amuck-landowner

Vultr and false claims.

drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
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!‎‎
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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"?
 
DomainBop

DomainBop

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
Munzy said:
Linode, DO, Wable.
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None of the above when talking about "4x faster" :p  "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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P

perennate

New Member
Verified Provider
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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drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
DomainBop said:
None of the above when talking about "4x faster" :p  "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/
Click to expand...
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.
 
L

lunanode

New Member
Verified Provider
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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DomainBop

DomainBop

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
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.
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...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.
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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

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
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
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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.
 
MannDude

MannDude

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

Amitz

New Member
MannDude said:
@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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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.
 
eva2000

eva2000

Active Member
MannDude said:
@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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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.
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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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kcaj

kcaj

New Member
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.
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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.
 
DomainBop

DomainBop

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
kcaj said:
It's not my job to do anything. I make a few positive comments about Vultr on the internet 
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...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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