I decided to spend some time playing around with the hosting service from Ninefold. Their offering looks great, with excellent pricing. They seem as simple to use as Heroku, but you can still get to control an actual server.

Signup is easy. They give you 30 days before requiring billing information. After the 30 days, you still get the first $50 waived. It’s a very frictionless activation process, and well worth the effort to get a ‘machine in the cloud’.

Launching a machine was super easy. I managed to get a virtual machine running with almost no typing (I had to name the machine). I’m impressed by the simplicity of it. Eventually, I got to a page showing progress…

The yellow highlight is mine. I wanted to call-out the monthly price of the server, of which the first $50 a month is waived. I.e., it’s free.

After the provisioning was complete I got an email from ninefold with a password for the machine.

My first reaction to seeing a password in an email was to cry out in pain. Admittedly, this is a very simple way to provide initial credentials, and I was immediately able to change it. I also setup SSH keys to avoid typing a password at all.

With very little effort, and no real cost, I now have a little virtual machine running in the cloud. Ninefold seems to give the simplicity of Heroku, but you get much more control of deployed resources. It’s definitely worth a try if you are interested.