VPC server on IBM Cloud usage review
We need some insurance enrollment applications with nearly 4K users once in a year for around 3 months and we find it extremely useful to …
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPCFormerly IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
Starting at $0.01 per hour
View PricingOverview
What is IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC?
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are customizable, public or private, cloud-based servers available from IBM. User can launch applications and software across blended, hybrid environments as the servers integrate with all cloud models.
Recent Reviews
How IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Differs From Its Competitors
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Popular Features
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (81)8.383%
- Monitoring tools (84)8.383%
- Pre-defined machine images (78)8.383%
- Operating system support (84)8.282%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (dedicated host)
starting at $0.22
Cloud
per hour
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (dedicated host)
starting at $149.00
Cloud
per month
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (multi-tenant)
starting at $0.038
Cloud
per hour
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://cloud.ibm.com/vpc…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
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Product Details
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- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC?
IBM Cloud® Virtual Server for VPC offers
fast-provisioning compute capacity—also known as virtual machines—with high network speeds and secure, software-defined networking
resources available on the IBM Cloud. Built on IBM Cloud Virtual Private
Cloud (VPC) and featuring 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon®
processors, this developer-friendly infrastructure helps drive modern
workloads faster and easier with pre-set instance profiles, rapid
deployment and private network control in an agile public cloud
environment. Choose multi-tenant or dedicated, add GPUs, and it is pay-as-you-use by the hour.
IBM Cloud virtual server environments deliver cloud-native solutions that work across public, private and hybrid
deployments. Boasting cost-savings, control, and visibility that is needed with a variety of flexible provisioning and pricing options, including single and multi-tenant environments, hourly and monthly pricing, reserved capacity terms and spot billing. Its elastic infrastructure, globally distributed data centers and premium services aim to bring data to life no matter where it resides.
Smart provisioning
Customize with a variety of virtual server instances and billing options. Rapidly
scale up or down, on-demand. Stay open with no vendor lock-ins, and reply on
complete integration with new and traditional architectures.
Highly distributed
Access a globally distributed network of modern data centers with built in high-availability
and security, inbound public bandwidth and high-speed private network options, public and
private network ports, fast data ingest offerings, geographically redundant
DNS, and dual-stack IP capabilities.
Advanced essentials
Used to build blended hybrid environments
with more predictability and confidence, and to create new solutions that interact with existing infrastructure and applications. A variety of network choices are available with AI solutions designed to put data to work.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Features
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Features
- Supported: Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
- Supported: Dynamic scaling
- Supported: Elastic load balancing
- Supported: Pre-configured templates
- Supported: Monitoring tools
- Supported: Pre-defined machine images
- Supported: Operating system support
- Supported: Security controls
Additional Features
- Supported: Remote management
- Supported: Virtual GPU support
- Supported: Suspend billing
- Supported: Flexible instance options
- Supported: Spot pricing
- Supported: Placement groups for high-availability
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Integrations
- VMware ESXi
- VMware vSphere on IBM Cloud
- McAfee Total Protection (discontinued)
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MongoDB
- Veeam Data Platform
- FreeBSD
- NetApp ONTAP Select
- OSNEXUS QuantaStor
- Virtuozzo Application Platform
- Ubuntu
- CENT OS
- CloudLinux
- Debian
- Microsoft
- Red Had
- Vyatta Virtual Router Appliance
- Citrix XenServer
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- APF Software Firewall
- Microsoft Windows Firewall
- Basho Riak
- IBM Cloud Analytics
- My SQL
- Fantastico
- RVSkin
- Softaculous
- R1Soft Server Backup Manager Enterprise
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Competitors
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
Frequently Asked Questions
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are customizable, public or private, cloud-based servers available from IBM. User can launch applications and software across blended, hybrid environments as the servers integrate with all cloud models.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machines are common alternatives for IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC.
Reviewers rate Security controls highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(119)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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October 19, 2020
IBM virtually compared to the others, Google, AWS, etc
IBM was been evaluated for the whole organization to address a complete solution of cloud services. To provide domains which would be a start of our companies business identity with the room and infrastructure to grow. Along with the support needed for employees that are not familiar with the product. Also, as a small business initial price had a huge impact.
- The absolute best as stable environment.
- Safely instructing users of bad practices.
- Documentation and tutorials are well written and thought out.
- Remote SSH connection is for advanced users. Some employees had a difficult time therefore they did not participate.
- Support was marketed heavily, but had to rely on documentation.
- Prices are not scaled for small business and startups.
October 01, 2020
New user initial evaluation impressions.
Mine is a startup company, and we have a 1-year bonus on IBM Cloud services. It is been used as a computing platform for all services that ScienceDesk will provide. We are evaluating and trying to build a reliable, secure, and well organized infrastructure.
- The provision time is reasonable.
- Not able to properly and easily manage VLANs and subnets in classical infrastructure. Some functions are there but fail to apply with no useful details. Online support has not been able to help at all.
- There is a terraform plugin but documentation is not easy to follow. Some functions are cited on documentation but link to other places that don't really have the information in an easy way to use. For instance, I was not able to provision, using terraform, a virtual server with GPU because I couldn't find the GPU options code anywhere.
- Could not find GPU machines on VPC Infrastructure Gen1 or Gen2. I would like to have all our servers in VPC infrastructure but we need servers with GPU that seem not to be available. Online support has not been able to clarify that.
- The panel interface is unstable and seems to lack some refinements. One time, while trying to provision some services while searching for and accessing documentation, it all changed language to what seemed to be Japanese and the only what to have it back to English was to erase all site cookies.
August 30, 2020
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Review
The technology department is using it and it's being used to run 24/7 education-related server software and it solves cost of electricity maintenance and runtime errors.
- Cheaper than AWS and GCP
- Chat support is excellent.
- Provide trial and startup credits
- Boot images are well deployed.
- Easy login and restart VMs
- Faced internet disconnection errors more than ever imagined
- Even tested Azure AWS and GCP but never faced internet disconnectivity once but it happened 5 times on IBM.
- Bandwidth cost is high.
June 16, 2020
Cheaper and better cloud
We use IBM Cloud Virtual Servers across the organization, Foreseer, as a turnkey human-in-the-loop solution to extract information from documents, emails, and feeds. Our AI-powered system combined with human review = Best of breed information extraction. An open platform that your data scientists and business users can leverage to unlock value without worrying about technology heavy-lifting necessary to deliver a scalable, robust, enterprise-grade solution. We need a lot of infrastructure for training and deploying our models and UI.
- Straightforward
- Cheaper than AWS
- Could use a slightly friendlier interface
- Marketplace
June 03, 2020
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Review
Access to the IBM cloud virtual servers is available to all departments across the organization to deploy as needed.
Used for quickly deploying scalable servers at reasonable rates across development/devops and QA. This helps us to quickly deploy sand box servers where we need to test and validate some thing - Think docker scenarios to prove that something will work in production.
Used for quickly deploying scalable servers at reasonable rates across development/devops and QA. This helps us to quickly deploy sand box servers where we need to test and validate some thing - Think docker scenarios to prove that something will work in production.
- Nothing that stands out as compared to the competitors
- Price is comparable
- Pricing needs to be clearer, but this is a problem with most cloud providers
- User guidance and help tutorials similar to DO
- Customer support at the level of Linode will be splendid
May 25, 2020
Awesome Service but Costs May Be High
We use IBM Cloud to optimize our customer experience. It is also used in our infrastructure and our website. Therefore, it is being used across the whole organization rather than just a department.
- Fast provisioning.
- Fast support.
- Easy integration.
- Great UI.
- Expensive.
- Charges for OS reloads.
- Charges for switching licenses with no refund.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is mainly being used to take the computing load for our advanced financial forecasting and modeling. We use this when running data reports that have a high CPU load. We have found this fits our needs as we do not have the scope to purchase our own servers and IBM cloud allows us to manage the cost of our package subject to our requirements.
- The flexibility of the packages available is great. We can choose just what we need almost on a case by case basis.
- Price structure is very clear and easy to understand.
- To date the uptime on the servers has been second to none.
- The UI of the control panel can take some getting used to.
- User documentation could be expanded.
May 20, 2020
Decent cloud based virtualisation
We use IBM Cloud Virtual Servers within the IT department. We use various hosted servers for data transfer purposes mainly SFTP. This saves us from having to purchase our own hardware, saves time on maintenance and also saves bandwidth on our office internet connection. As an IT company we find it extremely easy to spin up new servers in the cloud.
- Intuitive UI
- Excellent help and documentation
- Flexible VM options
- No reseller training portal
- Expensive licences
April 20, 2020
Great product that could use some simpler VS setups
It is mainly being used in data science and actuarial departments for heavyweight modelling where either high memory or large CPU requirements (or both) are required. Also as we explore further the use of machine learning and AI, the possibility to access very large GPU machines is appealing as this dramatically increases efficiency in a cost effective way.
- A broad range of setup options, so we can choose the right GPU/CPU/RAM for the run at hand, which makes things more cost-effective.
- Data security is important to us, being able to choose a server location helps with giving assurance that the data will be looked after appropriately.
- The cloud site is extremely well set out, it is very easy to quickly spec out and cost a VM.
- When launching a VSI it's not always obvious how far progressed or how long we will have to wait.
- It's also not 100% clear when billing starts and stops.
- It would be great to have a few "works out of the box" configurations, with sensible defaults so that inexperienced users can quickly launch a windows instance to run a heavy model without having to worry about getting config exactly right. "too many options".
April 11, 2020
Overall a positive review, you guys are great!
Dedicated server that hosts a variety of different websites. It's best for me to have a dedicated server so I can control any custom software I need to use like Apache, MySQL, the PHP version, and Node. I also can control and verify the server backups which is a big deal to me. It allows me to ensure all the critical data is being backed up and how often those backups are being stored on another remote server outside of the data center.
- Uptime of the servers, and when there is downtime then you guys always notify me of the downtime and the issue.
- Customer support is always perfect.
- Flexibility when I need to add better processors, or more memory, etc.
- I can see just about every detail of my server by logging in to IBM's control panel.
- Can start off very low budget ($50.00 dollars per month) and scale up in the future when needed.
- The control panel is sometimes a little overwhelming because you offer so many products and services.
- I always had trouble setting up the KVM, but that could be me just not knowing how to set it up.
- I get so many status update emails that I tend to ignore them. I understand it's important to notify people of a status like "IBM Cloud engineers are conducting a technology refresh project on internal components of the provisioning system". But really I just want a status update if my server will be going offline. Perhaps I can change this in settings, but I have not been able to locate where to make this change.
April 08, 2020
My IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Review
We have been with IBM Cloud for more than 5 years and, initially with 1 server and then we added a few servers for testing applications. We have settled with 2 now. This server is used by many of our clients across the country and beyond. The IBM Cloud Virtual Server addresses our IT Infrastructure requirements and its elastic nature fits best for our business.
- Excellent Support
- Very good performance
- Very easy to use
- Voice Support should be provided to premium customers
April 07, 2020
A powerful, often overlooked cloud platform
IBM Cloud Virtual servers are one of the easiest VPS clouds to setup. Offering a lot of flexibility, high visibility on projected costs, and accurate estimates of setup time, it takes very little time and effort to get an IBM Cloud Virtual server off the ground. The wide variety of locations lets my industry, video games, select the appropriate location depending on relative player base location, a very helpful problem to address.
- Many locations available
- Fast setup time
- Clear cost structure
- User access can be confusing.
- Not a friendly interface for those not familiar with cloud technologies.
- Somewhat high price when provisioning Windows servers.
April 07, 2020
Good use of VM capabilties
Extensive use for IBM Cloud deployments for CPQ and CLM enterprise capabilities
- scalability is very strong.
- monitoring is good, but could be improved with more stats.
- access groups
- resource groups
- monitoring
- Some API services are very immature
April 02, 2020
IBM Cloud - amazing portfolio
We are selling IBM Cloud Virtual Servers to our partners. Our partners use it for different cases. The main reason they choose IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is the fact that it is very easy to use as well as the fact that it is highly scalable and it makes them future proof.
- Highly scalable.
- Fast provisioning.
- Great integration with third party services.
- Billing items is not clear enough.
- The catalog can be overwhelming.
March 04, 2020
Review of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
We use IBM Cloud Virtual Servers across the whole organization. We are using the IBM cloud to host our servers and support our security of these servers. We want to leverage the IBM infrastructure and don't want to spend time or money on hosting our own servers. We are a startup, so time and resources need to be prioritized and valued.
- UI for spinning up a new server is excellent.
- The documentation for spinning up a new server is excellent.
- Spin-up time is very good.
- After the server was provisioned, I did not see the "Password" choice on the lower left-hand side of the screen.
- Documentation, especially this line, "Select the Passwords tab to show all passwords for the instance," is not correct. There is no "Passwords tab." It is a selection choice on the left-hand side of the screen.
- The website does not even mention the root password or where to find it.
January 28, 2020
I love working with IBM, even though my company is small.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is the main service used by our company. We are a software supply company in the SaaS form, and we use IBM's infrastructure to install our software and provide services to our customers.
- Very clear price and services
- Simple and easy setup
- Support in Portuguese
January 12, 2020
Not a very happy customer with IBM
We host all of our services on the IBM cloud. We use more than 20 servers to run our frontend, backend, databases, and internal streaming services. All of the virtual IBM tools are used to serve our clients and to solve big data and ML problems. We do our own customizations to match the needs of our clients.
- Limiting your choices.
- Giving you reasons to learn how to do things your own way and not fully depend on their platform.
- Does not support virtual Lan.
- Does not support unlimited virtual disk storage.
December 30, 2019
Review Of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
We are replacing our datacenter for infrastructure as a service. We have some racks and our rent data center, so we decided to move to the cloud and stop buying expensive hardware while getting more infrastructure. It is more cost-effective to go to the cloud for our infrastructure and our datacenter.
- Citrix Services
- ERP Solutions
- DRP on premises.
- Citrix Provisioning Services
December 17, 2019
Perfect set of IT tools by a world class cloud provider
We are using IBM Virtual servers for several reasons:
- For quickly distributing environments between team members so they can develop and test our web portal iterations.
- We are using IBM Virtual machines specifically for development and DevOps purposes.
- By using IBM Virtual servers, we overcome many difficulties such as maintenance of physical hardware, we achieved scale-ability and our team easily works on our products remotely.
- IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are available in many regions around the world which is helpful in case we need a server near to our client.
- IBM Cloud Virtual Servers can be configured to use all sorts of operating systems which comes in handy to test applications across many environments.
- I would love to have more profiles for quick provisioning.
- IBM recently offered a discount for its Bare Metal Servers. You need to have the same service for the IBM Virtual Server.
December 07, 2019
Review: IBM Virtual Servers for Cloud Gaming
We use IBM Cloud VM across our infrastructure for different purposes. We are a cloud gaming company and we are super satisfied as we get top notch hardware such as V100s for our users to satisfy their gaming specs. From the business perspective, the prices are cheap than what GCP and AWS has to offer.
- Fast Provisioning
- Cheaper prices than competition
- Technical Support Debugging
- GPU performance is sometimes degraded.
- Lot of maintenance activity.
- No option BYOL for Windows Servers.
December 06, 2019
Great value option in the right use case
I am using IBM Cloud Virtual Servers directly to test the design decisions that have been taken for client solutions. Cloud Virtual servers are an easy and cost effective way of building test/POC environments to test out architecture designs and to provide quick and easy proof of concept facilities.
- Quick provision times.
- Plenty of configuration options.
- Easily managed.
- Flexible.
- No improvements to suggest.
December 02, 2019
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Review
I resell IBM Cloud services to my clients.
- Honestly looking at other companies like Azure and Amazon, I don't see pros for IBM.
- Windows licenses are very expensive.
- Support, it was very bad, just getting worse!
- Cloud images are too few compared to AWS, IBM is way behind AWS.
- Reseller training and certification practically does not exist.
- The decrease in the resale value that resellers have in reselling services.
November 22, 2019
IBM is the best!
We use IBM Virtual Servers for our entire company. We offer web hosting and game server hosting (hosted in IBM Servers) in Mexico for small businesses and students in all of Latin America.
- Support is really good, and you have chat support and people helping for everything you need!
- It offers a variety of configurations and operating systems for all needs.
- It offers great add-ons and integrations.
- Dashboard loading at login.
- More locations for Latin America would be good.
- More add-ons and integrations.
November 13, 2019
If you have a need for high IOPS, the IBM cloud is probably your most cost-effective option
All of our servers are on the cloud, and that is IBM's cloud. As of today, we have 102 virtual servers, along with the associated required storage. In our case, storage is our largest cloud investment since our business is to host a data-crunching application to help our clients and utilities, make sense and act upon their customers' incoming smart meter data.
- Storage that provides high IOPS at a cost-effective rate. We evaluated other offerings this summer, in particular, AWS and Microsoft, and their high-IOPS disks were more expensive than IBM's.
- Automated deployment of new virtual servers and their storage is simplified by an API which we leverage using Ansible.
- In our tier, support is timely.
- Billing is complicated and unclear. It can be difficult to determine exactly how much each instance costs, and grouping them is also difficult (we need to charge different machines to different internal departments, and while we have resorted to using labels in the server names, we are not able to do that with storage).
- Their firewall options are not user-friendly nor very cost-effective. We use their Vyatta offering and, though it is an operating system rooted in free software, it is expensive. It is difficult to manage as well as its mgmt is done exclusively via a hard-to-learn text-only hierarchical configuration.
November 11, 2019
Could use a better UI and customer service
We host several services such as a development server, management
software, etc. It is basically the pool for our shared information and
software.
- They are always online and there is not so much trouble to connect and use.
- You can almost immediately use a new server.
- There is a lot of flexibility on the hardware one can use.
- We had trouble using the copy of the virtual server we made. So we had to reconfigure it from scratch.
- It would be good if one could dynamically change the hardware’s characteristics without having to reset the whole server.
- We have been struggling with the new UI. When it changed from Softlayer to IBM cloud. We experience difficulties getting used to the new interface, the customer service also was slower and sometimes even incorrect since they gave us a solution from the last UI which did not longer work.
- Also, the new webpage is not as responsive as it should. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to load, or one needs to reload in order to see the changes.