# VPS with one time payment option?



## mariourk (May 1, 2015)

Hi,

I'm running a few VPS servers at cloudatcost. It a hoster that resides in Canada and they offer very cheap VPS solutions. Recently, they offer FreeBSD templates too, which is nice. But what I like the most about them, is the option to choose for a one time payment option. No monthly subscription, just pay a larger amount of money and be done with it.

I know, I was a bit skeptical about this business model too. But as far as I can tell, these guys are legit. And because the offers were so cheap (they often have 50% off offers), I just went with it. And I have to say, so far, so good. However, if anyone can tell me a different story, I'm all ears.

Anyway. I want to host a few VPS servers elsewhere too. So I'm not depending on just one hoster. But searching for a hoster that offers a one time payment solution, turned up empty. They either don't offer it, or it's some sketchy firm that just turns out to be a scam.

Does anyone of you guys know a cheap, yet reliable, hosting solution?


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## drhowarddrfine (May 1, 2015)

I've used RamNode for a year now with few problems. They're very accessible, both with tickets and IRC and even phone (I think), and very friendly and helpful. I don't know if they have a yearly plan but I'd bet, if you asked them, they'd set it up for you. I got a 50% off thing when I first signed up and only pay $3.75 or so monthly.

I've also wanted to try Vultr. In fact, I have but, after setting FreeBSD up over there, I lost the job. It worked really well for the two weeks or so I had a chance to use it and I plan on setting up my current job with them. Again, I didn't look to see if they'll do yearly payments but they're bigger than RamNode is. They also get high marks from all the review sites I looked into.


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## NewGuy (May 1, 2015)

I second the vote for Vultr (vultr.com). Their basic plans are $5/month and you can load up as much (or as little) money on your hosting account as you like. Some people on their forums mention paying $500+ up front and then just leaving the account to run. Vultr supports FreeBSD and allows users to upload their own ISO files for custom installs. Their support people have been excellent (I've been using them for about eight months) and I'm quite happy with them.


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## mariourk (May 1, 2015)

Apparently this doesn't seem clear. But the one time payment option of cloudatcost means that you just pay once, for life. You won't get billed anymore. Ever.


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## gkontos (May 1, 2015)

I would never trust this type of offers because they scream:* I NEED MONEY NOW*.


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## mariourk (May 1, 2015)

Yes, I totally agree. As I said, I was quite skeptical myself about this. But because it was so cheap, I got a few anyway. Just to see how it went. And it works surprisingly well, actually. How they mean to make money in the long run with this model is beyond me. My guess it's with other services they offer.

Since I'm not running anything super-serious (a cheap webserver, weechat, openttd, mumble, that sort of stuff) I'm fine with it. I'm using it for almost a year now and so far I found nothing wrong with these guys.

If someone knows a similar hoster and has good experience with them, I would like to know about them


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## Deleted member 9563 (May 2, 2015)

I believe the owner is Jody Schnarr and I don't know his reputation, but this looks terrible. For one thing this is a tight margin business, and somebody is going to have to pay for server hosting and peering. From what a lot of people say, CloudAtCost is uneven and much slower than advertised. I haven't tried it, but so many bad reviews and very dissatisfied current and present customers, I wouldn't touch it. From what I read, they were down for a while, the "chat" is fake, and support won't answer. Check out reviews here and here, and of course the Lowendtalk forum is chock full of harsh comments in a number of threads.

Oh, and one more thing. The server is in Ontario, Canada. If that's what you want then that's a good thing, but from what I see around, servers and hosting costs are significantly higher in Canada than USA. That makes me even more suspicious about the unrealistic pricing.


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## mariourk (May 4, 2015)

Well, as I said, depending on what you use it for, it can be a very nice deal. And my personal experience with them, including support, is actually quite good. But my expectations aren't that high either 

Anyway, thanks for pointing out some good alternatives


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## BrokenSyntax (Jun 23, 2015)

So, here's what I can tell you about CloudAtCost.
They are run by a parent company (Fibernetics) who owns a TON of fiber all across Canada.
They've been a very customer-centric company for as long as I have known of them, probably longer.
I started using their free homephone (VoIP) service in 2008 (Then called FreePhoneLine.ca, now fongo).
I ported my cell-phone number onto them and haven't looked back since.

I used to provide a lot of support on their community forums for freephoneline, (They didn't have official support staff, but a couple of the techs from the company frequented the forum.) They now have a more official team on the forums.

CloudAtCost is a much newer offering of theirs, based in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area of Ontario, (A new datacenter is being planned now.)
They produce more energy through solar and renewable sources than their datacenter actually requires, which certainly helps to keep costs down 

I have heard good and bad about CloudAtCost support, I'm not the right person to ask about that as I cheat. (I know three staffers from my time on their FreePhoneLine forums, most questions I can jump the queue with by going straight to a systems engineer.)

Now for the big one:
They run on ESX/VMware, NOT Xen, KMS, or another free platform.
This is in large part due to them having several former VMWare engineers on staff. You have to "go with what you know" as they say.
I've seen their infrastructure go through re-works, slow periods and fast periods, but overall, the service is solid, but I don't know if I would run anything professional on it which required a 99%+ SLA, at least not until the second Datacenter is running.


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## mariourk (Jun 23, 2015)

Cool, thanks for the update.

I'm running several server there now. In fact, I just got a new one this morning (60% off offer). And so far, I have zero complaints.



> I don't know if I would run anything professional on it which required a 99%+ SLA


So far, I had one day downtime. Apparently a truck had snapped their fiber connection. But I'm running strictly private/hobby stuff there. So, although it was a bit annoying, it wasn't really a problem.


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## BrokenSyntax (Jun 23, 2015)

mariourk said:


> So far, I had one day downtime. Apparently a truck had snapped their fiber connection. But I'm running strictly private/hobby stuff there. So, although it was a bit annoying, it wasn't really a problem.



Yep, that was one of two such major outages I'm aware of them having suffered.
They do have a back-up pipe, but it simply isn't big enough to support their infrastructure on its own. 
Last time I checked, they were working on getting another fat-pipe from a different provider for fail-over.

Once that is up, and they have a mirrored data-center at an alternate location I would say they're ready for prime-time usage.
As it is I've used them for Asterisk/Freeswitch deployments, IRC Bouncers (Quassel), and NGINX servers without complaint. (VPN and SOCKS Proxies also, but don't tell my boss  )


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## Anisur Rahman (Oct 22, 2017)

I googled CloudAtCost alternatives and stumbled here... I actually agree with Mariourk.. CloudAtCost is really surprise for me too... but I am looking similar service with different locations.. I really love CloudAtCost but not happy with the customer support responses.. Too slow.. >.<

However- I need other locations with ONE-TIME-PAID-VPS... I would really appreciate if anyone can help...


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## Deleted member 9563 (Oct 23, 2017)

Anisur Rahman said:


> I really love CloudAtCost but not happy with the customer support responses.. Too slow.. >.<


Support is expensive. Perhaps the price you paid does not cover much, if any, support. In fact, some very cheap services which are otherwise very good, explicitly come with no support whatsoever.


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## rigoletto@ (Oct 23, 2017)

I am client of Hosteur a French/Swiss company with very reasonable prices and very reliable (my experience), and you can usually pay annually - I indeed paid for 10 years for a domain I own. However, I do not use VPS services and so I cannot comment on it, but the last time I saw they would put any OS image you desire.


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## aragats (Oct 23, 2017)

mariourk said:


> Does anyone of you guys know a cheap, yet reliable, hosting solution?


If a European VPS works for you, I'm happy with Liteserver. No one-time payment, but you can pay annually, and they have many different options, e.g. €5/month works great for my FreeBSD KVM VPS. Currently they offer 15% for life.


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## sko (Oct 23, 2017)

I'm using DigitalOcean for testing, backup services, service/server migrations of physical machines and other things. Pricing is very transparent compared to other cloud/VPS services and their web interfaces are really easy to use (but they also have a nice API which can be leveraged e.g. by Ansible or Chef). I'm basically dropping off some money via paypal every ~4-5 months and get alerted if my credit drops below a given amount...

What I also really like about DO: you can snapshot a fully installed/configured droplet and migrate that image to any region, allowing you to spin up your ready-to-use droplet within seconds in any DO datacenter over the globe.


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## ekingston (Oct 23, 2017)

I had a look at CloudAtCost. It looks to me like they offer a discount (in the form of one-time-payment) for their developer VPSes. Their larger sized VPSes all fall under what they call "production" VPSes. I suppose they may make up any losses on the one-time-payment scheme by ending up as the preferred hosting company for anything that starts there and gets big. I find this a bit hard to believe, but I suppose it is possible.

Personally, I've had a VPS with lightserver and have only good things to say about them. Currently I've got a VPS with Vultr and am also very happy. I made the move purely on price: the Euro went up when I needed to get a bit more RAM for what I was doing and as a result Vultr ended up about $1 cheaper for me per month.

I'm interested in CloudAtCost because I consider Canadian hosting to be a big advantage. I'm curious if there are more than 2 people on the forums that actually use it and how long have they? For me this is a hobby so 5-9s reliability is not needed but I would expect 98% or better. Based on the terms for CoudAtCost, they imply a 96% reliability (they will refund for service interruptions in excess of 24 hours once you inform them of the interruption).


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## aimeec1995 (Oct 26, 2017)

Mudfish is pay for what you use. 

You can pay for x amount of data and use it at any rate you please.

As for whether or not the yhave a native client for FreeBSD I do not know.


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## Anisur Rahman (Dec 15, 2018)

OJ said:


> Support is expensive. Perhaps the price you paid does not cover much, if any, support. In fact, some very cheap services which are otherwise very good, explicitly come with no support whatsoever.


You are right.. I am actually taking a bigger risk now.. Now that their dedicated servers are on ONE TIME PAYMENT model too, I want to try it..

Here is my feedback on CloudAtCost, if anyone is interested-

# I bought Cloud Pro 3 v2 X 50 units.. Cheap and does my job perfectly.. I tend to do little overload stuff with data extracting apps.. My VPS can handle the load and work perfectly for a week.. Then it either goes down or starts to act groggy.. usually I am scared to reboot them.. Most of the time I find it never turns on again.. Hahaha.. So I made a system that backsup the data to another server every second and once my VPS is dead/not responding, I can re-deploy a new VPS deleting the existing one and clone the image using a gitclone script from backup server.. So I am totally habituated with the tricky stuffs [considering I am using the full working one VPS for 7-30 days without having to pay any monthly bills at all!]

# Why go through such trouble to run VPS? Well I am fortunate that I bought my VPS resources when they were on 80% sale. And now that they introduced Version 2- DAMN! The speed and services has been exceeding my expectation! I don't know if you guys knew that they had an annual charge of $9/year for maintenance purpose. From last black friday, they have omitted it too! So literally I am using around 200+ VPS, paying only $1500 back in 2016.. Unfortunately there is no discount like that anymore  Sometimes I really feel like I bought bitcoins back then!

# Best part of CloudAtCost is that they use the latest updates.. I used tons of cheap OpenVZ VPS before [since my projects make next to no-profit] and Kernel version is important to that.. Only CloudAtCost made me happy here... 4.4.0-137-generic... I remember once a support agent from Virmach literally offended me by telling, I need to invest more in KVM so I can enjoy such benefits.. Who would have thought, the most unpopular CloudAtCost will get that for free for me! Hahaha..

# I am now habituated with CAC's turtle-speed support... I now delete and re-deploy VPS if I am not happy.. I literally don't bother support anymore.. And still I am super satisfied that I made those calls back in the years.. At this point, I am trying my best to convince the support team to give me more discounts, but they won't just agree to it.. so little upset with it.. but still- happy that I own more resources than I need and already rented the remaining to my friends for their projects [yes my initial investment was fulfilled as well- so I am now making only profits out of it!]

# Bottomline- I believe from my explanation above, you understood I am no technical geek.. But I can only share my experiences project-wise.. I wish they had other country IP available.. But it's 100% Canadian.. So I am using third party VPN [got lifetime deals with 50% from socialstack] that just works fine for me now! However if anyone has any specific test or information to know- you can ask me.. I can try and come back with the feedback for you!

Hope this post would help someone to make their decision


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## chrcol (Dec 16, 2018)

I can see how its profitable, these one time costs are very high, equivalent to several months of service at the very least from comparable providers, I hazard a lot of customers typically may cancel after only short time so this is higher guaranteed income per customer which may well balance out to make it overall profitable.


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## leebrown66 (Oct 24, 2019)

Updating this zombie because Cloud at cost, while still offering a "free" account, now add on a mandatory maintenance fee of $10/mo to that free account.  It's cheaper to rent a low-end VPS, so I had them delete my account.


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## SirDice (Oct 25, 2019)

If you're looking for alternatives, we have a large thread with various providers and people's experiences: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-hosting-shared-vps-etc.21472/


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## aragats (Oct 25, 2019)

leebrown66 said:


> Updating this zombie because Cloud at cost, while still offering a "free" account, now add on a mandatory maintenance fee of $10/mo to that free account.  It's cheaper to rent a low-end VPS, so I had them delete my account.


Not only that. I upgraded my free account to a better one, they told me I have to reinstall my VPS and can leave my current VPS until I set up the new one. That was back in June. They had only FreeBSD 10.1 template, but I was able to update my free VPS to 12.0 before. So, I created a new server out of that template and found that the disk IO is very bad, 4-5 times slower that in the free one. I upgraded it to 11.x, then to 12.0 – nothing has changed. I submitted a ticket, they replied that I'll have to use a new template, and "We are updating all of our Templates right now. They should be available on the new DataCenter in a few weeks or so". That was on June 4, 2019. I checked their templates today – they still have only 10.1. They tried to charge me $9 maintenance fee a couple of months ago, I complained, and they refunded.


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