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iCloudHosting - £3.95 512MB Xen VPS in UK

iCloudHosting Joe from UK-based iCloudHosting emailed me a special coupon code a few days ago where you can get the cheapest of their Cloud Servers for £3.95/month (~USD$6.13). Use the code LEB0911 when you order, or use this sign up link.

  • 512MB memory
  • 25GB storage on SAN + 25GB backup
  • 500GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
  • 2x vCPU
  • Xen

iCloudHosting takes PayPal, WorldPay and bank transfer. Offer is only available to 10 signups or until the end of October. Servers in North London using Gyron data center. Their domain has been registered in November 2009, but domain WHOIS privacy prevents us to know who is behind the business. The domain, however, is registered to “BBS Commerce Ltd” which can be found on the CompaniesHouse (No. 04837714, since July 2003).

The architecture is indeed the interesting one here, which can be found on this page. They use a pair of redundant SAN + backup on NAS, and then hypervisor boxes connecting to SAN via iSCSI switches. If a server crashes, your VM instance can boot straight up on another server without loosing persistent data. I am currently using a SAN based Xen VPS with dual 10Gbps between the blade and SAN boxes, which provides some pretty decent IO throughput and redundancy. It was costly though, so it’s interesting to see a similar setup in the low end box pricing range.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

35 Comments

  1. Daniel:

    Ive heard of that company before and here is some info

    http://i.imgur.com/ZuJ9d.png
    http://i.imgur.com/Z5mYz.png

    October 3, 2011 @ 12:05 pm | Reply
  2. Just ordered. Waiting for VPS to be setup.

    October 3, 2011 @ 12:33 pm | Reply
    • Keith:

      You won’t get an email, you have to login to the client area to find out if it’s ready & get your initial root password.

      October 3, 2011 @ 2:10 pm | Reply
  3. dpflap:

    “Offer is only available to 10 signups or until the end of October.”

    what’s the point in posting it then?

    October 3, 2011 @ 1:19 pm | Reply
    • Tom:

      Agree, I would buy this in a few weeks as I’m huge budget SAN lover, but come on damn it, 10 sign ups for a blog that gets more then 1k uniques per day?? Took less then an hour to sell that much and the blog post will remain here for at least a few weeks.

      October 3, 2011 @ 2:44 pm | Reply
    • rm:

      10 signups is not even funny, IMO such offers should not be posted.

      October 3, 2011 @ 3:11 pm | Reply
      • I would think 10 is actually quite reasonable. So it’s better for none to get the offer, than to have 10?

        October 4, 2011 @ 10:29 am | Reply
        • rm:

          > So it’s better for none to get the offer, than to have 10?

          If they’d get a “Sorry but that makes absolutely no sense” answer to their E-Mail, maybe next time they’d consider a 40-50 signup offer at the very least.

          On the other hand, if you post it and therefore condone such practice, then what’s next, 5 signup offers, or 3, or for just 1 signup? :)

          October 4, 2011 @ 10:55 am | Reply
        • Yes obviously there is a limit to it, and I think 10 is reasonable. I have indeed received offers with less quantity before and opted not to post them.

          I guess I didn’t expect all 10 signups are used up hours after the post went online. There have been offers posted here that hardly get any comment let along sign ups. So I guess people ARE interested in those redundant-SAN setups that aren’t usually available in the LowEndBox pricing range?

          October 4, 2011 @ 11:03 am | Reply
        • At least they announced it a head of time. We’ve had providers who have kept that information to themselves and announced it after the offer was posted.

          Now that’s worse.

          October 4, 2011 @ 12:39 pm | Reply
        • rm:

          > So I guess people ARE interested in those redundant-SAN setups that aren’t usually available in the LowEndBox pricing range?

          I think it’s just that 4 GBP for 512 MB Xen in the UK is a very good deal on itself.

          Also it’s not obvious to me that a shared SAN accessed over network will perform better than a dedicated per-node RAID on fast drives. Sure it might be more convenient to the host, and may reduce the need for downtime if implemented correctly (that’s a big “if”, when we speak about some small lowend provider), but not much to justify a significant premium over regular offers.

          October 4, 2011 @ 12:47 pm | Reply
      • No, a SAN doesn’t necessarily perform better. The advantage we see of a SAN for our customers is high-availability, and you can hit pretty much any performance you want to get with SSD-based caching which benefits everyone. :)

        October 4, 2011 @ 12:49 pm | Reply
  4. Miguel Ângelo Santos Pereira / MrGeneral:

    Damnit, I love this offer, however, right now, I cannot afford to signup.

    :-(

    October 3, 2011 @ 1:40 pm | Reply
    • Spirit:

      You would be too late anyway… “The promotion code you have entered does not exist”.

      October 3, 2011 @ 2:06 pm | Reply
      • Miguel Ângelo Santos Pereira / MrGeneral:

        Heh, so I guess they’re sold out hehe <.<

        October 3, 2011 @ 2:09 pm | Reply
        • Spirit:

          Very surprising, a? :P

          October 3, 2011 @ 4:38 pm | Reply
        • Miguel Ângelo Santos Pereira / MrGeneral:

          Ooops, late reply.

          Not very surprising tho, I’d love to see some feedback1 :-)

          October 11, 2011 @ 9:29 pm | Reply
  5. Their website is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY slow for me.

    And no im not using IE.

    October 3, 2011 @ 5:01 pm | Reply
  6. Daniel:

    lol there standard pricing for this is £14.95 What a ripoff for what you get.

    October 3, 2011 @ 5:02 pm | Reply
    • Tom:

      Are you fucking drunk? Redundant SAN + 512MB + 25GB and +500GB with 2virtual CPU for 15p? Seems like a very decent price of such package with out any discount for this looking for SAN storage. And 4p LEB is awesome. Ofc I didn’t read a TOS and such yet.

      October 3, 2011 @ 7:58 pm | Reply
      • Spirit:

        iCloudHosting 4p LEB don’t exist. It’s a myth! :P

        October 3, 2011 @ 8:13 pm | Reply
        • Daniel:

          So no one managed to get one here then?

          October 3, 2011 @ 8:51 pm | Reply
        • Keith:

          I did

          October 3, 2011 @ 8:56 pm | Reply
      • ab:

        don’t feed the troll kids

        October 3, 2011 @ 8:36 pm | Reply
    • Rip off? Far from that. As I’ve said that I have a VPS with 50GB SAN storage running my business website, and I pay much more than that. Personally I do not think LowEndBox is the kind of territory iCloudHosting wants to get into in the first place with their kind of set up.

      October 4, 2011 @ 10:34 am | Reply
  7. Guys, don’t despair! We’ve got a few more available, we were blown away by how popular the offer was. If you missed out, drop me an email on joe dot watts at icloudhosting.com and I’ll do my best to sort something out for you! :)

    I hope this is all OK within the rules on here.

    October 4, 2011 @ 7:49 am | Reply
    • hello Joe

      just sent email, hope you will get one for me :)

      October 5, 2011 @ 4:00 am | Reply
  8. James:

    Promo code does not work.

    October 5, 2011 @ 10:42 pm | Reply
    • Spirit:

      Tell us something new..

      October 5, 2011 @ 11:08 pm | Reply
  9. Hi James, drop me an email on joe dot watts at icloudhosting.com and I’ll do my best to sort something out for you!

    October 6, 2011 @ 6:58 am | Reply
  10. Box:

    Can someone who’s purchased this post performance stats please?

    October 17, 2011 @ 6:48 pm | Reply
  11. It looks like BlueLightHost[.com] by iCloudHosting has the same layout template/design as BuyVM[.net] with some changed colors and jQuery versions.

    Is that like a (free) public template or something? or an inspired-by-BuyVM template?

    [anyone remember what happened to boxsrv? :P]

    October 18, 2011 @ 9:09 am | Reply
  12. Very perceptive Grizzly, we haven’t even promoted that site yet. The appearance is very similar to BuyVM, but philosophy on architecture is completely different. As I understand it BuyVM have storage on the servers with no failover, but we’re doing SSD-cached ZFS SANs with automatic failover between hypervisors. I think they’re KVM and we’re Xen too, so some differences there.

    October 18, 2011 @ 9:56 am | Reply

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