No IRC? From https://uptano.com/aup:

  UPTANO's services may only be used for lawful purposes. Users may not use UPTANO's Services to engage in, foster, or promote illegal, abusive, or irresponsible behavior, including:
  ...
  Internet Relay Chat IRC servers, bots, clients, or anything related to IRC.

Not sure I appreciate the implication that IRC is somehow unlawful.

Hah! Me neither. Updated. The idea was only to prohibit public IRC uses, since they tend to attract the naughty people. Running your own private IRC stuff is fine. I've been on IRC for ~15 years myself.

What do you mean, public IRC uses?

Some people run private IRC servers for their company/friends and that's something we want to allow. We just want to prohibit public IRC servers/clients/bots because they tend to be a magnet for network/server attacks.

I'd imagine anything that attracts DDoS traffic. Generally speaking you know when you are hanging out in rooms where people are willing to DDoS you to kick you offline.

Giving away some free servers during October to some fellow HN'ers. The beta code is good for one server hardware claim and 500 GB of bandwidth during October.

Uptano is my new project and I'm looking for early adopters and feedback. Enjoy, and Thanks!

Edit: Opened up some more slots for people.

I cannot seem to find any information on what kind of connectivity they have/peering. Also, do you get anything like iKVM or even a way to power cycle it?

It sounds like anything you run is going to be virtualized anyways or at least under a hypervisor, or else why the 7.5GB of RAM?

We'll be adding remote console support. You can shutdown and reboot your servers from the web.

Our network is currently connected to nLayer, Tiscali, PCCW/BTN, and peered with Equinix and a bunch of others. We'll be adding a number of additional providers as well. Our US West1 location is in downtown LA, where just about everyone has a presence.

Yes, your hardware is dedicated to you alone, but you launch virtualized instances on it. They run on OpenVZ, which has very minimal performance overhead compared with things like Xen.

Thanks for the questions.

I am TAing a course on computer security this quarter, and was just looking for a hosting provider to set up a CTF server for the students to play around with. I would need the hosting for November and the first week of December as well. Could I get this promo extended that long?

This one is for October. Try sending me an email ([email protected]) in November and I'll try to help you out.

Why limit the number of VMs, rather than just have it limited directly by memory?

For example, why can't I have three instances with 2gb of memory and two with 768mb?

It would make it pull the trigger.

Larger hardware profiles will have higher server limits. These are the "Standard Small" hardware profile, so splitting it up into 4 servers seems sufficient for most people.

How many would you want to run on this hardware? 5?

I'd personally go as high as 6-8 in some scenarios. You can do a good bit with 512mb of memory of it's only doing a single task. Sometimes it's nice to keep things separated and compartmentalized.

For larger hardware profiles the limit will definitely be higher. Current plans are for Standard Medium and Standard Large to be 6 and 8, respectively. So far no one seems to need more that that. Thanks for the feedback.

That's funny; I've never seen a 7.5 GB DIMM before. And I didn't know they still make 120 GB disks.

I would assume 0.5GB is for the virtualization.

As for the drive space, maybe it's an SSD, though I'm being very hopeful. Or maybe it's a bigger disk with a bunch of images on it so you can quickly create a virtual machine without waiting for a network drive.

These are 10K RPM RAID1 hard disks, but we will be rolling out SSD options in the very near future.

My dedicated hardware was given to me instantly, and it took less than a minute to ssh into my machine. I'll take it!

They're ever so slightly smaller than 8 GB DIMMS! And 120 GB is the usable disk space in the Standard Small hardware profile that's being offered. :-)

I'm getting a "limit reached" message. I guess that's it then?

Sorry about that. Updated the title. I have been increasing the limit repeatedly to make room for more people, but it looks like there's going to be far more than I can allow in right now ;-)

I hope to offer something to everyone that signed up now but didn't make it in this time. Thanks for checking it out.

I signed up to check it out, and it definitely looks cool... The connection is lightning fast, but I'm wondering what other server options you'll have in the future. I'd love to have a few servers that are I/O beasts, and others full of 128GB or 256GB of RAM. Right now, we pay so much to Amazon each month, and we're playing with other options.

Yeah, we're going to announce a number of new hardware profiles in the coming weeks. We'll eventually have a number of "extreme" hardware profiles that are specialized for certain use cases.