There are plenty of better deals as long as you don’t limit yourself to big clouds and clouds with startup-esque landing pages frequently posted to HN. LowEndTalk may be the most well-known place for finding such deals.

(Not saying the typical cheap VPS on LowEndTalk has comparable PaaS features. Only responding to parent’s use case of a single cheap instance.)

Best business model in the world, buy stuff in big bags, put it in smaller ones, sell at a multiple of the original price.

Fly is mostly (to my knowledge) reselling Netactuate and OVH servers, their main innovation is the developer experience on top, using Docker on a MicroVM based approach. Of course not only that, but I think it’s their main differentiator.

Haven’t used that in a while but Scaleway offered ridiculously cheap dedicated ARM hardware close to these price points, not sure if they still do.

Nowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings?

You can easily get 4 GB of RAM for $5 from the likes of Hetzner or Hostinger, so that's 16x more RAM for 2.5x the price. One relatively unknown provider I have used in the past offers 2 GB of RAM for €3.6/month (if paid monthly, €3 if anually), so 8x more RAM for 1.5-2x the price. I'm sure I could find something even cheaper, but I'm just looking at providers I have personally used.

BTW that dropdown seems to be sorted cheapest > most expensive. If you go to the bottom of the list the price for that same VPS doubles.

Oracle free is one 4 core 24gb ram vps + 2 dualcore amd vps.

One such microVM per month used to be within the free monthly allowance, is that not the case anymore?

Maybe if you're limiting yourself to AWS-wrapper cloud companies. What good is a $2/mo cloud instance if it's down multiple times a month?

Just get a $5/mo VPS instead if you're really concerned about a few dollars a month.

I used to use Racknerd for that sort of thing, and the costs were around there -- maybe $1.90/mo for a 512MB instance. It was easy to squeeze several hobby projects onto the machine.

I'm getting 1$ for a 2gb ram vps in ovh for the first year

i recommend lowendtalk what fly.io doing is running colocated baremetal servers and using firecracker to overcommit (probably via memory ballooning and other disk compression on demand)

if you are going to haggle over $2/month then you are better off just connecting your raspberry pi with wireguard/cloudflare tunnel on a residential connection

Sounds like a Lambda function....

Now just to worry about GCP getting shut down with a few days' notice. /s

But in all seriousness the gall to raise prices before actually fixing the reliability problems is pretty shocking. I understand it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing where you maybe are tight on resources but there's no scenario where it's acceptable to have a product with these kinds of problems and then raise prices on existing customers who are putting up with it.

theres just so many anecdotes/nightmare stories from people using fly.io here much more than the ones linked by GP

expect to see more of these "post-mortem apologies" from fly.io in the future because it won't be the last

It's basically the new Heroku with less lock-in, because it works with Docker.

You get edge computing, autoscaling, and load balancing without additional configuration.

Not as flexible as AWS, but also much easier to setup and maintain.

But the reliability issues suck now and then.

I have an SSR Astro project. Using Fly makes my project fast.

For dynamic data I use SWR.

I could use Cloudflare workers but it doesn’t play so nice with Astro.

I also have a “form submission service” where I receive a Post and send an email.

I need maximum uptime to avoid revenue loss.

It’s a go service so I deploy ~6 machines across the US to ensure I don’t drop any requests.

I haven’t had downtime in years.

If half your customers are in new your and half in sidney it makes you app faster if you run it in both places.

There is a lot of things we do for our users that we don't need (no one "needs" SPA etc). But if it is easy to make your app faster for your users, why not?

I would take edge compute if it's free and easy. That's fly.io's value prop.

In a world where much web browsing starts with ACK SYN ACK, it is nice if the server is close to you.

I typed fly launch, fly deploy and my node.js project was deployed. So I guess hobby projects?

I am going to go out on a limb and say there is no real value prop to fly.io. I could completely be wrong but it always feels like the modern MongoDB. Everyone wants to use it but I am not sure they are extracting value from it and instead its a shiny toy that is fun to build from.

This is the second place you've offered this sentiment. Was it your expectation that we were going to hit some point, sometime in the near future, where we weren't going to have deployment-blocking outages? I'd like to better understand your premise. If it's "I can get more reliability by deploying on a hyperscaler cloud", who ever told you otherwise?