UpCloud's viral marketing travels in time

Yesterday, I was happily procrastinating all types of useful work by playing Valve's unsanctioned casino game[¹], when I received an email that confused and somewhat startled me.

From: UpCloud <noreply@upcloud.com>
Subject: Account Removal Warning

Hi! This is an automatic notification. Your account 'gbl08ma' has been inactive for a long time, and will be permanently deleted [...]

Now, I had already come across @upcloud.com on Bluesky a handful of times, most recently just a couple of days ago; just like coming across users vouching for them has also been a common occurrence[²]. I had even gone to check out their pricing page a couple times, just to make sure I was still better off continuing to host my stuff elsewhere.

I was pretty sure I hadn't actually created an account with them, and that mere curiosity was where my involvement with them ended. I started to worry. Perhaps I was suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, or some kind of bipolar disorder, or more realistically, could it be that my email address had been used by someone else to sign up? Well, one inbox search later, it turns out I did sign up for UpCloud...

back in 2013.
Twelve years ago.

My present-day self had no idea UpCloud had been around for that long. Yes, I've always had poor long-term memory, and keeping with the theme, I didn't actually remember why I had signed up. As one of my friends would say, "goldfishing intensifies." Add that to the notion still ringing in my mind: 2013 was 12 years ago? I was really having one of the "fuck, I'm old!" moments of all time.

One inbox search brought as much light into the situation as I'm going to get. Apparently, at the time, UpCloud was offering a one month trial for a server with 1 CPU core, 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of SSD storage. I was 16 years old at the time, so it is possible that I broke some terms just by signing up.

Back then, I was naming my servers after chemical elements, and the email trail shows I had called this server "ununoctium." 2013 was sufficiently long ago, that this element is now called oganesson!

I vaguely remember a time when I was signing up for lots of VPS trials while having no intention of actually starting to pay for any of them. I remember that I named all of these ephemeral servers after unstable elements, which seemed fitting. What I don't quite remember anymore is what I wanted them for.

Readers who have ever worked in internet services providing of any kind, probably had thoughts of phishy malfeasance cross their mind as soon as they read the last paragraph. Teenage me was, however, too innocent, boring and especially scared to ever wear any darker hats.

At that age, I was actually well aware of all such malfeasance going on in these series of tubes, as then I had already been on the service operator side for a couple years. I was probably too aware for someone my age, in fact.

You see, tny.im was a URL shortener I first launched in 2011 under some free subdomain (l.f.nu, if I remember correctly), taking its proper domain in mid-2012, and finally shutting down in early 2025. tny.im was a heavily modified and extended instance of YOURLS, the PHP-based URL shortening software package.

This shortener was just one of multiple web services I was running. Yes, I started operating services when I was barely old enough to be generally "allowed online" according to COPPA, and these often were abuse-prone services at that, including image hosting at some point.

My first domains, including gbl08ma.com, were gifts from online friends who were not much older than me. I suppose hosting your own websites is, after all, an alternative to not being allowed on COPPA-compliant websites. In retrospective, it might be a miracle that I'm still here to tell the story. No, I don't think anyone should trust most kids to be as careful and self-restrained as I somehow was... but I sure appreciated that trust/blissful ignorance from the adults in the (other) room, and I'd be a much worse professional if not for it.

The memories of the specifics are really quite murky in my mind, but I do know that for a couple years earlier on, tny.im was horizontally scaled. No, I don't think I knew what that meant, and such terms were definitely not as widespread back then, even among the more technically-inclined...

Essentially, I had two or three crappy servers I had gotten for free or very cheap - there was an entire forum community centered around offering and discussing free and cheap VPS, freevps.us! I was a moderator there for quite a bit of time. This is proof that even in a world before Discord, the moderators on the web could already be literally 14 year olds.

The world for "self-hosters" at the time was different. For a start, I believe nobody called them that. I don't remember running across the "homelab" term until much later on. Fiber-to-the-home internet connections were much less widespread and almost science fiction for someone living in a rural area. Cloudflare Tunnels weren't a thing. For someone like me, the only way to host web services with any sort of reliability, was to have a proper (slice of) a machine located in a data center. And these somewhat shady free VPS were the only way I knew to get that, for someone who couldn't spend money online without explaining the entire thing to adults.

Because no such individual server was sufficiently reliable for my unrealistically high personal standards, I thought (incorrectly) that the solution would be to try to scale the database layer of that typical LAMP stack app, and run replicas of it on every crappy server, with round-robin DNS to "distribute" requests. Back then these were not called "apps" but whatever.

Of course, this actually meant that requests would randomly error if the DNS resolution happened to return the IP address of a server that was going through some hiccup at the time. Plus, the database was MySQL, and the replication was multi-master. Yes, that was as terrible and unreliable as it sounds. I think I lost portions of the database multiple times, and I sure did get to learn how to create and restore backups.

I am certain that this configuration led to less availability than hosting the website on just one of the crappy servers, and interestingly, I suspect that deep down, teenage me already knew that, too. But younger people tend to have more dreams, and for some time, one of my dreams was that with just a bit more effort, I could make it work.

More effort was put in: around 2014, mersit and later PicoRed - the latter being my first project written in Go - would be an attempt at automating changes to the DNS records, to try to smooth over most hiccups. I don't think these solutions ever really improved the reliability of the service, but they sure were a crash course into the challenges of distributed consensus.

Between turning 18, getting some free DigitalOcean credits by way of being a university student, and having less and less time for hobby projects, I started realizing that I really ought to leave the digital hobo life behind, by exchanging money for goods, services and peace of mind. From 2015-ish onwards, my Percona-powered MySQL replication adventures gradually came to a close. If not before, they definitely ceased once I started paying for a Hetzner dedicated server, which was multiple times more powerful than any VPS I had used before, making all those load-balancing attempts seem obviously futile.

Getting back to what brought us here: the UpCloud trial from 2013. My reconstructed memory of what happened, that caused me to take an interest in free server trials rather than just permanently free/sponsored VPSs, was that I wanted to see how quickly I could spin up replicas of my now-defunct URL shortener.

I think I wanted to see if it would be possible to keep it hosted for free, by load-balancing across ephemeral servers (the free trials), which despite their short half-life[³], would still be more performant and reliable throughout those periods than the typical free VPS offered by shady up-and-coming hosting providers and/or friends. It's also possible that I was already trying to test out an early version of mersit, as well.

The FreeVPS and LowEndTalk forums were the sort of place where such appealing trials were shared. Some providers were interested in having people try their services, sometimes without asking for any form of ID or payment method - to a certain degree, times were a bit different, but UpCloud already had some awareness that this was abuse-prone, as judging by the email trail, the firewall on trial servers had some restrictions in place, allowing "just" SSH, HTTP(S) and RDP connections.

I have a vague idea that some providers offered these trials just to somewhat trusted members of FreeVPS (I was a moderator there, so definitely trusted). I imagine that this might still happen to some extent at LowEndTalk.

A few days into the UpCloud trial back in 2013, I received a "Trial-Period Experience Enquiry" email from one Antti Myyrä, who is possibly @anttimyyra.bsky.social? They probably don't even work at UpCloud anymore. I left that email unanswered - being upfront about my intentions was certainly not going to benefit my research into whether my web services could host themselves for free in a regenerating, possibly self-propagating, Hydra-like fashion.

Side-note: looks like UpCloud used to include a phone number in the footer of all their emails. That is no longer the case, and the phone number seems to be missing from their present-day website. It's funny how this is more accepted nowadays than it used to be; is it more of a tale of how the role of phones in our lives has changed, or more of a sign of changing customer expectations?

Should Antti Myyrä or anyone from UpCloud see this post, consider it to be the extended response to the inquiry about my experience. I know, it is twelve years late and yet still a weak signal. I imagine the server was good enough, although I was clearly too cheap for it at the time. Thanks for hosting my shenanigans for free for one entire month!

Take this post as proof that UpCloud's Bluesky marketing strategy has been working well enough for me to recognize their company name as soon as the email landed on my inbox, with my mind jumping to the "cool kids' cloud provider that's going around on Bluesky," rather than "that one hosting company from which I freeloaded back in 2013."

To a degree, I wrote this mostly for myself, as a way to preserve some of my memories before I forget them further. I don't think there's much of a possible conclusion, other than that UpCloud has apparently started purging inactive accounts only recently, and their grassroots marketing has had some effect on me. If you've read this far, thank you! I hope you found it worth your time.

Footnotes

[¹] It's the one that has a 2 in the name since 2023, not to be confused with the hat-themed one that's had a 2 since 2007. It took until becoming almost 30 years old for me to find some interest in this game... yes, my brain must be rotting.

[²] It is likely that this notion, that UpCloud is held in high regard, is mostly restricted to my bubble on Bluesky. It is my understanding that UpCloud has some fans on there because... UpCloud kinda are fans of Bluesky themselves, with their account being run by engineers and all. Additionally, I believe they sponsor some ATProto projects with free or discounted hosting. It's funny how that works, could it be that most decent people take a liking to those who have shared interests and seem decent themselves? And that some positive synergies are more likely to arise when the algorithms in place aren't specifically designed to prevent them?

[³] Oh no, another Valve reference... on footnote three?! I swear this isn't sponsored by Valve, in case the casino allusion wasn't enough indication, and also not by UpCloud, in case the mentions of trial abuse weren't sufficient indication, either.