ADTAQ VPS

I'm old enough to remember when "the cloud" first came to market. It was an amazing, entirely new way to think about hosting and deploying applications. Truly innovative and ground-breaking at once.

Then, I tried ordering a cloud server.

To my surprise, It barely worked. The hardware it was running on must have been extremely oversold. I would type, and 5-10 seconds later the characters would show up; not a great first impression.

I did what I would normally do on any system and installed web-server. Installing the packages via the package installer seemed to take forever; this thing was seriously bottle-necked on I/O.

Eventually, the install completed, and I was able to upload my content without issue.

"Guess I'm in 'the cloud' now..." I told myself... right before my instance went completely unresponsive for no clear reason.

Granted, "the cloud" has gotten much better since then. But as anyone who has tried to use it can attest to, it was not built for people, but for computers. There is no tech support, the control panels are a mess and nearly incomprehensible, and the naming schemes and "flavors" are all totally cryptic. I mean look at this:

Oh and clear, straight forward pricing? Good luck. If your organization is of any scale whatsoever, you'll need a dedicated resource just for budgeting. Instance size, disk storage, disk IOPs, elastic IPs, bandwidth transfer, etc; all of these things are billed separately and endlessly configurable.

As I said earlier, "the cloud" was not built for people, but computers. A computer doesn't care if a command prompt is slow to respond or it takes a long time to update packages. If its code says to do something and that thing is not complete within a defined time frame, it just spins up another instance automatically to speed things up... which is great, especially if you are AWS and get to bill for it.

That brings me to my next point, which is that "the cloud" was never intended to save you money. It allows you to shrink and grow your infrastructure with automation, and hey, that's cool! But if you were to calculate how many cloud instances you'd need to equal one properly configured and not oversold Virtual Private Server, you would quickly find that cost-savings is NOT the cloud's forte.

For fellow IH members, maybe that's a perfect fit. People here are trying to build apps that are inexpensive early on and can then grow elastically as their business gains traction. Developers traditionally aren't system admins and don't want to (or know how to) configure web servers, tune app servers, manage databases, etc. So I do get it, "the cloud" allows all of that to "just work." All I'm saying is there is a cost associated with it.

What ADTAQ is doing is just much more straightforward. Choose a VPS package that fits your needs, push the "Subscribe" button, and log in as root. You get a dedicated CPU core, dedicated RAM, and local storage on the device for maximum performance. Here's OUR provisioning screen:

And it's fast, too! Here are the results from a yabs.sh run:

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 150.24 MB/s  (37.5k) | 2.39 GB/s    (37.3k)
Write      | 150.63 MB/s  (37.6k) | 2.40 GB/s    (37.5k)
Total      | 300.88 MB/s  (75.2k) | 4.79 GB/s    (74.9k)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 7.68 GB/s    (15.0k) | 953.74 MB/s    (931)
Write      | 8.08 GB/s    (15.7k) | 1.01 GB/s      (993)
Total      | 15.76 GB/s   (30.7k) | 1.97 GB/s     (1.9k)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 1.25 Gbits/sec  | 688 Mbits/sec   | 138 ms
Scaleway        | Paris, FR (10G)           | 989 Mbits/sec   | 809 Mbits/sec   | 149 ms
NovoServe       | North Holland, NL (40G)   | 1.16 Gbits/sec  | 1.15 Gbits/sec  | 145 ms
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 895 Mbits/sec   | 755 Mbits/sec   | 224 ms
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 1.92 Gbits/sec  | 368 Mbits/sec   | 65.2 ms
Clouvider       | Dallas, TX, US (10G)      | 2.22 Gbits/sec  | 1.80 Gbits/sec  | 63.3 ms
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 2.63 Gbits/sec  | 2.01 Gbits/sec  | 37.1 ms

There are no APIs, it's not elastic, and we only have one (very sexy) datacenter. But focusing on doing just a handful of things very well allows us to be very efficient, and we then pass on the savings from that efficiency directly to our customers.

For example:

1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 1 TB RAID6 Disk Space
2.5 Gbit Network Uplink / 3 TB Transfer
$10/month | $100/year

2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM / 2 TB RAID6 Disk Space
2.5 Gbit Network Uplink / 6 TB Transfer
$20/month | $200/year

3 vCPU / 3 GB RAM / 3 TB RAID6 Disk Space
2.5 Gbit Network Uplink / 9 TB Transfer
$30/month | $300/year

4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 4 TB RAID6 Disk Space
2.5 Gbit Network Uplink / 12 TB Transfer
$40/month | $400/year

These offers may not be for everyone, but we feel there is a market for real customer service, real performance you can count on, and straight-forward transparent pricing.

I mean heck, I'd buy it...