Review Incoming

Note: I have yet to dive in and test out a spin up, but that will be coming soon.

Here are my initial impressions and experience so far.

I found out about Vultr from good ol’ Josh Tronic’s blog on his VPS Hosting Showdown

Have a Coupon (or not)

I was trying to get the $10 credit from Josh’s blog, but NOPE.jpg
I did though end up tossing $25 with this coupon:
https://www.vultr.com/coupons/
via: https://www.vultr.com/match/
Code: VULTRMATCH
If I have helped here’s my referral 😛 http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7163096

Gotchas

This company seems to have a lot of gotchas that DO tends to have the same of but DO is more up front about them which I’m now learning a bit too late for Vultr : \

1. A commenter on Josh’s blog says that you can only have 2 instances @$2.50/m
   It’s silly that it’s semi-comparable to DO’s $5 instance but is deemed unworthy (hell I’ve run Minecraft slimmed down on 256MB of ram or less – I should really have done a write-up on it)
2. These instances are only available at specific locations and will otherwise show “Temporarily Unavailable” I assume they’re planning to roll out to other regions but there’s no timeline as far as I know. Also that verbiage is not very straightforward and ambiguous – it sounds like if you wait for a day or a week you might have a chance to nab a server for 2.50 on that region, but the reality is that it’s not yet rolled out there yet.
3. I just started reading the terms on the VULRMATCH code and they’re saying that if you don’t use that money up within a year they’re going to take it away (so much for the crazy idea of running a 2.50/m server for 2 years – at that point I was assuming I’d be getting a $10 credit on top of my double match. Nerp.
   1. So are they going to take the funds out of the money they matched you on before dipping into the money you gave them for it? Nope, they’ll take 50/50 from that money, so you’re still going to have to use it up in the same amount of time.
   2. There’s no $20 option for some reason?
   3. Their credit card system wasn’t taking any of my cards so I had to use paypal :\

I’m tempted to try and get a refund and only put like $10 in now.

Quick Service Review Thus Far

If you’re used to Digital Ocean you’re going to find this host very familiar, they practically ripped the UI from DO. One interesting feature they have over DO which has always been a legal gray zone is the ability to upload your own ISOs – we’ll see how long that lasts. I also haven’t tried that feature out so I’m not sure if there’s any limitations or a review process? There are definitely some different flavors of OS (There are some Windows server OS, they cost extra per month) and Software like CPanel that DO doesn’t offer.

I imagine the $2.50/m servers are very much like shared hosting on overfilled machines but we shall see…