Right up there with New Relic writing a blog post about how you couldn't trust Sumo Logic (and should move to NR) after they got bought by Francisco Partners, only to be bought by Francisco Partners themselves.
Assuming they did this raise because they need the capital to throw more into their GPU business, this is not really a remarkable quote. One of the first things noted in the article is this is soon to be the largest part of their business. This is their first capital injection too. While its fueled by the growth in AI, the business itself is mundane, they rent GPU access. Growing that requires a lot of capital.
They're not even a startup, the company is 10 years old.
The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.
I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.
In all fairness, Vultr was the first hosting company to offering fractional GPUs - and they gained a lot of traction with indie developers as a result of it.
Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)
Journalists learn a new phrase that sounds techy / flashy and beat it to death. Watch CNBC for 5 minutes and you will see their "experts" use the phrase "hyper scalers" at least 5 times.
I don't remember the exact details, but I used to have a Vultr VPS (I think the smallest they had, for something like $2.50/month) for a few years running OpenBSD. One day I noticed IPV6 had stopped working, so I emailed support after a while because I wasn't sure if I had broken it during an upgrade a few months before or not (I don't ever really specifically use IPV6). Anyways, got a super detailed reply back from support with the exact cause / how to fix it that was specific to OpenBSD. I was pretty surprised they had someone replying to emails from a $2.50/month customer who was actually knowledgeable about a fairly niche OS!
When people try to cheap out on customer support, this is exactly what they lose, and it's something I always try to bear in mind as I go about things.
By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.
That's awesome and reminds me of a similar experience I had with Schwab some years ago. I contacted support with a question from an account with a paltry amount of money in it and got back a very detailed and helpful response. My account value to them was probably similar to your $2.50/month VPS account so I was blown away at the quality of the response. I have stuck with the company for years and recommended them multiple times.
My experience with Vultr has been better than with any of the other smaller VM providers. They always seem to provide just a little extra, and don't always nickle and dime you at every opportunity. I originally chose them because they most consistently had the best VM performance/price measured by a third party.
The other thing that stands out in that space is that their pricing isn't linear by vCPU and RAM. e.g. larger instances give better ratios and also offer bare-metal servers if you got to a scale and stability where that would be better suited.
I was a happy Vultr customer until the day I tried to get port 25 unblocked. Instead of getting it unblocked I received a ”sorry not sorry” copy paste from some senior sales guy.
I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.
Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).
That's odd. I had a single HDD vps for a few months, back when they offered those, and they immediately unblocked port 25 when I asked them via a support ticket. At the time I had expected more pushback about it, or clarifying questions. I kept using that same server for many years until they stopped offering that tier of server and force stopped it many years later.
The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.
I tested them out maybe like 7-9 years ago and that's the reason I didn't continue. 25 blocked by default. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me
I use Vultr for a BGP anycast CDN (they let you bring your own ips) and they're overall excellent. They also have budget GPU VPSes that are perfect for webgl screenshotting via chrome headless. Their sales rep gave me a 10% discount and we're not even slightly in their high volume category. Extremely underrated VPS provider IMO, I've had better results with them than DO. I hope this development does not change things.
I searched for a provider that would let me do BGP on a VPS and found Vultr. Their network is solid with tons of peers, low latency, high bandwidth to my location. My brief interaction with their support was very smooth.
WSJ blocked my request to view the page after making me do a captia to see it, and then only the first paragraph is visible on the Wayback Machine. The modern web is a joy to use.
WSJ is also blocking my request to view the page. Why they need a shitty request blocker for a web article - server side rendering only the first paragraph, I don't know.
I originally signed up with Vultr because they make it easy to set up an OpenBSD server, and I wanted to experiment with hosting my own mail server on OpenBSD. I've since expanded my usage with them and host everything on Vultr. Very satisfied with their service!
When they announced Bare Metal I was hoping it was closer to Hetzner, basically old fashion dedicated server.
AMD EPYC™ 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads, + 128 GB DDR5 ECC + 3.84 TB NVMe SSD for $221 and a $88 one time set up fee on Hetzner. Even if they could do it at $100 more expensive at $321 would still have been good enough.
But their Cloud / VPS offering are still very good. Now that Linode is nearly gone. DO is mostly Intel based. Vultr is mostly AMD. The other one that is close if not better is UpCloud.
Interesting that this ends up posted on the same day I got this email from them for my VM hosting a vpn:
"Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. A sudden reboot has been detected. Our engineering team is currently investigating the issue that caused this, but we expect no impact on data and/or configurations."
I've started testing with vultr some because they offer affordable fractional GPUs. I think I had something running for about $60/month with a 'real' GPU. 1/24th a GPU, IIRC, but... better than nothing. DO and linode offer GPU service, but the minimal cost just to get something up is significantly more.
This is awesome news. The more players in this market, the more validation we (Hot Aisle) have for the things we've been working on for over a year now.
Having spent a bunch of time talking in person with the Vultr team, they are a great group of people.
[+] [-] neom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] t3rabytes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] infecto|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coolgoose|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|1 year ago|reply
Joke aside, 300M for 10% of your company in its only ever funding round is a pretty sweet deal. It made its founder a billionaire "overnight".
He stands at a company with about the same market cap as DO, but private, with full control and very low dilution. I would consider that a win.
[+] [-] leetrout|1 year ago|reply
We really have let this go too far when a mid tier VPS provider is now a "cloud AI startup".
[+] [-] mrweasel|1 year ago|reply
The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.
I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.
[+] [-] alberth|1 year ago|reply
Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220524005336/en/Int...
[+] [-] chipgap98|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] oefrha|1 year ago|reply
> the AI revolution is powered by technologies that are either built on MinIO or integrated with it.
[+] [-] nickdothutton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_zeros|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MangoCoffee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gorbypark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pocketarc|1 year ago|reply
By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.
[+] [-] rurp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dzonga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
The other thing that stands out in that space is that their pricing isn't linear by vCPU and RAM. e.g. larger instances give better ratios and also offer bare-metal servers if you got to a scale and stability where that would be better suited.
[+] [-] b-lee|1 year ago|reply
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/vultr.com
[+] [-] Gud|1 year ago|reply
I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.
Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).
[+] [-] extraduder_ire|1 year ago|reply
The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.
[+] [-] indigodaddy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kyledrake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Zambyte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 65|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SoloPolo|1 year ago|reply
Lots of DMCA requests from news publishers means the binary extension is actually hosted on GitFlic.ru instead of Github or Firefox Addons site.
[+] [-] zcdziura|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] impulser_|1 year ago|reply
DigitalOcean is also currently valued at 3.5 billion right now, does ~800m ARR, 125m FCF, and profitable.
Anyone know how Vultr compares to this?
[+] [-] blackcoffeeice|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|1 year ago|reply
AMD EPYC™ 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads, + 128 GB DDR5 ECC + 3.84 TB NVMe SSD for $221 and a $88 one time set up fee on Hetzner. Even if they could do it at $100 more expensive at $321 would still have been good enough.
But their Cloud / VPS offering are still very good. Now that Linode is nearly gone. DO is mostly Intel based. Vultr is mostly AMD. The other one that is close if not better is UpCloud.
[+] [-] VoidWhisperer|1 year ago|reply
"Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. A sudden reboot has been detected. Our engineering team is currently investigating the issue that caused this, but we expect no impact on data and/or configurations."
[+] [-] mgkimsal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alchemist1e9|1 year ago|reply
IMO Vultr is best cloud provider and I’ve tried many. I can’t give a single reason but more they seem to get the balance of features correct for me.
[+] [-] everfrustrated|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanydeez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] latchkey|1 year ago|reply
Having spent a bunch of time talking in person with the Vultr team, they are a great group of people.
[+] [-] qoez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nijave|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] stefantalpalaru|1 year ago|reply
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