What's new about this? Alibaba cloud has been around for 8 years, it's called Aliyun in China (literally Ali-cloud). They didn't build datacenters in 7 countries overnight.
Could anyone explain the sudden excitement about their service?
To be honest, I'd just never heard of this. I'm excited to hear they've got a Dubai datacenter because every now and again my company is asked about starting an instance of our app over there. I've done lots of searching for UAE based cloud hosting and somehow never came across Alibaba. I was resigned to just leasing some servers if we ever actually had to do this but it's great to know we've got another option.
I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them
----- Dear Vultr Customer,
Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.
In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.
Maybe the $300 new user credit or $30/year SSD cloud server is new. Probably not too many people knew about these things even if they weren't. Always fun to play around with something different at low or no cost. I actually didn't see too much excitement in the comments!!!
Could anyone explain the sudden excitement about their service?