Since October 1, cheap VPS provider Vultr has begun charging for snapshots. This was announced in a blog post on September 20. They explained the reason for this change is due to abuse of the previously free service:
“Vultr now has hundreds of thousands of customers, with millions of cloud instances deployed. Because snapshot storage was previously free, users tended to leave old snapshots in their accounts indefinitely (we get it – we would too if it was free!).”
This was a nice option, and to be fair people probably did exactly as Vultr suggests – made a ton of snapshots with zero incentive to clean them up. Going forward, snapshots will be billed at $.05/GB.
This was announced on rather short notice, and was only mentioned in a blog post. Might have been better if an email had been sent out, perhaps with a note saying “your account has 56 snapshots and will pay $XX.XX per month for them starting October 1st.” Oh well – you got free service for years, so who can really complain.
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Always bothers me when a company says ‘unlimited on , never a charge’ and then quietly starts charging. Sounds like something Google would pull…
The word “unlimited” is used far too frequently and rarely really means unlimited.
Unfortunately after running a business for 40 years I’ve found that people tend to value, look after and appreciate those things they have to pay for.
Great point Robert, I agree.
> people made a ton of snapshots with zero incentive to clean them up
> snapshots will be billed at $.05/GB
How about 1 or 2 snapshots included then $.05/GB for anything more? Maybe a notification that you haven’t made a snapshot in x months?
> Why is Vultr making this change? Old and unused snapshots.
> Over 90% of Vultr customers will see less than a 2% increase in their monthly invoice
Sounds like that 2% is just as important as dropping old and unused snapshots.
> We would rather give our customers more capacity in more locations, globally, than spend money storing old snapshots.
So I guess Vultr customers should expect their free storage upgrades in the next month.