Yea it says that on their homepage, but when you click pricing the cheapest server available (at least on the pricing page) is $10/mo

$30/year is a special offer. there is a link on top of the pricing page "SSD Cloud Server up to 84% Off. Start deploying." it leads to the page with offers: https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/ecs-ssd-cloud-server

Wow... yea that's a great offer.

But their marketing just reaks of my local cable promotion offers that I get in the mail (selling really bad products with horrible gimmicks).

"Only 39.99/mo for the first 6 months"

And then it's like $210/mo after that.

And they only ever put the $210 in size 8 font on the back of the advertisement.

It's a great way to test out their infrastructure, sure. But the $300 credit they offer could afford the same experience.

Coming into an already highly competitive market with a gimmick like that and overall pricing that is double that of your competitors does not sound like a recipe for success imho.

I was really excited about a new competitor in the cloud space but was immediately turned off when I clicked through to their pricing page (after reading the offers on the homepage).

If you check the various data centers and non-windows operating systems, you'll find as low as $5.10/month. But their special offer allows you to get one server for $30/year for the first year prepaid. Kind of a crappy way to advertise a PAAS.

The server locations are outside Asia ("US West, US East, EU Central and Australia regions"). Any idea whether those servers have good peering with mainland Chinese ISPs?

Just for your information, many Chinese firms buy hosts from AWS, linode etc. majorly US located servers, had no issues with that.

US West has reasonable peering, under 200ms most of the time and I can run a VPN through it.

Best is HK though, is that region not included?

200ms is OK. How is the throughput? And which domestic ISP do you use?

HK wasn't in the list (I pasted the list directly). For some reason hosting in HK is generally more expensive than nearby places like Taipei or Tokyo. Not sure why.

I've been on both China Telecom and Unicom, in Shanghai though so YMMV in other places. I've heard Beijing is much worse for connecting through Telecom.

My throughput isn't bad, I can very occasionally get up to 2mb/s download speed but it's usually around 500-600.

It also mentions a "Public traffic fee" of 0.13USD/GB - not sure what that's about.