It could be the three.js shader on the page that they use which renders in the background. I think you may be able to disable shaders to test but not sure. Been awhile.

We fixed this, please try again, also if anyone knows how to run a Three.js shader without exploding people's laptops I am very open to suggestions.

Yeah, I had the same experience. It made the page basically unusable for me.

Oh wow, same thing on my oldish Macbook Air from 2018, using Firefox. Completely unusable.

It's good of you not to jump to any conclusions!

Same on my low end android phone

It is also terrible to scroll on iOS with power saver turned on.

Same here.

If you need more trial credits than our pitiful $1 email me at derek@carolinacloud.io. We were inundated with crypto miners from Russia so we had to ban all .ru domains from signing up + shrink the free trial.

People on HN are obviously legit users so anyone reading this please email me at derek at carolinacloud.io and we will give you $250 free credits at least or maybe more if your workload requires it!

Thanks for the honest feedback. We just fixed this, I was hoping people wouldn't stick around on the landing page for too long since our console lets you do almost everything without needing an account. That assumption was obviously misguided!

We have no egress fees but you're right about Hetzner. They're cheap. We aim to offer more value-added software to make up for it. Also that machine is in Europe, Americans don't like the latency (at least I don't), they have been known to shut people down (within reason).

Also I'm seeing that the most they can go RAM-wise for a dedicated US location is 192G. We go to 512 and will soon go beyond. I'm sure they'll get there soon but that's a consideration as well.

What about ingress costs?

We own all of our own hardware and we rent space in a colocation center in Charlotte, NC. We used to run out of my house since I had 8Gbps unmetered from Google Fiber but ultimately went to colocation since it was relatively cheap and has the backup power/network infrastructure.

login.carolinacloud.io resolves to 216.227.218.162 which is owned by https://www.tier.net/ which has a datacenter in Charlotte.

> they can shutdown your account if threats persisted

That problem can NEVER be avoided at any level unless you run absolutely everything (which is almost impossible).

What everyone does is have a system to quickly pass on and also shutdown who's 1 layer down. You receive a report and deal with the client.

> I was interested in building my own cloud

At the end of the day the problem has nothing to do with clouds. It happens everywhere e.g. if you rented out a house and someone did something illegal with it... how do you avoid it? All the same.

even if the datacenter provider owns the IP ranges and thus gets all the abuse mail, they are kind of incentivized to keep you as a customer? since you are paying them

also, if you get your own IP ranges then the provider won't care much about e.g. your clients scanning the internet / running malware

Another topic is DDoS to your clients which can exhaust the uplink bandwidth... Don't know much of it

> Some of the cheap European providers have US presence now as well

Not that offer s3-compatible object storage (which I guess is on the roadmap) and Turin VPS. These prices are legit and I'm not pulling the trigger yet but I'm definitely interested.

Landing page or console? We didn't really build our console for mobile though we probably should.

We don't have on-demand API-based bare metal provisioning right now. Sorry if that is misleading on the website. Our bare metal is OTC right now (over the counter).

For the rest of our provisioning (VM and container) I wrote the software myself. It's based on a Django app called the "master" that hosts the console and keeps track of who has rented what etc + a bunch of "host" nodes that listen for instructions from the "master". Pure python, the only thing that's in Go is the CLI.

I looked into Proxmox but ultimately decided I wanted full control. ZFS storage from Proxmox is something I do sometimes wish we had — going to offer s3-compatible storage very soon but I know Proxmox does ZFS out of the box really well.

> left my job earlier this year

They are probably reselling from hetzner/vultr

Why would they need to buy bandwidth? Many places would offer you a gigabit pipe directly.

three.js shader. Surprisingly runs super well on my iPhone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We have about 1000 cores right now.

We're really excited for the AMD EPYC Venice — 256 physical cores each -> 512 vCPUs -> 1024 vCPUS on a single board with dual-socket. It will probably be about $40k per machine with these RAM prices but we're definitely going to buy a few. A full data center on a single motherboard!

So we're limited on capacity since we own all our own hardware. Please do not use us for auto-scaling just yet. Our software would have no issue with us linking up other cloud machines such as AWS EC2 to our fleet and offering it there, which could help with auto-scaling, but we would not make any money on that and it would be a lot of engineering effort for us right now.

Did you try to log in with Github or gmail?

Really it's for both. One of our cofounders came from a genomics background and so that's why we have the Marimo notebooks + R Studio Server + genomics container. But we've also had a lot of requests for general VMs so we made some of those as well.

You are right for probably 60% of customers. For someone spending $3k/mo on cloud on a company doing $500k/yr of revenue then going down to $1k/mo on cloud for a less tried and true product (us) is likely a bad idea.

Similarly for a mom-and-pop bakery (contrived example) hosting a website for $60/mo, going down to $20/mo (just to keep the 1/3 ratio) also is probably not worth it.

But some of our customers are not like that. For example a hedge fund we have been working with needs 512G RAM and 256 vCPUs for a mortgage model. The data size is not too big and once they get their results they rip it back to on-prem. The complexity is low, ie they just ssh in and do their models. Often they let them run over the weekend.

And these guys are very price-sensitive. In their industry, saving money means more carry for partners and bigger bonuses for quants. These guys are counting nickels.

So I think you're totally right for the large part of the market that we're not really for, and we're not really competing for those types of customers. But we're not really providing much managed service, we're providing a commodity that, assuming you don't need the high-complexity ecosystem surrounding it, can be very nice for customers who are price-sensitive.

The argument I'm hearing you make is that Hetzner needs to license a white-labelled version to distributors. If the servers are really commoditized then why aren't the data scientists in this "AWS is too expensive for data science" market going to Hetzner?

Thanks for the explanation. As a long time user I feel embarrassed to have not known this but I will definitely keep this in mind going forward.