I run my blog on 3 distributed instances, one of them being at Vultr. (The 2 others are DO and Scaleway.)

In my experience, all 3 are very reliable: zero downtime since I started using them 8 months ago. Vultr has the nicest dashboard: it uses the noVNC HTML5 client to give you access to the console, it supports 2FA (TOTP) for authentication, etc. They give you $50 of free credit to use in the first 60 days (or did, when I signed up). Plus they accept Bitcoin payments!

Only minor complaint I have is when you create a vps they don't give you its SSH host key fingerprint. You have to log in the console to get it...

Would you mind sharing the technicalities of splitting requests for your blog across 3 providers? Is the 'load balancing' part done at the DNS level?

Yes—full details at http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/ Don't forget to lower your TTL to make it work decently.

Merci bien.

Sounds like a solid provider, I'll give them a try with my next small project. Especially for that price.

I've been running on vultr $5/mo boxes for years now. No complaints - the boxes are snappy and the web UI/dashboard is nice. I originally picked them because they supported FreeBSD out of the box, and let you upload your own ISO to boot from if you want to run something else (like OpenBSD). I've only ever had one interaction with their support staff, and the service was prompt and professional. I've been on AWS and DO as well, and am happy with the vultr experience by comparison, so can happily recommend them if you're curious to give them a shot.

They just recently started supporting OpenBSD officially as well.

I immediately switched. This way I wouldn't have to deal with the generally more messy and weaker[1] OS that is FreeBSD, nor would I have to use old pf syntax.

[1] "Theo De Raadt Says FreeBSD Is Just Catching Up On Security": https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raa...

I ran https://precursorapp.com on Vultr in the early days. I had a setup with a few dedicated servers for the DB and load balancer, and then I would spin up and shut down application servers whenever I deployed new backend code. Infrastructure looked like: https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-Infrastr...

I used to recommend it to everybody, but don't any longer. I had two negative experiences that made me stop recommending it.

The first is frequent restarts. Very small sample size, but both me and a friend started experiencing restarts every month or so. I don't think I got any advance warning about the restarts, but I'm not positive.

The second is that networking between instances stopped working for me in the middle of the night shortly after Vultr did an upgrade. Support wasn't able to help (though they did try) and I couldn't figure out anything on my end. I had to switch everything to AWS to get the site back online before people woke up in the morning.

I was super happy with it before those two problems, though, and the people there seemed competent and professional. I was also using FreeBSD, so it may not be as well supported as Linux (which may have contributed to the networking problem).

Thanks for this comment. I was about tell my team to investigate Vultr as an option for our next website, but I guess we'll first do some more research into this.

We're still on AWS too. Currently spending about $50 / site which adds up quite quickly when you have 20+ sites. Our current breakup is something like (2 x t2.micro - one for website, one for cron created using Elastic Beanstalk, 1 x db.t2.micro for RDS + Elastic load balancer cost). I'm sure we can bring it down to $10 / site if we were to move to Vultr or Scaleway but it's a very small site to pay for the reliability AWS has provided to us all these years (apart the recent S3 outage). So guess we'll too just stick to AWS for now until.

Why not just get a couple of bigger instances and run all your sites on them?

There are many reasons but a few from the top of my head are:

1) The whole system is running on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk (via Docker). Beanstalk provisions 3 instances for every site (1 Web, 1 Worker/cron, and 1 RDS) for every app with ELB on front.

2) It makes installing updates easy and automatic using deployment scripts which we have on every site.

3) Everything (web/cron/database) is configured to scale up and down automatically, i.e. new servers start as per demand. This may not be possible otherwise.

dev ops is hard!

I encountered the same problem with restarts you did, though I only had 4 in ~8 months. They gave no advanced warning and simply notified that my instance had been restarted which was extremely unprofessional to me.

I went through a period of frequent restarts on vultr too. Moved to ssd nodes with their reddit offer to two locations.

I saw this a while ago: https://storify.com/phoul/vultr-tampering. Unsure what to make of it really but it's made me somewhat wary of Vultr.

That's... weird, actually. I'm inclined to think that this is incompetence rather than malice, if only because as malice its extraordinary incompetent. I mean, what would the point even be? I would think it's a MITM, but they already control the hypervisor, so I can't imagine any sort of compromise that isn't completely trivial to implement invisibly.

I was hosting a project on a vultr VPS and they rebooted my instance more than 4 times in 8 months. Definitely wouldn't recommend them.

I used to colocate with one of their sister companies and I've chatted with the CEO a few times on IRC. They were generally very reliable, although they didn't return my rail screws or cables oddly enough.

I've just had one small $5 VPS with them for about a year now. No downtime, no complaints. Since my needs are so basic I think I could probably get away with one of these $2.50 offerings, however the problem - and it's the only problem I've run in to with Vultr so far - is that downgrading VPS plans isn't possible. You can only go up.

Snapshot your current running instance and create a new $2.50/month server using that snapshot.

Works fine, I just moved a site from $5 to $2.50 without issues.

Why not spin up a new one and recreate your configuration? Only weak point is if they don't let you move the IP

I've been running a lot of personal projects on Arch Linux on the $5 plan for over a year with 0 complaints.

I use them. Basically DO but with better IPv6.