Managed Kubernetes now available in Open Beta. Test out the new service yourself at your Control Panel.
Managed Kubernetes now available in Open Beta. Test out the new service yourself at your Control Panel.
SimpleLogin is a startup working on open-source products to protect users’ online privacy. Our main product is an email alias service that allows you to use an “email alias” instead of your personal email address. All emails sent to an alias will be forwarded to your personal inbox. You can also send emails from an alias, making aliases to function like normal addresses for email delivery.
As a French startup, we initially chose the AWS Paris data centre. The choice was largely due to the proximity and our belief that working with a large provider such as AWS would save us time and effort. As it turns out, this could not have been further from the truth. We ended up spending way too much time and effort to have our EC2 instances handle email delivery correctly:
Of course, we could have created removal requests to the blacklist maintainers for these IPs but such tasks are a continuous time-waster. By our experience, AWS doesn’t have in place a good enough mechanism to stop spammers from using their Elastic IPs, leading to their bad network reputation.
Because of the earlier difficulties, we decide it’s maybe better to just manage the cloud servers ourself. UpCloud was our first choice due to several reasons:
We decided to move our infrastructure from AWS to UpCloud, starting with our staging environment. The hardest part was to replace the Relational Database Service (RDS), the managed database service we had used on AWS. We decided to take on managing our database ourself using Docker along with some monitoring and backup scripts. Other components were easy to move as they were already based on Docker.
After extensively testing the staging environment we took the plunge to migrate the rest of our cloud environment. Our entire infrastructure is now running on UpCloud. Despite our cautious expectations that the migration would be a rough journey, in the end, the move was smooth and downtime less than 10 minutes. After deploying all components on UpCloud, the longest step was actually just waiting for the DNS changes to propagate.
Now our service has run on UpCloud for some time and our users report having much better success with email delivery. Time will tell, but so far we are pretty happy with UpCloud.
One of the most common questions our customers ask us is that how we can compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on price as they have economies of scale on their side.
Comparisons
With the wide-scale migration of SMEs onto cloud infrastructure, managed services have become increasingly popular. They work as a natural extension to the offerings of Infrastructure-as-a-Service companies as a suite of services on a single platform. Cloud customers can look to further benefit from the expertise of their cloud provider by adopting managed services. But […]
Comparisons
Editors note: Since publishing, ServerBear has been shut down. The performance metrics are still fairly valid but more recent benchmarks can be found here and here. You can also compare us against other providers, such as AWS EC2, DigitalOcean and Vultr. Performance is an interesting feature in a hosting provider – if two cloud serversĀ are […]
Vision and culture