Choopa sends out Vultr to drown in the DigitalOcean

[tonyg]

Jezzus H, you guys weren't kidding about the website being pretty much the same as DO!!

Not only the blue, but the green, yellow and blue markers in the middle.

Really shameful, I would be embarrased to put something out like this.

 

[drmike]

It's an odd launch.   I saw after posting this that Serverian posted about this new offer on Lowendtalk...  I stumbled into it looking at search placement of terms unrelated on an unfiltered terminal --- Google AdSense ad...  So, spending money for something quickly fumbled  nice luxury and perhaps detrimental to the brand short term.

As is, this must be a soft launch and beta (security collisions and unavailable locations).   Interesting the sheer mass of interest and coverage though... Hacker News picked Vultr up later this morning:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7286493

 

[raindog308]

The name alone will keep me away.

Is there any positive connotation to "vulture"?  Nope.

"We are hoping to pick the bones of DO once it goes belly up?"  I guess that's what they're trying to say.

And btw, what is with people using TM for trademarks they haven't registered?  Another reason to assume this is not a serious long-term venture.

 

[drmike]

The name alone will keep me away.

Is there any positive connotation to "vulture"?  Nope.

From the immortal Gil Scott Heron, poet, political activist, musician, junkie and recently deceased:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztA6zUoqUcc

Standing in the ruins


Of another Black man's life,


or flying through the valley


He's separating day and night.


"I am death," cried the Vulture.


"For the people of the light."


Charon brought his raft


from the sea that sails on souls,


And saw the scavenger departing,


taking warm hearts to the cold.


He knew the ghetto was the haven


for the meanest creature ever known.


In a wilderness of heartbreak


and a desert of despair,


Evil's clarion of justice


shrieks a cry of naked terror.


Taking babies from their mamas


and leaving grief beyond compare.


So if you see the Vulture coming,


flying circles in your mind,


Remember there is no escaping


for he will follow close behind.


Only promised me a battle,


battle for your soul and mine.


He taking babies from their mamas


And he's leaving


Leaving


Leaving


Leaving


Leaving

 

[tchen]

And btw, what is with people using TM for trademarks they haven't registered?  Another reason to assume this is not a serious long-term venture.

TM is allowed usage for unregistered trademarks (market rules).  R is the one that requires USPTO registration.

 

[raidz]

So billing stuff is bad.

but but, didn't they just soft launch on Friday (2-3 days ago)? Cut them some slack on the documentation and the lack of OS's/dc's guys, jesus!

How can you compare them to DO who has been around for a 1+ year and a company who just soft launched 2-3 days ago?

 

[drmike]

but but, didn't they just soft launch on Friday (2-3 days ago)? Cut them some slack on the documentation and the lack of OS's/dc's guys, jesus!

Meh, the security issue was a classic fubar.  Unsure who is being paid to dev stuff, but something like that is grounds for some pain in any environment I've ever worked.  Like someone getting docked some money and humiliated.  Someone needs coursework / mentor / best practices refresher.

Debian as an OS option, yeah, it's sort of the server staple and odd to see it missed / not included.  Unsure who the genius who dropped that was... Must be a CentOS adherent.

I'd be fine with this as an alpha to beta launch... But spending on Google Ads and all... That's pretty much show time.  This stuff should have been identified in pre-launch.

There is a reason I won't buy from new companies...  Have to expand that to new offers like this from established companies too.

Shame, cause seriously, Choopa runs a good network.  I rather like them, but this is well,  disappointing ripoff of the worst kind.

 

[drmike]

and... about the website for Vultur.

"Cloud Hosting on the Largest Worldwide Network"

False.  Unsure how they can claim this.   Largest compared to who?  To DigitalOcean?  If so then compare head on and name the competitor.  Otherwise, competing with all sorts of providers and obviously some that are larger.

"Deploy on 6 Continents"

False.  You have 2 choices today in the US and 2 in Europe.  Even the out of stock locations add up to 4 continents:  North America, Europe, Australia, Asia.

"12 Data Centers Worldwide"

Semi-false.   4 datacenters available.  12 available when/if stock provided to sell at other locations.

Stuff like this runs afoul of false advertising claims.   Dangerous territory I point to all the time.

 

[lbft]

Yeah, it really is a dick move to not make such limited DC availability public so people can know before signup.

 

[k0nsl]

Okay, so I decided to give Vultr a test so as to base my judgement from my own (actual) experience.

Here are (briefly) what happened:

- money deposited from PP, no hitches, and it doubled

- picked one of the primary locations (NL) for deployment

- OS: Ubuntu 13.10

- server becomes ready, did not take very long (not even one minute)

- I try to reach the instance via SSH - connection times out, repeatedly, so I reboot it: same result.

- so I decided to try to reinstall the OS, perhaps there was some hiccup for w/e reason...okay, all done, I wait a few moments extra just to be sure everything is deployed, and then I SSH to it: connection refused.

- after I had written the above I try it again (SSH) and it now works

I'll do some (again only superficial / brief) testing on it:



[email protected]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; unlink test                                                           16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.28387 s, 470 MB/s







I wrote a blog post with my initial results which is basically an extended version of this post, but not by much. I started writing it here but decided to get it up on the blog as it has been running stale lately

Anyway, will fiddle around with it and see how it does.

 

[k0nsl]

Vultr Hosting added Debian 6 x64 (squeeze) and Debian 7 x64 (wheezy) as of today (just now, it appears)

 

[serverian]

- server becomes ready, did not take very long (not even one minute)

- I try to reach the instance via SSH - connection times out, repeatedly, so I reboot it: same result.

- so I decided to try to reinstall the OS, perhaps there was some hiccup for w/e reason...okay, all done, I wait a few moments extra just to be sure everything is deployed, and then I SSH to it: connection refused.

- after I had written the above I try it again (SSH) and it now works

OS installation is not finished once it says it's activated. You can check it on VNC.

 

[k0nsl]

Thanks @serverian. Somebody just notified me about that via my blog.

/me slaps himself

 

[Steven B]

That is not my virtual machine

Whoever's it was, at least got the option to change the Description (possible from the games server host that they're sharing with).  I can't tell if I'm missing something obvious, or whether there really is no option to set the description/name either when creating, or when managing.

no snapshots or such, only two OS choices.

The lack of snapshots was definitely saddening.  While it's not exactly difficult to set up a deployment script, it does add to deploy time and adds variables that I'd just as soon not have to deal with.

A lot of information is missing about what they are offering.

Right?  Here's one: at DO, if you merely stop a droplet you still get billed for it.  You have to destroy it if you don't want to be billed.  That information is easily found, and they'll even send you an e-mail saying as much the first time you stop one.

At VULTR?  I have no idea.  I did read the terms (copy/paste from the games service, probably.. see VIII.C.6 - where you'll also find there's a 500MB/day download limit), but didn't see anything on the subject.

Similarly, as there was a bit of turmoil regarding the subject at DO, I don't see anything on whether data gets scrubbed when you destroy an instance.  It will say the data is lost, but that doesn't necessarily mean it gets scrubbed.

OS installation is not finished once it says it's activated. You can check it on VNC.

Yes, which really makes their 'deploy in less than 60 seconds' thing a bit misleading.  It took over 6 minutes between placing the order and being able to log in.  While I don't remember DO's from-scratch deploy time, the fact that you can use a snapshot as the base does mean that you're up and running with additional DO droplets much more quickly.

So far, I'm not really all that impressed in terms of the interface/deployment/information available.  The connections seem okay, but I don't run high bandwidth/connectivity material myself.  If anything, (burst) CPU use is what I'd find more interesting, and so far they seem to edge out DO a bit.  Taking the average across 10 DO Droplets vs 26 VULTR instances (all on the $5/month plans), the VULTR averages out about 15% faster.  But it's pretty variable across droplets/instances, with some going a fair bit slower, and some going much faster.  On the up side, did I mention 26 VULTR instances?  DO caps at 5 after which you have to request more manually.  Not sure if this is a good thing for VULTR going forward, though; could easily be abused.

I realize they only just had their soft launch, so I am cutting them a bit of slack - but a lot of the issues mentioned in this thread and ones I've tweeted about are things that could have / should have been in place.

While on twitter this was touted as a 'Digital Ocean clone', I can only imagine that they're referring to the color scheme.. as other than that, Digital Ocean doesn't have much to worry about yet.  It's nice to have some more competition, though.

 

[Steven B]

Thanks @serverian. Somebody just notified me about that via my blog.

Fancy seeing you here

I'll  have to destroy a DO droplet and see how long it takes to start one up again (without using my snapshot).  As I recall, it was faster.  Will have to refresh page a lot, as I think you can't get a view of the instance until it's actually ready at DO (VULTR does allow a view almost immediately.. watching things install and configure..).

Edit: 59 seconds at DO.  This matches with their own statistic.  Most of my droplets seem to have been created around 1 minute, regardless of bare install vs snapshot.  I'd imagine their bare install is a snapshot, itself.  While their progress indicator is almost as broken as Windows 95's 'file copy' progress indicator, at least on the whole it's more accurate at fulfilling the "in 55 seconds" claim than VULTR's deploy.

 

[dano]

Guess they are looking for scraps that have fallen off of AWS/DO/Linode/etc (vulture just isn't that appealing)

 

[raidz]

Meh, the security issue was a classic fubar.  Unsure who is being paid to dev stuff, but something like that is grounds for some pain in any environment I've ever worked.  Like someone getting docked some money and humiliated.  Someone needs coursework / mentor / best practices refresher.

Debian as an OS option, yeah, it's sort of the server staple and odd to see it missed / not included.  Unsure who the genius who dropped that was... Must be a CentOS adherent.

I'd be fine with this as an alpha to beta launch... But spending on Google Ads and all... That's pretty much show time.  This stuff should have been identified in pre-launch.

There is a reason I won't buy from new companies...  Have to expand that to new offers like this from established companies too.

Shame, cause seriously, Choopa runs a good network.  I rather like them, but this is well,  disappointing ripoff of the worst kind.

I agree with you on most of what you said, however, I always like seeing more competition, it will force DO to keep doing better stuff.

I am going to give Choopa more time to resolve this. I am pretty sure that AWS did not have a standard Debian template until the Debian team themselves offered one up in the community...

 

[bdtech]

Are the nodes filling up yet? Hard to tell by the tests and benchmarks

 

[sleddog]

A side-by-side comparison of vultr.com and digitialocean.com show a lot of similarities.  A total ripoff if I may say so myself.

So offering similar features at a similar price constitutes a ripoff?

If that's the case then most VPS providers are ripoffs.

 

[tonyg]

So offering similar features at a similar price constitutes a ripoff?

If that's the case then most VPS providers are ripoffs.

It's not just similar features...the actual website is an obvious copy.

Vultr is not being lauched by some kid from his parents house...no excuse.