Changed to yet another VPS provider yesterday, so here are my initial experiences regarding our new host UpCloud.com.
Disclaimer: We struck a deal with UpCloud exchanging advertising on our community for hosting credits. Even with this affiliation, I intend to share my un-biased view on their operation. Good or bad, I will report.
UpCloud has four datacenters: Chicago, London, Helsinki and Frankfurt. The company itself is based in Finland. They are relatively new having started in 2012. They are somewhat popular in the Nordic IT-scene and have received favorable reviews. I also have some friends at Kontena.io (world class container gurus), and they spoke favorably about UpCloud.
In terms of pricing they position themselves exactly against the market leader Digital Ocean (another great option). What caught my attention is their marketing, where they also benchmark their operation against DO, claiming significantly better performance. Their marketing promise includes faster CPU cores and significantly faster disk I/O than the similar Digital Ocean VPS. I have not benchmarked their servers.
The UpCloud administration dashboard is straight forward and servers spin up in 45 seconds or so. I am currently on their 80$ plan (Frankfurt), featuring 6 cores, 8GB RAM and 200GB storage. My initial expression is that our site (Tappara.co) is now very snappy and responsive - better than ever before, but of course this is a rather beefy VPS I am using (I have also used DOâs 80$ plan in the past).
I have just started using them, so too early to say anything about the reliability or long term performance. At least based on the specs, UpCloud should be a good fit for Discourse. If anyone here has used them, Iâd be interested in hearing any comments or feedback how they perform.
One minor thing noticed - the way my VPS reports CPU cores caused incorrect number of unicorns configured by discourse-setup. So slight editing to app.yml may be needed in order to get best results.
More than two months with UpCloud and so far the experience has been perfect. 100% uptime, excellent performance day after day. Their 80$ plan with 6 cores and 8GB RAM has serious oomph under the hood and it has handled our traffic spikes effortlessly.
True test comes when there are issues, but that is yet to happen. So far could not be happier.
I donât know how their backup system works, but I took a snapshot of my Discourse instance literally in 3 seconds. My 1.8 update went fine though, so I have no reason to verify how the snapshots are restored.
I know a small host in germany with right now 4 employees and there (They use KVM right now like UpCloud) and while the machine is running you can take a backup in a few seconds literally, if you suspend the machine even with RAM.
Thatâs because they are not backups, they are snapshots! They arenât the same thing. Iâm not saying that it is wrong or that backups are better than snapshots. Itâs just important to know the difference and the tradeoffs.
Yes, snapshots. I was just wondering as there is quite bit of data on my instance and I have not seen the similar function working this fast on other VPS providers.
I assume you are posting this because you are affected. Could you say a few words about what this and the previous incident meant for you in practice? In other words, are you posting this to show how good they are in addressing issues or how often they have issues?
