties.  Entire lack o' integrity at play with their data comparison.  Beyond the apples vs. oranges of two different products.

Like most of the Vultr stuff it's half baked approach to spin angles and avoid stick points that shoe horn things exactly.  Can't say a thing about RAID - but can say "enterprise SSD".  Cause enterprises always lack RAID or run the bottom line expanding RAID-0 (Dave loves when you ask about RAID on his forum - they've taken to deleting threads about said sore topic).  Yeah multi-homed got dinged for similar marketing at the front and failure to deliver on the backside according to some.

AWS is a cloud.  People buy it for the elastic concept of growing, on demand, multiple sites, live migrations, fail over, real SAN storage (minus the DD porn --- although DD porn probably means something entirely different at Vultr).  AWS for it's slowness vs. a VPS provider kicks the shit out of said VPS companies and isn't going to do something stupid to your site, content, etc.  Can guarantee growth with AWS, ability to withstand such, financial viability, etc.  I don't use AWS, and am not their intended market - but they seem to be selling a ton of their products and at MUCH HIGHER PRICE POINTS.  Hard to argue with the success of AWS.

Vultr isn't a cloud and absent some miracle, isn't going to be a cloud, regardless of how many times they say CLOUD in a single press release or how many cloud infused graphics they pretty their site with.

From their "FEATURES" page:



> See Why All Clouds Are Not Created Equal
> 
> 
> Vultr is up to 4x faster than the competition - see full benchmarks


There is so much irony in the title...so much.  How about creating a fncking cloud before claiming to be one?  

Wannabes. Same would seem to apply to their bullshit envy heroes at DigitalOcean.  Cloud, yeah right.  Egos the size of hurricanes.  Hopefully regulators take note and bring both companies back down to earth.


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## willie (May 20, 2015)

drmike said:


> AWS is a cloud.  People buy it for the elastic concept of growing, on demand, multiple sites, live migrations, fail over, real SAN storage ...
> Vultr isn't a cloud and absent some miracle, isn't going to be a cloud, regardless of how many times they say CLOUD in a single press release or how many cloud infused graphics they pretty their site with. ...Same would seem to apply to their bullshit envy heroes at DigitalOcean.  Cloud, yeah right.  Egos the size of hurricanes.  Hopefully regulators take note and bring both companies back down to earth.


I've never thought there was a really clear distinction between "cloud" and vps's, enough to get regulators involved.  There was a thread about it a while back and what I got out of it was that "cloud" hosts 1) offer hourly billing; 2) let you spin instances up and down with an API instead of a manual order form; 3) invoice you at the end of the month for services you've used that month, instead of pay in advance like budget VPS.  Perhaps SAN storage is another feature.  Really though, that stuff can all be done with OpenStack or the like.  AWS is not magic.  They have a lot of hardware and an ecosystem, neither of which are defining features of clouds.

AWS conjures at least a perception of unlimited expandability, but if you want big servers on short notice, you find they are usually out of stock just like at a VPS host.  (I worked at a place that spent around $100K/month on AWS and ran into that problem at some critical times). 

OTOH, here's someone who says he doubled his site speed by moving from Linode to AWS:

http://docraptor.com/blog/2014/08/20/linode_to_aws_migration

I wonder what kind of instances he was using, and how a bunch of Hetzner-style dedis would have compared.  Unfortunately we don't seem to have anything like that here any more.


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## drmike (May 20, 2015)

Billing isn't a cloud feature.   Anything can be billed however.  That's a business role and nothing involved on the hardware / infrastructure really.

Ditto for invoicing end of month.   Any VPS company could post-use bill.  I know why most won't though - they claim they'll be stiffed payment for services already rendered.  Me I think while that is true among a minor sliver of customers, the fact is after a lousy month, lots of downtime, slow container due to neighbors that moved in and partied in their container next door, etc.   customers would rightly be more inclined to say screw paying you and then promptly bail. This would  leave many of these companies without that month of income over a larger subset of customers who moved the next month to avoid the crap neighbors for inability of the host to play landlord properly.

AWS being out of inventory made me snicker.   Poor planning for the JIT inventory and warehousing kingdom... Guess those rules aren't applying at AWS or they haven't figured out the variables yet   AWS is far too nerdy minimalist, strange doc approach, etc. for me to go tank a sewer of time and then overpay for the luxury.  No thank you.

Cloud is a big vague thing..  Arguably so is the rest of hosting.  It's supposed to have elastic aspects to scale and redundancy.   Redundancy isn't just having RAID and a backup.  Scale isn't buy and manually provision more instances.

As-is what we see in fake clouds is as wrong as me going and selling VPS as a dedicated server.  Look guys, I am selling dedicated servers for $1 a month.  Sure it's a VPS, but it's dedicated.  Not selling the same container to someone else. Shared hardware, so what, not like shared hosts give you unshared network and your own router... 

Whole situation of these fake clouds reminds me of an eight year old using super fancy words they don't understand but heard on some biz show. #BUZZWORD-BINGO.    

These guys will be cloud, when I see them at Cloud Expo 2015 at the Javits Center in New York City June 9-11.  It's local and all, so no excuse.

These cats know what they are doing.  They know they are are lying.


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## DomainBop (May 20, 2015)

drmike said:


> These guys will be cloud, when I see them at Cloud Expo 2015 at the Javits Center in New York City June 9-11.  It's local and all, so no excuse.


Humor, on April 3rd 2014, Cloud Expo's official Twitter feed tweeted that Vultr was _"16X faster than #AWS"_.

https://twitter.com/cloudexpo/status/451696508099129344

Cloud Expo trivia: OVH was a platinum sponsor of Cloud Expo 2013 in NYC



> Cloud is a big vague thing..


There have been some attempts to define "cloud".  The US Commerce Dept's  National Institute of Standards and Technology released a definition of cloud computing in 2011 (see page 6 of this .pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf).

CloudControls has also been working on developing security standards for "the cloud": ISO/IEC 27017 (Cloud Security http://www.iso27001security.com/html/27017.html ). The "questions to ask your cloud provider" spreadsheet I've linked to in the past is from these standards (see  http://www.cloudcontrols.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Cloud-Control-Framework-Risks-Questions-and-Controls-V3.0-EN-29052013.xlsx)


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## GIANT_CRAB (May 21, 2015)

@willie, AWS cloud server isn't supposed be just used alone, it is supposed to be used together with the other services they offer - Route 53, Storage, ELB, etc. CPU power sucks, no doubt at all but the tightly integrated ecosystem is what makes it powerful.

Besides, companies are willing to spend money on it because it is an established brand and they know that there will be tech support who will answer them.

There are also "cloud engineers" employees who are well versed with AWS services so when the company consult the "cloud engineers" they employed, these "cloud engineers" will say, "Hey, I'm very familar with AWS systems, let's go with AWS."


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## joepie91 (May 21, 2015)

willie said:


> [...] There was a thread about it a while back and what I got out of it was that "cloud" hosts [...] 3) invoice you at the end of the month for services you've used that month, instead of pay in advance like budget VPS.


That would make DigitalOcean not a "cloud host", then.


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## DomainBop (May 21, 2015)

telephone said:


> That's not really fair to include the Sandbox instances, as they're still in beta and come with no SLA.


 one day later: OVH rolled out OpenStack Sandbox instances on its regular site today with an SLA: €3 /2GB RAM/100 Mbps unlimited/10GB local SSD disk/SLA  http://www.ovh.com/fr/cloud/They also added a big RAM line (30GB-240GB RAM) and CPU line (7GB-120GB RAM with up to 32 cores).



> @willie said "I hadn't heard of arubahost before.  Why is their 1gb instance 1 euro/month when the "best selling" 2gb instance is 6.5x that amount?  Promotional?"


 The 1GB was recently reduced in price (permanently) from €4.99 to €1.00 .  Think of it as a loss leader, or something to test on.  Most people who use VMware "cloud" instances for production probably opt for the 2GB and above sizes.


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## drmike (May 21, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> one day later: OVH rolled out OpenStack Sandbox instances on its regular site today with an SLA: €3 /2GB RAM/100 Mbps unlimited/10GB local SSD disk/SLA  http://www.ovh.com/fr/cloud/They also added a big RAM line (30GB-240GB RAM) and CPU line (7GB-120GB RAM with up to 32 cores).
> 
> 
> The 1GB was recently reduced in price (permanently) from €4.99 to €1.00 .  Think of it as a loss leader, or something to test on.  Most people who use VMware "cloud" instances for production probably opt for the 2GB and above sizes.


Is OVH doing OpenStack for their "cloud"?

I saw the prices today and I must say rather insane on the first 2-3.


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## DomainBop (May 21, 2015)

drmike said:


> Is OVH doing OpenStack for their "cloud"?
> 
> I saw the prices today and I must say rather insane on the first 2-3.


They have multiple "clouds". RunAbove, Hubic, and the new OVH.com cloud plans are OpenStack but their dedicated private clouds are VMware (vSphere and vCloud available) and Microsoft (Hyper-V and Azure available).  Their regular VPS line is also VMware (VMware for regular VPS and OpenVZ slabbed inside VMware for the budget line).


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## drmike (May 21, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> They have multiple "clouds". RunAbove, Hubic, and the new OVH.com cloud plans are OpenStack but their dedicated private clouds are VMware (vSphere and vCloud available) and Microsoft (Hyper-V and Azure available).  Their regular VPS line is also VMware (VMware for regular VPS and OpenVZ slabbed inside VMware for the budget line).


Damn disaster.


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## splitice (May 22, 2015)

DomainBop said:


> ...but recent research shows Vultr is up to 7X more expensive than their much larger European "cloud" competitors and gives less "bang for the buck"!
> 
> ----begin press release----
> 
> ...


Location, Location, Location.... the world be not just Europe.


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## HN-Matt (May 28, 2015)

drmike said:


> Vultr isn't a cloud and absent some miracle, isn't going to be a cloud, regardless of how many times they say CLOUD in a single press release or how many cloud infused graphics they pretty their site with.


Totally disagree, being a cloud provider is literally nothing more than (i) choosing to commit to the redundant appearance of the word 'cloud' w/ cloud infused graphics and (ii) banking on the far-reaching vagueness of the term. If the worry is that 'false' clouds can't really provide all of the premium tech/service connotations that only the 'true' clouds offer, the best advice would probably be for the latter to abandon the term entirely.

Hark, I too wish to have an etymological battle re: the marketing buzz word, CLOUD!


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