I left my job earlier this year after watching companies get crushed by cloud bills for workloads that didn't need hyperscaler complexity. Some examples from my previous life: - $1k/month for a basic 16 vCPU VM - $50k/month for a high-RAM instance - Over $1k/month for notebook platform start-stop execution
We built Carolina Cloud for data scientists and small teams who need serious compute without the sticker shock. Our sweet spot: if you're running VMs, notebooks, or RStudio and not deeply tied to AWS/Azure/GCP service ecosystems, we can save you a lot of money.
What we offer: - Standard Ubuntu VMs - One-click Marimo notebooks - One-click RStudio Server and Shiny hosting - S3-compatible object storage (launching soon) - Prepay discounts for commitments as short as 2 weeks - SOC2-certified, HIPAA-compliant datacenter in Charlotte, NC
Simple pricing: $0.005/vCPU/hr, $0.005/GiB RAM/hr, and $0.0001/GiB of hot storage/hr on AMD EPYC Turin processors. A 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM instance runs ~$240/month vs $800+ on AWS.
We're not trying to replicate every AWS service - if you need Lambda + Secrets Manager + S3 with pre-signed URLs, stick with AWS. But if you're a hedge fund running backtests, a biotech team analyzing genomics data, or a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price.
Check us out at console.carolinacloud.io - happy to answer questions about our infrastructure, pricing, or why we think there's room for regional clouds built on owned hardware.
i think the trick is to not attempt to render at each frame (that is, don't try to provide something similar to a game engine). just render it based on user input, like the page I linked
I was interested in building my own cloud (which had a specific niche) and the biggest issues which happened for me personally were that most companies had the issues that if you wanted to create your own cloud on top of, you were responsible for the abuse from your clients and they can shutdown your account if threats persisted/It wasn't really clear for many companies so I was always somewhat worried about it, so I am curious as to how you are dealing with it or what your thoughts are on this matter.
My family (sort of) has some relations with internet providers in the area so if I actually do follow this, its not something that I am exactly fearing about.
Now regarding the fact that you ran it out of your house, I suppose you had a completely different firewall/fibre to prevent your devices to get any sort of (malware?) since the servers would be running untrusted code
I am more so interested in these two aspects:
Were you worried about the fact that your public ip was available or anything similar? Like I had this fear that it was equal to effectively ddosing myself even though my ip of the current router only gets geolocated to a place 150 kms away from me, I (still?) have that fear
I am not thaat familiar with networking but did you have your own ip ranges or did you provide ipv4 ranges to your customers?
Also how were you managing the fact that maybe your house could've been swatted (I am not sure about the security of north carolina) but I have this deep (irrational?) fear that anyone might do nefarious things since effectively I think that we are only as strong as our weakest link and I am curious if something like this happened with you or did you have any such thoughts?
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.
This is why honestly I had been talking to more indie cloud providers and realized the whole space of low-endtalk and I think that a good compromise to the whole situation is as if I can rent servers but they can realize that at the end of the day, I am an indie solution myself and this is something which in my opinion is only possible with either large but specific cloud providers (fwiw upcloud although they blocked my account because I hadnt added card details or similar supports it and mostly small cloud providers support it)
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
Curious if you are having to buy bandwidth as well. Some of the Midwest data centers include over 30TB of bandwidth in the rack rentals.
And if you are willing to go into the details curious how you are handling bare metal provisioning. MaaS or home grown tooling? Or are you just installing proxmox by hand?
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.
They are probably reselling from hetzner/vultr
Which actually isn't that far. But I don't think they could fake it if they say the servers are in NC.
100Mbps is 33TB / mo. 1Gbps is 330 TB / mo. I'm curious what they have and how they prevent saturation from a client or they just pass on networks managed by the DC.
i.e. you don't have redundancy? A gigabit is nothing these days sadly. You can get a surge in traffic (DDoS or not) and be stuck quite quickly. You always need extra capacity to deal with issues unforeseen and that adds to the cost.
Of course you’re not in AWS, forget about all the managed services, but we’re talking about 95%~98% cheaper egress costs, with 20TB included in most machines.
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.
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.
> Charlotte, NC
> bojangleslover
Username checks out!
Seriously though, this looks really cool. And I'm always happy to see other NC folks representing on HN.
I could see using your service for some stuff, so who knows, we may be sending some business your way. It wouldn't be much (for now), but hey...
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!
How will you provide high quality service and reliability while competing on price with the scale and financial might of AWS?
Because in B2B, those things tend to have a higher value than initial cost. Or to put it another way, your customers will be making long term investments by choosing you.
Successfully competing on price in a commodity market requires cheaper access to resources and because price is the easiest way to segment a market, low prices attract price sensitive customers...they are the least desirable customers. Good luck.
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.
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.
> if you're [...] a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price
The AWS egress fee is $0.08/GB, whereas Hetzner has $0.00/GB. So, why pay $0.0225/GB?
These companies are the worst kind of scam. If you could really provide a product on par with the big boys but somehow lower than commodity prices, you'd corner the entire hosting/cloud market. But you can't, because they already made things hyper-efficient.
It's like trying to sell someone a $5 hamburger by advertising that some other restaurant sells a $15 hamburger. It turns out that other restaurant also sells a $5 hamburger, it's just not at the top of the menu, because cheap isn't always a sales leader.
If it is possible/easy, please indicate in a reply to me, and we can update the title and post.
Of course it’s still fine to be on the front page of HN if the community finds it interesting. But Show HN is meant to be about showcasing an interesting project you’ve built (with a focus on technology discovery) rather than announcing a product people can buy.
https://console.carolinacloud.io/ is unreachable, my container is also unreachable.
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/console.carolinacloud.io...
