Alibaba Cloud Review

Alibaba

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Alibaba Cloud was founded as a VPS provider in 2009.
It is headquartered in China.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.

It has datacenters in:
  • Australia
  • China
  • Germany
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Japan
  • Malaysia
  • Philippines
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Singapore
  • South Korea
  • Thailand
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

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Alibaba Cloud VPS Features

Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.

Feature Value Comment
Hourly Billing  Mixed
DDOS Protection  Yes
Backups  Yes

Snapshots are free.

Control Panel  Custom
SSH Keys Setup  Yes
Total Number of Datacenters  24
Number of Datacenter Continents  4
Monitoring Charts  Yes

CPU, Network, CPU credits for burstable instances.

Admin REST API  Yes
Upgrade VPS from admin console  Yes
Mobile Friendly UI  No
Reverse DNS  No
Accepted Forms of Payment  Credit cards, Paypal, Alipay
Hidden CPU Model  No
Affiliate Program  Yes
IPv6 support  No
Firewall  Yes

Called Security Groups. They allow to choose which ports are open or closed.

Shelving  No
Compare Features

Pros and Cons

Strengths

  • Numerous datacenter locations.
  • Large catalog of cloud services.

Weaknesses

  • Varying pricing depending on location.
  • Complex, hard to use UI.

Alibaba Cloud Extra Services

In addition to features included in VPS plans, Alibaba Cloud also offers the following services (possibly for a fee):

Backups   Block storage   Object storage   Load balancer  
Floating IP addresses   Team Management   Managed databases   Serverless  
DDoS protection   Kubernetes   GPU instances   Private network

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

For each Alibaba Cloud VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.

See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.

Average Provisioning Time Min Provisioning Time Max Provisioning Time Number of VPS Samples
45s 30s 60s 2

Control Panel Screenshots


Cloud Storage Prices

For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.

Storage Type Price / GB / month Description Restriction
Snapshots $0.018 US-East price. Charges only for incremental size of the snapshot. Snapshots are stored in object storage (OSS).
Alibaba Cloud snapshots storage
First 5GB are free
Object $0.016 Standard Storage. Infrequent and Archive storage option are also available for lower prices.
Alibaba Cloud object storage
First 5GB free.
Block $0.030 "Ultra Disk" is $0.01/GB for Pay as you go in the US east region.
Alibaba Cloud block storage
Standard SSD Pay as You Go Network Access Storage in US East

Alibaba Cloud Instance Types and Plans

How fast are Alibaba Cloud servers?
Screen all Alibaba Cloud VPS Plans

Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.

Plan Number of CPU cores RAM Storage Price
Instance Type:
Other

No description

Starter 1GB 1 core 1 1.0GB 25GB $4.50 / month
ecs.t5-lc1m1.small 1 1.0GB 40GB $6.52 / month
ecs.n4.small 1 2.0GB 20GB $13.66 / month
ecs-t5-c1m1-large 2 2.0GB 20GB $14.13 / month
ecs.t6-c1m2.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $20.91 / month
ecs.n4.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $35.41 / month
ecs.c5.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $37.52 / month
ecs.c6e.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $41.32 / month
ecs.g6.large 2 8.0GB 0GB $43.19 / month
ecs.c7.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $49.32 / month
ecs.c7a.large 2 4.0GB 40GB $58.32 / month

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