LunaNode - Toronto SSD Cloud - $10 Free Credit for New Customers (20x)

perennate

LunaNode is a cloud platform in Toronto. We offer an extensive array of cloud features:

• Hourly Billing: our services are billed hourly! See pricing here.
• Live Snapshots: whether you use it for templating or backups, snapshots are super convenient. You can take consistent snapshots without even turning off your VM!
• Volumes (Block Storage): volumes are block devices that can be attached/detached between your VMs, and are stored on a redundant Ceph cluster. Pricing is just $0.03/GB/mo.
• Uptime Monitoring, DNS, E-mail: active customers (used at least $3 credit in the current month) can use our uptime monitoring, DNS, and e-mail platforms for free (with limits on free usage)!

First 20 users satisfying the requirements below to PM me get $10 free credit. Please read the requirements!

• Account must have at least one comment posted before 1 December 2017.
• Must register for an account at https://lunanode.com and PM me the e-mail address associated with the account so I can add the credit.
• Must not already be an active/past customer of LunaNode. Sorry . Okay, first five active customers to PM get $5 credit, include "active" in the PM. Update: ran out!

You will only be able to use the credit for services in Toronto. If you make a payment later you will be able to use our other locations (OVH Montreal/Roubaix) as well.

Edit 16:35 EDT still 18x $10 for new users / 4x $5 for active users left.

Edit 17:44 EDT still 16x $10 for new users / 3x $5 for active users left.

Last edit: still have some $10 for new users, no more $5 for active users

sleddog

Lunanode is awesome. Period.

DanSummer

Great guys and support is excellent! Can't beat hourly billing.

mtsbatalha

@perennate

"Account creation error: Registration is not permitted from country selected.."

perennate

@mtsbatalha hmm some countries with frequent fraud are blocked, PM me your e-mail and I'll whitelist it.

mtsbatalha

@perennate said:
@mtsbatalha hmm some countries with frequent fraud are blocked, PM me your e-mail and I'll whitelist it.

Thanks my friend. Very friendly. Thanks for the credit.

simonindia

Well thought of tyring them a lot before got some credit $$.

Thanks @perennate

Well play with internal network tomorrow.

arunsharma7

thank you @perennate for the credit. Have been exploring lunanode since last week and quite impressed.

piohosting

Tbank you @parennate i'll try your service

andiklive

Lunanode is doing great work, im your existing customer, will PM'ed.

anyway no double credit offer this time @perennate

Edmond

Waiting for @perennate to apply them to my account. Thanks again!

That was quick, thanks again! Going to test drive some applications.

hardshadow

cool, can i get it?

perennate

hardshadow said: cool, can i get it?

No, read the requirements.

miusang

Nice offer. Can't wait to give it a try.

cirrus_cloud

Basically the best in the VPS space because of resizable volumes that aren't super expensive.

vimalware

Always wanted to give luna a go . Fingers crossed.

mexyul

thanks for the credit

plusnettr

thanks for the credit

perennate

Credit for existing customers is used up. Still have some for new customers though!

aglodek

Great deal... you'll probably need the extra credit to cover their "dynamic CPU" fees they may quietly hit you with

I say "may hit you" as I'm on an old plan that's no longer being offered, so YMMV... This said, I'd still keep an eye on their billing vis a vis the plan you originally sign up for!

Fact is, for years, LunaNode used to be one of the best providers around, hands down. Highly recommended until a few months ago when they quietly started overcharging. Luckily, nothing critical on my box with them anymore, as the only way to avoid the ghost fees was to power down the box until I have time to copy the data and bid them good bye. Support wasn't of any help (they've grown and their founder's no longer handling that, probably outsourced to India or elsewhere). Frustrating, especially having been with them for so many years

Good news is, these days, there are a few other reputable providers on occasion offering same or better deals than my old plan with LunaNode ($7/month 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD KVM). Price wise, their current plans are much less competitive. Having said this, their service is rock solid. Admin panel and add-ons are nothing but first class. Customer support's pretty useless these days, but prior to this overcharging stint, had had no cause to deal with support for a great many years.

seanho

@aglodek said:
Great deal... you'll probably need the extra credit to cover their "dynamic CPU" fees they may quietly hit you with

In fairness, their CPU usage policy is pretty clear, and you only get charged overage if you opt into it; otherwise you'll be throttled when you hit your CPU limits. If you're consistently going over, perhaps it's time to consider a dedicated CPU plan (or investigate optimising your site). Their dedicated CPU plan pricing is reasonable and not out of line with hourly bare-metal pricing elsewhere.

All hourly providers advertise shared CPU, it's just that many don't have clear policies on how it's enforced.

aglodek

@seanho said:

@aglodek said:
Great deal... you'll probably need the extra credit to cover their "dynamic CPU" fees they may quietly hit you with

In fairness, their CPU usage policy is pretty clear, and you only get charged overage if you opt into it; otherwise you'll be throttled when you hit your CPU limits. If you're consistently going over, perhaps it's time to consider a dedicated CPU plan (or investigate optimising your site). Their dedicated CPU plan pricing is reasonable and not out of line with hourly bare-metal pricing elsewhere.

All hourly providers advertise shared CPU, it's just that many don't have clear policies on how it's enforced.

In fairness, this all sounds very reasonable. Except for three things:

1. I never opted in for this "option". My account and box predate their CPU usage policy by many years. I was blissfully unaware of any such service "improvement" until informed by their support in response to my overbilling complaint. Looks like LunaNode opted me in all by themselves!

2. Once I was first overcharged and then appraised of this "option", I quickly opted out of course. No such luck. Soon thereafter, I was opted in and overbilled again!

3. Last but not least, there are but two small sites on my box, getting maybe one or two visitors per day, if that. Plus a couple of "Under Development" pages. If this really hits any of LunaNode's CPU limits, that really speaks volumes about their nodes' CPU's or "CPU usage policy" or both (sic!)

Having been a happy customer of theirs for many years, I hesitate to call them out as scammers... IMO most likely some bug in their system, but one they seem content to ignore for many months and keep on overbilling customers

Or maybe this is their unobtrusive way of bringing old clients' account fees more in line with their current much less competitive pricing. Either way, shame on you, @perennate!

perennate

aglodek said: I never opted in for this "option". My account and box predate their CPU usage policy by many years. I was blissfully unaware of any such "option" until informed by their support in response to my overbilling complaint. Looks like LunaNode opted me in all by themselves!

Hm, you were probably on one of our Flexible plans (no longer supported since they have been superseded by the new burstable resource system).

• From the beginning, Flexible instances did not include any CPU usage.
• Unlike the new plans, which include a baseline level of CPU performance, the Flexible plans include no baseline CPU usage.
• Instead, users of Flexible plans were charged $16/vCPU/mo, billed hourly in proportion to CPU usage.
• So even if you are using very little CPU, you would still be charged (but a few percentage points of CPU usage would amount to a couple cents per day).
• This information has been detailed on both our main website and the page where you provision VMs from the day Flexible plans first launched, up until when we retired them.
• The recent burstable resources changes did not impact Flexible instances at all.
• The confusion may have arisen because there were several months where there was an error in our billing and users were not charged for CPU usage on Flexible instances.
• However, the information about the charges has always been there:

Plans marked "Flexible" have additional charges for CPU and bandwidth usage; read more about flexible plans.

• I do acknowledge that it is possible for a customer to provision a Flexible instance without realizing that CPU usage is charged differently for these instances (although, again, when customers provisioned Flexible instances it stated this difference)
• If you open a ticket, we could undo the charges and apply a credit on your account.
• However, you would need to move off of the Flexible plan to avoid future charges. We cannot let customers continue using a Flexible plan without CPU charges going forward, since such a plan was never offered in the past.
• None of our current plans charge for CPU by default. It is an opt-in checkbox, and there are no hidden fees.
• Customers on our older plans that were not Flexible plans are similarly not charged for CPU usage by default.
• Customers with Flexible plans opted in to CPU charges by provisioning a Flexible plan.
• The burstable resource policy is similar to AWS t2 instances and Azure burstable instances, and helps to reduce costs while giving customers clear information on their allowed resource usage on the VMs. Most VM providers have very vague terms about this, and will suspend if you use too many resources rather than automatically throttling.

Let me know if you still have doubts about this. I acknowledge that customers may have missed the notice about Flexible plans when they provisioned it. Nevertheless, I hope that you understand that we did not overbill you and that the way that Flexible plans work has not changed since they first launched many years ago.

Support wasn't of any help (they've grown and their founder's no longer handling that, probably outsourced to India or elsewhere).

I'm sorry you were not happy with our support response.

I'd like to mention that we did not retroactively charge for unaccounted CPU usage during the months when the billing was down. Any charges that you got hit with would have been from current usage at the time on the Flexible plan, and would have instantly shown up on your account.

As far as growing, I'd also like to add that it has always been Jason and I from when we first launched in 2013. We do not have any support staff, just the two of us.