Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care | Hacker News Reader

Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care

cloudscale.ch

59 pointsgoodluckknot60 comments

As a Swiss citizen myself, I am not convinced that hosting in Switzerland is any better privacy-wise than e.g. in Germany. New laws like BÜPF and NDG seem to get us closer to where the EU is in terms of what the government is allowed to access, and what providers are forced to log.

This talk is a good intro on what's going on in Switzerland right now https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7205-netzpolitik_in_der_schweiz#...

It's branding, people think "swiss" implies trust, when really hosting there is unlikely to offer any better protection than most other european country.

The same is true of Iceland. Some well-meaning people had good ideas for new laws and lobbied for them. Most of their suggestions never got implemented, but foreign media was fawning over it and didn't correctly indicate that these were just proposals. So now people believe Iceland is some kind of free-speech data haven.

Internationally wise, it's not. We have a long history of doing whatever other big countries ask us to do. Especially when the request comes from the United States. (I'm Swiss as well)

Switzerland has been hosting Onyx [1] for fiteen years now ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)

Edit: typo

Post-2008 (i.e., the final turning point re: the IRS was when the former UBS employee spilled his beans, but I'd be willing to bet Swiss cooperation post 9-11 just by some heavy-handed Homeland Security Agents in poorly tailored suits storming in discourteously) even grandfathered numbered accounts have no security in them for foreign nationals. As I understand it, if you're an MNC you transfer price and lodge your funds in the most tax-friendly domicile (Ireland) and retain those earnings without any remittance. For US nationals, the best way to engage in tax avoidance is to play a game of seashells in the Seychelles (oh god I'm sorry for the pun) with shelf-companies and auxiliary signatories, and keep on routing around until you eventually land up in HK. The only thing a US citizen gain from a Swiss bank account from is protection domestic civil litigation, i.e., divorce claims. Swiss nationals, as I understand it, still retain their anonymity but who really knows.

Fun fact: It's not the Caymans, Switzerland, or HK that is the largest tax shelter in the world - it's the US banking system.

I've heard that for nationals outside US, US is very good place to store your wealth. Because they give zero information outside. However practically all financial institutions outside US are very dependant on US finance infrastructure. That means they will comply hard with US data requests, which means that US citizens outside US have hard time hiding their assets.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a VPS has it's limits compared to physically segregated kit.

If a company's tag line is "For Developers Who Care", I'd expect more than a blatant rip-off of DigitalOcean's home page.

The first part of the page is dominated by the demo on the right on both and the tag-line and signup on the left. The workflow for creating a VPS is basically the same right down to selecting an SSH key. Even the demo video is surrounded by the same minimalist OS X-like window. It isn't a standard library that they both share, but rather a visual copying.

It seems tacky to use the same home page. More than that, I've used a bunch of different providers (Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, Rackspace, OVH) and they all have very different control panel interfaces showing distinct development. It seems like they simply copied DigitalOcean's interface as much as possible.

Going back to the home page, the second part is a three column bit with info about the service and each column is dominated by a giant icon, just like DigitalOcean. Next comes the pricing boxes on each. Both have a "what people have said about" section. Both put another signup box right before the footer. Both have the same grey footer. Even the headers in the footer (like "PRODUCT") are all-caps like DigitalOcean. The whole home page is just a rip off of the whole flow and style of DigitalOcean.

The fact that they simply ripped off DigitalOcean's user interface seems to discredit their claim that they're "For Developers Who Care". They don't care enough to do more than blatantly copy a competitors design (and then charge a premium by mentioning the name "Swiss" a lot). Cloudscale - For Developers Who Like Making Blatant Rip-Offs?

That might sound harsh, but DigitalOcean has worked hard to gain its reputation and trust in the community. To have someone with no reputation (yet) simply copy their design, possibly out of a combination of laziness and trying to ride DigitalOcean's coattails, seems really crappy (especially when they're trying to claim that they're for people that care).

So, you're saying:

1. DigitalOcean is a good product people trust.

2. They copied everything about it.

3. So, it's a bad product that we can't trust?

What am I missing aside from an ethical argument? If it's operationally like DO, then that's already an argument in it's favor. If it's just appearances, then it's a knock-off that ain't worth shit. I'm ignoring ethics of copying interfaces for now in favor of quality of service as many businesses will. Clearly, the interface will do just fine.

Both sites actually remind me of Twitter Bootstrap and one of their (commercially licensed!) themes in particular: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing (take a good look at the footer section)

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

I would prefer moving some of my many VPS to a local provider but Exoscale and this one have a minimum of around CHF 30 which doesn't make it worth it for me. I run many small instances not just a few big ones.

In addition I would like to know which datacenter this is in and who is providing the uplink? Many datacenters in Zürich are foreign owned. Equinix alone has 5 running and will have 7 soon.

EDIT: BTW Swisscom offers application hosting (https://developer.swisscom.com/pricing)

Just a small heads up: Swisscom is the ex-monopolist and very anti net-neutrality and even went as far as to dream about demanding money from startups who want priority of their data.

So, on the flip side, the availability will probably be good for the near and long term? ;)

WOW that's expensive for no good reason. I can get a server like this for about 10% of the price at for example OVH. Apart from being based in Swiss which I'm sure you're not the only host, what does this have to offer that's worth the 1000% higher price?

It's in Switzerland, which is one of the most expensive countries.

Switzerland is expensive, true, but it's not 10x more expensive than France.

The OVH offer you are referring to seems to have local storage in RAID-10. Price difference is huge (x6 imho) but the offers are not really the same.

It's a great marketing ploy for those who are paranoid of the MPAA and want to tunnel their torrents or add an additional extra node between them and a Silk Road. He could commoditize it directly and sell SOCKS 5 proxies for 10 dollars a month and make a killing just because of the false perception that the Swiss government won't release information at the request of US federal agencies. People are way better off using US-hostile-ish countries like China, Russia, or Yemen (though I'd imagine a Visa charge to Yemen might add a whole new set of watch-list problems for a US national).

Simple pricing. No need for a calculator.

And then you quote prices in swiss franks instead of US dollars as its common in hosting industry.

I don't have currency converter in my head nor I know USD->CHF rate

It practically 1:1 at the moment (1.00 USD = 0.999026 CHF)

If you are looking at their website using a browser connected to the internet, you don't need to do currency conversions in you head and memorise the exchange rates every morning, you can just use that same browser to ask for a currency conversion from any of a number of sites, e.g.

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?#q=1%20chf%20in%20usd

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1chf+in+usd&ia=currency

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+chf+in+usd

If they are charging in CHF, then it's in both their and their customers' interests to quote in CHF, otherwise fluctuations in currency markets and variations in the exchange rates offered by their customers' banks will invalidate those quotes.

You do have a point, but it still would be more convenient if the website showed the price in USD\other currencies as well.

The problem is that exchange rates vary. Showing the current rate would be misleading.

That's all very true but not the point. If you want to sell your product, you should make it as easy as possible for the customer to understand the value of your product and price is part of that judgement. And charging in CHF is not an excuse not to put the price in USD or EUR next to the CHF with the most up-to-date conversion rate that you get from those links you shared.

How do you think the rest of us feel? Sure you get a feel for roughly how much a dollar is but I also don't have a currency converter in my head, just in my browser.

Maybe an extension that converted things that look like currency into a grokkable currency of your choice?

CHF 30 (approx $30 USD) is quite steep for the base offering, compared to US-based providers (DO, Linode, AWS).

What specific guarantees do I have regarding data privacy that I wouldn't get of I hosted in the US? That's something I'd like to see listed prominently on the site, so I can determine if the extra cost is worth it.

I'll save you the trouble - no it is not. I read the entire (very short) TOS just to see if this was mentioned. They mentioned their _Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung_'s address of operation, a few indemnification clauses re: natural disasters and the right to TOS you.

OT: Not to sound negative, but I always find it strange to see these 'popular' banners on these (now standard) pricing pages. I'm sure for such a new product no pricing plan is yet 'popular' or do they already have so many customers?

popular with employees?

I've seen enough pricing pages to know that "popular" really means "recommended", but with the added benefit of social proof.

Wow, you actually believe that? To me 'popular' means 'has the best margins for us'.

For me these popular badges always were much more about anchoring [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

Sure, but that's just the means, the margins are the ends.

Which explains why they recommend it!

It's a lot more complicated than that. My friend ran a reselling company back during the CPanel days and he broke down his pricing structure. For hosting, profit is almost always a direct function of the level of plan if they're priced without specials and you assume the transfer was used to capacity(which was the largest expenditure during that era, by far -- hardware and 1.5 amps to each unit was negligible). Things were different since this was before the advent of bittorrent, dropbox, and ones ability to get 100mb fibre drops to the home from Verizon, but I think he mentioned ~80% of his COGS was bandwidth and unpredicted expenditures (i.e., server maintenance by a tech-- this was when KVM-over-IP units were like $200/mo).

His customers fell into a variety of groups though. Some people wanted to host their own domain/mail (again, this was before Gmail), so their consumption was negligble and despite being on the lowest tier, his margins were huge. Then you'd have people who'd take the middle-tier deal where the margins were bigger, but people (like my friends and I in high school) would host-jump and max out or bandwidth every month until they TOS'ed us (unfairly, might I add). I'd speculate there might be quite a few people who buy the lowest deal because it's the cheapest, never log in, and fail to cancel it out of lethargy as it's like 4 dollars a month (i.e., the "Godaddy upsell"). Who knows though.

I once rented servers from Switzerland. I guess mainly based on the image of them being secure, privacy-oriented etc. It was not cheap, of course, but I was fine with that.

Turns out that they had really lousy security practice, their staff was probably some idiots. The granted access to our servers to some random dude with simple social engineering hack. In addition they never admitted their mistake, although it was clear from the admin console what had happened (I guess they didn't even research it).

The company in question was Private Layer Inc. Never use their services. I will personally never trust anything Swiss on any IT-related.

If you use that kind of measure, I guess we'll all have to create our own countries to make sure we don't use services from a country that once had a company with bad practices?

Yeah, that doesn't work out as well as you might think.

I wondered if you would comment on that ;)

Wasn't really meant as a practical suggestion though

There are so many countries in the world, that it doesn't really do much harm to ignore one country when choosing product from international markets.

I knew you were talking about Private Layer long before you mentioned them in the end.

They are utter shit and not representative of the Swiss hosting market.

What about putting the prices in EUR or USD?? I know it only takes a google search to find out. But you see, other than Swiss no one really cares, thinks, calculates or anything in Swiss francs.

Is Bitcoin and/or paysafecard an payment option? all that talk about privacy is kinda silly if can not pay with (Semi)private payment methods

edit: why downvote? is this not a valid concern for a service that is marketing privacy as its main pro?

Presumably it is not about the operator's privacy, but about keeping the data stored/processed private. Protecting your users' data, not you.

On-topic but not for this particular company...

What is an ideal host for privacy? Been doing research for a potential security product and that particular question is one of the still-open problems to be solved.

Unfortunately CH gave in to the US -- look e.g. at the banks, or at the EU, especially DE blackmailing tiny CH to give up privacy.

Iceland is a country worth investigating when it comes to hosting.

Comparing with DigitalOcean (seemingly CloudScale's model), what's missing here for me is a dirt-cheap, let's-spin-a-VM-for-a-single-webpage option. I want something like CloudScale to exist so I'll definitely give it a try.

Edit: had a comment about previous performance, but I had mistaken CloudScale for one of their competitors, woops.

Is there still a market for providers that only sell bare bone private servers?

I wish more would look into cloning Heroku in terms of features and ease of deployment.

It's not just easy to create, deploy and manage but it's easy to add a slave or replace Memcached with Redis.

> Is there still a market for providers that only sell bare bone private servers?

Are there still sysadmins out there who would prefer that their servers run only the softwtare they themselves installed on it, no more?

There's something to be said for turnkey solutions like Heroku, but there will always be those who want more control.

Instead of advertising your "simple control panel", advertise your "simple and secure API".

This is very expensive. I have the exact same spec from a German provider for 10% of the price.

I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, a US-based cloud provider, and we have special HN pricing where you can get 1GB RAM instances for only $2.99/mo

https://www.ssdnodes.com/hn/

* You can upgrade with zero downtime to a larger server (it will live resize)

* 100% uptime SLA

* Fastest SSDs (we've achieved over 200K write IOPS and 1GB/s writes)

* Direct support from engineers

* Bitcoin payments accepted

* 7-day no-hassle refund guarantee

/plug

Where is the servers based? Why is there no info besides "us based". Do you have data-centers in EU as well?

We operate out of several datacenters, the servers for this deal are located in Montreal, Canada. We don't have EU servers yet, but are planning in expansion.

What virtualization do you use? OpenVZ, KVM, XenPV, XenHVM?

Across the company we use all of them, because our enterprise clients all have different needs. For this deal we use OpenVZ, with our own proprietary workload balancing algorithm that migrates containers so that each gets optimal performance.

Thanks. Like most technically-minded people, I wouldn't be interested in OpenVZ even at $2.99 a month.

(Responding here since I can't reply directly)

No problem. We actually ran a sale a few weeks ago at LowEndBox and added several hundred customers for our OpenVZ offerings, so I would point at the numbers as proof :-)

I wouldn't call LowEndBox a discriminating audience in any metric.

How are you compared with DO?

One more query, will the pricing remain same forever if we signup as HN user? And there is no detail about what will be the cpu configuration.

Can you throw more light on that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com