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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy Vultr customer and I can only be happier. I was looking for other providers recently for my personal needs, as I don't need that much resources and there were other providers with less that $5/month prices, but now I'm not looking anywhere.

Sweetest thing is hourly pricing. Sometimes I need Paris VPN for few hours. I have some scripts, so I can launch new instance with configured OpenVPN in 2-3 minutes, use it, then dispose and I would pay only few cents. Impressive, if you ask me. That's what cloud is for.

Network speeds are quite good, vultr has lots of features (want to install OpenBSD from your own ISO via web 2.0 KVM, no applet nonsense? Or Windows XP? No problem at all), and prices are just so low now. Also IPv6 works fine. I don't know about their support, I never had to contact them yet, but otherwise it's awesome service.

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Do you have to recreate the entire system each time? That's one of the downsides to Digital Ocean for me, you need to pay even when you're not actually running your droplet.

There might be better ways to do this but each new instance on vultr takes a few minutes to set up (you can actually use their web VNC console to watch their install script run，a unique experience not offered by other VPS providers I have used) and then you can restore old config from a snapshot which takes a bit more time but it is pretty fast overall.

There are options to load your own distro image and init scripts but I have not tried them since most things I need in a transient instance can be installed by following a simple bash script calling apt.

I'm recreating the entire system each time. Basically they copy predefined CentOS image, then running my post-install script which installs OpenVPN and copies some configuration files. It's quite fast in the end.

I think, you can snapshot the entire system, then delete server and recreate it from that snapshot later.

But yes, if you're just stopping server, you'll pay for it.

You can spindown Upcloud* instances and you only have to pay for storage (which you actually use) IIRC.

* http://upcloud.com

I'm curious why you'd need a specific VPN for a few hours? Get around streaming restrictions?

I'm playing WoW and sometimes something goes wrong with my ping from Astana to Frankfurt (where WoW servers are located), but Paris still works fine. So VPN solves that problem.

I occasionally start a VPS for a few hours to download stuff using OpenVPN AS... Living in France under constant phobia of HADOPI law :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law

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