Vultr - New Sweden PoP & Snapshot pricing from October 1st

Decicus

They apparently posted both of these things on their blog a few days ago, but I just saw them tweet about the new PoP.

You can now get their 'cloud compute' instances in Stockholm, with high frequency & bare metal plans coming 'in the future'.

They're also beginning to charge for snapshots from October 1st 2021, costing $0.05/GB, which is the same price is DigitalOcean (Hetzner Cloud still cheaper at €0.01 (~$0.012) per GB).
Until now they've been free, so I'm surprised it took them this long to charge for snapshots. Seems they first released snapshots back in 2014, so that's over 7 years of free snapshots.

corbpie

Charging for the snapshots is fair but it can be a killer especially as you cannot download/upload them. Now you either pay for the snapshot to be stored or spend the time to re-setup when you deploy a new instance.

Decicus

@corbpie said:
Charging for the snapshots is fair but it can be a killer especially as you cannot download/upload them.

Are there any providers out there that offer snapshots and let you download them? From my experience that's not the case.

Now you either pay for the snapshot to be stored or spend the time to re-setup when you deploy a new instance.

I suppose those are valid concerns, but I feel like if you were using snapshots, you should've seen this coming to a certain extent. Nothing stops you from re-deploying instances from snapshots now and dumping the data, but of course you'd have to spend some time with it and deal with extra compute costs. It's likely not worth it unless you have really big snapshots.

My concern is the fact that I found out randomly through their blog, because I was looking for more information about their Sweden PoP.
Had I not checked that myself, I never would've known, as I haven't received any email nor do I see a tweet about it. Especially considering the fact that it's going into effect only 10 days after the blog post was published.

With that said, I don't have any active compute instances (only snapshots), so maybe that's why I haven't received anything.

tetech

@Decicus said: Are there any providers out there that offer snapshots and let you download them? From my experience that's not the case.

Azure, Lunanode

tetech

@corbpie said:
Charging for the snapshots is fair but it can be a killer especially as you cannot download/upload them. Now you either pay for the snapshot to be stored or spend the time to re-setup when you deploy a new instance.

Exactly. I don't have an objection to Vultr charging, and will probably continue to use them (mostly for building packages) but this is an inconvenience. I'll probably end up shifting more of my stuff to Lunanode. They also have a good system for "shelving" instances, give a small tier of free image storage, and let you download them.

Not_Oles

@Decicus said: Are there any providers out there that offer snapshots and let you download them?

MetalVPS ✔️

Radi

Or you can create your own snapshot with Clonezilla on your own machine.